Rapid prototyping based on common substrate of knowledge

The authors describe the implementation of a specialized problem solver within the FAME system developed by J. Kastnec et al. (1986) and C. Apte et al., (1989). FAME is a knowledge-based system which provides financial marketing expertise. The authors present a very brief overview of the FAME system, with an emphasis on the general architecture of its knowledge bases and the philosophy underlying it. They then describe the implementation of a marketing incentives support service for FAME. This description illustrates the ease with which a fairly complex problem solver was readily implementable due to the availability of a common substrate of knowledge, and how the same substrate provided a mechanism for seamless sharing and communication between the newly added problem solver and other problem solvers that have already been implemented using FAME's knowledge bases. The authors demonstrate some of the advantages of representing knowledge in an object centered style for developing a system with multiple problem solvers.<
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