Automating reuse of software for expert system analysis of remote sensing data

Systems involving remote sensing analysis for airborne and satellite data in combination with geographic information systems are large and complex. The Canada Centre for Remote Sensing (CCRS) has created an expert system shell and several expert systems in order to provide image analysis programs with the necessary knowledge to solve difficult image processing problems, such as updating a forest inventory geographic information system. An interactive task interface (ILTI) provides an expert system with a Prolog module designed to answer queries from the image analysis program by retrieving knowledge from an image analysis knowledge base, the analyst advisor. Image analysis experts currently create ILTI's. They have found this to be a time-consuming task. An incremental/adaptive planner has been developed that will create a plan that emulates the ILTI's behavior by analyzing image processing session dialogues between a human expert and an image analysis program for several cases of forest updates. The planner relies on a knowledge base in order to generalize and modify plans acquired from session dialogues. The planner speeds and simplifies the creation of new expert systems. >