Projected Significant Accomplishments

Significant accomplishments after 1 year

George Mason University will demonstrate the capability of building Knowledge Acquisition Agents that could be taught by subject matter experts similarly to the way students are taught by teachers, through examples and explanations. This will allow an expert with little or no knowledge base or computer experience to develop a knowledge-based system that exhibits the expert's knowledge and problem solving capabilities and could act as an assistant to the expert or as an independent intelligent system.

Significant accomplishments after 3 years

George Mason University will demonstrate the capability of building Knowledge Acquisition Agents that could be taught by subject matter experts similarly to the way students are taught by teachers, through examples, explanations, and guidance in problem solving. These Knowledge Acquisition Agents will allow a collaborating team of domain experts with little or no knowledge base or computer experience to rapidly build a large Knowledge Base. Each expert will interact with a personal Knowledge Acquisition Agent to build a portion of the Knowledge Base, to integrate it within the Knowledge Base, and to communicate with the other experts. Moreover, this technology will produce validated knowledge bases and will allow easy modification of the Knowledge Base in response to changes in the environment or in the requirements of the application.