Knowledge acquisition includes knowledge structuring, which is also known as conceptualisation. This is a time-consuming and often complex process that can be improved by utilising visualisation during the modelling of the domain knowledge. This visualisation requires explicitly designed conceptual modelling, which is effectively used through the user interface. The purpose of conceptual modelling is to capture a factual and procedural complete and accurate model of the current state of the domain knowledge.
Developing and expanding the knowledge base in a rule-based knowledge system increases the complexity and makes it more difficult to comprehend, in particular when only the syntax of the rules is displayed through the interface. More intelligible content descriptions can be realised when descriptive concepts is applied to rules to produce semantic meanings.
The aim of this paper is to suggest a visual conceptualisation for acquiring and structuring the domain knowledge as well as the reasoning strategy. The concepts encountered capture semantic notions at different levels of abstraction and visualise the domain knowledge both sequentially and hierarchically: Sequentially, the visualisation is presented in the Unified Modelling Language’s (UML) sequence diagram and hierarchically it is visualised in hierarchical diagrams.