Using UML class Diagrams for Design of Knowledge Bases of Rule-Base Expert systems

N. O. Dorodnykh, Postgraduate Student, e-mail: tualatin32@mail.ru, A. Yu. Yurin, Head of Laboratoty, e-mail: iskander@icc.ru, Institute for System Dynamics and Control Theory Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Irkutsk

The paper describes the approach for computer-aided design of rule-bases on the basis of conceptual models. The proposed approach consists of six steps: design of the conceptual model, representation of the conceptual model in the form of a XML-document, analysis (parsing) of the XML-document, generation ontology of rules, visualization and modification of rules, model-based generation of a program code. UML class diagrams are considered as the main source of conceptual models, because the analysis shown that it is the most common way of conceptualizing knowledge in software development. The original notation — Rule Visual Modeling Language (RVML) is proposed for visualization and modification of rules. The C Language Production System (CLIPS) is selected as a targeted programming language.

The main advantage of the approach is minimization of errors in program codes.

The approach does not eliminate errors caused by inaccuracy or incompleteness of analyzed conceptual models, however, the automatic model-based generation of program codes allows to apply the principle of rapid prototyping for the design of knowledge bases with the subsequent inspection and testing obtained codes with the aid of third-party tools.

The proposed algorithms are implemented in a prototype of a web-service. The main area of application of the web-service is providing distributed collaboration of experts and analytics in design of knowledge bases for rule-based expert systems.

Keywords: knowledge base, rules, computer-aided, knowledge acquisition, conceptual model, ontology, UML, CLIPS

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