Inferential knowledge acquisition

This paper describes the approach we are pursuing for modeling inferential processes in knowledge-based systems. It is aimed at overcoming the lack of generality affecting many of the systems described in the literature. This mainly happens since the problem-solving method adopted by those systems is too closely tied to the particular domain problem over which the method itself has been modeled. We also describe a system called M-KAT (Medical Knowledge Acquisition Tool) which is useful in simplifying the process of acquiring inferential knowledge. M-KAT relies on an epistemological model of medical reasoning which represents a generalization of most of the problem-solving methods adopted in medical knowledge-based systems. The metarules formalism has been adopted as a mean for representing inferential knowledge and making its acquisition easier, thus allowing the computational implementation of the epistemological model of medical reasoning.