Practical treatment of uncertainties appearing in acquisition of knowledge for knowledge based systems in structural engineering

Uncertainties appearing in, or related to, knowledge acquisition have appeared as one of major problems in development of knowledge-based systems (KBS) applied in the field of structural engineering at the author´s institution. General theoretical concepts have often to be modified and/or combined with the ad hoc developed solutions in order to solve these problems. This is proved by the results of an inquiry involving over 40 engineers, who expressed their understanding of linguistic descriptors of engineering terms and uncertainty estimators used in KBSs