KBS Development Through Ontology Mapping and Ontology Driven Acquisition

The benefits of reuse have long been recognized in the knowledge engineering community where the dream of creating knowledge based systems (KBSs) on-the-fly from libraries of reusable components is still to be fully realised. In this paper we present a two stage methodology for creating KBSs: first reusing domain knowledge by mapping it, where appropriate, to the requirements of a generic problem solver; and secondly using this mapped knowledge and the requirements of the problem solver to ``drive'' the acquisition of the additional knowledge it needs. For example, suppose we have available a KBS which is composed of a propose-and-revise problem solver linked with an appropriate knowledge base/ontology from the elevator domain. Then to create a diagnostic KBS in the same domain, we require to map relevant information from the elevator knowledge base/ontology, such as component information, to a diagnostic problem solver, and then to extend it with diagnostic information such as malfunctions, symptoms and repairs for each component. We have developed MAKTab, a Protégé plug-in which supports both these steps and results in a composite KBS which is executable.