Shelter Project Home Page
Objective
Many potential applications (e.g., transportation planning,
design and engineering tools, intelligence analysis) need knowledge
bases one or more orders of magnitude larger than today's.
Particularly given the time and effort required to build any knowledge
base, these considerations dictate that bigger, better, and cheaper
systems can only be achieved through much greater sharing and reuse of
knowledge bases. SHELTER is intended to offer an environment for
collaborative, team development of large knowledge based systems in a
manner facilitating sharing and reuse. It provides an integrated
solution to two companion problems: managing the size and complexity
of knowledge bases, and managing the size and complexity of the
activities required to correctly use, modify, or extend them.
Approach
SHELTER facilitates sharing and reuse by helping developers
find candidate material to reuse and ensuring that it is used
properly. There are two key ideas in SHELTER. One is an interaction
paradigm, embodied in a set of browsing and retrieval tools, that
encourages reuse of knowledge structures. The paradigm finds and
presents pre-existing knowledge structures consistent with those
currently being created, allowing users to "borrow rather than build"
whenever possible. The other is a set of methods for helping
knowledge base system builders record assumptions and guidance about
how the knowledge should be used and extended, using structured forms
which the system can interpret to assist developers in ensuring the
appropriateness of later modifications.
SHELTER is being developed initially to support construction of
knowledge bases in ISI's LOOM. knowledge
representation and programming language. However, it is implemented
in a modular fashion facilitating porting to other representation
systems in the same basic representational family, in particular such
common standard knowledge representation systems as are developed in
DARPA's Knowledge Representation Standards effort. At the end of the
effort, the final version of SHELTER will be made available to DoD and
the DARPA research community for consideration as a common foundation
for further research and development in knowledge representation
construction environments.
Shelter Information
Location of this page
http://www.isi.edu/isd/shelter/shelter-home.html