The use of description logics in KBSE systems

The increasing size and complexity of many software systems demand a greater emphasis on capturing and maintaining knowledge at many different levels within the software development process. The knowledge-based software engineering (KBSE) research paradigm is concerned with systems that use formally represented knowledge, with associated inference procedures, to support the various subactivities of software development. As they grow in scale, KBSE systems must balance expressivity and inferential power with the real demands of knowledge base construction, maintenance, performance and comprehensibility. Description logics (DL's) possess several features - a terminological orientation, a formal semantics and efficient reasoning procedures - which offer an effective tradeoff of these factors. We discuss three KBSE systems in which DL's capture some of the requisite knowledge needed to support design, coding and testing activities. We close with a discussion of the benefits of DL's and ways to address some of their limitations.<>