Data and Knowledge Intensive Systems

Abstract

Knowledge plays a central role in computer problem-solving. In traditional programming, however, domain knowledge is not explicit in the computer code and in the relevant data, and is used by software designers and programmers in a strictly task-dependent way. During the last thirty years there has been a remarkable progress in the attitude of understanding the role of knowledge in problem-solving. Knowledge becomes progressively more explicit in computer code and data and more independent of the tasks for which it is used. The concept of knowledge-based programming advocates a new perspective on computer problem-solving, which is grounded on the principle of providing an explicit task-independent representation in a software system of a large amount of domain knowledge, and of exploiting such knowledge for problem-solving issues through general-purpose programs.