ABSTRACT
This chapter describes typical expert system applications and briefly describes knowledge representation techniques. The procedure/subroutine approach is good for representing heuristic knowledge, modeling complex meta-problems, and performing extended logical inferences and reasoning. The purpose of knowledge representation is to organize the required information into a form that the expert system can readily access for decision making, planning, recognizing objects and situations, analyzing scenes, drawing conclusions, and other cognitive functions. Using direct representation, certain properties of a new situation can be described by reference to a known situation, and the known situation’s recommended course of action can be borrowed by an expert system faced with a new but similar situation. In the procedure/subroutine approach, knowledge about the world is contained in procedures, small programs that know how to do specific things. The property lists approach uses objects and lists of their properties to describe the state of the world.
