CPE/CSC 481-W06 Knowledge-Based Systems Assignment 2: Family Relationships

Goal

This assignment builds upon the knowledge base for family members from the previous assignment. The task here is to specify additional relationships between individuals that can be derived from existing relationships. For example, if the "mother" and "father" relationships are given, the "parent" relationship can be derived from those, essentially by saying that if a person is somebody's father or mother, they are a parent of that person.

Objectives

In particular, you should:

• learn how to specify knowledge through facts and rules in CLIPS/Jess;
• gain more experience with the interaction between facts and rules.

Description

Below you find a partial listing for a CLIPS knowledge base on family relationships. (Your templates for the original knowledge base may be different, which can require modifications in the rules as well.) Your task is to complete the rules so that the following relationships are covered:

• mother, father
• sister, brother
• cousin (first degree only)
• brother in law, sister in law, mother in law, father in law
• grandfather, grandmother, grandparent
• great-grandfather, great-grandmother, great-grandparent
• ancestor (recursive extension of parent -> grandparent -> great-grandparent, etc.; it should work for any number of generations, not just the ones that happen to be present in your set of family members. If your family knowledge base has less than four generations, add some fictional ancestors.)

In this assignment, you can restrict yourself to traditional families consisting of husband, wife, and possibly children. You do not need to consider more complex relationships that may arise as a consequence of divorce, adoption, or similar circumstances. In case of doubt, specify the exact relationship as a comment.

If you want to, you can earn extra credit of up to 10% of the assignment score for additional relationships. If you're planning to do this, please discuss it with me first.

Partial Sample Program

A partial sample of a CLIPS program for family relationships is available through this link: Family Knowledge Base sample. You may have to modify some aspects to reflect the structure of the knowledge base you use.

Submission

This assignment must be submitted electronically via the handin program on hornet to the grade480 account. Please make sure that you have a functioning account on hornet. Use "handin grade480 A2 filename" to submit file. To check if your file is there, omit the filename, and you'll see a listing of already submitted files. Instead of submitting individual files, you can also put all of the files in to an archive (e.g. .tar, .zip). Follow this link for further directions.

You must submit the following items:

1. a diagram of the family tree you are using
2. a file containing the knowledge base (facts and rules) for the family tree
3. a file with the rules for the family relationships
4. a file with at least one test run for each of the requested relationships
5. a README file with instructions for using your program

The first two items can be identical to the ones from the previous assignment, and will not be graded. Their main purpose is to provide the whole set of relevant items in one package.

Grading Guidelines

I will use the following grading guidelines:

• 16 points in total for the correct formulation of the relationships
• 6 points for the test runs
• 3 points for the README file and documentation of the source code