Thomas Hemmann : On the Reuse of Software Engineering Reuse Approaches and Techniques in Knowledge Engineering

We survey the past and presence of a recently emerging computer science research subdiscipline: software engineering’s research on reuse. The aim of this paper is to learn from software engineers’ experiences with reusing software, try to avoid their errors, and to adapt their know-how according to the special needs of knowledge engineering. So the emphasis lies both in concrete approaches and techniques as well as in the abstraction of their methodologies respectively the ideas behind them. The justification for our investigation is that, since the software engineering discipline is older than the knowledge engineering discipline, it seems promising to check its results on their applicability in knowledge engineering. Of course, not all findings and outcomes can be simply transferred due to some inherent differences between the respective areas of discourse. On the other hand there is much overlap between the fields. We therefore identify some more general experiences as well as some concrete approaches and techniques which probably will be reusable in the knowledge engineering field.