Demo will be done on author's laptop, a beamer will be provided.
Please submit to ekaw2000 the title of the demo and a short presentation.
Companies have to manage and reuse engineering knowledge to improve business processes, to reduce time to find new solutions, to make correct first time and to retain best practices. The aim of the MOKA project is to provide a methodology to capture and formalise engineering knowledge to reuse it, for example within KBE applications. Development and maintenance of knowledge intensive software applications is a complex and potentially expensive activity. The number of Knowledge-Based Engineering (KBE) systems used in the aeronautical and automotive industries has increased last years. Experience has shown that long term risk can be reduced by employing a systematic methodology that covers the development and maintenance of such systems. The ESPRIT-IV funded project called MOKA (No. 25418) is intended to satisfy this need by providing both a methodology and a supporting software tool, both of which are independent of any KBE platform. MOKA identified two models as key artefacts in the KBE application development lifecycle :
Protégé-2000 is the latest entrée in the lineage of Protégé tools for ontology editing and knowledge acquisition. Protégé-2000 has hundreds of users who use it for projects ranging from modeling cancer-protocol guidelines to modeling nuclear-power stations. Protégé-2000 is aimed at making it easier for knowledge engineers and domain experts to perform knowledge-management tasks. Ontology developers can quickly access relevant information whenever they require the information and can use direct manipulation for navigating and managing an ontology. Tree controls allow quick and simple navigation through a class hierarchy. Protégé uses forms as the interface for filling in slot values.
The knowledge model of Protégé-2000 satisfies the requirements of the Open Knowledge-Base Connectivity (OKBC) protocol and therefore Protégé can interact with other OKBC-compatible knowledge-representation systems. One of the major advantages of the Protégé-2000 architecture is that the system is constructed in an open, modular fashion. Its component-based architecture enables system builders to add new functionality to Protégé-2000 by creating appropriate plugins.
We performed a case study in which we used Protégé-2000 to build a tool for constructing CommonKADS knowledge models. The case study tries to capitalize on the strong points of both approaches in the tool-support and modeling areas. We specified the CommonKADS knowledge model as an ontology in the Protégé representation formalism, and defined a number of visualizations for the resulting types. The study showed that this type of usage of Protégé as a metaCASE tool is to a large extent feasible. In particular, the flexible class/instance distinction in Protégé-2000 is a feature that is needed for undertaking such a metamodeling exercise. The case study revealed a number of problems, such as the representation of rule types. The study also led to a set of new tool requirements, such as extended expressivity of the Protégé forms. Finally, this experience showed how the concrete, operational approach of Protégé and the highly methodological approach of CommonKADS can be combined successfully to provide the middle-ground tool that reduces the gap between a conceptual model and a usable knowledge model. The code of the tool including the example can be downloaded from the Protégé-2000 website (http://protege.stanford.edu/).
In the knowledge acquisition community, there is a long tradition of separating a domain model and its associated data (a knowledge base) from the procedures that operate on this model (the problem-solving methods, or PSMs). A PSM is the reasoning component of a knowledge system: It encodes an abstract, domain-independent algorithm for solving the generic task of the system, such as classification or diagnosis. To foster their reuse across application domains and tasks, PSMs are collected in libraries and indexed in various ways. In the framework of Protégé, an extensible ontology-editing and knowledge-acquisition environment (http://protege.stanford.edu), we are currently developing a tool to support the use of libraries of PSMs. We have built a "PSM Librarian"-a Protégé-2000 extension that connects a domain knowledge base with existing PSM libraries. We model libraries of PSMs with the Unified Problem-solving Method description Language (UPML), designed to specify and broker reasoning resources on the WWW (http://www.cs.vu.nl/~upml/). In particular, a PSM defines an ontology of terms and relationships describing its problem-solving behavior, including its input and output requirements. Our PSM Librarian helps users to browse available PSMs, and select one appropriate for their domain. Additionally, the PSM Librarian assists users in creating explicit mapping relations between the data requirements of the selected PSM and the corresponding domain entities. Although the PSM Librarian is still at an early stage, we believe that it will facilitate the construction of a wide range of knowledge systems, providing a systematic framework for the conceptual modeling and reuse of reasoning components.
WebODE is a new tool for modeling knowledge using ontologies. It's based on the widely used and tested methodology named Methontology model built in the Technical School of Computer Science (FI) in Madrid. WebODE is the web counterpart for ODE (Ontology Design Environment) and includes a lot of new and interesting features becoming a very simple yet powerful tool for building ontologies.
The ontology conceptual model of WebODE is based on the intermediate representations of METHONTOLOGY, and permits to represent at a conceptual level: concepts, constants, instance attributes, class attributes, references, taxonomic and 'ad hoc' relations with its properties, axioms in first order logic, set of instances, and instances, etc., which are components commonly used for the representation of the ontology. WebODE as well as ODE, is an ontology development tool that does not manipulate a knowledge representation language. Instead, the ontology is built at the conceptual level and later automatically translated into different target languages. In the current version of WebODE, translators to languages like Ontolingua, Prolog, Loom, CARIN, and Flogic are under construction.
See descriptionThe Corese platform implements an RDF/RDFS processor based on Conceptual Graphs (CG). It enables the processing of RDF Schemas and RDF statements within the CG formalism. The graph matching algorithm, called projection, enables to retreive RDF statements according to a query and hence implements a search engine.
The following components are operational in the prototype :