Knowledge Engineering: Principles and methods

This paper gives an overview of the development of the field of Knowledge Engineering over the last 15 years. We discuss the paradigm shift from a transfer view to a modeling view and describe two approaches which considerably shaped research in Knowledge Engineering: Role-limiting Methods and Generic Tasks. To illustrate various concepts and methods which evolved in recent years we describe three modeling frameworks: CommonKADS, MIKE and PROTÉGÉ-II. This description is supplemented by discussing some important methodological developments in more detail: specification languages for knowledge-based systems, problem-solving methods and ontologies. We conclude by outlining the relationship of Knowledge Engineering to Software Engineering, Information Integration and Knowledge Management.Richard Benjamins was partially supported by the Netherlands Computer Science Research Foundation with financial support from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), and by the European Commission through a Marie Curie Research Grant (TMR).Peer Reviewe