Knowledge engineering in volcanology: Practical claims and general approach

Knowledge engineering, being a branch of artificial intelligence, offers a variety of methods for elicitation and structuring of knowledge in a given domain. Only a few of them (ontologies and semantic nets, event/probability trees, Bayesian belief networks and event bushes) are known to volcanologists. Meanwhile, the tasks faced by volcanology and the solutions found so far favor a much wider application of knowledge engineering, especially tools for handling dynamic knowledge. This raises some fundamental logical and mathematical problems and requires an organizational effort, but may strongly improve panel discussions, enhance decision support, optimize physical modeling and support scientific collaboration.