No abstract

Critiquing systems, a special kind of knowledge-based systems, can be seen as a personal assistant helping to reflect on a particular design and to improve it. They have successfully demonstrated their capability to aid users during design tasks. Critiquing systems make knowledge and expertise of different domain experts available to end users of authoring tools. Unfortunately it is a quite demanding and time consuming task to get the expertise of different distributed domain experts into such a system and to maintain it. That might explain why many critiquing systems only exist as prototypical implementations. We propose a collaborative development environment for supporting domain experts in constructing design-oriented critiquing systems. Our approach intends to support rapid prototyping, establishment and maintenance of critiquing systems. Especially domain experts not familiar with programming shall be enabled to participate in this process. We expect to improve and to ensure the knowledge base's quality by supporting information exchange and negotiation processes between domain experts.

Design-oriented critiquing systems have successfully demonstrated their capability to aid users in designing artifacts. They can be seen as personal assistants helping to reflect on a particular design and to improve it. For doing so, design-oriented critiquing systems make knowledge and expertise of domain experts available to end users of authoring tools. Unfortunately, it is a quite demanding and time consuming task to compile the expertise of domain experts and to maintain it.We present a collaborative development environment for supporting domain experts in building design-oriented critiquing systems. In this article we focus on assisting domain experts in building a consistent and preferably complete knowledge base of a domain. A knowledge base forms the basis of a critiquing system. Well-structured negotiation processes clear up predictable disagreements arising when domain experts from various disciplines compile their knowledge collaboratively. Considering that experts are not necessarily familiar with programming we provide means for rapid prototyping and maintenance of design-oriented critiquing systems.

An important question of knowledge management is how we. can support domain experts in formulating their domain knowledge and in making this expertise available via knowledge-based systems. Critiquing systems are a special kind of knowledge-based systems. These systems provide context sensitive advice, and rationale to an artifact (for example charts, web-pages and so on) designed by a user: This is realized by delivering so-called critiques, which contain relevant information for the user to the task at hand. We present a visual programming language -called VisualCiLa -which allows design experts to formulate such critiques. I t is based on a special subset ofjrst order logic and a special form of text construction. VisualCiLa is built on top of a pipe-, filter and collector-metaphor and allows users to plug critiques together by placing tiles on a spreadsheet. Furthermore, VisualCiLa supports users in simulating the inference mechanism, which is represented by t h e j o w of objects through the pipes. Filters and collectors visualize the functionality of inference and support the debugging process of such critiques. A user test with 26 kids showed that the language eases the burden of understanding and formulating formal critiques. We believe that this language is a framework which allows design experts to formulate, to test, and to debug their expertise as critiquing knowledge.

No abstract