ECAI-2002 Conference Paper

[full paper]

Knowledge Representation for Program Reuse

Sabine Moisan

In recent years, programs and knowledge about programs have become an important part of the ``patrimony'' (or intellectual property) of companies. In order to efficiently manage this knowledge it is necessary to model it. However, the scope of this knowledge is wider than the simple code sources. We propose a novel framework to encompass such knowledge. In this framework, we have defined a general ontology for program management and the Yakl knowledge description language, for documenting, modelling and capitalising on the knowledge about the use of code. The paper presents the concepts of the ontology and their concrete representation in Yakl. Yakl provides a common language to experts, which is understandable across domains. It is an open language that can be extended or adapted to suit different needs. It can also be used in an incremental manner: from simple code documentation to an operational knowledge base, that can be run by different inference mechanisms.

Keywords: Reuse of Knowledge, Cognitive Modelling, Knowledge Representation

Citation: Sabine Moisan: Knowledge Representation for Program Reuse. In F. van Harmelen (ed.): ECAI2002, Proceedings of the 15th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IOS Press, Amsterdam, 2002, pp.240-244.