The Handbook of Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering is the first comprehensive handbook covering these two important areas that have become interwoven in recent years. Many international experts contribute to this Hand book. Each article is written in a way that a practitioner of software engineering and knowledge engineering can easily understand and obtain useful information. Each article covers one topic and can be read independently of other articles, pro viding both a general survey of the topic and an in-depth exposition of the state of the art. Practitioners will find this Handbook useful when looking for solutions to practical problems in software engineering and knowledge engineering. Researchers in turn can use the Handbook to quickly obtain background information, current trends and the most important references on a certain topic.

The Handbook consists of three volumes. Volume One covers the basic principles and applications of software engineering and knowledge engineering. Volume Two expands the coverage of basic principles and also contains many articles that specif ically addresses visual and multimedia software engineering, and emerging topics in software engineering and knowledge engineering such as software patterns, data mining for software knowledge, etc. Volume Three provides a comprehensive treat ment. of recent new advances and also completes the coverage of basic principles such as Petri nets. The three volumes form a complete set but can be used separately for different purposes.