WP005: Concurrent Knowledge Systems Engineering - Kunz, John (CIFE Publications, 1989)
To build a knowledge system, it is necessary to specify the purposes in building the system, the domain description, reasoning and decision criteria, user and system interfaces, and a set of case examples to use in testing. These issues are offered as the major issues in building knowledge systems. This paper argues that they should be developed concurrently so that each is understood at an equal level of maturity at each stage of the knowledge systems development process. The "maximum anxiety heuristic" is an organizing principle to direct the attention of developers to these issues: the development process should focus on one of these issues until some other appears to be less well defined, or until some other causes greater anxiety. This opportunistic development activity can be used throughout the software development process, from concept definition through maintenance. The benefit of using this heuristic is that all of the basic knowledge engineering issues will be addressed explicitly, and addressing one helps to clarify understanding of the others.
Kunz, John. (1989). WP005: Concurrent Knowledge Systems Engineering. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at: http://purl.stanford.edu/sk877fn6909
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Keywords: technical report; CIFE; Center for Integrated Facility Engineering; Stanford University; Knowledge-Based Systems; Maximum Anxiety Heuristic