esommer.net : AI & product configuration

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Anal96	E. Sommer, Extensional and intensional analysis of relational knowledge bases. In Nigel Shadbolt, ed., Proc. European Workshop on Knowledge Acquisition (EKAW-96), Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, Berlin, 1996. Springer-Verlag. older version: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/ml-archive/GMD/papers/ML70.ps.gz
Bricklin80	Dan Bricklin, VisiCalc. 1980.
DeKleer86	J. De Kleer, An Assumption Based TMS, Artificial Intelligence, Vol. 28, 1986, pp. 127–162.
DM97	Stefan Wrobel, Dietrich Wettschereck, Edgar Sommer, and Werner Emde. Extensibility in Data Mining Systems / 214. In: Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD-96). Edited by Evangelos Simoudis, Jia Wei Han, and Usama Fayyad. AAAI Press, 1997. 400 pp. ISBN 1-57735-004-9 http://www.aaai.org/Conferences/KDD/1996/kdd-program.html ftp://ftp.gmd.de/ml-archive/GMD/papers/ML75.ps.gz
Eval95	E. Sommer, An approach to quantifying the quality of induced theories. In Claire Nedellec, ed., Proc. IJCAI Workshop on Machine Learning and Comprehensibility, 1995. Available via WWW http://nathan.gmd.de/projects/ml/lit/mlpublist.html ftp://ftp.gmd.de/ml-archive/GMD/papers/ML70.ps.gz
Eval96	E. Sommer, An approach to measuring theory quality. In Nigel Shadbolt, ed., Proc. European Workshop on Knowledge Acquisition (EKAW-96), Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, Berlin, 1996. Springer-Verlag. older version: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/ml-archive/GMD/papers/ML70.ps.gz
Fender95	E. Sommer, Fender: An approach to theory restructuring. In Stefan Wrobel and Nada Lavrac, eds., Proceedings of the European Conference on Machine Learning (ECML-95), Volume 912 of Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, Berlin, 1995. Springer-Verlag. http://ftp.gmd.de/ml-archive/general/ecml-95/AcceptedPapers.html
Haag98	Albert Haag, Sales Configuration in Business Processes. IEEE Intelligent Systems, July/August 1998:79-85, 1998.
IPC2000	SAP, The Internet Pricing and Configurator. [sic] http://www.sap.com/ipc. SAP, Walldorf. 2000.
KEE	Intellicorp, KEE: The Knowledge Engineering Environment. User Manual. Intellicorp, 1982.
KirstenWrobel98	Kirsten, Mathias & Wrobel, Stefan, Relational Distance-Based Clustering. In: David Page (ed.): Proc. 8th Int. Conference on Inductive Logic Programming (ILP98); Springer: Berlin, New York, pp. 261 - 270.
MOBAL93	K. Morik, S. Wrobel, Jörg-Uwe Kietz, and W. Emde. Knowledge Acquisition and Machine Learning. Academic Press, London, 1993.
MOBAL96	E. Sommer, Werner Emde, Jörg-Uwe Kietz, and Stefan Wrobel. Mobal 4 User Guide. Arbeitspapiere der GMD (Tech Report), GMD, 1996. Up-to-date versions accessible via WWW http://nathan.gmd.de/projects/ml/home.html or FTP ftp://ftp.gmd.de/gmd/mlt/Mobal/
SAPhlp	SAP, SAP R/3 Library. Available online at http://www.sap.com, and http://help.sap.com, as well es on CD and in print form.
SPEED94	E. Sommer, K. Morik, J.M. Andre, and M. Uszynski. What on-line learning can do for knowledge acquisition. Knowledge Acquisition, 6:435-460, 1994.
TR96	E. Sommer, Theory restructuring: Coarse-grained integration of strategies for induction and maintenance of knowledge bases. In R.S. Michalski and G. Tecuci, editors, Third International Conference on Multistrategy Learning (MSL'96). AAAI, 1996. http://www.aaai.org/Press/Proceedings/MSL/1996/msl96-contents.html Version: http://theoryrestructuring.iscool.net
TR98	E. Sommer, Theory restructuring. infix, 1998.
WinoFlor86	T. Winograd and F. Flores, Understanding computers and cognition: A new foundation of design. Ablex, Norwood, NJ, 1986.

Glossary of FTGAASSs

/n	well-loved prefix attached to a transaction number in R/3 when addressing it directly (as opposed to navigating the menu hierarchy) see transaction.
AI	Artificial Intelligence. An area of informatics concerned with problems too challenging for other areas of informatics.
ATMS	Assumption-based TMS. [DeKleer86] A better TMS that remembers and administrates the assumptions made during the inference of new propositions.
attotw	at the time of this writing
BOM	Bill-Of-Materials. Key datastructure of ERP systems used to define (nested) product structures.
CBASE	configuration base Central database table in the R/3 system; used, since release 4.5, to store configurations.
CBR	Case-Based Reasoning. AI sub-discipline closely related to ML that treats examples as cases and compares cases based on similarity metrics.
CRM	Customer Relationship Management
ERP	Enterprise Resource Planning. ERP systems are mind-bogglingly large conglomerations of software used by large companies to administer -- in the extreme case -- all aspects of their business.
FOL	First Order Logic. aka first order predicate calculus. Often used synonymously with Horn logic, the theoretical fundament of the programming language Prolog.
FTGAASS	Full-Throttle Geek Acronyms And SAP-Speak-isms
IDE	Integrated Development Environment.
ILP	Inductive Logic Programming. ML in FOL.
IPC	Internet Pricing and Configurator [sic, unfortunately]. A Java-servlet wrapper around the SCE and the SPE that allows integration of VC-compliant configuration functionality with a webserver.
KB	Knowledge Base. AI datastructure that encodes all the statements and rules valid in a logical theory.
KEE	Knowledge Engineering Environment. Grandfather of all AI-oriented software IDEs; had its heyday in the mid- to late 1980s.
material variant	type of R/3 datastructure, technically a configurable material with a definite value for each characteristic. Conceptually a saved complete and correct configuration state.
ML	Machine Learning. AI sub-discipline concerned with generalizing from examples, usually by way of induction.
MM	Materials Management
Mobal	Model Based Learning. Second (third?) generation AI IDE based on a FOL rather than PL representation.
PL	Propositional Logic. aka zeroth-order logic aka zeroth-order predicate calculus aka attribute/value logic. The most common form of representation used in the second (third?) heydey of AI in the 1980s.
PP	Production Planning
R/3	SAP ERP system, Release 3 (not to be confused with the releases of R/3 itself, which have names like 3.1H and 4.6C)
RDBMS	relation database management system
SAP	Systems, Applications, Programs Fourth-largest (attotw) software company in the world.
SCE	Sales Configuration Engine. SAP product implemented in Java, understands the same modeling language as the VC, but can be used independantly of R/3, e.g. on a laptop or connected to a webserver.
SD	Sales & Distribution
SPE	Sales Pricing Engine. Younger brother of the SCE that allows R/3-compliant pricing of R/3-compliant orders, while independant of R/3, e.g. on a laptop or in a webserver.
TMS	Truth-Maintenance System. AI algorithm that controls and administrates the truth values of statements, or propositions, or facts, in a logical system. Closely tied to the inference engine that generates new facts from known facts based on the rules of the theory.
transaction	Context of interaction with an RDBMS-based ERP system such as SAP R/3. An ERP system guarantees transactional integrity at runtime, meaning that if user A is inside a transaction editing datum X, then no other user will be allowed to modify X at the same time. Any datum associated with a transaction is "checked out" when A enters the transaction, and "checked back in" when A leaves. Such data will be "locked" for any user B during this period.
VC	Variant Configurator. The configurator inside the SAP R/3 ERP system, integrated with all other aspects of the supply ruver (CRM, SD, MM, PP, the classification system)

Glossary of Symbols

`A(C)`	attributes of a class
`A(X)`	attributes of a configuration The set of attributes in the current configuration. More technically, the set of attributes of the class of which the current configuration is an instance.
`a`	attribute An attribute (feature, property, characteristic) of a configuration.
`range(a,S(X))`	range of an attribute The set of values that an attribute can legally take in the current state of the configuration.
`S(X)`	state of a configuration A set of attribute/range pairs decribing what values each attribute can legally take in the current state