Abstract: Salles and Bredeweg, 1997

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Publication details

Paulo Salles and Bert Bredeweg. 1997. Building Qualitative Models in Ecology. Proceedings of the Eleventh International workshop on Qualitative Reasoning, QR'97, pages 155-164, Cortona, Italy, June 3-6, Liliana Ironi (editor). (PostScript) (PDF)

(Also published in proceedings of the Dutch AI conference, NVKI'97, pages 181-190, 1997)

Abstract

Building qualitative models is a difficult task. The construction of re-usable models, as well as the formalisation of the modelling process itself, are goals both to researchers in qualitative reasoning and ecology. This paper presents a library of model fragments for reasoning about the behaviour of ecological communities. We have developed a kernel of partial models that represents general knowledge about populations, which can be (re-)used in different situations. In addition, this paper discusses guidelines for the construction of qualitative models, based on our experience in representing the ecology of fire in the Brazilian cerrado vegetation. Our aim is to explicate the decisions we took during the construction of our models and to reformulate them as (more) general guidelines for the construction of qualitative models. Understanding the modelling process is a first step towards realising modelling support.

Last modified on May 4th, 2001

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