Abstract:

In the field of decision making teaching, we present the aspects of an on-line benchwork illustrating the use of Caml as a knowledge management tool.

It gives the means to represent and manage knowledge with a natural-like approach for people who do not care to use or do not have time to learn deep programming.

The use of the provided advanced packages allows the easy elaboration of knowledge data bases giving way to uncomplicated test of data-mining methods by non programming experts users.
We will be glad to share our expertise of teaching in the Technological Institute of the Paris 5 University, in the Statistics department. There, students, in a limited amount of time, are able to build their own data bases and to use them in a data-mining context, by acquiring in a intuitive fashion the basic programming bases.

We will illustrate this concept by the recursive types definition specific to this language, that allows to match formal data types with the Caml language structures. A short example of tree data structure will be presented.
We insist particularly on the limited amount of time necessary to acquire the basics of the language without previous knowledge.