A generic shell-specialized knowledge acquisition tool for multimedia workstations development

The authors describe mwKAT, an interactive knowledge acquisition tool generated from GAS, a generic acquisition shell. It is used for acquiring knowledge about multimedia software and hardware components to provide suggestions for multimedia workstation development. The authors describe how mwKAT is generated from GAS and how mwKAT acquires and analyzes relevant knowledge pieces. mwKAT uses problem solving primitives such as parameter proposing, violation checking, and fix proposing to incrementally construct an intermediate knowledge base represented by a dependency model. These primitives identify necessary domain knowledge, check possible weakness in the knowledge base, and guide users to revise constrained parameters