Artificial Intelligence (AI) has now stepped out of the science laboratories into the real world of industry and commerce. AI is a viable, cost-effective technology today that is increasingly establishing its usefulness in diverse applications such as knowledge representation, information retrieval, natural language processing, database design, and decision-support systems.

Recognizing this progress, the U.S. Government has established a Knowledge Engineering Group at the Center for Strategic Leadership, which teaches executive level AI seminars to top government officials. Universities now offer M.S. programs in Knowledge Engineering. Industry groups have established their own implementation centers, such as the Knowledge Engineering on Hydraulic & Pneumatic Systems Ltd. that is a USA-France-Brazil collaboration.

Knowledge Engineering projects now seek to establish large-scale repositories of Reusable Knowledge, implement distributed collaborative ontology, enhance the technology for the reuse of design objects, assist modeling & analysis of physical systems and implement Adaptive Intelligent Systems.

 KNOWLEDGE ENGINEERING CONSULTING

Knowledge Engineering - simplified - is the process of capturing, encoding, and testing domain-specific impact knowledge, procedures and legislation for use in a software application. This serves as the triggers for impacts and the related mitigations, operating procedures and legislation to be considered. Additionally, knowledge management creates a systematic process of finding, selecting, organizing and presenting information in a way that improves employees' comprehension in a specific area of interest. Overline provides systems study, design, programming and implementation services. Additionally we provide basic training and a continuing support program to assist clients' knowledge engineers/workers with the task of using the systems.

 EXPERT SYSTEMS

Conventional programming languages provide for procedural manipulation of data. Humans, however, often solve complex problems using very abstract, symbolic approaches. AI techniques allow modeling of information at higher levels of abstraction to closely resemble human logic. These systems that emulate human expertise in well-defined problem domains are called Expert Systems. Overline has experience in Rule-based Expert Systems that use rules to represent heuristics, or "rules of thumb," which specify a set of actions to be performed for a given situation. An INFERENCE ENGINE automatically matches facts against patterns and determines which rules are applicable, employing either backward-chaining or forward-chaining techniques.