VERITAS - An Application for Knowledge Verification

Knowledge Management is one of the most important goals of any organization. Therefore, several automatic tools are used for that purpose, e.g. Knowledge Based Systems (KBS), Experts Systems, Data Mining Applications and Computer Aided Decision Systems. The Validation and Verification (V&V) process is fundamental in order to ensure the quality of used knowledge. The usage of Automatic Verification tools can be a reliable, inexpensive and reusable way to overcome the constant growth of the Knowledge Bases, the shortening of development times and the costs of Validation, specially field tests. This paper addresses the Verification of Knowledge Based Systems, focussing on VERITAS, a verification tool initially developed to verify a KBS used to assist operators of Portuguese Transmission Control Centers in incident analysis and power restoration. VERITAS performs knowledge base structural analysis allowing the detection of knowledge anomalies.