The role of assumptions in knowledge engineering

Problem-solving methods are means to describe the inference process of knowledge-based systems. During the last years, a number of these problemsolving methods have been identified that can be reused for building new systems. However, problem-solving methods require specific types of domain knowledge and introduce specific restrictions on the tasks that can be solved by them. These requirements and restrictions are assumptions that play a key role in reusing problem-solving methods, in acquiring domain knowledge, and in defining the problem that can be tackled by the knowledge-based systems. In the paper, we discuss the different roles, assumptions play in the development process of knowledge-based systems and provide a survey of assumptions used by diagnostic problem solving. We show how such assumptions introduce target and bias for goal-driven machine learning and knowledge discovery techniques.