Browse Books

Reviewer: Jose M. Ramirez

This textbook presents the methods and techniques related to the knowledge engineering discipline, using CommonKADS, a comprehensive methodology that is very popular in academic institutions and is coming to be known in software-related industries. The book is organized as follows: Prologue: The value of knowledge. The book is presented along with its aims, and suggested road maps for reading and teaching using the book and related material. Knowledge-engineering basics. A historical background is presented, including the evolution of the discipline, principles, terminology and the initial study of process roles and modeling. The task and its organizational context. The objective of this chapter is to show how to identify knowledge opportunities and problems within an organization and how to integrate organization- related issues into information analysis. Knowledge management. In this chapter, CommonKADS starts to be used as a tool to link knowledge management and knowledge engineering in a model suite. The analysis starts with some considerations about knowledge types, the knowledge value-chain and the relation of knowledge management with the business processes. Knowledge model components. The building blocks of a knowledge model are covered: task, inference, domain schema and knowledge base. The syntaxes and related semantics are presented using CommonKADS. The examples are quite clear and the sequence of presentation is very smooth; these features improve the understanding of a far from obvious subject. Template knowledge models. This chapter deals with knowledge re- use and the way this can be achieved using templates. The authors emphasize the use of template repositories as a base for a custom knowledge model. Knowledge model construction. The three main stages in knowledge model construction are presented: identification, specification and refinement. Knowledge-elicitation techniques. This chapter is the least original of the book. Some standard knowledge elicitation techniques are covered very briefly and some effort is put into relating these techniques to the models presented in chapter seven. Modeling communication aspects. This chapter explains how to construct a communication model to specify the information exchange between tasks carried out by different agents. The layers presented in a communication scenario are covered: communication plan, individual transactions and information exchange specifications. Case study: The housing applications. Designing knowledge systems. This chapter describes the construction of the specification of a software system based on the requirements in the knowledge model. These specifications lead to a structure-preserving design using CommonKADS. Knowledge-system implementation. Two implementations of the housing applications case (chapter 11) are shown. The first one is in Prolog, a full structure preserving implementation, and the second is in AionDS 8.0, a popular Object-Oriented business environment. Advanced knowledge modeling. Some advance domain-modeling techniques are studied, including aggregation, formulation, modularization and the construction of hierarchies. UML Notations used in CommonKADS. This is a very useful chapter that shows how UML and CommonKADS complement each other in the development of knowledge systems. A subset of UML is used within CommonKADS to specify activities, states, classes and even use cases. Project Management. The concepts of project cycles and model states are introduced as a way to divide a project into manageable pieces. There is also a glossary of graphical notations. The index is too brief for a textbook; a more extensive index, probably organized by topics, would be useful. The book assumes a basic knowledge of systems engineering, information management and some understanding of business process modeling. The book has plenty of real-world examples and is complemented by a Web site where the authors have published a large number of exercises, case studies, sample systems, links and other valuable resources. Online Computing Reviews Service