Britt Kroepelien
We are working on the construction of a computer based expert system for Norwegian silver tankards designed to assist museum curators in the authentication and attribution of this material. Two largely automatic procedures contributing to this process have already been developed and tested: form recognition and the matching of master and city marks. We have also laid the groundwork for the more innovative application which lies at the heart of the expert system. This process relies on a knowledge database which is compiled by recording in exhaustive detail factual information about all silver tankards which have been confidently attributed and representing this information in form which lends itself to the application of computer algorithms. By a statistical analysis of these facts, we hope to derive rules by which the expert system can make inferences about the origin of an unknown tankard.
KEY WORDS Expert system, Norwegian silver, semantic network, pattern recognition,