Embedding formal knowledge models in active documents
Brian R. Gaines, Mildred L. G. Shaw · Communications of the ACM · 1999
However, the formal nature of computational symbolic models is also problematic in that people find it difficult to make their reasoning processes explicit, and the models developed may be difficult to comprehend and validate.In knowledge acquisition research and applications the transition from the informal expression of knowledge that is natural to people to the formal expression of knowl-edge that is required for computation is recognized as a major problem [4].Knowledge acquisition architectures have been developed that use hypermedia technologies to combine the forms of representation that are natural for people, generally media such as text, images and movies, with forms of representation that are both computational and comprehensible by people, generally semantic networks representing symbolic models in visual languages [9].The product of knowledge acquisition is generally thought to be an expert system of some kind, and these are associated with their own interfaces to support advice giving and explanation.However, it is attractive to make the product a humanly-understandable document that integrates informal multimedia knowledge representation with the