Knowledge Acquisition

Past, Present, and Future of Knowledge Acquisition This book contains the proceedings of the 11th European Workshop on Kno- edge Acquisition, Modeling, and Management (EKAW 99), held at Dagstuhl Castle (Germany) in May of 1999. This continuity and the high number of s- missions re?ect the mature status of the knowledge acquisition community. Knowledge Acquisition started as an attempt to solve the main bottleneck in developing expert systems (now called knowledge-based systems): Acquiring knowledgefromahumanexpert. Variousmethodsandtoolshavebeendeveloped to improve this process. These approaches signi?cantly reduced the cost of - veloping knowledge-based systems. However, these systems often only partially ful?lled the taskthey weredevelopedfor andmaintenanceremainedanunsolved problem. This required a paradigm shift that views the development process of knowledge-based systems as a modeling activity. Instead of simply transf- ring human knowledge into machine-readable code, building a knowledge-based system is now viewed as a modeling activity. A so-called knowledge model is constructed in interaction with users and experts. This model need not nec- sarily re?ect the already available human expertise. Instead it should provide a knowledgelevelcharacterizationof the knowledgethat is requiredby the system to solve the application task. Economy and quality in system development and maintainability are achieved by reusable problem-solving methods and onto- gies. The former describe the reasoning process of the knowledge-based system (i. e., the algorithms it uses) and the latter describe the knowledge structures it uses (i. e., the data structures). Both abstract from speci?c application and domain speci?c circumstances to enable knowledge reuse.