Knowledge Service Modeler

With the Knowledge Service Modeler, users can construct strategies in a graphical language that is: accessible to a wide range of users; hierarchical in nature; object-oriented; fully reflective; and easily integrated into existing systems. In this environment, knowledge engineers can work with subject-matter experts as well as software engineers to develop models of expertise. At all points in the process, experts can understand and modify the models, even when models are fully operational.

The Knowledge Service Modeler uses a layout in which information goes from less specific to more specific as one moves from left to right across the interface. The Knowledge Service Modeler consists of several areas including:

Menu bar—provides menu options, including project, edit, model, view, solve and help for the application.

Tool bar—contains buttons for convenient interaction with the model.

Overview pane—organizes the high-level strategies (hierarchies) contained in the model. The pane is split into two parts. On the top are lists of strategies and on the bottom are elements filtered to the selected strategies in the top of the pane. From the Overview pane, users can navigate to any element in the project, and they also can create new strategies or delete strategies.

Model pane—serves as the main work area for the application, where strategies and classes are drawn. The content in the Model pane is created through double-clicking and right-clicking. All elements can be dragged and dropped as either single entities or groups. Elements can be collapsed and expanded, and they can be scaled to any size by zooming in or out.

Properties pane—provides specific information about selected elements on the Model pane, including comments, preconditions, success conditions, parameters (which can be fully defined objects), descriptions, etc.

Message pane—displays compile and run-time information about the models.

A user may select any combination of these panes when working with the knowledge service modeler. To simplify the complexity, a user can collapse and reuse strategies and can create behaviors for objects. Behaviors are object-specific methods, and they are specified through the graphical language.