On the road to automatic knowledge engineering

The paper presents a scheme for categorizing knowledge engineering tools. The classification of knowledge acquisition systems has revealed some interesting facts about these systems. It seems that systems which are able to work on multiple tasks produce very shallow (i.e., not of expert-level) knowledge bases. On the other hand, systems which produce expert-level knowledge bases function on a single task. These insights have led to the design of ASKE, a knowledge acquisition system which can be used to build expert-level knowledge bases in several domains and for different task-types. The knowledge acquisition process is based on the notion of templates, the knowledge-bearing units of ASKE. Templates provide a convenient way of representing domain knowledge.