ABSTRACT
Land management is the making of decisions about the application of non-land resources so as to bring about or maintain the efficient, equitable utilization of land resources. This chapter discusses some of the possibilities for land managers offered by developments in artificial intelligence research, especially expert systems. Expert systems research attempts to develop computer programs that behave like experts in a problem domain; in the present case, to develop expert computer programs for land managers. Although it is a fundamental design characteristic of expert systems to separate the domain knowledge from the application mechanism, the design of the inference engine is dependent on the particular type of knowledge representation used. Many of the features of the GEOMYCIN system were specifically developed during this work in order to represent the expert's knowledge more efficiently and to ensure that the program behaved in a reasonably consistent fashion during its application to realistic problems.
