Airid-An Application Of The KAS/Prospector Expert System Builder To Airplane Identification

The Knowledge Acquisition System /Prospector expert system building tool developed by SRI, International, has been used to construct an expert system to identify aircraft on the basis of observables such as wing shape, engine number/location, fuselage shape, and tail assembly shape. Additional detailed features are allowed to influence the identification as "other favorable features." Constraints on the observations imposed by bad weather and distant observations have been included as contexts to the models. Models for Soviet and U.S. fighter aircraft have been included. Inclusion of other types of aircraft such as bombers, transports, and reconnaissance craft is straightforward. Two models permit exploration of the interaction of semantic and taxonomic networks with the models. A full set of text data for fluid communication with the user has been included. The use of demons as triggered output responses to enhance utility to the user has been explored. This paper presents discussion of the ease of building the expert system using this powerful tool and problems encountered in the construction process.