Knowledge-Based Assistant

Intelligent assistants facilitate design and construction of complex software. In this article, we propose a model for an intelligent assistant to aid in building one kind of software-knowledge-based sys- tems-and discuss a preliminary implementation. The assistant partic- ipates in knowledge-based system (KBS) construction, including ac- quisition of an initial model of a problem domain, acquisition of control and task-specific inference knowledge, testing and validation, and long- term maintenance of encoded knowledge. We present a hypothetical scenario in which the assistant and a KBS designer cooperate to create an initial domain model, and discuss five categories of knowledge the assistant requires to offer such help. We then discuss two software technologies upon which the assistant is based-an object-oriented pro- gramming language, and a user-interface framework.

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