Abstract
Knowledge in organizations today is considered as one of the most important assets the organization possesses. A considerable part of this knowledge is the knowledge possessed by the individuals employed by the organization. In order for intelligent systems to perform some of the tasks their human counter parts perform in an organization the intelligent systems need to acquire the knowledge their human counter parts possess for the specific task. To develop an intelligent system that can perform a specific task in an organization, the knowledge needed to perform the task will have to be extracted from the individuals in the organization via knowledge acquisition. This knowledge will then be presented so that the intelligent system can understand it and perform the task. In order to develop an intelligent system an ontology representing the domain under consideration as well as the rules that constitute the reasoning behind the intelligent system needs to be developed. In this dissertation a development environment for developing intelligent systems called the Collaborative Ontology Builder for Reasoning and Analysis (COBRA) was developed. COBRA provides a development environment for developing the ontology and rules for an intelligent system. COBRA was used in this study to develop a Cellular telecommunications Network Consistency Checking Intelligent System (CNCCIS), which was implemented in a cellular telecommunications network.
Prof. E.M. Ehlers