KARO: An Integrated Environment for Reusing Ontologies

This paper shows how KARO (Knowledge Acquisition Environment with Reusable Ontoiogies) supports the development of the domain layer in MIKE (Model-based and Incremental Knowledge Engineering). KARO supplements the reuse of generic problem-solving methods at the task and inference layers in MIKE with a commonsense ontology at the domain layer. The intention is to make the development process easier and the final domain layer more robust. In order to reuse ontologies powerful and integrated tools and methods are absolutely necessary. Therefore, we will describe the formal, linguistic and graphical methods, the architecture and other properties of KARO. We will enrich this survey with several examples which clarify the modeling process of the domain layer in a scheduling task using MIKE. We will show the integration of KARO and MIKE in respect of the development of the domain layer of a model of expertise. We finish the paper with a comparison of related approaches.