NEW COMPUTER SOFTWARE FROM NASA
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

While examining their environment, humans form concepts by organizing
observations on the basis of shared characteristics. These concepts
provide a framework into which new observations having similar
characteristics can be classified. COBWEB/3, from NASA Ames Research
Center, is an approach to "conceptual clustering", a computational
framework for forming concepts from any data that can be represented as
conjunctions of attributes and their values; examples include objects,
places, events, and protein sequences. As the program learns, it forms a
hierarchy organizing the concepts, each of which summarizes some of the
encountered instances. As in its human counterpart, this process occurs
incrementally - concepts become more discriminating over time as the
system encounters more examples. In addition to this learning mode,
COBWEB/3 can also operate in a prediction mode, in which the acquired
concepts are used to fill in missing information. This program can be
useful for projects needing to cluster data into groups that share
regularities across a number of attributes. The algorithm of COBWEB/3 is
based on the previous COBWEB and CLASSIT systems. COBWEB/3 also has
prediction capabilities. Given a partial description and a hierarchy
(either user-specified or one the system has-constructed), it will
classify the instance and predict the missing attribute's value.

COBWEB/3, inventory number ARC-13186, is written in Common LISP and is
designed to be machine independent. An implementation of Common LISP is
required to compile this package. COBWEB/3 is available in UNIX tar format
on a .25 inch streaming magnetic tape cartridge (standard distribution) or
on a 3.5 inch diskette. It is also available on a 5.25 inch 360K MS-DOS
format diskette or on a 3.5 inch Macintosh format diskette. An electronic
copy of the documentation in PostScript format is included on the
distribution medium. Program $900; documentation $21.

COSMIC, The University of Georgia
382 East Broad St, Athens, GA 30602-4272
(706) 542-3265;  Fax: (706) 542-4807

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