ABSTRACT
The division of computational science that has come to be known as expert systems (ES) has its origins in the broader discipline of artificial intelligence (AI), where it still resides. Put very simply, the broad aim of artificial intelligence is to simulate human reasoning (Laurini and Thompson, 1992). Expert systems are the most mature products to emerge from this field (Raggad, 1996), dating back to the mid-1960s. Since that time, when researchers at Stanford University developed a program that used chemical expert knowledge to automatically deduce molecular structure (Durkin, 1996), a plethora of definitions for the emergent technology have been put forward. The following gives an indication of how the use of expert systems has expanded to encompass nearly every scientific discipline in that time (Cress and Diesler, 1990).
