EMYCIN: A Knowledge Engineer’s Tool for Constructing Rule-Based Expert Systems

Much current work in artificial intelligence focuses on computer programs that aid scientists with complex reasoning tasks. Recent work has indicated that one key to the creatior~:..@f intelligent systems is the incorporation of large amounts of task-specific knowledge. Building knowledge-based, or expert, systems from scratch can be very time-consuming, however. This suggests the need for general tools to aid in the construction of knowledgebased systems. This chapter describes an effective domain-independent framework for constructing one class of expert programs: rule-based consultants. The system, called EMYCIN, is based on the domain-independent core of the MYCIN program. We have reimplemented MYCIN as one of" the consultation systems that run under EMYCIN.