Knowledge-Based Systems. Methods for Developing and Evaluating Expert Systems: An Environment for Building and Testing Advice-Giving Systems in Medicine

摘要

A three-phase environment has been developed to facilitate the construction, maintenance, and testing of practical expert advice systems. 1) A standard word processor is used by the knowledge engineer and domain expert to create and refine the system's knowledge base (KB). 2) A set of software tools written in LISP incorporate knowledge about the domain to assist in refining and maintaining the knowledge base. 3) A C language shell assembles the KB, and is linked to a domain-specific user interface also written in C. This design allows the system developers to refine and massage the knowledge base conveniently, e. g., on a desktop PC. It allows knowledge verfication tools to be written and refined in LISP which is well-suited for knowledge manipulation logic. At the same time, the resulting executable program runs in C and is therefore computationally efficient and well suited for use as an operational system. The paper uses LIPID-ADVISOR, which gives advice concerning lipid and cholesterol management, as an example to illustrate these various points.