Purposes of LamaLama is a software platform written in the Orion team. It is devoted to the design of Knowledge-Based Systems (KBS), i.e. to both knowledge base and reasoning engine design. It provides experts or engine designers with a generic environment, composed of common tools that can be shared among different KBS.
ApproachIn problem solving, several reasoning strategies can be applied. Depending on the task to solve, these strategies are different and use information about different entities, organized in different ways. When solving a complex task, the strategy can be decomposed into more simple «reasoning steps». Furthermore, for one task more or less complex versions of a reasoning strategy may be needed, depending on the application domain specifics.Lama's framework provides designers with data structures for knowledge representations and reasoning components that implement small grain-size «reasoning steps». Standard, general purpose reasoning components are e.g. choosing between a set of elements, matching two elements, testing a condition, etc. These components are free of implementation details, for the designers to configure or adapt engines, based on abstract reasoning step, but independently of implementation issues. This allows easy versioning of engines and limits code re-writing. Lama provides basic data structures and reasoning instructions that are the basic items of reasoning mechanisms; they correspond to elementary steps of reasoning that have been identified in reasoning tasks, such as planning for example. Lama proposes to base the design of new engines on reusable structures and instructions, that are intended to facilitate the job of engine designers. The philosophy of Lama is based on both a clear separation and an easy mapping between a model and its representation and implementation. Separation means that a model can be designed and versioned independently of implementation issues. Mapping means that a corresponding engine can easily be implemented in different languages and on different machines, without extensive code re-writing. LAMA is a research project initiated at INRIA in the Orion team and headed by Sabine Moisan. Several other persons contribute to it at present: J-P Rigault, F. Avnaim, or have contributed to it in the past, as engineer, or Ph.D. students: J. van den Elst, P. Itey, R. Vincent, M. Marcos, and M. Crubézy. Orion Team |