KAW: Knowledge Acquisition, Modeling and Management

Sisyphus-IV Project

Background

Sisyphus-IV is a project proposed at KAW'96 to encourage collaborative use of KA tools through the net and web and the integration of web tools at different sites through the net.

In the early years KAW attempts to share tools were not very successful because:-

In recent years many knowledge acquisition tools have been ported to operate through the Internet (the net) and World Wide Web (the web), and it has become possible to provide access to tools to the community in a way that alleviates the problems noted above:

The Sisyphus-IV project is intended to test these assumptions. The following sections outline some of the current initiatives. Please send updates and details of other projects to gaines@cpsc.ucalgary.ca.

Relevant Systems and Technologies

A range of existing systems already address some of the objectives of Sisyphus-IV, notably:

(KA)2: Knowledge Annotation Initiative

The Knowledge Annotation Initiative of the Knowledge Acquisition Community (KA)2 is an initiative officially launched at EKAW-97 to develop an ontology that models the knowledge acquisition community (its researchers, topics, products, etc.). This ontology will form the basis to annotate WWW documents of the knowledge acquisition community in order to enable intelligent access to these documents. (KA)2 is an open joint-initiative where the participants are actively involved in (i) a distributive ontological engineering process to model the knowledge acquisition community (a domain ontology), and (ii) annotating webpages relevant for the KA community (the instances of the domain ontology). (KA)2 aims at "intelligent" knowledge retrieval from the Web and automatic derivation of "new" knowledge. In other words, it aims at knowledge-based reasoning on the Web, as opposed to the more usual information retrieval. Another objective of the initiative concerns a distributive ontological engineering process.

Integrating WebGrid-II with other Systems

A number of projects are underway on the integration of the WebGrid-II knowledge acquisition and modeling tool with other systems. A major example is Jeni Tennsion's research at Nottingham on linking APECKS with WebGrid.

Integrating KA and Requirements Engineering

The KA-RE Sisyphus-IV initiative is to define a common case study for the Knowledge Acquisition community and the Requirements Engineering community. Both communities work on related things. However, only a joint case study can resolve communication problems to enable fruitful collaboration making use of joint problems and solutions. The study will integrate the two communities through systems on the World Wide Web.


gaines@cpsc.ucalgary.ca, 1-Jan-98