Application of a User-Centered Design Approach to the Definition of a Knowledge Base Development Tool

Abstract

Knowledge Bases (KB) are used to store structured and unstructured information about a specific subject. KB are a key element of Expert Systems, a type of Computer-Based Information Systems designed to analyze and offer recommendations and explanations about a specific problem domain, providing support when human experts are not available or helping experts dealing with very demanding and critical problems, usually because of the problem’s complexity, the volume of information processed, and the pressure for short time answers. Developing KB is a quite difficult task, since there is the need to figure out and map, among others, the knowledge elements, organization, context of use, composition and representation, relations, importance and the reasoning processes used to feed the inference process, combining the inputs coming from real world data with such knowledge in order to present the desired outputs. In this paper we propose to address the context and issues involved in defining the requirements for designing a KB development tool, which supports cooperative and participatory processes of knowledge elicitation, which, despite the eventual complexity of the problem at hand, are intuitive and easy to implement. This calls for an approach that carefully considers the principles and methodologies proposed by User-Centered Design.

Keywords: User-centred Design, Knowledge Bases, Expert Systems, Development Tools

DOI: 10.54941/ahfe1001259