Building Web-based knowledge clusters

Today the WWW as an easy to use environment for all kinds of applications and is widely accepted. Knowledge based systems profit in many ways from this new technology. Using an Internet browser as a generally available low cost front end makes it possible to offer the power of an expert system to many users. Depending on the declarative nature of knowledge structures, it is very easy to generate dynamic html pages and to build up a knowledge server (S. Bamberger, 1997). In spite of this, it is very difficult for a user to find the appropriate knowledge server for his demands. We discuss an approach showing how it is possible to integrate an arbitrary number of distributed knowledge servers to a knowledge cluster using only one Internet server as a central communication interface to the user. The tool is based on an expert system shell tool kit called Coop-D3 (S. Bamberger, 1997) which can be used to build up heterogeneous diagnostic knowledge bases