Agile knowledge engineering for mission critical software requirements

This chapter explains how a mission critical Knowledge-Based System (KBS) has been designed and implemented within a real case study of a governamental organization. Moreover, the KBS has been developed using a novel agile software development methodology. Due to fast changing operational scenarios and volatile requirements, traditional procedural development methodologies perform poorly. Thus, an Agile-like methodology has been exploited, called iAgile. The KBS is based on an ontology used to merge different mental models of users and developers. Moreover, the ontology of the system is useful for interoperability and knowledge representation. Mission critical functionalities have been developed in 5-week cycles, along with the ontology. So, the KBS serves for three main activities: (i) requirement disambiguation, (ii) interoperability with other legacy systems, and (iii) information retrieval and display of different informative sources.