Dependable knowledge-based systems development and verification: what we can learn from software engineering and what we need

It is argued that knowledge engineering could benefit from incorporating methodologies for software development and verification as found in traditional software engineering. Specifically, the authors investigate if and how traditional software engineering approaches could be transported to the development and verification of knowledge-based systems (KBSs). They present a few ideas on how to use formal methods in KBS development using, e.g. algebraic specifications. The fundamental conflict between the expressive power and the provability of knowledge engineering languages is identified and discussed