CODE4: Conceptually Oriented Description Environment

A System for Knowledge Management: Acquisition, Analysis, and Retrieval
Doug Skuce <doug@site.uottawa.ca>
Tim Lethbridge <tcl@site.uottawa.ca>

Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Department of Computer Science, University of Ottawa

Introduction

CODE4 (Conceptually Oriented Description Environment) is a general purpose knowledge management system intended for analysing, debugging, and delivering knowledge about some domain. It is designed to be easily adaptable to many applications, such as natural language processing, software specification and design, expert systems, general terminological analysis, or teaching subjects such as biology or Unix. It can be learned by non-computer people in a few days.

The system features a frame-based representation with a number of inheritance and inferencing modes, a very flexible graphic user interface with various graphing facilities, a hypertext mode of browsing, the ability to specify functional computation like in a spreadsheet, an optional simple restricted English-like syntax, and document scanning and lexicon management facilities. These features are all designed to assist a person in the semantic interpretation and conceptual analysis of knowledge (i.e. in knowledge entry), or in knowledge retrieval.

Features of CODE4

Object-oriented:
programmed in Smalltalk; runs on all major platforms
Highly graphic user interface:
Hybrid AI knowledge representation + hypertext:
several inheritance link types and associated inference mechanisms.
Database-like search:
answers queries in a knowledge base ("show me all X such that Y")
Knowledge debugging features:
User can build up knowledge bases and lexicons by scanning real documents
Lexicon management:
terms are stored as first-class concepts. Terms can have several meanings, and concepts can have several terms.

Typical Applications of CODE4 KMS Technology