Project Structure and Development Methodology Toward The IT Revolution ― Lesson from Practice―

摘要

In the face of the Information Technology (IT) revolution, knowledge-based systems are going to play an important role in the advancement of information services. However, the development and maintenance of a knowledge-based system generally take much time and require intensive labor. It is not easy for a small research project to achieve a great degree of success. We have been introducing a new project structure and a new development methodology based on the experiences with developments of practical knowledge-based systems since about 7 years before. The fundamental idea is to allow domain models, modeling techniques, software tools, and whatever else possible to be shared by making all possible effort to generalize them. This concept is relevant to the research and development methodologies of general information systems which support the IT revolution. This paper describes the project structure and the development methodology that we have adopted. The concept of Information-Driven Systems is also introduced. It is a natural generalization of this approach regarding overall research on information systems.