Speci cation and Generation of Custom-Tailored Knowledge-Acquisition Tools

Domain-oriented knowledge-acquisition tools provide e cient support for the design of knowledge-based systems. However, the cost of developing such tools is high, especially when their restricted scope is taken into account. Developers can use metalevel tools to generate domain-oriented knowledge-acquisition tools that are custom tailored for a small group of experts, with considerably less effort than is required for manual tool development. An epistemic obstacle to creating such metatools is the speci cation model for target knowledge-acquisition tools. The metatool dots is based on an abstract-architecture approach to the speci cation and generation of knowledge-acquisition tools. Dots is domain and method independent, because it is based on an architectural model of the target knowledgeacquisition tool.