Abstract
Common knowledge acquisition and documentation structuring (CommonKADS) methodology is used for building knowledge-based systems. Legacy systems built depending on CommonKADS suffer from weak points regarding reusability. The main objectives of this work are: (1) switching of CommonKADS methodology from just a design model to be an executable application, (2) facilitating the linkage and cooperation between CommonKADS services that are using different terminologies and (3) enhancing suitability and reusability of existing CommonKADS-based systems. An enhancement to the CommonKADS methodology in order to improve its applications reusability is introduced. This enhancement contains an adaptation of the original CommonKADS methodology and utilization of service-oriented architecture (SOA) as a promising software engineering technology. The proposed adaptation model includes two alternative processes: adjusting and converting. An adjusting process performs a transformation of the existing CommonKADS layers to be SOA-enabled so that it includes representing the data in a new standard form to be transformed into set of services. Converting process is concerned with changing CommonKADS-based legacy systems to SOA-enabled systems through using GenericSOA framework. An example application, a potato CommonKADS-based expert system, was used to evaluate the new proposed model through the analysis and automated restructuring of it to be SOA-enabled system.