Knowledge Engineering is the ​​research area focusing on the design of knowledge-based systems (KBS) according to their use by human agents.

This field is at the crossroad with several other research areas as Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KRR) working on formal languages for representing knowledge and reasoning on it, Natural Language Processing (NLP) developping methods to analyze natural language; Terminological research focused on the semantics of words and their relationships, Human-Machine Interaction studying interactions between a system and its user, and the field of information retrieval that develops efficient methods for extracting relevant information from unstructured data.