Commonsense reasoning, in particular qualitative spatial and temporal reasoning (QSTR), provides flexible and intuitive methods for reasoning about vague and uncertain information including spatial orientation, topology and proximity.  Despite a number of theoretical advances in QSTR, there are relatively few applications that employ these methods.  The central problem is a significant lack of application level standards and validation methods for supporting developers in adapting and integrating QSTR with their domain specific qualitative spatial and temporal models.  To address this we present a significantly novel methodology for QSTR application validation, inspired by research in software engineering.  In this paper we focus on unit testing, and adapt the software engineering strategy of defining boundary cases.  We present two critical boundary concepts, a methodology for isolating the units under testing from other parts of the model, and methods to assist the designer in integrating our critical boundary unit testing approach with a broader validation plan.

In this paper knowledge representation and inference issues for rule-based systems are discussed. The paper deals with improving the logical calculus of Set Attributive Logic founding an expressive rule language XTT2. Representation extensions are introduced, and practical inference rules provided. The original includes an extended state specification, as well as interpreter design. xamples of rule analysis are given. Visual design tool HQed assuring rule quality is also presented.

In this paper certain knowledge and software engineering methods integration issues are discussed. The principal idea is to consider an effective design and implementation framework for rule design with UML, and implementation with Java. The solution proposed in the paper consists of using a custom knowledge engineering design method for rules in the design stage. The rule base is then transformed to UML behavioral diagrams, which can be considered a visual encoding. The rule implementation involves the serialization to Java language using classes representing the decision tables grouping rules sharing the same attributes.

Recently, the development of distributed knowledge systems has become more attractive due to the existence of new social semantic applications such as semantic knowledge wikis. User-friendly tools like wikis allow for a simple acquisition of formal knowledge, but also pose new challenges in knowledge engineering. In this paper, we reconsider classic criteria for verification in the light of a distributed knowledge base and we discuss novel anomalies that possibly occur during the collaborative development of a distributed knowledge base.

Empirical testing is a very popular evaluation method for the development of intelligent systems. Here, previously solved problems with correct solutions are given as cases to the system. Validity is tested by comparing the expected results with the derived solutions. Besides classic forms of boolean testing of occurring solutions more refined methods are required for a thorough evaluation of real world knowledge systems. We present extended precision and recall functions for interactive knowledge systems that are generalizations of the existing measures. Additionally, we propose a visualization method for inspecting the validation result for interactive systems. A case study with a second-opinion system from the medical domain demonstrates the usefulness of the approach.

Quality management, analysis and evaluation of intelligent systems are important tasks. This paper proposes a data mining approach based on the technique of subgroup mining utilizing a data warehouse that contains data from the respective intelligent system to be evaluated and from other external sources. The context of our work is given by an intelligent documentation and consultation system in the medical domain of sonography. For demonstrating the applicability and benefit of the presented approach, we provide several realworld examples of a case-study applying the approach in the medical domain of sonography.

Design, evaluation and refinement of intelligent systems was a popular topic at FLAIRS 2008. More and more authors have realized that the lack of systematic methods and formal techniques for the design, the evaluation, and the refinement are often important reasons for not using AI systems in practice. The first contributions in this field were limited to classical AI approaches such as rule-based systems. Actually, more and more papers regarding nonclassical types of systems (like case-based systems, for example), knowledge processing principles (learning principles, for example), and intelligent behavior (game strategies, for example) are published. Rule-based systems are still a subject of the track, but the focus is widened from their verification and validation towards also covering the design issue.

Instance classification using machine learning techniques has numerous applications, from automation to medical diagnosis. In many problem domains, such as spam filtering, classification must be performed quickly across large datasets. In this paper we begin with machine learning techniques based on the naive Bayes classification and attempt to improve classification performance by taking into account attribute confidence intervals.  Our prediction functions operate over nominal datasets and retain the asymptotic complexity of one-pass learning and prediction functions. We present preliminary results indicating a modest, albeit inconsistent improvement over the naive Bayes classifier alone.

In this search, we focused on supervised learning task using association rules algorithms (association based classification). These algorithms, developed in unsupervised learning, extract all the rules whose the support and confidence exceed a prefixed threshold support. After extracting the frequent itemsets, (i.e their support exceeds the threshold support), algorithms subdivide these itemsets to build the rules, and keep only the rules whose confidence exceeds the threshold confidence. The extraction of class association rules, using these algorithms, have several problems, because of the rules' a posteriori filtering. In the first stage, one extracts useless frequent itemsets, those which do not contain class, whereas the second stage can be simplified, since an itemset containing the class gives place only to only one class rule. In order to be able to work with a low threshold support, we propose FCP-Growth an adaptation of FP-Growth which eliminates the frequent itemsets not containing a class. Moreover, to make the minority class be in advantage during the construction of the class itemsets, we adapt the threshold support, in order to use the same threshold support inside each class.

The success of knowledge discovery in real-world domains often depends on our ability to handle data imperfections. Here we study this problem in the framework of association mining, seeking to identify frequent itemsets in transactional databases where the presence of some items in a given transaction is unknown. We want to use the frequent itemsets to predict "missing items": based on the partial contents of a shopping cart, predict what else will be added. We describe a technique that addresses this task, and report experiments illustrating its behavior.