This paper reviews the research leading from the GUIDON rule-based tutoring system, including the reconfiguration of MYCIN into NEOMYCIN and NEOMYCIN's generalization into the heuristic classification shell, HERACLES. The presentation is organized chronologically around pictures and dialogues that represent turning points and crystallize the basic…

A poorly designed knowledge base can be as cryptic as an arbitrary program and just as difficult to maintain. Representing inference procedures abstractly, separately from domain facts and relations, makes the design more transparent and explainable. The combination of abstract procedures and relational language for organizing domain knowledge…

The concept of a qualitative model provides a unifying perspective for understanding how expert systems differ from conventional programs. Knowledge bases contain qualitative models of systems in the world, that is, primarily non-numeric descriptions that provide a basis for explaining and predicting behavior and formulating action plans. The…

This report describes the application of a shell expert system from the medical diagnostic system, Neomycin, to Caster, a diagnostic system for malfunctions in industrial sandcasting. This system was developed to test the hypothesis that starting with a well-developed classification procedure and a relational language for stating the…

Arguing that an explicit representation of the problem-solving method of an expert system shell as abstract control knowledge provides a powerful foundation for learning, this paper describes the abstract control knowledge of the Heracles expert system shell for heuristic classification problems, and describes how the Odysseus apprenticeship…

TAIGA (Twente Advanced Interactive Graphic Authoring system) is a system which can be used to develop instructional software. It is written in MS-PASCAL, and runs on computers that support MS-DOS. Designed to support the production of structured software, TAIGA has a hierarchical structure of three layers, each with a specific function, and each…

Explains the design and development of BISTATS, a computer application using dBASEIII for compiling bibliographic instruction statistics that was developed at State University College at Buffalo. Highlights include system design and development, data items included in the records, programming procedures, and testing and modifications. (LRW)