1991 Reports

Taxonomic Plan Reasoning

Devanbu, Premkumar T.; Litman, Diane J.

CLASP (CLAssification of Scenarios and Plans) is a knowledge representation system that extends the notion of subsumption from terminological languages to plans. The CLASP representation language provides description-forming operators that specify temporal and conditional relationships between actions represented in CLASSIC (a current subsumption-based knowledge representation language). CLASP supports subsumption inferences between plan concepts and other plan concepts, as well as between plan concepts and plan instances. These inferences support the automatic creation of a plan taxonomy. Subsumption in CLASP builds on term subsumption in CLASSIC and illustrates how term subsumption can be exploited to serve special needs. In particular, the CLASP algorithms for plan subsumption integrate work in automata theory with work in term subsumption. We are using CLASP to store and retrieve information about feature specifications and test scripts in the context of a large software development project.