Building Expert Systems

The vocabulary used with expert systems; Why expert systems?; What is an expert system?; Knowledge-base management and system evolution; Business opportunities offered by expert systems; Linking expert systems to toher software; The construction of expert systems; Verifying suitability of tasks for expert system support; Building expert systems; The expert system life cycle; Expert system construction requirements; Tools for building expert systems; Languages; Expert system shells; Commercial expert system shells; Hardware for expert systems; Construction strategies; development of a personal computer expert system; How ro select the right tools; The future of expert system technology; Index.

Computer science textbook, computer programming, knowledge processing (data processing) - evaluation and design of expert systems. Bibliography, glossary, illustrations.

Not long ago" Dennis Merritt wrote one of the best books that I know of about implementing expert systems in Prolog, and I was very glad he published it in our series. The only problem is there are still some unfortunate people around who do not know Prolog and are not sufficiently prepared either to read Merritt's book, or to use this extremely productive language, be it for knowledge-based work or even for everyday programming. Possibly this last statement may surprise you if you were under the impression that Prolog was an "artificial intelligence language" with very limited application potential. Please believe this editor's statement that quite the opposite is true: for at least four years, I have been using Prolog for every programming task in which I am given the option of choosing the language. Therefore, I 'am indeed happy that Dennis Merritt has written another good book on my language of choice, and that it meets the high standard he set with his prior book, Building Expert Systems in Prolog. All that remains for me to do is to wish you success and enjoyment when taking off on your Adventure in Prolog.

Practical Experience in Building Expert Systems brings together detailed descriptions of completed expert systems written from a critical viewpoint. Contributors discuss projects from a ``warts-and-all'' perspective, and a full complement of partial or complete failures are described, as well as a number successes. The aim is to provide the potential expert systems developer with hard information based on actual experience from a variety of countries and a wide range of applications areas, and to pass on these lessons to developers of future expert systems.

When I compare the books on expert systems in my library with the production expert systems I know of, I note that there are few good books on building expert systems in Prolog. Of course, the set of actual production systems is a little small for a valid statistical sample, at least at the time and place of this writing - here in Gennany, and in the first days of 1989. But there are at least some systems I have seen running in real life commercial and industrial environments, and not only at trade shows. I can observe the most impressive one in my immediate neighborhood. It is installed in the Telephone Shop of the Gennan Federal PTT near the Munich National Theater, and helps configure telephone systems and small PBXs for mostly private customers. It has a neat, graphical interface, and constructs and prices an individual telephone installation interactively before the very eyes of the customer. The hidden features of the system are even more impressive. It is part of an expert system network with a distributed knowledge base that will grow to about 150 installations in every Telephone Shop throughout Gennany. Each of them can be updated individually overnight via Teletex to present special offers or to adapt the selection process to the hardware supplies currently available at the local ware houses.