Software engineering and knowledge engineering: From competition to cooperation

The development of engineering systems is usually based upon the deployment of classical software engineering (SE) lifecycle (LC) models. In the case of Knowledge integration in Knowledge Based Systems, specific knowledge Management cycle, often called knowledge engineering (KE) lifecycle, is adopted. The objective of this paper is to discuss the relations between the software engineering lifecycle and the knowledge engineering lifecycle. Assuming that deployment of SE deals with the identification of the application components, KE tends to define the content of these components. However, these two cycles are deployed separately. The consequence is a lost of expertise in the final software solution. The goals of our study are to minimize this expertise loss by identifying the correspondence between the activities of the two cycles and to propose a common lifecycle for both SE and KE within the same system development project.