Meta-DENDRAL

B.G. Buchanan and E.A. Feigenbaum, Dendral and Meta-Dendral their application dimension. Artif. Intell., 11 (1978) 5-24. 

Buchanan BG, Feigenbaum EA (1978) DENDRAL and Meta-DENDRAL their applications dimension. Artific Intell 11 5... 

The well-known DENDRAL and META-DENDRAL programs (43) are noted as the major AI success in chemical applications over the past decade. However, advances in analytical technology and computer capabilities have led to new approaches (44-56). Information fusion from selected instrumental tools often is a more productive route than exhaustive data analysis from a single source. Furthermore, combination of chromatographic separation with spectral, thermal, and microchemical analyses can be realistically achieved in many laboratories. Generalizing and documenting this trend using an AI approach seemed appropriate at this time. 

DENDRAL consists basically of two subprograms Heuristic DENDRAL and Meta-DENDRAL. Heuristic DENDRAL uses the mass spectrum and other available experimental data to produce a set of potential structure candidates. Meta-DENDRAL is a knowledge acquisition system that receives the structure candidates and corresponding mass spectra to propose hypotheses for explaining the correlation between them. These hypotheses are validated in Heuristic DENDRAL. 

Two of the first AI programs in chemistry were DEND-RAL and OCSS." The DENDRAL project can actually be broken into two separate subprojects, as shown in Figure 3. The first is heuristic-DENDRAL, which was a rule-based program whose purpose was to elucidate the possible structures for a molecule based on the mass spectrum. The second is Meta-DENDRAL, which was a learning program that accepted structure-spectrum pairs and attempted to create rules that would be usable by heuristic-DENDRAL. 

Buchanan, B.G. Feigenbaum, E.A., Dendral and meta dendral Their applications dimension. Artificial Intelligence, 1978, 11, pp. 5-25. 

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