Expert System

Expert System

An expert system is a set of programs that manipulates the encoded knowledge in order to solve the problems in the specified domain which normally requires the human expertise. An expert system's knowledge is obtained from the expert source and coded in the form that is suitable for the system to use in the inferences and the reasoning process. The expert knowledge must be obtained from the specialist or other sources like the journal article, standard textbook and so on. This type of knowledge usually requires much training and experiences in some specialized field such as medicine, geology, system configuration, engineering design etc. Once a sufficient body of expert knowledge has been acquired it must be encoded in some particular form and loaded into the knowledge base and then define continuously throughout the life of the system.

Examples of the expert system are MYCIN, prospectus, MAX, XCON.

Characteristic features of the Expert System:

The expert system differs from the conventional computer system in several important ways.

1. The expert system uses knowledge rather than data.
2. The expert system was capable of explaining how a particular conclusion was reached.
3. The expert system uses the symbolic representation for knowledge and performs their inferences through a symbolic computation that closely resemble manipulation of natural language.
4. An expert system is often reasoned with meta-knowledge that is they reason with knowledge about themselves.

References:

1. Elaine Rich, Kevin Knight 1991, "Artificial Intelligence".
2. Nilsson, Nils J. Principles of Artificial Intelligence, Narosa Publishing House New Delhi, 1998.
3. Norvig, Peter & Russel, Stuart Artificial Intelligence: A modern Approach, Prentice Hall, NJ, 1995
4. Patterson, Dan W. Introduction to Artificial Intelligence and Expert Systems, Prentice Hall of India Private Limited New Delhi, 1998.