Meta-tool support for knowledge acquisition

Knowledge acquisition is a major bottleneck in expert system development. Specialized, or domain-oriented, knowledge acquisition tools can provide efficient support in restricted domains. However, the principal drawback with specialized knowledge acquisition tools is that the tool cost per expert system developed is typically high. Meta-level environments is an approach to support knowledge engineers in developing such knowledge acquisition tools. Meta-tools, i.e. tools for creating knowledge acquisition tools, can be used to specify and automatically generate knowledge acquisition tools for single domains and even single applications. This thesis presents an abstract architecture approach to the specification of knowledge acquisition tools. In this framework knowledge acquisition tools can be specified according to an abstract model of the target tool architecture. DOTS is a meta-tool that supports the abstract-architecture specification scheme. Knowledge engineers can use DOTS to specify and generate domain-oriented knowledge acquisition tools that can be used by domain experts directly. Two implementations of knowledge acquisition tools for different domains are presented in this thesis. These tools are representatives of knowledge acquisition tools that are desirable to generate form meta-tools. One of them was hand-crafted and specialized to the domain of protein purification planning. The other emerged form an evaluation of DOTS by developing a knowledge acquisition tool in a different domain (troubleshooting laboratory equipment). Results from this evaluation are also reported. (144 refs.) (au)