Formal Support for Development of Knowledge-Based Systems

This article provides an approach for developing reliable knowledge-based systems. Its main contributions are: Specification is done at an architectural level that abstracts from a specific implementation formalism. The model of expertise of CommonKADS distinguishs different types of knowledge and describes their interaction. Our architecture refines this model and adds an additional level of formalization. The formal specification and verification system KIV is used for specifying and verifying such architectures. We have chosen KIV for four reasons: (1) it provides the formal means required for specifying the dynamics of knowledge-based systems (i.e., dynamic logic), (2) it provides compositional specifications, (3) it provides an interactive theorem prover, and (4) last but not least it comes with a sophisticated tool environment developed in several realistic application projects.