CYCORP, INC. — Department of Defense STTR Phase I: The process of an MDA stakeholder specifying a needed modeling and simulation system has m

Description

The process of an MDA stakeholder specifying a needed modeling and simulation system has many problems: they may be ambiguous, overly specific, overly general, contradictory, etc. Symbolic knowledge-based representation and reasoning systems have matured to the point where they can ameliorate this. E.g., an extension of Cyc can help a Marines ISR-E requirements officer prepare a JCIDS CDD needs document spec"ing a complex future system. We propose an analogous application of Cyc here. Part of Phase I will involve eliciting the needed decision rules and heuristics in the MDA M & S domain, and, along the way, augmenting the system"s ontology and English lexicon. What makes this R & D is that, unlike the JCIDS task, there is less preexisting structure in this domain, so part of Phase I will involve Cycorp eliciting the knowledge from GMU (and, where there are still gaps, the two of them eliciting it from MDA) to create in effect a detailed instruction manual (which, incidentally, might be of use to the humans learning to do this task, not just to our Cyc-based automated assistant.)