Eccles J R, Saldanha J W
Department of Computer Science, Birkbeck College, University of London, U.K.
Comput Methods Programs Biomed. 1990 Jun;32(2):115-23. doi: 10.1016/0169-2607(90)90091-m.
Present-day knowledge-based systems (or expert systems) and databases constitute 'islands of computing' with little or no connection to each other. The use of software to provide a communication channel between the two, and to integrate their separate functions, is particularly attractive in certain data-rich domains where there are already pre-existing database systems containing the data required by the relevant knowledge-based system. Our evolving program, GENPRO, provides such a communication channel. The original methodology has been extended to provide interactive Prolog clause input with syntactic and semantic verification. This enables automatic generation of clauses from the source database, together with complete management of subsequent interfacing to the specified knowledge-based system. The particular data-rich domain used in this paper is protein structure, where processes which require reasoning (modelled by knowledge-based systems), such as the inference of protein topology, protein model-building and protein structure prediction, often require large amounts of raw data (i.e., facts about particular proteins) in the form of logic programming ground clauses. These are generated in the proper format by use of the concept of metadata.
当今的基于知识的系统（或专家系统）和数据库构成了“计算孤岛”，彼此之间几乎没有联系或完全没有联系。在某些数据丰富的领域，使用软件在两者之间提供通信渠道并整合其各自的功能特别具有吸引力，在这些领域中已经存在包含相关基于知识的系统所需数据的预先存在的数据库系统。我们不断发展的程序GENPRO提供了这样一种通信渠道。原来的方法已经得到扩展，以提供具有句法和语义验证的交互式Prolog子句输入。这使得能够从源数据库自动生成子句，并对后续与指定的基于知识的系统的接口进行全面管理。本文使用的特定数据丰富的领域是蛋白质结构，在该领域中，需要推理的过程（由基于知识的系统建模），例如蛋白质拓扑结构的推断、蛋白质模型构建和蛋白质结构预测，通常需要大量以逻辑编程基础子句形式存在的原始数据（即关于特定蛋白质的事实）。这些数据通过使用元数据的概念以适当的格式生成。
