During the last years, a number of formal speci cation languages for knowledge-based systems have been developed. Characteristic for knowledge-based systems are a complex knowledge base and an inference engine which uses this knowledge to solve a given problem. Speci cation languages for knowledge-based systems have to cover both aspects: they have to provide means to specify a complex and large amount of knowledge and they have to provide means to specify the dynamic reasoning behaviour of a

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... owledgebased system. This paper will focus on the second aspect, which is an issue considered to be unsolved. For this purpose, we have surveyed existing approaches in related areas of research. We have taken approaches for the speci cation of information systems i.e., Language for Conceptual Modelling and Troll, approaches for the speci cation of database updates and the dynamics of logic programs Transaction Logic and Dynamic Database Logic, and the approach o f Evolving Algebras. This paper, which is a short version of a longer report, concentrates on the methodology of our comparison and on the conclusions we h a v e drawn. The actual comparison between the languages has been removed from this version because of space limitations.