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A Frame-based Expert System to Identify Minerals in Thin Section.

Wright-DD; Stanley-DA; Chen-HC; Et Al

Paper in Microcomputer Appplications in Geology II Pergamon 1990 :289-299

10007685

A computer program to aid in identifying minerals in thin section, xmin-s, was built using a commercial expert-system shell and is designed to run on IBM-compatible microcomputer systems. The program uses a menu-driven method of data input to avoid syntax errors typical of free-form user input. The menu also allows the user to input any number of optical properties of a mineral in any order. The program will match the user input with the optical properties of the minerals in the knowledge base. Frames are used to store the characteristics of each mineral in the knowledge base, and a b-tree structure is used to index the minerals on secondary storage. The use of a b-tree structure permits the use of a large database of minerals on microcomputer systems with reasonable access times. Approximate reasoning is used to accomodate imprecision of measurements and uncertainty of observations. Help facilities are available to provide definition of terms or to explain the procedure to be used for determining a particular optical property.

19900101

OP;

1990

OP 112-90

TURC;

Paper in Microcomputer Appplications in Geology, II; Pergamon, 1990, PP. 289-299