Does Prior Knowledge Facilitate the Development of Knowledge-Based Systems?

One factor that affects the rate of knowledge base construction is the availability and reuse of prior knowledge in ontologies and domain-specific knowledge bases. This paper reports an empirical study of reuse performed in the first year of the High Performance Knowledge Bases (HPKB) initiative. The study shows that some kinds of prior knowledge help more than others, and that several factors affect how much use is made of the knowledge.