Seattle Method

Imagine a system that combines a software application used for performing some task, a knowledge management system that contains knowledge related to performing that task, and a reasoner which understands how to interact with the knowledge based within the knowledge management system, the software application, and the user of that software system. A subject matter expert (SME) and a software application agree on a common representation of knowledge , a conceptualization , using global open standard technical formats such as XBRL, RDF+OWL+SHACL, or GQL. That means that rather than embedding subject matter logic within the code of a software application; that logic can be separated from the software application.  This makes both that common representation of knowledge more useful and modifications to the software easier. This distinction (i.e. separating knowledge and code) makes knowledge based systems very different from typical software applications. The architecture of a knowledg...

Conceptualization is the process of identifying, abstracting, and organizing a coherent set of concepts and relationships that represent the essential important elements, relationships, and possible states of affairs within a given subject domain (a.k.a. area of knowledge , field, universe of discourse). It transforms the complexity of reality into structured ideas that can be shared, discussed, analyzed, and modeled. A conceptualization is a shared mental or collective understanding of what exists and how what exists hangs together in some area of knowledge (a.k.a. domain). A conceptualization is intended to be understandable by humans (the community of subject domain stakeholders) but can also be represented in machine interpretable form. Conceptualizations are social artifacts, sociotechnical tools. A conceptualization serves as a shared understanding among domain stakeholders, enabling them to articulate and reason about the subject domain in consistent, meaningful, and useful wa...