Engineering large knowledge-based systems

摘要

Designers of knowledge-based systems seem to have the perception that realistic systems can be built by individual programmers. This approach no longer works for very large systems. Building large systems is a collaborative effort of people who each take responsibility for only part of the work. Software engineering has focused on the complications arising from system size and organizing people. This paper describes how software engineering might help in recognizing the problems of building large knowledge-based systems and in offering some methods tools and techniques to solve these problems. The paper ends with making the point that benefits may also flow in the other direction, from Artificial Intelligence to software engineering, resulting in a general improvement of these tools, methods and techniques.