The NED IIS Project - Forest Ecosystem Management

For many years we have held to the notion that an Intelligent Information System (IIS) is composed of a unified knowledge base, database, and model base. The main idea behind this notion is the transparent processing of user queries. The system is responsible for “deciding” which information sources to access in order to fulfil a query regardless of whether this involves a data retrieval, an inference, a computational method, a problem solving module, or some combination of these. The NED IIS project is an effort to develop a robust, intelligent, goal-driven forest ecosystem management system to help forest managers plan and achieve wildlife, ecological, water, landscape, and timber goals. NED, using a blackboard architecture dominated by semi autonomous intelligent agents, integrates a core database, domain knowledge, meta-knowledge, and a GUI with external (possibly distributed) legacy and special purpose (heterogeneous) information sources. The current version of NED is NED-2. NED-2 is still under construction, however a prototype incorporating the major components of the architecture has been completed and