Metadata Guiding Knowledge Engineering: A Practical Approach

This paper presents an approach to the analysis, design and development of Knowledge Based Systems based on the Knowledge Artifact concept. Knowledge Artifacts can be meant as means to acquire, represent and maintain knowledge involved in complex problem solving activities. A complex problemis typicallymade of a huge number of parts that are put together according to a first set of constraints (i.e. the procedural knowledge), dependable on the functional properties it must satisfy, and a second set of rules, dependable on what the expert thinks about the problem and how he/she would represent it. The paper illustrates a way to unify both types of knowledge into a Knowledge Artifact, exploiting Ontologies, Influence Nets and Task Structures formalisms and metadata paradigm.