Knowledge acquisition for evaluation systems

Abstract

KNACK is a specialized knowledge acquisition tooi that generates expert systems for evaluating different classes of designs. An important goal in the development of KNACK is that it acquires knowledge from domain experts without presupposing knowledge engineering skills on their part. During knowledge acquisition KNACK gains power by exploiting a presupposed problem solving method and a domain model. This paper describes KNACK's approach to automating the acquisition of a domain model as part of its knowledge acquisition strategy. To build a model of a domain, general understanding about evaluation is incorporated into KNACK. In an initial questioning session with domain experts KNACK customizes that knowledge and builds a preliminary model of the domain. Critical for KNACK's performance is its general understanding about evaluation and its ability to refine the preliminary domain model into a detailed structural and functional model of a particular domain. To get a better understanding of the means of evaluation and how to derive a domain model, KNACK was used to create a series of application systems in different domains. The experience gained with these tasks resulted in some data describing KNACK's performance and scope.