Representing Process Models in Cyc: An Application to Crisis Management

The IDEF3 process modelling technique has been used to represent the process of Crisis Management [2], which is one of the HPKB challenge problems. The process models add detail and structure to the description of this task given in the challenge problem specification [1]. The resulting process models have been verified by SMEs and therefore can be considered to be accurate descriptions of the activities of intelligence analysts. As high-level descriptions of ‘what analysts do’, process models identify the activities of human analysts that HPKB-program tools might support. In addition, the models identify important steps of reasoning in crisis analysis. A process model is not detailed enough to allow problemsolving methods to be defined, but it can identify distinct reasoning tasks. As a result, process models can potentially be used to organise the reasoning in a very large knowledge base—such as Cyc—in a way which resembles the reasoning of SMEs to a greater extent. The additional structuring of the KB may also improve the effectiveness of automated inferencing. This report therefore suggests how IDEF3 process models can be represented in Cyc, and how this representation can be used to structure Cyc’s reasoning within the context of the HPKB challenge problems: Section 2 provides an introduction to IDEF3 process models and to Cyc. Section 3 formalises our concept of process as a collection within the hierarchy of Cyc collections. Section 4 shows how the structure of the process model can be used to define KBs for crisis management knowledge. The problem of connecting these KBs together to reflect the sequence of processes in the process model is also addressed. Section 5 defines the idea of relevant information and presents a formalisation of it in Cyc. Section 6 proposes a means of explicitly capturing the competence of the process model in terms of which queries are answerable.