BaRT: A Bayesian Reasoning Tool for Knowledge Based Systems

As the technology for building knowledge based systems has matured, important lessons have been learned about the relationship between the architec­ ture of a system and the nature of the problems it is intended to solve. We are implementing a knowledge engineering tool called BART that is designed with these lessons in mind. BART is a Bayesian reason­ ing tool that makes belief networks and other prob­ abilistic techniques available to knowledge engineers building classificatory problem solvers. BART has already been used to develop a decision aid for clas­ sifying ship images, and it is currently being used to manage uncertainty in systems concerned with analyzing intelligence reports. This paper discusses how state-of-the-art probabilistic methods fit nat­ urally into a knowledge based approach to classifi­ catory problem solving, and describes the current capabilities of BART.