Knowledge Oriented and Object Oriented Design: The Experience of KSM

Knowledge modeling is a new activity derived from the AI field that may be used to develop software applications under a perspective of knowledge organization instead of the traditional data + processes approach. According to this, a new methodology, called knowledge oriented , is emerging as an alternative to conventional methodologies in software engineering. Different structuring concepts were proposed to create knowledge models, based mainly on the concept of task, which presents a functional view of a model. In this paper, we propose as structuring concept the knowledge unit, which introduces a new perspective of a knowledge model. The organization derived from the use of this concept presents a more synthetic view showing explicitly what the model knows besides what the model performs. We describe also the KSM (Knowledge Structure Manager) software environment which was developed to support the structured methodology based on knowledge units. KSM allows the user to develop a knowledge model and translates it automatically into a collection of software objects which constitute the executable version of the model. Then, the traditional approaches to software development, where the structure of an application was guided by programming constructs understandable by programmers, may be modified in such a way that the structure of the application is guided by a conceptual pattern structure organized in knowledge blocks, understandable by users non programmers, which has the property of being computable. Consequently, the organization based on the knowledge unit conceptual pattern structure provides a user friendly image for reusability and maintenance purposes.