The KAMET II methodology: Knowledge acquisition, knowledge modeling and knowledge generation

The knowledge acquisition (KA) process is not “mining from the expert’s head” and writing rules for building knowledge-based systems (KBS), as it was 20 years ago when KA was often confused with knowledge elicitation activity, and modern engineering tools did not exist. The KA process has definitely changed. Today knowledge acquisition is considered a cognitive process that involves both dynamic modeling and knowledge generation activities. KA should be seen as a spiral of epistemological and ontological content that grows upward by transforming tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge, which in turn becomes the basis for a new spiral of knowledge generation. This paper presents some of our attempts to build a new knowledge acquisition methodology that brings together and includes all of these ideas. KAMET II, the evolution of KAMET (Cairó, 1998), represents a modern approach to creating diagnosis-specialized knowledge models that can be run by Protégé 2000, the open source ontology editor and knowledge-based framework.