Reference: Puerta, A. R.; Eriksson, H.; Egar, J. W.; & Musen, M. A. Generation of Knowledge-Acquisition Tools from Reusable Domain Ontologies. Knowledge Systems Laboratory, November, 1992.
Abstract: We present Mecano, a development environment that automates the design of knowledge-acquisition software tools for knowledge-based systems. Mecano is a component of PROTEGEII-a development environment for knowledge-based systems. Given an explicit model of the domain-called a domain ontology-that is shared by Mecano and the target knowledge-based system, we show how a specification for a knowledge-acquisition tool can be inferred. In particular, the domain ontology is used to determine (1) the knowledge requirements of the target knowledge-based system that must be fulfilled by the knowledge-acquisition tool, (2) the appropriate dialog sequences with users of the tool that ensures the consistency and completeness of the acquired knowledge, and (3) the presentation and layout of the components of the tool's interface. The use of shared domain ontologies to design knowledge-acquisition tools facilitates the integration of tools with target knowledge-based systems, produces domain- oriented tools, and eases the propagation of changes in the domain ontologies from the knowledge-based systems to the knowledge-acquisition tools.
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