What Do You Know about Mail? Knowledge Representation in the SINIX Consultant

摘要

The SINIX Consultant is an intelligent help system for the SINIX operating system which answers natural language questions about SINIX concepts and commands and gives unsolicited advice to a user as well. In this paper the representation of domain knowledge in the SINIX Consultant will be discussed, i.e. the representation of concepts of the SINIX operating system in the so-called SINIX Knowledge Base. The SINIX Knowledge Base is a taxonomical hierarchy of SINIX concepts which are divided into objects and actions operating on these objects. A single concept in the knowledge base is described by a set of attributes reflecting structural or syntactical features, the use, application and purpose of the command or object, and additional information for explaining the concept to the user. The description of commands in the SINIX Knowledge Base which is mainly used in order to generate tutorial explanations and advice for the user, and the main ideas of describing SINIX objects are outlined in this paper.