Meta-knowledge in systems design: panacea … or undelivered promise?

  • Authors:

  • Yannis Kalfoglou;Tim Menzies;Klaus-Dieter Althoff;Enrico Motta

  • Affiliations:

  • School of Artif. Intell., 80 South Bridge, Univ. of Edinburgh, Edinburgh EH1 1HN, Scotland – Knowl. Media Inst. (KMi), The Open Univ., Walton Hall, Milton Keynes MK7 6AA, England. yannisk&co ...;NASA/WVU Software Research Lab, 100 Univ. Drive, Fairmont, WV, USA – Dept. of Elec. and Comp. Eng., 2356 Main Mall, Vancouver V6T1Z4 BC, Canada. tim@menzies.com.;Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering, Kaiserslautern, Germany. klaus-dieter.althoff@iese.fhg.de.;Knowledge Media Institute (KMi), The Open University, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes MK7 6AA, England. e.motta@open.ac.uk.

  • Venue:
  • The Knowledge Engineering Review
  • Year:
  • 2000

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Abstract

In this study we present a review of the emerging field of meta-knowledge components as practised over the past decade among a variety of practitioners. We use the artificially defined term “meta-knowledge” to encompass all those different but overlapping notions used by the artificial intelligence and software engineering communities to represent reusable modelling frameworks: ontologies, problem-solving methods, patterns and experience factories and bases, to name but a few. We then elaborate on how meta-knowledge is deployed in the context of system's design to improve its reliability by consistency-checking, enhance its reuse potential and manage its knowledge-sharing. We speculate on its usefulness and explore technologies for supporting deployment of meta-knowledge. We argue that, despite the different approaches being followed in systems design by divergent communities, meta-knowledge is present in all cases, in a tacit or explicit form, and its utilisation depends on pragmatic aspects which we try to identify and critically review on criteria of effectiveness.