Developing a Software Engineering Methodology for Knowledge-Based Systems.

Current expert systems are typically difficult to change once these are built. This report describes a design methodology intended to make a knowledge-based system easier to change, particularly by people other than its original developer. The basic approach for solving this problem is to divide the information in a knowledge base and attempt to reduce the amount of information that each single knowledge engineer must understand before he can make a change to the knowledge base. The method thus divides the domain knowledge in an expert system into groups and then attempts to limit carefully and specify formally the flow of information between these groups to localize the effects of typical changes within the groups. Keywords Rule based systems Programming languages Algorithms Partitioning Production systems.