Fidel Ruiz’s research while affiliated with University of Amsterdam and other places

. Formal knowledge modelling languages have a number of advantages over informal languages, such as their precise meaning and the possibility to derive properties through formal proofs. However, these formal languagesalso suffer from problems which limit their practical usefulness: they are often not expressive enough to deal with real world applications, formal models are complex and hard to read, and constructing a formal model is a difficult, error prone and expensive process. The goal of the study presented in this paper is to investigate the usability of one such formal KBS modelling language, called (ML) 2 . In order to analyse the properties of (ML) 2 that influence its usability, we designeda set of evaluation criteria. We then applied (ML) 2 in two case-studies and scored the language on our evaluation criteria. A separate case-study was devoted to analysing the possibilities for reusing formal model fragment. (ML) 2 scored well on most of our criteria. This leads us t...

Formal specification languages can improve the development of knowledge-based systems, but several problems limit their usefulness. (ML)², a formal language based on the knowledge models used in the CommonKADS KBS development method, avoids many of these problems. We describe a study that investigated the usability of a formal KBS modeling language, (ML)². To analyze (ML)² usability, we first designed a set of evaluation criteria. Then we performed a small case study, constructing an expertise model in (ML) ², to test and refine these criteria. Subsequently, we used (ML)² to construct a second model, which formed the basis for our language evaluation. Altogether, we performed three case studies, which we used to score (ML)² with our evaluation criteria