Enabling Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) to formulate knowledge without the intervention of Knowledge Engineers (KEs) requires providing SMEs with methods and tools that abstract the underlying knowledge representation and allow them to focus on modeling activities. Bridging the gap between SME-authored models and their representation is challenging, especially in the case of complex knowledge types like processes, where aspects like frame management, data, and control flow need to be addressed. In this paper, we describe how SME-authored process models can be provided with an operational semantics and grounded in a knowledge representation language like F-logic to support process-related reasoning. The main results of this work include a formalism for process representation and a mechanism for automatically translating process diagrams into executable code following such formalism. From all the process models authored by SMEs during evaluation 82 percent were well formed, all of which executed correctly. Additionally, the two optimizations applied to the code generation mechanism produced a performance improvement at reasoning time of 25 and 30 percent with respect to the base case, respectively.

In this paper we present an approach towards knowledgeacquisition of process knowledge for the natural sciences.The work has been conducted within Project Halo, whichis creating advanced knowledge authoring and questionanswering systems for the natural sciences. An analysis of AP®-level questions for Biology, Chemistry and Physicsuncovered that process knowledge is the single most frequenttype of knowledge required. Thus, we developedmeans to acquire process knowledge, to formally representit, and to reason about it in order to answer novel questionsabout the domains.All these tasks are supported by an abstract process metamodel.It provides the terminology for user-tailored processdiagrams, which are automatically translated into executableFLogic code. The meta-model and the code generationare based on the notion of Problem Solving Methods(PSM) which represent an abstract formalization of thereasoning strategies needed for processes.