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Section A
Expert Systems Technology


Part I
Expert System Development Process

Chapter 1
Methodologies for Building Knowledge Based Systems: Achievements and Prospects

Robert de Hoog


CONTENTS

1. Introduction
2. What's a Methodology?
3. Boxes-and-Arrows Approaches
4. Focused Approaches
5. Full-Fledged Methodologies
6. Prospects
References

1. INTRODUCTION

Since knowledge-based systems (KBSs) became a commercially viable solution to real-life problems in the beginning of the 1980s, increasing attention is paid to ways to develop them in a systematic fashion, just as ordinary information systems. Just as the latter, early KBSs suffered from serious delays in delivering, disappointing functionality, and appreciable problems in maintenance. The code-and-fix approach, so typical for research laboratories from which they evolved, simply could not stand up to the harsh reality of operational environments and intransigent users. Not surprisingly, the first guidelines for developing KBSs appeared in the middle 1980s and the heyday's of tailored methodologies fell somewhere in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The goal of this chapter is to give a bird's-eye overview of this development1. It should be stressed from the beginning, however, that there is no claim to completeness. The blooming of methodologies and methods (this distinction will be discussed in Section 1.2) in the period under study precludes this. Additionally, it will be argued that there are only a few methodologies as they are going to be defined in the next section. This rules out the need for a comprehensive overview of methodologies that do not qualify as such in my definition. In Sections 3 and 4, some of these will be mentioned briefly, but the selection is rather arbitrary, based on my necessarily limited insight in the literature. Section 5 devotes more attention to full-fledged methodologies as they are defined in Section 2. In Section 6, some prospects for KBS-specific methodologies in the future are sketched.


1Earlier examples of reviews comparable to this one are Inder and Filby (1991), Hilal and Soltan (1991), and Hilal and Soltan (1993).

This chapter could have been stuffed with tens or even hundreds of references to books, papers in journals, and conference proceedings that mention something about methodology. This author has chosen not to do so. First, it would make the chapter almost unreadable. Second, what matters most, to the author at least, are not the details but the general line of development from which we can derive insights for the future. Third, most references would only have a curiosity value, because of all the proposals, methods, techniques, methodologies, and so forth, only a few have made some impact and even fewer survive in daily use.


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