Design goals for sloppy modeling systems

Abstract

The sloppy modeling paradigm regards knowledge acquisition as a cooperative process between user and system, in which the system's learning and structuring algorithms and the user are regarded as partners in a common problem solving activity. In this paper, we discuss the design goals that this paradigm entails for a knowledge acquisition system, with a special focus on the environment that needs to be presented to a user. We identify six criteria that such a sloppy modeling environment should meet. We then present the sloppy modeling system BLIP, its knowledge representation, its system architecture, and its user interface as an example of such an environment. After a transcript of a sample session with the system, we finally evaluate BLIP on the criteria established.