A Tool for Dynamic Knowledge Modeling

This paper presents the design and implementation of a software tool for modeling knowledge to be used in knowledge based systems or the semantic Web [T. Berners-Lee, J. Hendler, & O. Lassila, " The Semantic Web", Scientific American, May 2001. ]. The tool presented has been developed based on the inferential modeling technique [C.W. Chan, "From Knowledge Modeling to Ontology Construction", Int. Journal of Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering, 14(6), Dec 2004. ], which is a technique for modeling the static and dynamic knowledge elements of a problem domain. A major deficiency of existing tools is the lack of support for modeling dynamic knowledge. To address the inadequacy, the focus of this work is on dynamic knowledge modeling. To address the objective of modeling dynamic knowledge, a Protege [Protege, http://protege.stanford.edu ] 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 OWL and can be shared and re-used. The tool is applied for constructing a knowledge model in the petroleum contamination remediation selection domain.