Tools for Industrial Knowledge Modeling and Management

This paper presents the design and implementation of software tools for modeling and managing knowledge to be used in knowledge based systems or the semantic Web. The tools presented have been developed based on the inferential modeling technique, which is a technique for modeling the static and dynamic knowledge elements of a problem domain. Some major deficiencies of existing tools include the lack of support for modeling dynamic knowledge and knowledge management. To address the inadequacies, the focus of this work is on knowledge management and dynamic knowledge modeling. To address the first objective of knowledge management, a Class Editor, which supports management of static knowledge, has been developed. The Class Editor supports knowledge sharing and re-use by automatically managing author information and access rights in a peer-to-peer environment. To address the second objective of modeling dynamic knowledge, a Protege plug-in, called Dyna, has been developed, which supports dynamic knowledge modeling. Task behaviour, which is a component of dynamic knowledge, is being modeled using Task Behaviour Language (TBL), and test cases for task behaviour can be created in TBL. Test cases are runnable, enabling verification that the model is working as expected. The dynamic knowledge models are stored in XML and can be shared and re-used. The suite of tools will be applied for constructing a knowledge model in the petroleum remediation selection domain.