Acquiring Design and Analysis Knowledge for Knowledge-Based Systems

A workbench for acquiring design and analysis knowledge to build knowledge-based systems is presented. Eliciting and modeling such knowledge from a human designer is a major problem when building knowledge-based systems for CAD problems. Aquinas, an extended version of the Expertise Transfer System (ETS), combines ideas from psychology and knowledge-based systems research. Aquinas interviews design and analysis experts and helps them model, analyze, test, and refine their knowledge. Expertise from multiple designers or other knowledge sources can be represented and used separately or combined. User consultations are directed by propagating information through hierarchies. Aquinas delivers knowledge by creating knowledge bases for several different expert system shells. Help is given to the expert by a dialog manager that embodies knowledge acquisition heuristics. Aquinas contains many techniques and tools for expertise transfer; the techniques combine to make it a powerful testbed for rapidly prototyping portions of many kinds of complex knowledge-based systems.