Enhanced Maintenance and Explanation of Expert Systems Through Explicit Models of Their Development

Principled development techniques could greatly enhance the understandability of expert systems for both users and system developers. Current systems have limited explanatory capabilities and present maintenance problems because of a failure to explicitly represent the knowledge and reasoning that went into their design. This paper describes a paradigm for constructing expert systems which attempts to identify that tacit knowledge, provide means for capturing it in the knowledge bases of expert systems, and, apply it towards more perspicuous machine-generated explanations and more consistent and maintainable system organization.