Towards Understanding Cognitive Aspects of Configuration Knowledge Formalization

Knowledge about formal (semantic) interpretations of natural language domain descriptions is crucial for avoiding communication overheads between domain experts and knowledge engineers. In this paper we report preliminary results of an empirical study in which we investigated in which way natural language statements are formalized by knowledge engineers. We summarize the findings of our study and discuss aspects to be taken into account in order to avoid additional (often not needed) iterations in configuration knowledge engineering processes. This work is exploratory and intended to figure out open issues for future work.