Knowledge has come to be recognized and handled as a valuable entity in itself.  Surveys consistently
         show that top executives consider knowledge to be the single most important factor in organizational
         success. In this knowledge-driven society, knowledge systems have their place as an important
         mainstream technology. That is why there is a strong need to convert the art and craft of knowledge
         engineering into a real scientific discipline.

         CommonKADS is the leading methodology to support structured knowledge engineering. It has been
         gradually developed and has been validated by many companies and universities in the context of the
         European ESPRIT IT Programme. It now is the European de facto standard for knowledge analysis
         and knowledge-intensive system development, and it has been adopted as a whole or has been partly
         incorporated in existing methods by many major companies in Europe, as well as in the US and
         Japan.

         CommonKADS enables to spot the opportunities and bottlenecks in how organizations develop,
         distribute and apply their knowledge resources, and so gives tools for corporate knowledge
         management. CommonKADS also provides the methods to perform a detailed analysis of
         knowledge-intensive tasks and processes. Finally, CommonKADS supports the development of
         knowledge systems that support selected parts of the business process.
 
 

   Who can use CommonKADS?
 
 

              For software engineers who are in the business of building knowledge-intensive IT systems
              that need to satisfy the organization needs of the customer, CommonKADS offers a de facto
              standard for system development that ensures a high-quality solution based on reusable
              components and supported through practical guidelines and tools.

              For knowledge managers CommonKADS offers methods to create coarse-grained
              descriptions of knowledge-intensive tasks within the overall business process  as well as
              techniques for detailed knowledge analysis, knowledge development and knowledge storage.
 

   What is so different about CommonKADS?
 
 

         Unlike other knowledge engineering approaches, CommonKADS provides a clear link to modern
         object-oriented development and uses notations compatible with UML. The CommonKADS product
         has been developed over some 15 years and is now being used in wide variety of application projects
         and is the in-house standard of a growing number of companies.

         After many years of effort, CommonKADS is now entering the mainstream market:
         "Most O-O methods are immature. Although current efforts toward standardization of methods
         and techniques will prove valuable, techniques such as requirements gathering use-cases are
         likely to give way to more powerful approaches such as those used for years in knowledge
         engineering (i.e. CommonKADS (KADS-II) ) and ontologies will replace data dictionaries." (P.
         Fingar, J. Clarke & J. Stikeleather, The Business of Distributed Object Computing, Object Magazine,
         April 1997).
 

   CommonKADS and O-O
 

         CommonKADS uses UML notations wherever possible, in particular class diagrams, activity
         diagrams and state diagrams. An appendix of the textbook explains how this feature i detail.
         The knowledge-modelling framework is similar in spirit to modern object-oriented component
         frameworks. The templates are what one could call "patterns of knowledge-intensive tasks" in O-O
         jargon.