Reference: Gennari, J. H.; Altman, R. B.; & Musen, M. A. Reuse with Protege-II: From Elevators to Ribosomes. Knowledge Systems Laboratory, November, 1994.
Abstract: Although software reuse appears to be a simple solution to the high cost of software construction, it has proven difficult to build practical libraries of reusable software components or reuse environments that help developers use such libraries. This paper describes the PROTEGE-II environment in support of the construction of knowledge-base systems with reusable components. We demonstrate its use with a pair of configuration tasks: the task of configuring the parts of an elevator system and the task of identifying plausible configurations of helices in a ribosome strand. We argue that to assist developers with reuse, the terminologies of both methods and knowledge bases should be described as formal ontologies . To connect pre-existing methods to new domains and knowledge bases, we define declarative mapping relations , which we use to translate information from one ontology to another. With the use of PROTEGE-II and a set of mapping relations, we are able to reuse the same problem-solving method with these two seemingly disparate configuration tasks.
Notes: Updated March 1995.
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