Knowledge Engineering: Building Cognitive Assistants for Evidence based Reasoning
This book presents a significant advancement in the theory and practice of knowledge engineering, the discipline concerned with the development of intelligent agents that use knowledge and reasoning to perform problem solving and decision making tasks. It covers the main stages in the development of a knowledge based agent: understanding the application domain, modeling problem solving in that domain, developing the ontology, learning the reasoning rules, and testing the agent. The book focuses on a special class of agents: cognitive assistants for evidence based reasoning that learn complex problem solving expertise directly from human experts, support experts, and nonexperts in problem solving and decision making, and teach their problem solving expertise to students. A powerful learning agent shell, Disciple EBR, is included with the book, enabling students, practitioners, and researchers to develop cognitive assistants rapidly in a wide variety of domains that require evidence based reasoning, including intelligence analysis, cybersecurity, law, forensics, medicine, and education.