ERNEST: a semantic network system for pattern understanding

The authors give a detailed account of a system environment for treating general problems of image and speech understanding. A framework for representing declarative and procedural knowledge based on a suitable definition of a semantic network is provided. The syntax and semantics of the network are clearly defined. The pragmatics of the network in its use for pattern understanding are defined by several rules which are problem-independent. This allows one to formulate problem-independent control algorithms. Complete software environments are available to handle the described structures. The general applicability of the network system is demonstrated by short descriptions of three applications from different task domains