A Comprehensive Evaluation of Expert System Tools

Current trends in knowledge-based computing have produced a large number of expert system building tools. This onslaught of high-tech software stems from the discovery that expert systems can be effectively applied to a variety of industrial and military problem domains. A variety of vendors provide expert system prototyping and development tools which greatly accelerate the construction of intelligent software. Today's expert system tool generally provides the user with a friendly interface, an efficient inference engine, and formalisms that simplify the creation of a domain knowledge base. This paper presents a formalism for expert system tool evaluation and critiques an exhaustive variety of commercially available tools.