BLACKBOARD SYSTEMS AT THE ARCHITECTURE LEVEL

Since Hearsay-II, many application systems using the blackboard archit ecture have been built. Some of these applications have been built usi ng expert system shells or tools. These tools contain the skeletal con structs of blackboard systems into which the user adds the necessary i nformation and knowledge from the application domain to create an appl ication system. Although the tools are useful in the implementation ph ase, they provide little help in the design of the system, which must necessarily precede the implementation phase. The determination of the blackboard levels, the knowledge sources, and the details of the cont rol strategy is a task reserved for the knowledge engineer/system desi gner. In order to automate the design process, one needs to understand the relationships between the architectural constructs and domain inf ormation that provide the semantics of the architecture. In this paper the authors explore the components of blackboard systems from the per spective of the type of knowledge that goes into the makeup of blackbo ard systems at the architecture level. They describe a research system , KASE, that captures the various knowledge needed for design and appl ies the knowledge to aid knowledge engineers design blackboard systems .