Collaborative capture and reuse of system knowledge

Reusing parts of models is often experienced as being difficult and is not a mainstream practice in fields such as environmental science. Reuse poses a number of issues which include making models available to other researchers, searching for relevant models, and correctly taking a model part and integrating it into another model. An environment that supports reuse activities enhances the collaborative capture of knowledge and relieves researchers of redoing existing modelling work. Within the NaturNet-Redime project we have created a working environment around the qualitative modelling and simulation tool Garp3 that supports reuse of model parts, and the sharing and search for relevant qualitative models. Such support contributes to an increased reuse of model parts in the environmental modelling community. This article describes the established functionality to address these issues. It includes copy functionality in Garp3, the Web Ontology Language (OWL) formalization of QR models, and the qualitative model repository for which the OWL formalisation was created. The issues identified regarding reuse are not limited to Qualitative Reasoning and Environmental Modelling, but are in principle applicable to any field that uses formal representations of knowledge. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.