David Grosser’s PhD (2002)

Réunion Island University thesis - David Grosser - 1st of February 2002 at the IREMIA lab. (St Denis of La Réunion).

 Construction itérative de bases de connaissances descriptives et classificatoires avec la plate-forme à objets IKBS : application à la systématique des coraux des Mascareignes (PDF, 8.8 Mo, in french)

Abstract:

The ability to model taxonomic information using Knowledge Bases allows a better understanding, the preservation and the transmission to future generations of biological knowledge. There are three main elements that intervene in the building of a Knowledge Base : methods for managing knowledge, models for representing knowledge and appropriate software tools that are able to deal with the complexity of the concepts and the richness of the descriptions manipulated by systematicians. The proposed software environment, named IKBS, not only enables systematicians to build evolving Knowledge Bases but also offers tools for identifying and classifying complex descriptions. It uses an iterative methodology based on the experimental and inducitve approach usually adopted by naturalists. The object paradigm used for its implementation facilitates the extensibility and the reusability of developed software components. The software environment IKBS, combined with multimedia and hypertext technologies, was used by a group of experts for building a knowledge base on Mascareignes Corals.

Keywords : Knowledge Representation, Knowledge Bases, Identification and Classification of complex objects, Corals Systematics, object-oriented framework, Java