Situation and Perspective of Knowledge Engineering

Knowledge Engineering was in the past primarily concerned with building and developing knowledge-based systems, an objective which puts Knowledge Engineering in a niche of the world-wide research efforts at best. This has changed dramatically: Knowledge Engineering is now a key technology in the upcoming knowledge society. Companies are recognizing knowledge as their key assets, which have to be exploited and protected in a fast changing, global and competitive economy. This situation has led to the application of Knowledge Engineering techniques in Knowledge Management. The demand for more efficient (business to) business processes requires the interconnection and interoperation of different information systems. But information access and integration is not an algorithmic task that is easy to solve: much knowledge is required to resolve the semantic differences of data residing in two information systems. Thus Knowledge Engineering has become a major technique for information integration. And, last but not least the fast growing World Wide Web generates an ever-increasing demand for more efficient knowledge exploitation and creation techniques. Here again Knowledge Engineering technologies may become the key technology for solving the problem. In this paper we discuss these recent developments and describe our view of the future.