Managing KBS Projects

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Managing KBS Projects

• Contents
• How people matter
• Dealing with management and users
• Safety critical systems
• Systems integration
• The importance of quality assurance
• The importance of project management
• Being a professional knowledge engineer

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Managing KBS Projects

• The Project Champion
• Will convince users that the KBS
  is needed
• Must have some authority
• Must get on with both
  management and users
• Must have a personal investment in the project
• Must believe in the need for the KBS
• Must be capable of presenting the business
  benefits to management
• Must be highly motivated towards the success of
  the project

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Managing KBS Projects

• Convincing Management
• A project
  presentation at
  an early stage
  
  allows -
• An opportunity for
  management to be
  made aware of the
  
  reality of the project
• The knowledge engineer to gauge the real level of
  support from management

The need for a Knowledge Based System
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Managing KBS Projects

• The Monitoring System
• The goal of the system was to assist the
  clinician in the intensive care unit (ICU)
• The system addressed the following problems -
• the need for interpretation of measurement values
  with respect to historical information about
  changes in a patients status and therapy
• the difficulty of directly relating measurement
  values to a therapeutic recommendation

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Managing KBS Projects

• The Monitoring System
• The system was designed to perform the following
  tasks in the intensive care unit (ICU)
• predict the initial setting of the mechanical
  ventilator
• suggest adjustments to treatment by continuous
  reassessment of the patients condition
• summarise the patients physiological status
• maintain a set of patients specific expectations
  and goals for future evaluation
• aid in the stabilization of the patients
  condition

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Managing KBS Projects

• The Monitoring System Development

The knowledge elicitation sessions resulted in a
set of rules
A prototype was developed and shown to the
clinicians
Feedback from the prototype was used to refine
the system and rule set
The loop was repeated a number of times until the
final system was obtained
?
?
The system was tested on over 50 patients
The majority of the tests
showed a close agreement between the KBS and the
consultant
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Managing KBS Projects

• Safety Critical Systems

Whose fault is it if the system fails?
Has the system been developed to Quality
Standards?
Do we really know if it is correct?
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Managing KBS Projects

• Safety Critical Systems
• A recent BCS conference on Intelligent Systems
  Engineering contained articles on KBS being
  developed for -
• railway signaling
• alarm systems
• gas leaks
• nuclear power station
  process monitoring
  
  and control

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Managing KBS Projects

• The Integrated System - A Case Study
• A KBS was integrated with a conventional software
  system - a Human Resource Management system
• A HRM is a software system designed to make the
  best use of the people in an organisation
• Aims -
• to have a corporate pool of staff
• all projects across a department would employ
  staff from the pool
• all human resource data would be held and
  controlled centrally

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Managing KBS Projects

• The Integrated System - A Case Study

Database systems e.g. Information systems
application in HRM
Expert systems e.g. Artificial intelligence
application in HRM
Hybrid systems e.g. An integrated human
resources KBS
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Managing KBS Projects

• The Integrated System - A Case Study

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Managing KBS Projects

• Evaluation of KB Systems
• Evaluation falls into 2 stages -
• Validation
• Verification

You do it this way
No you dont, you do it this way
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Managing KBS Projects

• The Need for Evaluation

Real world domain
Distortion
Human expert
Distortion
Knowledge engineer
Distortion
Knowledge base
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Managing KBS Projects

• Evaluation of a K.B.

Verification
Validation
Gaps in knowledge
Internal quality checking based on logical
coherence
False knowledge
Expert and collection of proof cases needed
Potential for support by tools
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Managing KBS Projects

• Verification
• Syntactic coherence
• to see that all objects in the KB are correctly
  defined with respect to the inference engine
• Logical coherence
• to apply logical properties to detect
  contradictions
• Contextual coherence
• to see that the KB is consistent with the model
  of the problem

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Managing KBS Projects

• Subsumed Rules
• Occurs when 2 rules have the same conclusion but
  1 rule has additional conditions -
• Rule 1 A gt C
• Rule 2 A and B gt C

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Managing KBS Projects

• Unnecessary Conditions
• Occurs when the conclusions of 2 rules are the
  same and, except for one, the conditions of the
  rules are the same and this condition is reversed
  -
• Rule 1 A and B gt C
• Rule 2 A and not(B) gt C

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Managing KBS Projects

• Validation
• We need to -
• define the work domain
• define which proof cases
• define how many proof cases

Work Domain
Knowledge Base
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Managing KBS Projects

• Factors which have contributed to the adoption of
  standards for the software development process
  - (The UK National Computing Centre, 1972)
• The organisation producing the software needs to
  provide users with quality software that operates
  satisfactorily
• The need to develop software within the
  constraints of time, money and available staff
• The finished product must be at an acceptable
  level
• The product must be easy to maintain, and so
  documentation is an important area which must be
  addressed by any standards

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Managing KBS Projects

• Results of a survey carried out In 1991

Level of experience in KBS development
in the UK (Ng, 1991)
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Managing KBS Projects

• Results of a survey carried out In 1991

Use of KBS methods in the UK (Ng, 1991)
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Managing KBS Projects

• Results of a survey carried out In 1991
• Only 13 of organisation claimed to use any
  formal or semi-formal method to validate their
  KBS. Methods quoted were -
• Qualitative modeling
• Induction
• Customer satisfaction
• Regression testing
• Conventional testing
• In-house methods

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Managing KBS Projects

• The ISO9000-3 Standard

Quality system framework 1 Management
responsibility 2 Quality system
3 Internal quality audits
4 Corrective action
Quality system life cycle 5 Contract reviews
6 Purchaser requirements
7 Development planning
8 Quality planning 9 Design
implementation 10 Testing
validation 11 Acceptance
12 Replication, delivery
installation 13
Maintenance
Quality system support 14 Configuration
management 15 Document control
16 Quality records
17 Measurement 18 Rules, practices
conventions 19 Tools techniques
20 Purchasing 21
Included software product 22
Training
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Managing KBS Projects

• Operation and Maintenance
• When a system is delivered to a customer it is
  vital that it is accompanied by sufficient and
  appropriate documentation - in particular -
• A user guide which explains how to use the
  software
• A technical manual

Technical Manual
1
2
3
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Managing KBS Projects

• Project Management
• The Project Managers dilemma

Stakeholder
Expectation
They want a system which meets their needs
Users
Knowledge engineers
They want to be left to do their job
They want the system to conform to their quality
procedures
Quality manager
They want the introduction of the system to go
smoothly. They also want the project on time, to
budget and working
Senior management
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Managing KBS Projects

• Professionalism
• The collective body of persons engaged in any
  profession (Chambers dictionary, 1991)
• Characteristics of professions -
• Established by royal charter
• Control entry to that profession
• Act as a self governing and self regulatory body
• Enforce discipline among members
• Have a code of practice
• Have a code of conduct

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Managing KBS Projects

• Professionalism
• Grounds for granting a royal charter -
• It should be in the public interest to regulate
  members within that body
• The members should represent a coherent group