Knowledge Acquisition and Knowledge Representation with Class: The Object-Oriented Paradigm

Knowledge acquisition and knowledge representation are the fundamental building blocks of knowledge-based systems (KBSs). How to efficiently elicit knowledge from experts and transform this elicited knowledge into a machine usable format is a significant and time consuming problem for KBS developers. Object-orientation provides several solutions to persistent knowledge acquisition and knowledge representation problems including transportability, knowledge reuse, and knowledge growth. An automated graphical knowledge acquisition tool is presented, based upon object-oriented principles. The object-oriented graphical interface provides a modeling platform that is easily understood by experts and knowledge engineers. The object-oriented base for the automated KA tool provides a representation independent methodology that can easily be mapped into any other object-oriented expert system or other object-oriented intelligent tools