A Collaborative Development Environment for Design-Oriented Critiquing Systems

Design–oriented critiquing systems have successfully demonstrated their capability to aid users in designing artifacts. They can be seen as personal assistants helping to reflect on a particular design and to improve it. For doing so, design–oriented critiquing systems make knowledge and expertise of domain experts available to end users of authoring tools. Unfortunately, it is a quite demanding and time consuming task to compile the expertise of domain experts and to maintain it. We present a collaborative development environment for supporting domain experts in building design–oriented critiquing systems. In this article we focus on assisting domain experts in building a consistent and preferably complete knowledge base of a domain. A knowledge base forms the basis of a critiquing system. Well–structured negotiation processes clear up predictable disagreements arising when domain experts from various disciplines compile their knowledge collaboratively. Considering that experts are not necessarily familiar with programming we provide means for rapid prototyping and maintenance of design–oriented