Component-Based Support for Building Knowledge-Acquisition Systems

Abstract

sumes that, as with Web browsers, users will want to enhance and custom tailor the system's behavior by means of a variety of "plugins. " These plug-ins are modular pieces of program code that add new functionalities to Protg-2000 in well circumscribed ways. Developers can contribute new Protg-2000 plug-ins to a library maintained on the Internet, and can freely download new plug-ins to augment the behavior of their own knowledge-acquisition systems constructed using Protg-2000. Our approach establishes a new kind of knowledge-acquisition enterprise---one of building knowledge-acquisition--tool components that can be shared among a large community of users over the Internet. Protg-2000's modular architecture expands tremendously the kinds of systems that can be assembled to address specific knowledgeacquisition tasks, and offers the possibility that future knowledge-acquisition systems can be better tailored to the particular requirements of end users. 1. The Protg Lineage Since the