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