The general objective of this research project is to develop and to experimentally validate a collaborative assistant for rapid knowledge formation and reasoning (Disciple-RKF) that will enable a team of subject matter experts that do not have prior knowledge engineering experience, to rapidly construct, update and extend a high quality integrated knowledge base for a complex application.

Each subject matter expert will teach a personal Disciple-RKF agent while collaborating with it in solving specific problems. During this process, the Disciple agent will learn from the expert, building, extending and improving its knowledge base.

The emphasis of this research is on acquiring expert’s problem solving knowledge that is not normally represented in written documents. This task is complementary to that of acquiring knowledge that has already been expressed in textbooks or other documents.