APPLYING RULE-BASE ANOMALIES TO KADS INFERENCE STRUCTURES

The literature on validation and verification of knowledge-based syste ms contains a catalogue of anomalies for knowledge-based systems, such as redundant, contradictory or deficient knowledge. Detecting such an omalies is a method for verifying knowledge-based systems. Unfortunate ly, the traditional formulation of the anomalies in the literature is very specific to a rule-based knowledge representation, which greatly restricts their applicability. In this paper, we show how the traditio nal anomalies can be reinterpreted in terms of conceptual models (in p articular KADS inference structures). For this purpose, we present a f ormalisation of KADS inference structures which enables us to apply th e traditional rule-base anomalies to these inference structures. This greatly improves the usefulness of the anomalies, since they can now b e applied to a much wider class of knowledge-based systems. Besides th is reformulation and wider applicability of the traditional anomalies, further contributions of this paper are a novel formalisation of KADS inference structures and a number of improvements to the existing for malisation of the traditional anomalies. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science B.V .