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Why?

While searching for something to do my final project for my Artificial Intelligence class, Ben was busy getting the RoverWeb up and running. I glanced thru one the FAQ pages and realized that it was hard to figure out what kind of Land Rover I was looking at. In other words, there were many more kinds of Land Rovers than I had previously realized. So here was the idea for my final project: Build an Expert System that would ask questions and figure out what kind of Land Rover the user was looking at. Of course, I didn't want to type the answers to the various questions, and I wanted to put it on the Web to help Ben out. So here is the Web version of the Identa-Rover program. Enjoy!

How?

You want to know how I did it? Here is my final project paper submitted to the Cal State Chico CSCI 223 Artificial Intelligence class. If you don't want to burrow thru the paper, I used CLIPS to create the expert system (ES) that actually asks the question, checks the answers, and provides the results. I originally used the Tcl command expect to interface to the expert system. But this didn't work out for some weird reason and I had the use Tcl bidirectional pipes. The Tcl script is also a CGI script -- it gets called thru the web server from web pages, notably this page and the other question pages. By keeping track of the previous answers, the Tcl script can run the ES and get the next question, which is then returned to your web browser. Cool, huh?

What's it Got?

Currently the ES contains 12 Land Rovers. These are most everything except the Discovery, Forward Control, and Range Rover models (we hope to add these later...) There are 10 questions which are asked, unless a single match is made earlier. This ES is specially setup to handle "Don't Know" answers, in the event that a good answer can't be determined. This has proven to be one of its best features, in case one is looking at a photo or running the ES from memory and can't remember a specific. The question pages also show which Land Rover match so far, and provides a way to "Backtrack" to a previous question, which is useful for exploring the ES's knowledge base. For more info on the version , click here.
Identa-Rover Design and Implementation by