General systems: A basis for knowledge engineering

General systems formalizations of expert knowledge play a foundational role in the process of knowledge engineering of intelligent systems. Canonical definitions of systems (knowledge structures) which have been arrived at by a crossdisciplinary inductive modeling process are shown to be the basis for the modeling of certain generic categories of expert reasoning processes which are of current interest in knowledge engineering. The methodology for transforming the representation of knowledge expressed in general systems formalizations to the representation of that knowledge in expert systems is also developed. In particular, transformations from general systems formalizations into frames are presented.