Domain knowledge is

knowledge Knowledge can be defined as awareness of facts or as practical skills, and may also refer to familiarity with objects or situations. Knowledge of facts, also called propositional knowledge, is often defined as true belief that is distinc ...

of a specific, specialized discipline or field, in contrast to

general A general officer is an Officer (armed forces), officer of highest military ranks, high rank in the army, armies, and in some nations' air forces, space forces, and marines or naval infantry. In some usages the term "general officer" refers t ...

(or domain-independent) knowledge. The term is often used in reference to a more general discipline—for example, in describing a software engineer who has general knowledge of computer programming as well as domain knowledge about developing programs for a particular industry. People with domain knowledge are often regarded as specialists or experts in their field.

Knowledge capture

software engineering Software engineering is a systematic engineering approach to software development. A software engineer is a person who applies the principles of software engineering to design, develop, maintain, test, and evaluate computer software. The term '' ...

, ''domain knowledge'' is knowledge about the environment in which the target system operates, for example,

software agent In computer science, a software agent or software AI is a computer program that acts for a user or other program in a relationship of agency, which derives from the Latin ''agere'' (to do): an agreement to act on one's behalf. Such "action on behal ...

s. Domain knowledge usually must be learned from software users in the domain (as domain specialists/experts), rather than from software developers. It may include user workflows, data pipelines, business policies, configurations and constraints and is crucial in the development of a software application. Expert's domain knowledge (frequently informal and ill-structured) is transformed in computer programs and active data, for example in a set of rules in knowledge bases, by

knowledge engineer A knowledge engineer is a professional engaged in the science of building advanced logic into computer systems in order to try to simulate human decision-making and high-level cognitive tasks. A knowledge engineer supplies some or all of the "know ...

s. Communicating between end-users and software developers is often difficult. They must find a common language to communicate in. Developing enough shared vocabulary to communicate can often take a while. The same knowledge can be included in different domain knowledge. Knowledge which may be applicable across a number of domains is called ''domain-independent'' knowledge, for example

logic Logic is the study of correct reasoning. It includes both formal and informal logic. Formal logic is the science of deductively valid inferences or of logical truths. It is a formal science investigating how conclusions follow from premises ...

s and mathematics. Operations on domain knowledge are performed by

meta-knowledge Meta-knowledge or metaknowledge is knowledge about knowledge. Some authors divide meta-knowledge into orders: * ''zero order meta-knowledge'' is knowledge whose domain is not knowledge (and hence zero order meta-knowledge is not meta-knowledge ''p ...

Literature

* Hjørland, B. & Albrechtsen, H. (1995). Toward A New Horizon in Information Science: Domain Analysis. ''Journal of the American Society for Information Science'', 1995, 46(6), p. 400–425.

Knowledge capture

Literature

See also