"A Refinement Toolkit to Debug and Maintain Knowledge Based Systems"

7/2/1999: [time not recorded]
[location not recorded]

Abstract: Knowledge refinement tools have focused largely on debugging knowledge based systems implemented using specific tools; e.g. Prolog, Clips or particular expert system shells. The KRUSTWorks project is exploiting our refinement experience with a variety of applications to create a refinement framework that defines a set of generic KBS concepts and refinement steps, and implements an extensible toolkit that provides refinement components to achieve these steps. Thus KRUSTWorks will allow a knowledge engineer to assemble a particular KRUSTtool with which to refine a specific KBS. This talk describes the knowledge demands of such an approach and how the core refinement algorithm reasons about this centralized knowledge to achieve refinements of the target system. The approach will be demonstrated on TFS, a tablet formulation application that is in routine use at Zeneca Pharmaceuticals. The KRUSTtool removed faults from an early buggy version of TFS so that the refined KBS matched the manually debugged TFS. More impressively, the KRUSTtool further refined this version of TFS to effect the maintenance that produced the current TFS; its creation was prompted by a change in Zeneca's formulation policy.

Last updated: Mon Jun 19 17:44:06 2006