The DARPA Knowledge Sharing Effort: Progress Report

Building knowledge-based systems today usually entails constructing a new knowledge base from scratch. Even if several groups of researchers are working in the same general area, such as medicine or electronic diagnosis, each team must develop its own knowledge base from scratch. The cost of this duplication of effort has been high and will become prohibitive as we build larger and larger systems. Furthermore, lack of methodology for sharing and communicating knowledge poses a signicant road-block in developing large multi-center research projects such as DARPA/Rome Laboratory Planning and Scheduling Initative. To overcome these barrier and advance the state of the art, we must finnd ways of preserving existing knowledge bases, and sharing, reusing, and building on them.