Circumstancial knowledge management for human-like interaction

This project focuses on the circumstantial aspects of human-like interaction. Its purpose is in the first place to design and develop a general-purpose situation model, which would enhance any natural interaction system by providing knowledge on the interaction context, and secondly to implement an intuitive management tool to edit the knowledge base of this situation model. The development of both the model and the edition tool has followed the usual processes of software engineering: requirements elicitation and specification, problem analysis, design of a solution, system implementation and validation. In more specific terms, an spiral lifecyle composed of three phases was followed, which is a convenient approach in research projects as all the system requirements might not be known from the very beginning. After the implementation was completed, an evaluation was carried out for observing the advantages of the edition tool over the manual edition of the model knowledge. The results of this evaluation showed that the tool provides a mechanism for the model management which is significantly faster and more accurate than the manual edition. Moreover, a subjective survey also revealed that the experiment subjects preferred the edition tool, as they considered it to be more comfortable, more intuitive, more reliable and more agile. The resulting general-purpose situation model and the edition tool are a significant contribution to the state of the art, as the previously existing situation models were ad-hoc models, i.e., models implemented for supporting an specific system, and their knowledge bases were edited manually. Finally, this work will be applied in a research project funded by the Spanish Ministry of Industry (CADOOH, TSI-020302-2011-21), and for this reason some of the future works observed in this document will be executed in the coming months. A copy of the Cognos toolkit, including the edition tool developed within this project, is available in the next site: http://labda.inf.uc3m.es/doku.php?id=es:labda_lineas:cognos.Ingeniería Informátic