The use of knowledge-based systems has been limited to an area of very speci"c
applications where special methodologies and tools are used (di!erent from the techniques
applied for software engineering) oriented to model, according to di!erent
conventions of knowledge representation, the expertise in several commercially relevant
"elds. The software engineering "eld has been mainly focused in information systems
development improving the reliability and e$ciency of data services. However, the
current users of these services are increasingly interested in deeper functions integrated in
to the information systems supported by the knowledge related to the data conceptual
domains.
The relationship between both approaches has been produced only in the area of
knowledge-based support to software engineering tasks. Lowry and Duran (1989)