Collaborative Knowledge Engineering: Socialising Expert Systems

Social software such as Wikis and WebLogs have enabled global knowledge sharing communities to emerge. As with most of the current Web content, the knowledge captured is for human consumption only and too unstructured to allow automated reasoning. On the other hand, while sharing and reuse of knowledge are often the goal behind the development of a knowledge base or ontology, there is still currently little support even at the level of a version control system that notifies users when a module being checked-in has been edited by someone else. A collaborative learning approach is introduced which extends a combined rule and case based knowledge acquisition technique known as multiple classification ripple down rules to allow multiple users to view, define and refine a knowledge base over time and space.