Basic Concepts of Expert System Shells and an Efficient Model for Knowledge Acquisition

Emmanuel C. Ogu | Adekunle ^[18] | Y.A. ^[3]

Abstract: An Expert System is an intelligent computer program that employs knowledge and inference procedures to solve problems that are considered difficult enough to require significant human expertise for their solutions [12]. Since the implementation of the first expert systems (the DENDRAL, MYCIN, Dipmeter Advisor, XCON, to mention but a few. ) in the early 1970s, and the successes that followed, coupled with the advantages that humankind benefited from these early expert systems and their successors; one would expect that four decades later, there would have been a boom in the use of expert systems to perform more specialized tasks in different specific domains and application areas. The reasons for this could stem, asides other non-intrinsically-technical factors (such as financial implication, cultural and religious beliefs and restrictions surrounding the implementation of Expert Systems especially in third-world African Countries), either from a lack of adequate knowledge of the existence of Expert System Shells and/or the facilities, utilities and tools they provide that make the development of new expert systems sort of a �pretty easy endeavour�. This paper lays emphasis on the basic concept of Expert System Shells with the aim of highlighting their basic usage and creating some form of in-depth generic expos� into some of the component facilities and utilities they provide; proposing a more efficient model for Knowledge Acquisition � which would make the Knowledge Acquisition Bottleneck of developing Expert Systems a thing of no more concern � as well as highlight the functions performed by Expert System Shells, in a bid to emphasize their reusability across different other specific application areas either within or outside the same domain.

Keywords: Knowledge-Based Expert Systems, Expert Domain Areas, Domain Application Areas, Symbolic Information and Reasoning, Knowledge Acquisition

Edition: Volume 2 Issue 4, April 2013,

Pages: 554 - 559