The "Traffic Information Collator" (TIC) is a research prototype knowledge-based system which accepts "live" police descriptions of traffic incidents, recognizes and summarizes information of relevance to other motorists, formulates suitable advisory messages, and coordinates message delivery to motorists (via media such as cellular radio, Radio Data System etc.), and other appropriate parties (motoring organizations, other intelligent traffic control systems etc.). To achieve this, this system analyses the non-standard English text of the input, uses an "incident knowledge base" to construct and maintain a model of the traffic incident, and "dissemination policy rules" to judge the seriousness of the incident, and hence to determine an appropriate dissemination strategy. In this paper we describe the prototype TIC system, and discuss the strategy we have adopted in POETIC-project for generalizing from this pilot case.
Abstract