Dean F. Hougen | Research in Knowledge-Based Systems |
From 1990 to 1995 I worked as a research assistant in what is now the Department of Soil, Water, and Climate. (When I started there it was the Department of Soil Science.) In this position I gained a lot of experience in writing useful Knowledge-Based Systems -- including Expert Systems, Decision Support Systems, and Geographical Information Systems -- and Graphical User Interfaces for these systems. I also integrated various kinds of Knowledge-Based Systems into practical programs of great functionality.
This research was aimed at producing working systems rather than on developing theory in Knowledge-Based Systems; the theory being developed was in Soil Science. Nonetheless, we did cover some very interesting ground (if you'll pardon the pun) when it came to Knowledge-Based Systems theory. Unfortunately, because of the focus of the projects, I never had the opportunity to adequately publish on the theory of integrated Knowledge-Based Systems. In fact, there was only one publication (listed below) on the systems themselves. I plan to revisit the theoretical aspects of integrated Knowledge-Based Systems in the near future.
These systems were written for MS-DOS and MS-Windows, whereas most of my other work has been done on UNIX. Besides this experience, I also gained valuable experience working with customers of various kinds, from funders to end users.
The systems I developed are:
SOIL7 is described in:
Pierre C. Robert and Dean Hougen. "SOIL7: Soil Information Module for the EPPL7 GIS," In Minnesota GIS/LIS Consortium, 1994 Fourth Annual Conference and Workshops, 34, 1994.
Last update: 21 August 2001
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