Survey of Expert System Development Tools

摘要

A need exists, especially for first-time developers, to learn the types of tools which exist to aid the development of expert systems. Knowledge of these tools provides the option to acquire an existing tool which best meets the need, or build a tool. If already developed software can be used, it usually is more cost-effective to buy than to create such software from scratch. Existing Expert System Development (ESD) tools were surveyed covering the period from 1984 to early 1987. Included in the survey were product announcements, reviews of existing tools, reports of tool-use in research and applied settings, information obtained from a workshop on ESD tools, and discussions with tool users. A list of important ESD tool features was developed from the literature on expert systems. It included the following general features: Knowledge Representation, Control and Interference, Certainty Management, Hypothesis Handling, Knowledge Acquisition, User Interface, and External Access. Within these general features, subfeatures, also were listed and defined. Additional information also was given regarding availability, cost, vendor support and address, system requirements, and typical applications if they were known. Keywords: Knowledge representation, System requirements, Decision aiding. (kr)