WebShell: The development of web based expert systems

It is rare to find knowledge based appearing on the World Wide Web. This is, in part, due to difficulties associated with porting expert system shell environments to the world wide web. For instance, many real world applications require shell environments that do more than make mere inferences with rules. However, integrating rule based reasoning with other approaches exacerbate the difficulties in placing hybrid, ystems on the World Wide Web. In this paper, we present a knowledge based system shell, WebShell that enables knowledge based systems to be developed and executed on the World Wide Web. WebShell models knowledge using two distinct techniques; decision trees for procedural type tasks and argument trees for tasks that are more complex, ambiguous or uncertain. Rather than translate decision tree knowledge into rules, we map the decision trees into sets we call sequenced transition networks. These sets can readily be stored in a relational database format in a way that simplifies the inference engine design. The inference engines for both the argument tree and the decision tree models execute on the server side and have been implemented using a very small (30K) PHP program.