Reference: Walther, E.; Eriksson, H.; & Musen, M. A. Plug-and-Play: Construction of Task-Specific Expert-System Shells Using Sharable Context Ontologies. AAAI, San Jose, CA, 1992.
Abstract: Previous approaches to the reuse of problem-solving methods have relied on the existence of a global data model to serve as the mediator among the individual methods. This hard-coded approach limits the reusability of methods and introduces implicit assumptions into the system architecture that make it difficult to combine reasoning methods in new ways. To overcome these limitations, the PROTEGE-II system associates each method with an ontology that defines the context of that method. All external interaction between a method and the world can be viewed as the mapping of knowledge between the method's context ontology and the ontologies of the methods with which it is interacting. In this paper, we describe a context-definition language called MODEL, and its role in the PROTEGE-II system, a metatool for constructing task-specific expert-system shells. We outline the requirements that gave rise to such a language and argue that sharable ontologies are a fundamental precondition for reusing knowledge, serving as a means for integrating problem-solving, domain- representation, and knowledge-acquisition modules. We propose an approach based on the KIF ontology-sharing language for allowing developers to share knowledge-acquisition editors and problem-solving methods.
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