Introduction to the Basic Jig

A jig consists of two things:

• The objects that comprise the knowledgebase.
• A process of reasoning over those objects.

When you are creating objects in the KnowledgeWright Workshop, you can press F1 to get the help detailed here.

Knowledgebase Objects

The Basic Jig is the foundation on which many other jigs can be built. It provides a basic goal-seeking reasoning engine and can be used for a wide variety of advisor-type applications. It includes knowledge objects for:

• the knowledgebase itself which defines the goals for reasoning,
• rule sets and rules_tables, which define relationships,
• facts which define fixed values
• user questions, data_table queries and database queries, which are called to gather information when needed,
• dynamic text, which can be used to dynamically construct output documents,

Objects can be organized into folders. Folders have no effect on the reasoning process, they are simply an aid to knowledgebase development.

Reasoning Process

The reasoning engine starts with one or more goals, and seeks to find values for them. These can have simple values, or be complex text objects.

For example, the goal might be to find 'advice' and the value for advice is determined by a number of rules, and those rules depend on asking questions of the user and/or a database. Or, the goal might be to generate 'proposal' where the proposal is a text object that is composed of dynamic entities whose values are determined by rules which in turn ask questions, etc.