The Knowledge Collective Framework Makes Ontology Based Information Accessible, Maintainable, and Reusable

The Knowledge Collective is a multi-layer, multi-agent framework for information reuse in an intelligent knowledge base that supports a collection of agents called MicroDroids, which provide information management capabilities through a variety of interfaces for experts, human users, and software components. This information is stored in a variety of internal structures (e.g., Java objects, rules, database structures). The main concept is that information is stored in a format that is natural to the type of information being maintained (e.g., data, metadata, ontologies, concept maps, lexicons, rules). The Knowledge Collective will make ontology based information accessible to many end users, maintainable by domain experts and reusable by many users across many applications without knowing how or where the information is stored. The Knowledge Collective’s first use is in version 4 of CIRCSIM-Tutor, an Intelligent Tutoring System developed at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, IL.