Expert systems and hypertext are technologies which are coming together. This paper reviews the strengths and weaknesses of expert systems and hypertext. Then the complementarity of the two is both argued and illustrated. Translating expertise from documents into expert systems is difficult, but hypertext systems exploit the information in documents. Expert systems don't explain their decisions as well as some people would like, but hypertext is basically designed to provide explanations. On the other hand, people have difficulty deciding what links to follow in hypertext, but an expert system is designed to help people make decisions. When a hypertext reader is confused as to what step to follow next, an expert system might review the path taken thus far and suggest the appropriate next step. An annotated bibliography of the principal literature is provided.

Some of the issues involved in purchasing and using one of the powerful Knowledge Engineering Toolkits are examined. A case study problem is described and several products are reviewed as potential environments for implementing a solution. Experiences of using one System, ART, are described and observations are made regarded the selection, evaluation and use of such packages.

The Workshop on Formal Specification Methods for Knowledge-based Systems (KBS) took place in Amsterdam on August 8 1994 as part of the workshop program of the 11th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI'94). It was the sixth workshop in a series concerned with the development and application of formal and executable specification languages for KBSs. Starting from the first familiarization workshop at GMD in Bonn 1992, where the different research groups met for the first time, further successor workshops were held at the University of Karlsruhe, the University of Amsterdam, and again at GMD in Bonn. Additionally, at ECAI'92 in Vienna, a workshop was held to compare different specification approaches for complex multi-layered KBSs.

The Workshop on Applications of Logic Programming in Software Engineering was held at S. Margherita Ligure, Italy, on June 18 1994. This workshop was organized in conjunction with the International Conference of Logic Programming. We recognize that over the past decade, several sporadic research efforts have addressed the use of logic programming to improve the process of software development and the quality of its products. The workshop, we believed, would give an assessment on how effective logic programming has been and could be.

This paper examines the claim that machine induction can alleviate the current knowledge engineering bottleneck in expert system construction. It presents a case study of the rule induction software tool known as Expert-Ease and proposes a set of criteria which might guide the selection of appropriate domains.

This article outlines the basic corporate engineering process that leads to the commercialization of a knowledge engineering concept, or software process. The development of a commercial product and enterprise from a technology-driven research effort or idea is quite similar to the process of continual refinement and hard work demanded by the scientific method, so the fundamentals of corporate and product development should not appear foreign to academics or those involved in corporate research. Knowledge engineering and related disciplines are on the verge of significant commercial product development efforts. The process of commercialization of ideas, particularly those derived from academic and research environments may not be intuitively obvious to the KE professional. The author outlines the general process of commercializing KE products and describes the three primary functional activities required to undertake a successful technology-driven commercial enterprise—market and customer definition, the development of the product prototype and corporate infrastructure, and capitalization.

This paper is a review of certain non-monotonic logics, which I call default non-monotonic logics. These are logics which exploit failure to prove. How each logic uses this basic idea is explained, and examples given. The emphasis is on leading ideas explained through examples: technical detail is avoided. Four non-monotonic logics are discussed: Reiter's default logic, McCarthy's circumscription, McDermott's modal non-monotonic logic, and Clarks's completed database. The first two are treated in some detail. The recent Hanks-McDermott criticism of non-monotonic logic is discussed, and some conclusions drawn about the prospects for non-monotonic logic. Recommendations for further reading are given.

Logic programming is a programming paradigm with potential to contribute to software engineering. This paper is concerned with one dimension of that potential, the impact that experience with developing logic programs can have on software design. We present a logic programming perspective on programming patterns, systematic program development, design for provability, and the paradigm of meta-programming.