Knowledge acquisition, modelling and inference through the World Wide Web

The development of knowledge-based systems involves the management of a diversity of knowledge sources, computing resources and system users, often distributed geographically. The knowledge acquisition, modelling and representation communities have developed a wide range of tools relevant to the development and management of large-scale knowledge-based systems, but the majority of these tools run on individual workstations and use specialist data formats making system integration and knowledge interchange very problematic. However, widespread access to the Internet has led to a new era of distributed client-server computing. In particular, the introduction of support for forms on World Wide Web in late 1993 has provided an easily programmable, cross-platform graphic-user interface that has become widely used in innovative interactive systems. This article reports on the development of open architecture knowledge management tools operating through the web to support knowledge acquisition, representation and inference through semantic networks and repertory grids. (C) 1997 Academic Press Limited.