GENERATION OF KNOWLEDGE-ACQUISITION TOOLS FROM DOMAIN ONTOLOGIES

Metalevel tools can support the software development process by automating the design of task- and application-specific tools. DASH is a metalevel tool that allows developers to generate domain-specific knowledge-acquisition tools from domain ontologies. Domain specialists use the knowledge-acquisition tools generated by DASH to instantiate the concepts and relationships defined in the domain ontologies. The output of the knowledge-acquisition tools is a collection of instances that constitute the knowledge base for a knowledge-based system. To automate the generation of appropriate tools, the DASH architecture uses a dialog-design module to produce a dialog structure that defines the target tool at the editor and window level. Given the dialog structure, a layout-design module completes the window layouts. DASH allows the developer to custom tailor the layout of the knowledge-acquisition tool for its users, and to store such modifications persistently so that they can be reapplied when the target tool is regenerated. The DASH implementation is based on a mapping problem-solving method that defines the tool-design steps. The DASH Development Environment (DDE) is an application-specific environment that supports the configuration of the mapping method and the maintenance of DASH. We have used DASH to generate several knowledge-acquisition tools for a broad range of application tasks.