The Integrated Generic Task Toolset provides computational mechanisms especially suited for certain reasoning tasks which are typically encountered during the course of diagnosis, design, planning, and similar knowledge-based activities. By directly supporting a set of basic reasoning tasks, the toolset provides building blocks out of which more complex reasoning systems can be built. To support a particular reasoning task, the toolset provides a set of appropriate mechanisms, each with its own control strategies and characteristic ways of organizing and representing knowledge. Thus, the toolset provides to the knowledge system builder an advantage over rules, logic, semantic nets, frames, and neural nets, similar to the advantage that higher-level languages provide over assembly language for the computer programmer.
A release of the integrated toolset, called Fafner, is available for research use. Fafner provides the ``toolbed,'' a framework for integrating the individual tools, the RA tool, and the CSRL tool. The RA tool provides the facilities for constructing recognition agents, agents designed to determine the degree of match between a hypothesis and a situation. RA is the first of six tools to be included in this and later releases, and is an important foundation for the others. The CSRL tool builds on the foundation provided by RA, and allows the construction of hierarchies of classification specialists. Such hierarchies are used to perform the hierarchical classification task, an important part of both diagnosis and reasoning in general.
Fafner is written completely in Common Lisp and CLOS (Common Lisp Object System) and is fully portable at that level.