Validation of knowledge-based systems: Current trends and issues

Assuring the reliability of knowledge-based systems has become an important issue in the development of the knowledge engineering discipline. There has been a workshop devoted to these topics at most of the major AI conferences (IJCAI, AAAI, and ECAI) for the last five years, and the 1994 European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI-94) in Amsterdam was no exception. The focus of the meeting was on validation techniques for KBS, where validation is defined as the process of determining if a KBS meets its users' requirements; implicitly, validation includes verification, which is the process of determining if a KBS has been constructed to comply with certain formallyspecified properties, such as consistency and irredundancy.