Eighth Workshop on the Val - idation and Verification of Knowledge - Based Systems

search encompasses work in changing the development cycle of the KBS to make the product and process easier to verify and validate. In “Specification Refinement of Object-Oriented KBSs,” A. Vermesan (Foundation for Research in Economics and Business Administration, Norway) looks at KBSs that perform reasoning in a framework of structured objects. Her approach is to verify that as details are added to the specification of a KBS, these additions are consistent with the initial abstract specification. Thus, Vermesan’s approach is to verify a hybrid KBS as part of the formal development process. The paper describes a model of object-oriented KBSs using algebraic specifications that focus on design. P. Chander, R. Shinghal, and T. Radhakrishnan (Concordia University, Canada) also approach verification and validation as an integral part of the KBS life cycle in “GoalSupported Knowledge Base Restructuring for Verification of Rule Bases.” In this paper, Chander and his colleagues incorporate the knowledgeacquisition process into the verification and validation process by specifying the expert information as a goal-to-goal progression of the system. Looking at a more traditional rule base system, they portray the progression in a graph. Using the goal specifications, they can easily extract paths from the graph to perform a variety of evaluations on the system progression. Although traditional rule-based systems have been studied heavily in terms of verification and validation, hybrid KBSs made up of multiple programming paradigms are a topic of research that has only recently been investigated. In “Critical Exam■ The Workshop on the Validation and Verification of Knowledge-Based Systems gathers researchers from government, industry, and academia to present the most recent information about this important development aspect of knowledge-based systems (KBSs). The 1995 workshop focused on nontraditional KBSs that are developed using more than just the simple rule-based paradigm. This new focus showed how researchers are adjusting to the shift in KBS technology from stand-alone rulebased expert systems to embedded systems that use object-oriented technology, uncertainty, and nonmonotonic reasoning.