Programming Languages and Expert System Tools

Abstract

The central problem (“bottleneck”) in the development of expert systems is finding a way of transferring a great deal of detailed knowledge to the program. The most important primary sources of knowledge are experts and textbooks. However, the knowledge in the minds of the experts is not easily accessible, because experts usually have little time or motivation to pass it on and mostly have great difficulties in doing so. In many fields of application there are no good textbooks, and even if they are available they usually require background knowledge and/or practical experience to be understood, so that textbook knowledge alone is seldom sufficient for the development of successful expert systems. The situation is made even worse by the fact that the knowledge often changes rapidly.