KEWI: A Knowledge Engineering Tool for Modelling AI Planning Tasks

This paper introduces the Knowledge Engineering Web Interface (KEWI) which primarily aims to be used for
modelling automated planning tasks in a semi-formal framework. The conceptual model used to represent the
declarative and procedural knowledge in KEWI is described formally. The model consists of three layers: a
rich ontology, a model of basic actions, and more complex methods. It is this structured conceptual model
based on the rich ontology that facilitates knowledge engineering. The focus of this paper is to show how
the central knowledge model used in KEWI differs from a model directly encoded in PDDL, the language
accepted by most existing planning engines. Specifically, the rich ontology enables a more concise and natural
style of representation. For operational use, KEWI automatically generates PDDL. Initial experiments show
that the generated PDDL can be processed by a planner without incurring significant drawbacks.