ProKEt (Dialog Generator)

ProKEt

ProKEt is a knowledge engineering tool which tries to answer the following two problems:

• How do you get knowledge experts to formalize their knowledge?
• How can you have an front end, which allows for easy customization, so that all clients can have their own, fully customized, web-based access to the knowledge based system.

 Knowledge Formaliziation

To get experts to enter their knowledge, we believe it's paramount to provide them with intuitive tools. Of course, there are multiple ways to do that. One is creating a dedicated software, trying to follow all the guidelines for good interface design, making it powerful yet simple, usable without the need to read pages after pages of documentation. Our way is different: Use software that is already there, of high quality, and regularly used by most knowledge experts.

We use office tools like Excel or Word to formalize the knowledge. Those tools are already used by a lot of experts, like people in the medical profession. The input format it simple and new knowledge bases can mostly be created by copying and modifying existing examples. Of course, there is an extensive documentation too. It can be found here and has a lot of demos. A knowledge base which tries to support you in deciding which houseplant you should buy could look like this:

When opening the knowledge base in a browser, a user would see something like this:

Front-End Customization

Whenever you work with a corporation, they most likely want their own look-and-feel for the front-end of the knowledge based system. Especially when they are making  their system publicly available. To allow that, there are multiple ways to change the appearance of the front end.

• You can change the style of each knowledge base by uploading a CSS file to the knowledge base. No change of any ProKEt code is required.
• For every fundamentally different type of interface, there exists a Java class for it, allowing inheritance and other standard OOP techniques for rapid prototyping of new interfaces.
• We are currently trying to make a clear cut between the front-end and back-end code, do all the presentation in Javascript/HTML and providing a simple Javascript API to communicate with the knowledge based system.

An example of a completely different front-end using ProKEt can be found here. If you want to use ProKEt yourself or want more information about it, do not hesitate to send an email to felix.herrmann@uni-wuerzburg.de.