: Artificial intelligence software has for many years made extensive use of graphics facilities. However, knowledge engineers have not had access to visual programming tools which assist them during the critical early phases of knowledge acquisition. Moreover, during later phases of knowledge base debugging, knowledge engineers have had to work with program tracing tools (whether graphical or textual) which are inherently incapable of scaling up to the monitoring demands imposed by large, heterogeneous knowledge bases. To address these deficiencies, and to satisfy the needs of knowledge engineers throughout the software design, development, and debugging cycle, we have developed several novel visual programming and program visualization techniques aimed at knowledge engineers. Foremost among these are (i) a hypertext transcript analyser from which conceptual models can be generated; (ii) a `direct graph manipulation' sketchpad which allows the knowledge engineer to sketch out objects a...

: The numerous tasks required by the knowledge engineering process and their inherent complexity combine to make building knowledge-based systems both a time consuming and arduous activity. The key to reducing the complexity of the problem is to provide a methodological framework which can clarify the nature of the intermediate steps required to effectively encode knowledge into a performance system. Such a framework can then be used to drive the design of a comprehensive knowledge engineering toolkit. This is the approach we adopted in the Keats project. In this paper, we provide an overview of the Keats knowledge engineering methodology, which is based on a view of knowledge engineering as iterative refinement of qualitatively and teleologically different models, and we show how these ideas have driven the design of the Keats toolkit. 1. INTRODUCTION The construction of large, knowledge-based applications is a complex task that comprises a number of activities and involves various p...

: In this paper the architecture of the VITAL-KR is described. Author: Enrico Motta and Arthur Stutt Collaborators (VITAL Partners): SYSECA - SYSECA TEMPS REEL (Coordinator) * NOTT - UNIVERSITY OF NOTTINGHAM * BULL - BULL CEDIAG AC - ANDERSEN CONSULTING ONERA - ONERA PTT - ROYAL PTT NEDERLAND NV * OU - THE OPEN UNIVERSITY * NOKIA - NOKIA RESEARCH CENTER * marked partners are involved in this task page 1 _____________________________________________________________________ The Open University 1991 1. INTRODUCTION As discussed in (Motta, 1991) both the current practice of industrial KBS, and the consensus among researchers (Frisch & Cohn, 1991) suggest that hybrid architectures, embedding a number of specialized representations/reasoners, are required to enable knowledge engineers to build efficient and powerful KBs. This is due to the fact that it has been recognized that no universal knowledge representation language exists, which can efficiently model all types of proble...