Knowledge acquisition, modeling and management

This book features the proceedings of the 11th European Workshop on Knowledge Acquisition, Modeling, and Management (EKAW ’99), held at Dagstuhl Castle in May 1999. The high number of submissions reflects the mature status of the knowledge acquisition community. Initially, knowledge acquisition aimed to address the primary challenge in developing expert systems—gathering knowledge from human experts. Various methods and tools have been created to enhance this process, significantly reducing the costs associated with developing knowledge-based systems. However, these systems often fell short of their intended tasks, and maintenance remained a challenge. This led to a paradigm shift, viewing the development of knowledge-based systems as a modeling activity rather than merely transferring human knowledge into machine-readable code. A knowledge model is constructed through interaction with users and experts, focusing on providing a knowledge-level characterization of what the system needs to solve specific tasks, rather than strictly reflecting existing human expertise. Efficiency and quality in system development and maintenance are achieved through reusable problem-solving methods and ontologies, which abstract from specific applications and domains, facilitating knowledge reuse.