This is the first book to explain Ripple-Down Rules, an approach to building knowledge-based systems which is more similar to machine learning methods than other rule-based systems but which depends on using an expert rather than applying statistics to data The book provides detailed worked examples and uses publicly available software to demonstrate Ripple-Down Rules The examples enable users to build their own RDR tools

Machine learning algorithms hold extraordinary promise, but the reality is that their success depends entirely on the suitability of the data available. This book is about Ripple-Down Rules (RDR), an alternative manual technique for rapidly building AI systems. With a human in the loop, RDR is much better able to deal with the limitations of data. Ripple-Down Rules: The Alternative to Machine Learning starts by reviewing the problems with data quality and the problems with conventional approaches to incorporating expert human knowledge into AI systems. It suggests that problems with knowledge acquisition arise because of mistaken philosophical assumptions about knowledge. It argues people never really explain how they reach a conclusion, rather they justify their conclusion by differentiating between cases in a context. RDR is based on this more situated understanding of knowledge. The central features of a RDR approach are explained, and detailed worked examples are presented for different types of RDR, based on freely available software developed for this book. The examples ensure developers have a clear idea of the simple yet counter-intuitive RDR algorithms to easily build their own RDR systems. It has been proven in industrial applications that it takes only a minute or two per rule to build RDR systems with perhaps thousands of rules. The industrial uses of RDR have ranged from medical diagnosis through data cleansing to chatbots in cars. RDR can be used on its own or to improve the performance of machine learning or other methods.

The papers in this volume are the refereed application papers presented at AI-2005, the Twenty-fifth SGAI International Conference on Innovative Techniques and Applications of Artificial Intelligence, held in Cambridge in December 2005. The papers present new and innovative developments in the field, divided into sections on Synthesis and Prediction, Scheduling and Search, Diagnosis and Monitoring, Classification and Design, and Analysis and Evaluation. This is the thirteenth volume in the Applications and Innovations series. The series serves as a key reference on the use of AI Technology to enable organisations to solve complex problems and gain significant business benefits. The Technical Stream papers are published as a companion volume under the title Research and Development in Intelligent Systems XXII.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management, EKAW 2008, held in Acitrezza, Sicily, Italy, in September/October 2008. The 17 revised full papers and 15 revised short papers presented together with 3 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 102 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on knowledge patterns and knowledge representation, matching ontologies and data integration, natural language, knowledge acquisition and annotations, search, query and interaction, as well as ontologies.