THE CONFIGURATION-DESIGN ONTOLOGIES AND THE VT ELEVATOR DOMAIN THEORY

In the VT/Sisyphus experiment, a set of problem solving systems were b eing built against a common specification of a problem. An important h ypothesis was that the specification could be given, in large part, as a common ontology. This article is that ontology. This ontology is di fferent than normal software specification documents in two fundamenta l ways. First, it is formal and machine readable (i.e. in the KIF/Onto lingua syntax). Second, the descriptions of the input and output of th e task to be performed include domain knowledge (i.e. about elevator c onfiguration) that characterize semantic constraints on possible solut ions, rather than describing the form (data structure) of the answer. The article includes an overview of the conceptualization, excerpts fr om the machine-readable Ontolingua source files, and pointers to the c omplete ontology library available on the Internet. (C) 1996 Academic Press Limited