VM-in-Protégé: A Study of Software Reuse

Protege is a system that encompasses a suite of graphical tools and a methodology for applying them to the task of creating and maintaining knowledge-based systems. One of our key goals for Protege is to facilitate reuse on new problems of components of previously developed solutions. We investigated this reusability by applying preexisting library components in the Protege system to a reconstruction of VM; a well-known rule-based system for ventilator management. The formal steps of the Protege methodology-ontology creation problem-solving method selection, knowledge engineering, and mapping-relation instantiation-were followed, and a working system with much of the reasoning capability of the original VM was created. The work illuminated important lessons regarding aspects of component reusability.