A database architecture for reusable CommonKADS agent specification components

Intelligent Agent programs and Expert Systems in certain application domains may share considerable functionality: at an abstract level, specifications of these programs will share some of the knowledge they need to carry out their tasks. If there was a way in which this knowledge could be structured and stored in a repository so that it would be easy to browse, then some of these knowledge components could be reused to specify new intelligent systems in the future. This architecture would also provide an alternative knowledge resource for the developer, shortcutting the knowledge acquisition cycle and speeding up the development process. This paper describes a prototype database architecture that has been designed to formalize the knowledge repository. The approach taken is founded upon the principles of knowledge specification recommended by the CommonKADS methodology. The repository provides a system of tables, which supports the specification and storage of CommonKADS task, communication, agent and knowledge models. Domain knowledge resides in a third party generic database architecture called the Defence Command and Army Data Model (DCADM) and links (foreign keys) from the knowledge model tables integrate the domain layer into the repository. The repository is built in Oracle 8, and uses a Programming Language SQL (PL/SQL) application layer for standardized data input/output. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.