Project Halo update--progress toward Digital Aristotle

In the winter 2004 issue of AI Magazine, we reported Vulcan Inc.'s first step toward creating a question-answering system called Digital Aristotle. The goal of that first step was to assess the state of the art in applied knowledge representation and reasoning (KRR) by asking AI experts to represent 70 pages from the advanced placement (AP) chemistry syllabus and to deliver knowledge-based systems capable of answering questions from that syllabus. This article reports the next step toward realizing a Digital Aristotle: we present the design and evaluation results for a system called AURA, which enables domain experts in physics, chemistry, and biology to author a knowledge base and that then allows a different set of users to ask novel questions against that knowledge base. These results represent a substantial advance over what we reported in 2004, both in the breadth of covered subjects and in the provision of sophisticated technologies in knowledge representation and reasoning, natural language processing, and question answering to domain experts and novice users.
Project Halo is a long-range research effort sponsored by Vulcan Inc., pursuing the vision of the 'Digital Aristotle'--an application containing large volumes of scientific knowledge and capable of applying sophisticated [...]