This talk will consist of an informal review of work at Cancer Research UK aimed at developing general methods and technologies for building knowledge based services for web deployment. The main outcome of this work to date is PROforma, a declarative specification language for modelling task expertise, and a toolset for building and deploying PROforma applications.

PROforma can be variously viewed as a logic programming language, an object-oriented language and an agent programming language. This combination of paradigms is effective for modelling many types of expertise and provides a natural scaffold on which to hang varied knowledge services.

My aim in this talk will be to convey a practical sense of our approach, its strengths and weaknesses, rather than a formal discussion (which can be found in many publications). Much of the talk will consist of demonstrations of tools and example applications, to stimulate discussion of how our technologies might add value to, and benefit from, current research and developments at KMI.

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