Building the domain-expert for a cardiovascular physiology tutor

This paper describes the building of the domain-expert for a cardiovascular physiology tutor called CIRCSIM-Tutor using a systematic development methodology. The domain-expert is a functional component of CIRCSIM-Tutor and provides the domain intelligence to the rest of the system. The authors have developed a multi-dimensional knowledge representation technique to capture expertise in the domain, which led them to the construction of a conceptual model of the domain-expert of CIRCSIM-Tutor. The authors describe how this conceptual model is transformed via an object-oriented methodology to yield the architecture of the domain-expert of CIRCSIM-Tutor. The conceptual model is at the epistemological level and has a real-world-orientation, whereas the architecture of domain-expert emphasizes system-orientation. The resulting architecture is query-driven and provides a fully transparent access to each chunk of domain knowledge, of different types, with optimal flexibility