2011 International Conference of Information Technology, Computer Engineering and Management Sciences

Knowledge Management Method for Expert System Based on Cognitive Model

Shisong Zhu1,2, Lifang Kong2, Jinping Liu2
1. Key Laboratory for Land Environment and Disaster Monitoring of SBSM,
China University of Mining& Technology, Xuzhou, 221116, Jiangsu, China;
2. Xuzhou Air Force College, Xuzhou, 221000, Jiangsu, China
E-mail:zhushisong@sohu.com
explaining how the information is being processed during
completing their recognition activities.
In this paper, we have selected some 10~24 month old
children as the research objects. A cognitive model is set up
based on the analysis of the common procedure of their
actions during recognizing the complex world. According to
the model, a general concept learning method is presented,
which is applicable for the knowledge management for the
expert system.

Abstract A living expert system needs a mechanism to update

and increase knowledge to adapt this changeable world and the
knowledge acquired by different approaches need storage in
order for reasoning and updating conveniently. The method
presented in this paper bears this mission. Simulating the
learning procedure of human beings is the core idea of this
method from which we can find the ways how to add, delete,
amend and use the knowledge in an expert system. Based on
the analysis of the common procedure of childrens actions
during recognizing the world, a cognitive model of concept
learning is abstracted. A general concept learning algorithm, a
knowledge representation method based on general rules, a
logical structure in the forest shape, and a uniform data
structure for storage are accordingly presented. Thus, a
complete and more scientific management case for the
knowledge base of expert system is provided. At last,
comparing with some ontology knowledge bases, such as CYC,
WordNet, and NKI, two different characteristics of this
management method are discussed.

II.

Simulation is the goal of AI, but also the learning ways

and means. 10 24 month old children are the best
simulation objects for research on the intelligence growth
naturally, who are in an important phase for the intelligence
to take off. Because they have the material conditions on the
side of physiology and their psychology is also pure. So long
as the security sense obtains the guarantee, not have the
uncomfortable feelings, they can make the natural responses
to acquaintance's simple instruction. Through observed five
babies for more than four months, we found that the process
of the baby to distinguish things may reappear many times.
These are very important for the research on the
intelligence's natural increase process.
When a child is interested in a kind of objects at the first
time, an approximate impression will be marked in his
memory. This impression consists of a few main sensuous
features and the concept described with these features
appears very imprecise. But with the natural knowledge
management, this kind of knowledge will be improved.
For example: You tell a child there is a chick when he is
looking at it, the concept of chick will be established in his
memory. This concept is cursory and imprecise. After that,
when you point to a duck and ask him what it is, he will tell
you a chick again. This is because in his memory chick is
a kind of animal with two legs and all covered with feather
and the concept of duck has not existed yet. Under this
situation, while he finds an instance appropriate to the
concept of chick, he will bring this concept to his mind
instantly. So you tell him that this isnt a chick but a duck
and emphasize that the mouth of a chick is short and acute
but the mouth of a duck is long and flat, in order to help him
correct his concepts on them. Then he will note that the
shapes of their mouths are different indeed. Because of the
cognition of his sensibility, he has refined the concept of
chick and established another imprecise concept of duck
based on the new concepts of the mouth of a chick and the
mouth of a duck. But he will never point to a duck and tell

Keywords- Knowledge management, Expert System,

Cognitive Mode,Concept Learning, Knowledge Representation

I.

INTRODUCTION

The quality and quantity of knowledge in an expert

system determines its ability to solve problems. Similarly
with a human expert, the expert system needs the learning
ability to achieve new knowledge, eliminating errors,
improving existing knowledge, and to storage them in order,
which can create advantage conditions for actual reasoning
and application. Knowledge management in scientific can
help the expert system maintaining the exuberant vitality. In
essence, the process of knowledge management is the
process to improve knowledge in knowledge base, and is the
learning process for expert system.
The concept is a reflection of the nature of things. It can
be characteristic the things generally[1].The growth of human
knowledge thanks to concept learning methods, although the
learned knowledge is not necessarily a reliable, but it is the
important way for a man to improve his abilities on
recognizing the world. Current research on concept learning
is following two different routes [2]One is based on the
engineering method, which sets out from the potential
principle(not considering whether the principle is being in
the synthesis of the life),attempting to test and confirm a
engineering method of concept learning; Another is based on
the cognitive model, which tries to exploit a computing
theory of people s concept learning by analyzing and

978-0-7695-4522-6/11 $26.00 2011 IEEE

DOI 10.1109/ICM.2011.352

THEORY OF THE COGNITIVE MODEL

77

precondition completely uses first-order predicate logic or

proposition. The deduction mechanism is the same as the
production system, the rule conclusion can be used to further
reasoning or the suggestion directly, and it can also be
triggered a process command. The description of KRBGR
with BNF is shown as follows

you it is water because the visual images has made him have
the ability to distinguish the water form the duck and know
them to belong to two different domains since he cant find
similar attributes between them
If a child meets a new instance and knows he has no
concept about it definitely, he may ask the people with more
abundant knowledge and then establishes a new concept of
the new instance
In a word, the procedure of a child to cognize the world
is the procedure that during a period many new concepts in
different domains are established and many old concepts
refined from time to time. This procedure is based on
existing concepts in his memory, which is in accordance
with the fringe effect of learning. So we can call this
procedure the general concept learning. The model of the
learning procedure can be abstracted as Figure1. It is worth
noticing that during the procedure of refining the concepts of
one kind of instances, there will be some elementary
concepts produced, which are called ontology. Ontology is a
detailed description of the basic concepts [3]. With the
increasing of ontology, the learners experience will be
enriched and the ability of abstract thinking and reasoning
will be improved constantly.

<general rule>=<premise><conclusion><attribute set><concept

name>
<premise>=<single condition><compound condition >
<conclusion>=<fact><operation>
<compounded condition>=<single condition> <single condition>
[ ]<single condition> <single condition>[ ]
<operation>=<single operation><compound operation >
<compound operation >=<single operation > < single operation
>[ ]<single operation > < single operation >[ ]
<single operation >=<operation name><predicate name> [ <
variable>,]
<attribute set>=<single attribute><compound attribute>
<compound attribute >=<single attribute> <single attribute>[ ]
<single attribute>=<attribute name>[(<variable>,
<attribute value>]
<concept name>=<Instance name>[<variable >]

C.

The Advantages of KRBGR

Application of KRBGR, the knowledge expressed in
production rules, framework, semantic networks, relational
databases, and other modes can be consistently represented
conveniently and modular organization. It will be very useful
for large-capacity knowledge base system building
undoubtedly.

A set of instances
in different

Description of the instances

Search &match

KB

Refine
old concepts

IV.

Produce
new concepts

A. Logical Organization of KB

A reasonable way to organize a great deal of knowledge
from extensive domains can raise search and reasoning
efficiency of AI system, and to updates, maintenance and
expansion the knowledge base.
The organizational structure in forest shape is an ideal
choice, which has the natural advantage of multi-level,
modularity, and maintaining the contact between each other.
Each tree of the forest is a kind of knowledge module, the
root identifies the problem domain, each non-leaf node
represents a condition of a rule or a property of a concept,
each leaf node indicates the rules consequent or a concept
name. The relationships between nodes include parent-child
relationship and brotherhood. The parent-child relationship
has inherited characteristics, the brotherhood has shared
characteristics. In the forest, it is conveniently to use some
heuristic methods to improve the efficiency for matching and
searching.

Storage in
organized way

Figure 1. The common procedure of concept learning

III.

ORGANIZATION OF KNOWLEDGE

KNOWLEDGE REPRESENTATION

Knowledge representation is one of the important factors

that can influence the knowledge management method and
the expert system problem solving performance.
A. Requirements
The requirements of knowledge representation in expert
system usually include the following sides: (1) Strong ability
of expression; Convenient for control, contributing to
improving the efficiency of the search and matching;
Union structure, easy to expand, modify and consistency
check the KB.

B. Uniform data structure

Due to the length of branches is variable, to adopt a
uniform data structure for branches is not realistic, but we
can use consistent data structure on the leaf node. Node data
structure not only contains the node content itself, but also
including a variety of logical relationship of the node in the
tree. To store each node in the computer as a record can be
easily to recover the logical relationships between nodes
when reading knowledge. The Node data structure
description is as follows:

B. KRBGR and Its Description

Based on the analysis above, an ideal knowledge
representation mode is presented, which is called knowledge
representation based on generalized rules (KRBGR). Its
formal method fully incorporates the benefits from logic,
production rules in knowledge representation and reasoning,
and has compensated for their weaknesses. Overall, KRBGR
likes production rules, has the shape "premise
conclusions". The child conditions of facts and rules

78

finds a leaf node NC which is similar to NI , then ends; else

he will require the expert to enrich the description of the
training instance, which is to add more attributes to the
description of the instance, and then goes to step l
Step5 If Ai=Ti but VAi 9Ti then the learner will
produce a brother node Ai which is the same as Ti, and
append the attributes Ti+1,Ti+2,,Tn to the node Ai. Let NC
NI and end
Step6 If the learner can not find a node Ai on the ith
layer in the branch matching the attribute Ti in the
description of the instance in a sequence, then he will move
the attribute Ti to the end of the description of the instance,
and continue the operation of matching with Ti+l until a node
Ai is found which matches to Ti. If VAl=VTl, then go to step l;
else go to step 5If the attribute node Ai which is similar to
Ti can not be found, then a brother node Ai is produce which
is the same as Ti and the attributes Ti+1,Ti+2, , Tn are
appended to the node Ai. Let NCNI and end
Step7 If we use an instance without the name NI to test
the learner, then the learner will match the attribute nodes
with the attributes of the instance along a branch
(1)If the matching procedure just arrives at a leaf node
NC, then the learner will return NC to the expert and require
him to affirm it. If the concept is right, then the test has
succeeded; else go to step 3
(2)If n>m, the learner will return NC to the expert and
require him to affirm it. If the concept is right, then goes to
step 2else goes to step 3
(3)If n<m, the learner will require the expert to add
more attributes to the description of the instance, and then
goes to step l
(4)If a node Ai=Ti but VAi9Tiappears in the procedure
of matching, then the learner will ask the expert the name NI
and goes to step 5
Step8 In the learning procedure, if the learner meets
some elementary concepts which belong to some kind of
objects, he will add them to the component concept base of
the domain according to steps l to 6

struct node
{ int incrs// identify of node
char content[50]//content of node
int fath//father point
float C_v//confidence value
float T_v//threshold and some signs
}

Explain: incrs and fath are long integer data, T_v and C_v
are the single data, each 4 bytes. content accounting 50bytes.
In the domain node, set fath =-1, C_v= null. For the
uncertainty knowledge, in the non-leaf node, C_v represents
the weight of the sub condition, set C_v (0,1), T_v =null.
In the leaf node, set T_v and C_v [0,1],represent the
threshold t and confidence CF. For the certainty knowledge,
in the leaf node, set T _v=1and C_v=0,in the non-leaf node, T
_v=1and C_v are empty. In all branched nodes, set T_v=-2.
V.

ALGORITHM OF GENERAL CONCEPT LEARNING

Since the KB adopts a tree-shape structure to organize

the concepts and storage them, accordingly, the mechanism
of searching and match adopts the width-first method, and
the description of the instances and the concepts adopts the
representation method based on general rules. In order to
expatiate on the algorithm more clearly, two definitions are
given as follows
Definition 1 If instance I has n attributes T1,T2,,Tn,
each one of the attributes has a value VTi , the name of the
instance is NI, then the description of the instance can be
expressed as: {T1(I,VT1), T2(I,VT2), , Tn(I, VTn), N(I)},
iN,T1(I,VT1) represents the instance.
Definition 2 If concept C has m attributes A1, A2, ,
An, each one of the attributes has a value VAi, the name of
the concept is Nc, then the description of the concept can be
expressed as {A1(C, AT1), A2(C, AT2), , Tn(I, VTn),
N(C)}, iN,A1(C, AT1) represents the concept.
The description of the algorithm for GMLC is shown
as follows:
Step1 The system accepts a training instance I. If the
knowledge base is empty, then storage the nodes sequence
directly; else it will get the first attribute T1 to search for the
branch of the concept tree. If it finds a node Al has the same
name to T1 and VAl=VTl, then it will continue searching for
the nodes A2 A3 which match T2 T3 of I along
the branch until it finds a leaf node. If NI=NC and n=m, then
the system keeps down the description of the concept, and
end.
Step2 If the system finds a leaf node NC and NCNI,
but n>m, then it inserts the nodes Tm+1, Tm+2,,Tn which
have not been matched before the leaf node as the new
nodes of the branch of the concept tree and ends .
Step3 If the system finds a leaf node NC, but NCNI,
then the learner knows that a collision between the two
concepts has taken place and returns the branch of the
concept to the expert who is required to update the concept.
If a node Ai=Ti and VAi 9Tiappears, the system goes to
step 5
Step4 If the learner finds that the procedure of the
match is stopped for the reason n<m, then it l searches for
the leaf node NC of the branch with NI directly. If the learner

VI.

AN EXPERIMENT

A. Knowledge to Be Learned
The following set of facts and fuzzy rules used for the
anti-radar weapon against decision-making system to reason
and make decision. Each sub-condition of the rules has
assigned corresponding weight W, and each rule has assigned
confidence value C_v and threshold value t.
Fact1isa(attacking weapon,Anti- radiation UAV )[0]
Fact2isa(R, Anti-radiation missile)[1]
Fact3isa(R, mobile radar)[1]
Fact4isa(R, Spread spectrum radar)[0]
Fact5owns(R, radar bait)[1]
Fact6owns(R, high energy laser)[0]
Rule1isa(A, Anti-radiation missile)[0.4] isa(R, mobile radar)[0.6]
lower high voltage move [0.6,0.5]
Rule2isa(A, Anti-radiation missile)[0.4] isa(R, Spread spectrum
radar)[0.6]Spread spectrum instantly [0.7,0.5]
Rule3isa(A, Anti-radiation missile)[0.4] isa(R, Spread spectrum
radar)[0.3] isa(R, mobile radar)[0.3]Spread spectrum instantly
lower high voltage move[0.8,0.3]

79

Rule4isa(AAnti-radiation missile)[0.4] isa(R, spread spectrum

radar)[0.2] isa(R, mobile radar)[0.2 owns(R, radar bait)[0.2]Spread
spectrum instantly start-up bait lower high voltage move [0.9,0.2]
Rule5 isa(A, Anti-radiation missile)[0.4] owns(R, high energy
laser)[0.6]destroy with laser[1.0,0.5]


2

B. Physical Storage Format of Learning Result

The facts and rules listed above are learned by the
method GMCL, and the result can be seen in table1, which
can be got out from the database independently.
TABLE I.
incrs
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19

fath
-1
1
1
1
1
1
6
7
6
9

C_v

12

0.8

-2
0.6
0.5
0.6
0.5
0.3
0.3
0.3

6
14
15
16

0.9

0.2
0.2
0.2
0.2

6
18

1.0

0.6
0.5

1
0
1
0
0.4
0.6
0.7

11

14

18

10

12

15

19

13

16
17

THE PHYSICAL STORAGE FORMAT OF KNOWLEDGE

content
anti-radar weapon against
isa(Rmobile radar)
isa(Rspread spectrum radar)
owns(Rradar bait))
owns(Rhigh energy laser)
isa(AAnti-radiation missile)
isa(Rmobile radar)
lower high voltage move
isa(Rspread spectrum radar)
spread spectrum instantly
isa(Rspread spectrum radar)
isa(Rmobile radar)
Spread spectrum instantly lower
high voltage move
isa(Rspread spectrum radar)
isa(Rmobile radar)
owns(Rradar bait)
Spread spectrum instantly startup
bait lower high voltage move
owns(Rhigh energy laser)
destroy with laser

Figure 2. Tree-shape logical structure of the memory

T_v

B.

Compare with the Ontology KB

Under the guidance of the cognitive sciences, through
simulating the process of children's intelligent growth, a set
of KB construction methods of expert systems adapting to
common fields is presented. Compared with the current
representative mass ontology-based K%, such as CYC[4],
WordNet[5], NKI [6], there are some significant differences.
1) Different Routes: The Knowledge management based
on cognitive model is a computation theory of human
concept learning through analyzing and interpreting the
information processing process when human complete the
cognitive activities.
2) Different Goals: Ontology-based KB system is
mainly used for knowledge sharing and strived to complete
exhaustion. While the Knowledge management goal
mentioned in this paper is application-oriented directly, such
as expert systems, does not need to master a large nonrelated knowledge.

C.

Logical Structure of Memory

The knowledge learned by GMCL has the tree-shape
logical structure, by which the knowledge can be search and
called out conveniently from the memory. The number in
each node of the tree shown in Figure2 is the identification
of one corresponding record.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

This work is sponsored by the National Science

Foundation Grant such as #50811120111 and #40971275.
Thanks CUMT and Xuzhou Air force College for the
financial and scientific support.
REFERENCES

VII. ANALYSIS AND DISCUSSION

[1]

A. Space Complexity
Since the knowledge base using the tree-structure to
save concepts, the size of the storage space is the total space
of all nodes of the tree (or forest). Besides the content itself
(50 bytes), each feature node also contains four additional
information (16 bytes), such as incrs, fath, T_v and C_v. So
the node's structural overhead is about 24.2%. However, as
a tree-structure, which has the characteristics of inheritance
and share, thus eliminates many redundant storage spaces.
Overall, the structural overhead has not increased the space
complexity, but saved storage space, and provided favorable
conditions for control character nodes and maintaining
knowledge base flexibly.

[2]
[3]
[4]
[5]

[6]

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