Validating SPONGIA, an expert system for sponge identification

In this article we present the validation of SPONGIA, an expert system to h elp in the identification of marine sponges. Validation was performed by us ing data from 82 randomly selected literature descriptions of sponge specie s. The data gathered by SPONGIA to identify each specimen were obtained fro m the bibliographical description. The set of cases, in which each case was described by the data gathered by SPONGIA, was presented to five internati onally recognised experts in sponge systematics. The identifications genera ted by SPONGIA were compared with the identifications of these human expert s by means of a cluster analysis. The similarity between SPONGIA and human identifications was assessed using four measures: Euclidean distance, City- block distance, Mahalanobis distance and Kappa index. In this article we sh ow that SPONGIA obtains similar quality results to the experts in Porifera systematics. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.