were adapted by CAD when most corporate information technology shops were dominated by relational databases and procedural programming. As with expert systems, KBE suffered a downturn during the AI Winter. Also, as with expert systems and artificial intelligence technology in general, there was renewed interest with the Internet. In the case of KBE, the interest was perhaps strongest in the business-to-business type of electronic commerce and technologies that facilitate the definition of industry standard vocabularies and ontologies for manufactured products. The semantic web is the vision of Tim Berners Lee for the next generation of the Internet. This will be a knowledge-based Internet built on ontologies, objects, and frame technologies that were also enabling technologies for KBE. Important technologies for the semantic web are XML, RDF, and OWL. The semantic web has excellent potential for KBE, and KBE ontologies and projects are a strong area for current research. KBE and product lifecycle management Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) is the management of the manufacturing process of any industry that produces goods. It can span the full product lifecycle from idea generation to implementation, delivery, and disposal. KBE at this level will deal with product issues of a more generic nature than it will with CAx. A natural area of emphasis is on the production process; however, lifecycle management can cover many more issues such as business planning, marketing, etc. An advantage of using KBE is getting the automated reasoning and knowledge management services of a knowledge-based environment integrated with the many diverse but related needs of lifecycle management. KBE supports the decision processes involved with configuration, trades, control, management, and a number of other areas, such as optimization. KBE and CAx CAx refers to the domain of computer-aided tools for analysis and design. CAx spans multiple domains. Examples are computer-aided design of manufactured parts, software, the architecture of buildings, etc. Although each specific domain of CAx will have very different kinds of problems and artifacts, they all share common issues as well such as having to manage collaboration of sophisticated knowledge workers, design and re-use of complex artifacts, etc. Essentially KBE extends, builds on, and integrates with the CAx domain typically referred to as Computer Aided Design (CAD). In this sense KBE is analogous to Knowledge-Based Software Engineering, which extended the domain of Computer Aided Software Engineering with knowledge-based tools and technology. What KBSE was to software and CASE, KBE is