The rapid development of knowledge bases using UML class diagrams

The knowledge bases design that employs conceptual models and their transformations is one of the most interesting areas of knowledge engineering and it remains critical. This paper presents an approach to the rapid development of knowledge bases for rule-based expert systems on the basis of the model-based generation of program codes. The approach proposed uses conceptual models in the form of UML class diagrams as a source of knowledge. In accordance with the technique that we propose, diagram concepts and relationships are extracted, mapped to the ontology of a subject domain and represented in the form of fact and rules templates. The original notation, namely the rule visual modelling language (RVML), is used to visualise and modify mapped elements. The CLIPS is used as the targeted knowledge base programming language. This approach does not eliminate errors due to conceptual models; but provides minimisation of programming errors resulting from hand coding.