A software development environment to generate external interfaces for microcomputer-based expert systems

The authors address the problem faced by expert system developers who use microcomputer-based expert system shells requiring external interfaces to perform functions, such as communication, mathematical operations and file handling, that are not provided by the shells. A software development environment, the Data Resource Knowledge Acquisition and Retrieval Tool (DRKART), provides editing support, both for rules comprising an expert system's knowledge base and procedural code required for its external interface. It has a built-in communications subsystem and facilities for recording an expert's efforts in accessing and retrieving information from external data sources. The recorded efforts are stored as C functions in DRKART's relational database along with rule constructs required to call them from the knowledge base. These features enable DRKART to provide a simple but novel methodology for constructing microcomputer-based expert systems