The analysis and assessment of the safety of railway transport systems has shown that the process of transferring expert knowledge to a machine is complex and rarely studied and that the bottle-neck in the development of knowledge based systems (KBS) is not restricted solely to the extraction phase but also involves the characteristics and formalization of knowledge. The modes of reasoning whic...

Commonsense is of primary interest to AI research since the inception of the field. Traditionally, commonsense knowledge is gathered by using humans to create and insert it in knowledge bases. Automating the collection of commonsense from text that is freely available can reduce the cost and effort of creating large knowledge bases and can enable systems that dynamically adapt to current releva...

Our goal is to build knowledge acquisition tools that support users in making a broad range of changes to a knowledge base, including both factual and problem-solving knowledge. These changes may require several individual modiications to various parts of the knowledge base, that need to be carefully coordinated to prevent users from introducing errors in the knowledge base. Thus, it becomes es...

Developing a product configuration system is a non-trivial and challenging task for various reasons. First, the domain knowledge which has to be encoded into the system is often spread over several departments or functions within a company. Beside that, in many cases data from existing information systems have to be integrated into the configurator. Finally, the business rules or technical cons...

This paper presents an intelligent database system to support petrographic analysis. The main goal of the research is to solve problems in knowledge acquisition and representation to develop efficient systems in domains with weak theory. The proposition of this work is to use case-based reasoning technology coupled with a database system to develop systems that store and manage the information ...

This paper presents one approach to acquire knowledge from multiple experts. The experts are grouped into multilevel hierarchical structure, according to the type of knowledge acquired. The first level consists of experts who have knowledge about the basic objects and their relationships. The second level of experts includes those who have knowledge about the relationships of the experts at the...

The horizontal and vertical dimensions of individualism and collectivism are an important characteristic of cultures. These dimensions have many implications for the ways in which individual learners use and respond to interactive technologies. This article reports on a study that investigated the impact of culture, specifically horizontal individualism (HI), vertical individualism (VI), horizo...

In a recent study, Gevers and colleagues (2010, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, Vol. 139, pp. 180-190) showed that the SNARC (spatial numerical association of response codes) effect in adults results not only from spatial coding of magnitude (e.g., mental number line hypothesis) but also from verbal coding. Because children are surrounded by rulers, number lines, and the like in th...