An Intelligent Information System for Forest Management: NED/FVS Integration

An Intelligent Information System (IIS) is viewed as composed of a unified knowledge base, database, and model base. This allows an IIS to provide responses to user queries regardless of whether the query process involves a data retrieval, an inference, a computational method, a problem solving module, or some combination of these. NED-2 is a full-featured intelligent information system for the sustainable management of forest lands. It is designed to help managers plan for wildlife, ecology, water, and landscape objectives as well as timber production. FVS is one of the integrated decision support model components in NED-2. We provide the FVS simulation agent and “wrapper” that permit communication between FVS and NED-2. We are developing a meta-knowledge base. Simulation agents can use it to set up and execute external simulation models. This paper will briefly describe the NED decision process, the NED-2 architecture, and discuss the design issues explaining the integration of NED-2 and FVS.