Reference: Puerta, A. R.; Neches, R.; Eriksson, H.; Szekely, P.; Luo, P.; & Musen, M. A. Toward Ontology-Based Frameworks for Knowledge-Acquisition Tools. Banff, Alberta, Canada, 1994.
Abstract: One of the strongest limitations of knowledge-acquisition metatools—tools that automate the development of knowledge-acquisition tools—is that the knowledge employed by the metatools to produce domain-specific knowledge-acquisition tools is not explicit and cannot be used by other metatools. Therefore, the usefulness of a metatool is restricted to its implementation environment. A possible solution to this problem is the definition of a shareable ontology of knowledge-acquisition tools that represents explicitly the relevant knowledge of tool design and development. We take the position that knowledge-acquisition tool design is similar to user-interface design and that an ontology of knowledge-acquisition tools is a special case of an interface ontology. We propose that a shareable interface ontology can be defined by analyzing interface ontologies used in model-based user-interface development systems, and by resolving differences and conflicts among the ontologies—a process called model alignment. We present two systems, Shelter and Mecano, that use model-based user-interface development techniques as the basis for producing knowledge acquisition tools. We then show the result of the model alignment between these two systems and present the resulting ontology as a basis for knowledge-acquisition tool construction across implementations.
Notes: October 1993. Updated January 1994.
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