Research and Development in Expert Systems IX: Documents as expert systems

This paper is written in a document production tool that appears to a user as a word processor but also acts as an expert system shell with frame and rule representations supporting deductive inference. The electronic version of the document is active, providing typographic text and page layout facilities, versioning, hypermedia sound and movies, hypertext links, and knowledge structures represented in a visual language. It can be read as a hypermedia document and also interrogated as a knowledgebased system for problem-solving. The paper version of the document, which you are now reading, is produced by printing the electronic version. It loses its active functionality but continues to act as a record of the knowledge in the document. The overall technology has been developed as an alternative approach to the dissemination of knowledge bases. It also provides a different interface to knowledge-based systems that emulates document interfaces with which many users are already familiar.