A visual critiquing language for expressing design knowledge

An important question of knowledge management is how we can support domain experts in formulating their domain knowledge and in making this expertise available via knowledge based systems. Critiquing systems are a special kind of knowledge based system. These systems provide context sensitive advice, and rationale to an artifact (for example charts, Web pages and so on) designed by a user. This is realized by delivering so called critiques, which contain relevant information for the user to the task at hand. We present a visual programming language called VisualCiLa, which allows design experts to formulate such critiques. It is based on a special subset of first order logic and a special form of text construction. VisualCiLa is built on top of a pipe-, filter and collector-metaphor and allows users to plug critiques together by placing tiles on a spreadsheet. Furthermore, VisualCiLa supports users in simulating the inference mechanism, which is represented by the flow of objects through the pipes. Filters and collectors visualize the functionality of inference and support the debugging process of such critiques. We believe that this language is a framework which allows design experts to formulate, to test, and to debug their expertise as critiquing knowledge