The Active Glossary: taking integration seriously

Abstract Developing automated support for any workplace involves analysing a workplace, designing a problem-solving approach and knowledge base, populating that knowledge base with information required by the problem-solving approach, and introducing the new support into the workplace. Each of these development phases produces different components of the solution for supporting a workplace. Existing knowledge-acquisition tools support only a subset of the development phases, and the solution components they generate are not integrated: it is left to the developer to create and maintain a mapping between the different solution components resulting from the different development phases. A current trend in knowledge acquisition is to move towards coherent knowledge-engineering environments supporting the entire solution-development cycle. This emphasizes the need for tools that assist developers with integrating the different solution components produced by the knowledge-engineering environment into a coherent system. This paper introduces such an integration tool: the Active Glossary. The Active Glossary is part of the Spark, Burn, FireFighter knowledge-engineering environment. It assists a development team with describing workplaces and programming constructs so that their similarities and differences are made explicit. The result is an explicit mapping between the outcome of a workplace analysis and the design of a problem-solving approach. The Active Glossary further assists the development team with exploiting the similarities for the purpose of reusing previously defined workplace descriptions and programming constructs for new situations.