SNOWBALL: Representational issues in the design of a knowledge documentation system for expert system development

The authors review the implications of their efforts to develop knowledge elicitation tools and techniques. The three roles of a knowledge engineer as programmer, interviewer and communicator each have different implications for the type of tools that will be useful. The communicator role of the knowledge engineer requires a tool that facilitates the communication of visual representations between the domain expert and end users of the expert system. SNOWBALL is a hypertext knowledge documentation tool which supports flexible use of both computer- and paper-based representations. SNOWBALL facilitates expert review of the elicited knowledge. Limitations and future directions in the development of SNOWBALL are discussed