ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines the basic case for multi-environmental systems, and introduces multi-environments and multiple contexts into all the stages of construction of expert and knowledge-based systems. The multi-environmental knowledge-based system design places emphasis on the need to explore the fundamentals of the engineering design process by looking at the suitability of the existing design methodologies for building such system in multi-environment situation. The chapter discusses the three key factors by which multi-environmental knowledge-based systems should be evaluated. These factors are: acceptability, reliability and protect ability. A knowledge-based system will match more than one environment only if some definite conditions of its transferability from one to another environment in the predetermined set of environments are satisfied. The medical knowledge from the sources of several medical environments needs to be analysed, compared, and evaluated before it is transferred to the system, in order to provide reliable and compatible medical knowledge structures for the construction of a multi-environmental medical expert system.
