A collaborative environment for authoring large knowledge bases

Collaborative knowledge base (KB) authoring environments are critical for the construction of high-performance KBs. Such environments must support rapid construction of KBs by a collaborative effort of teams of knowledge engineers through reuse of existing knowledge and software components. They should support the manipulation of knowledge by diverse problem-solving engines even if that knowledge is encoded in different languages and by different researchers. They should support large KBs and provide a scalable and interoperable development infrastructure. In this paper, we present an environment that satisfies many of these goals. We present an architecture for scalable frame representation systems (FRSs). The Generic Frame Protocol (GFP) provides infrastructure for reuse of software components. It is a procedural interface to frame representation systems that provides a common means of accessing and modifying frame KBs. The Generic KB Editor (GKB-EDITOR) provides graphical KB browsing, editing, and comprehension services for large KBs. Scalability of loading and saving time is provided by a storage system (PERK) which submerges a database management system in an FRS. Multi-user access is controlled through a collaboration subsystem that uses a novel optimistic concurrency control algorithm. All the results have been implemented and tested in the development of several real KBs.