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:-

• Porting tools to different environments proved difficult
• Integrating tools from other sites proved difficult
• Supporting multiple sites was problematic
• Method of use was not well-defined by originators
• Tools were effective for orginators but ineffective for others

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:

• One tools are ported to the web they are available on all major platforms through web browsers
• The Internet provides the capability to integrate tools running on different servers
• Multiple sites can be supported technically because only the server needs updating, and support of use is more readily provided because the attempted use can be monitored at the server
• Methods of use still need to be defined but the literature and application examples have grown over the past ten years
• It is easier for the originators to collaborate with other users over the Internet which should increase the effective use of the tools

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:

• Ontolingua server, Stanford's web-based tool for collaborative ontology construction (Farquhar, Fikes and Rice, 1996)
• Ontosaurus, ISI's web-based tool for browsing and editing ontologies and knowledge bases (Swartout, Patil, Knight and Russ, 1996)
• WebGrid, Calgary's web-based knowledge modeling and inference tool based on repertory grid elicitation and analysis (Gaines and Shaw, 1996)

(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