The Chamois Component-Based Knowledge Engineering Framework

W hat many computing professionals call knowledge engineering is better known in industry as infrastructure technologies that enable enterprise business intelligence applications such as customer-relationship management, electronic commerce, business analytics, and information personalization. Broadly, knowledge engineering includes value-added data storage, data transmission across a network, and extraction and visualization of knowledge from stored data. We initiated the Chamois project to achieve two goals: research major areas relevant to knowledge engineering and build a prototype knowledge engineering framework that incorporates many of our research results. The currently operational Chamois prototype merges commercial software products with prototype software modules. We named our project after an antelope found in Europe and southern Russia. The chamois can jump very high after only a few momentum-generating gallops. We wanted our framework project to quickly propel the department and its students and professors to a high level of excellence in the same manner that a chamois leaps into the air. Chamois combines two main components. The infrastructure component consists of software products and prototype modules that provide key knowledge engineering technologies. The application component uses the infrastructure as a data and knowledge resource. We chose the primary application, an electronic commerce system, as our validation candidate because it includes various functional components that use the underlying knowledge engineering technology. These components include personalization, security, quality-of-service transmission of multimedia data, querying, and XML document management.