The development of an expert system shell

Abstract

Various issues must be considered when designing an expert system. These issues include the way in which the system represents knowledge about a domain of expertise, how it uses this knowledge to reason about various problems in that domain, the way in which it provides explanations justifying its reasoning and how it interacts with the user. This thesis discusses these and other issues related to the design of expert systems. The thesis also attempts to compare and evaluate the ease with which different programming languages lend themselves towards the implementation of expert systems. Three systems, written in LISP, Pascal and Prolog, were developed to evaluate these design and programming languages issues. Each system was an improvement over its predecessor.