Soft Systems Methodology (SSM) as a Viable Methodology for Knowledge Engineering: A Literature Review

Abstract

This paper presents a baseline perspective of knowledge engineering (KE) methodologies by taking a critical look at the methodological approaches currently used in knowledge engineering domain. A literature review bordering on; the knowledge role concept, knowledge elicitation techniques, and ontological approaches employed in knowledge engineering for the construction of knowledge-based systems (KBSs) was carried out. Journal and conference articles were sourced from multiple journals and research databases and a multi-step manual cross-checking based on carefully selected extraction and quality criteria were employed. The findings of the study show that the existing methodological approaches employed for constructing KBSs in KE is highly deficient and inefficient for solving KE problems under dynamic and uncertain environments. The paper concludes by presenting a strong argument as to why soft systems methodology is best suited for constructing knowledge base systems (KBS) in a spatially distributed, unstructured and shared domain specific context.