A Document-Oriented Approach to the Development of Knowledge Based Systems

ADDS (Approach to Document-based Development of Software) is an approach to the development of applications based on a document-oriented paradigm. According to this paradigm, applications are described by means of documents that are marked up using descriptive domain-specific markup languages. Afterwards, applications are produced processing these marked up documents. Formulation of domain-specific markup languages in ADDS is a dynamic and eminently pragmatic activity since these languages evolve in accordance with the authoring needs of the main actors that participate in the development process (i.e. domain experts and developers). OADDS (Operationalization in ADDS) is a processing model that promotes the construction of modular language processors and their incremental evolution. Thus, OADDS is specifically designed to cope with the evolutionary nature of the domain-specific markup languages encouraged by ADDS. ADDS and OADDS have successfully been applied to the development of applications in knowledge-intensive domains (i.e. transport networks and educational hypermedias). This paper also describes the advantages (incremental development and maintenance improvement) that this approach supposes for the development of knowledge-based systems.