Istar - Knowledge Based System, and Knowledge Server
Istar is a piece of software that allows you to distribute knowledge and
perhaps wisdom. (Name? Gandalf was one of the Istari.) It enables
you to construct and then run knowledge bases (KBs), which are
encapsulations of expert human knowledge.
Have you arrived here from a link at the bottom of a page produced by the
Istar knowledge server, or are you reading this as part of the Istar
documentation? If the latter, then read on through this page. If you have
arrived from a page sent by Istar and want to know what to do or what to
expect, then you might wish to jump to the section on
the server, and read the rest at your leisure. BUT FIRST, a tip:
Before you read on, why not go back to the page you came from and set your TimeOut to something longer than 10 minutes?
So you'll have time to browse these pages in comfort.
Since human knowledge has many aspects, including understanding and
principles, experience and rules of thumb, precision and uncertainty, all
in a complex network of interrelationships, knowledge based systems (KBS)
technology has developed ways of encapsulating and handling such a rich
mixture. Because Istar is a 'visual knowledge representation language', it
makes it especially easy for you to encapsulate knowledge and then make
that knowledge available across the world via the internet. There are two
steps, involving people in two roles:
The rest of this page is written from the point of view of the knowledge
user, such as someone who is running one of the KBs on the knowledge
server. If you are more interested in Istar itself (either general
interest or as a knowledge engineer) then the section
below takes you to copious documentation and allows you to download
Istar.
To connect to the Istar Knowledge
Server click here. (At present we have some problem with our
old hardware, so this link might not be active. Keep trying. A.B.)
The following will bring you to sections of the document describing the
Istar Knowledge Server.
If you wish to report a fault or to make a comment, please email me.
If someone phones you and then leaves the phone and doesn't return, after a
time you will hang up. Istar does the same. After a 'silence' from you of
10 minutes it will assume you have finished and abandon your session. But
you can set this TimeOut Period to longer (or shorter) than 10 minutes if
you wish, because you might wish to browse other pages during a session
without fear of finding Istar has done this.
To do this, look at the bottom of (almost) any page, and you will find a
statement of what your TimeOut is set to and some wee hyperlinks ranging
from 1 to 60 mintes. Hit one of these, and your TimeOut Period will
change.
Istar aims to be both easy to use as well as powerful, in building
knowledge bases. It is continually under development and is (not yet) a
commercial product, so you may download and use it free. But it is,
hopefully, as robust as any commercial product.
(Most of the following concern version 1.092, which is the version
immediately before the server module was added. However, almost everything
in that version and the server version are identical.)
NOTE: Istar itself runs on the Amiga platform. But, via its server module, its KBs can be accessed
from any platform.
Copyright (c) Andrew
Basden 1999.
Last updated: 11 September 1999 integrated with documentation.