The Role of Knowledge Artifacts in Knowledge Maintenance

Knowledge Maintenance is a crucial activity preventing the decrease of overall system effectiveness due to application domain dynamism and knowledge base aging. The Knowledge Artifact based approach to the analysis, design and development of Knowledge Based Systems is presented. A Knowledge Artifact is a conceptual and computational knowledge model of decision making in problem solution. Its representation needs the exploitation of a language that could be involved in instantiating knowledge models during knowledge engineering activities. The use of this language, derived form experts' ontology and modus operandi, allows experts to express knowledge model statements. This proposal aims to allow expert users to access and maintain the implemented knowledge model operating on its sentences. The latter can be also interpreted and processed by the KBS for supporting experts in decision making. The compounding problem. the related Knowledge Artifact and its accessibility aspects are discussed in the presented case study. Copyright © IICAI 2005.