KNOWLEDGE LEVEL MODELING - CONCEPTS AND TERMINOLOGY

We address the problem of highly varied and inconsistent usage of term s by the knowledge technology community in the area of knowledge-level modelling. It is arguably difficult or impossible for any standard se t of terms and definitions to be agreed on. However, de facto standard usage is already emerging within and across certain segments of the c ommunity. This is very difficult to see, however, especially for newco mers to the field. II is the goal of this paper to identify and reflec t the most common usage of terms as currently found in the literature. To this end, we introduce and define the concept of a knowledge level model, comparing how the term is used today with Newell's original us age. We distinguish two major types of knowledge level model: ontologi es and problem solving models. We describe what an ontology is, what t hey may be used for and how they are represented. We distinguish vario us kinds of ontologies and define a number of additional related conce pts. We describe what is meant by a problem solving model, what they a re used for, and attempt to clarify some terminological confusion that exists in the literature. We define what is meant by the term 'proble m', and some common notions used to characterise and represent problem s. We introduce and describe the ideas of tasks, problem solving metho ds and a variety of other important related concepts.