Over the past few years, we switched to other venues with an occasional post here. It is time to get back to this mode in order to report technical findings. Earlier this year, we did a brief summary.
While we work the logistics of our new presentation package, this post has a few pointers that relate to the theme and how it developed. This list will grow as part of a living bibligraphy that is devoted to rediscovering lost knowledge and information.
- This blog started with a post on 24 Jul 2007 with this question: Truth, can it be engineered? In that same post, see Remarks 01/01/2011. On a review four years later, I recalled finding during a browse session on the internet that someone had use the label; so I decided to get more public with the work that I was doing.
- David Jakstis coined the term after reading my white paper: Boeing Center for Computational Truth Maintenance. It had been submitted in 2000 as a proposal to the Chairman Innovation Inititiative of Boeing. He read the paper and said that it sounded like "truth engineering". We had discussed it under the auspices of modeling castings and forgings with MSJO assistance. David was a metals expert and dealt with specialized parts and alloys.
- Truth engineering came out of the "knowledge era". See this article for an overview. My KBE remarks are at the bottom: What the World Lost When We Abandoned Expert System Technologies By: Larry Walker, August 2026.
- Overall scheme of things: Truth engineering is not just about computational systems, it deals with the human world as well. One truism is the notion that people are an integral part of a properly configured computer system. DARPA has not shown otherwise.
- Mentioning them, one motivation for truth engineering came from Doyle's work at MIT with regard to truth maintenance which as the ARPA era. We will describe the connection later. For now, consider this copy at MIT: Truth Maintenance Systems for Problem Solving (PDF available - 133 pages). GenAI/LLM would have had a completely different look had the "knowledge" from the knowledge era been honed for a couple of decades.
- Continuation of the documentation of the basics: IIUG-MSJO.
- ...
This post will be in an edit mode for a bit. It will be referenced from the LinkedIn work on KBE & MBSE which is an ongoing effort to document pieces of "knowledge era" work. Needless to say, KBE split asunder but lives in lots of offspring, such as multi-physics. MBSE came out of the knowledge era; we were there and can describe the early modeling work.
Remarks: Modified: 08/30/2026
08/30/2026 --
