Describing control

Incremental development and maintenance of large systems imply that control be clearly separated from knowledge. Finding efficient control for a given class of knowledge is itself a matter of expertise, to which knowledge-based methods may and should be applied. We present here two attempts at building root systems that may later be tuned by knowledge engineers, using the semantics of each particular application. These systems are given heuristics in a declarative manner, which they use to control the application of heuristics. Eventually, some heuristics may be used to compile others (or themselves) into efficient pieces of programmed code