Description: All expert or intelligent systems depend on a knowledge base. Two well-known examples of this relationship are programmed securities trading and the defeat of chess champion Kasparov by IBM's Big Blue. In the former case, an adequate knowledge base but a poor expert system that made decisions on as little as one piece of information led to the 1987 stock market crash. For the latter, IBM had to assemble a large knowledge base of chess moves and results before creating an expert system to implement appropriate moves under particular conditions. Knowledge engineering is an explosively growing area with broad applications to industrial, manufacturing, financial, biomedical, and other large, interlinked database systems.

Relevant technologies are growing rapidly, including DVD storage devices, the 1000-MHz Flagstaff microprocessor by Intel, and plans for new satellite systems. The timing of these volumes coincides with just the right state of maturity in knowledge engineering.

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