Development of a knowledge based system linked to a materials database

Abstract

The distributed materials database system named 'Data-Free-Way' has been developed by four organizations (the National Institute for Materials Science, the Japan Atomic Energy Research Institute, the Japan Nuclear Cycle Development Institute, and the Japan Science and Technology Corporation) under a cooperative agreement in order to share new and accumulated information for use in the development of advanced nuclear materials and for use in the design of structural components, etc. In order to make the system more valuable, the development of a knowledge based system, in which knowledge extracted from the material database is expressed, is planned for more effective utilization of Data-Free-Way. XML (eXtensible Markup Language) has been adopted as the method of describing the retrieved results and their meanings. A knowledge note described with XML is stored as a knowledge item in the knowledge base. Since this knowledge note is described with XML, the user can easily convert the displayed tables and graphs into a data format that the user usually uses. This paper will describe the current status of Data-Free-Way, the method of describing knowledge extracted from the materials database with XML and the distributed materials knowledge based system.

Keywords

• Knowledge based system
• Materials database
• Data-Free-Way
• XML
• Knowledge notes