ITRI SEMINAR
               Thursday 6th November at 12.00

N.B. This seminar will take place in the ITRI (2nd floor of
     Watts), not in the Research Seminar Room (Watts 107).


      "What You See Is What You Meant: a new method of
                  editing knowledge bases"

                        Richard Power
                   University of Brighton


Knowledge-based systems  would  be  easier  to  develop  and
maintain if there  were an effective  means by which  domain
experts (as opposed to  knowledge engineers) could edit  the
knowledge. Graphical tools for editing knowledge bases  have
been developed, but  these cannot easily  be used by  domain
experts, since they rely  on technical notions of  knowledge
representation (e.g. conceptual hierarchies, attributes, and
value restrictions).

This seminar describes  an alternative method  in which  the
knowledge  is  presented  through  a  document  in   natural
language. This document is not edited in the usual way, i.e.
by inserting and deleting  characters. Rather, it is  edited
by opening pop-up menus on  `anchors' in a dynamic  document
generated by  the system.  The  document presents  both  the
current state of the knowledge,  and the options for  adding
further knowledge (by choosing concepts from the menus). All
editing choices are semantic, not  textual, so What You  See
Is What You Meant, not what you wrote.