flex Expert System Toolkit - LPIS

1. Introduction 9
1. Introduction
Welcome to the flex expert system toolkit.
We wish you success with generating your expert system
applications using flex.
What is flex ?
flex is an expressive and powerful expert system toolkit which supports
frame-based reasoning with inheritance, rule-based programming and datadriven
procedures fully integrated within a logic programming environment,
and contains its own English-like Knowledge Specification Language (KSL).
flex goes beyond most expert system shells in that it employs an open
architecture and allows you to access, augment and modify its behaviour
through a layer of access functions. Because of this, flex is often referred to
as an AI toolkit. The combination of flex and Prolog, i.e a hybrid expert
system toolkit with a powerful general-purpose AI programming language,
results in a functionally rich and versatile expert system development
environment where developers can fine tune and enhance the built-in
behaviour mechanisms to suit their own specific requirements.
flex appeals to various groups of developers; expert systems developers who
want to deliver readable and maintainable knowledge-bases, advanced expert
system builders who want to incorporate their own controls, AI
programmers who want access to a high-level language-based product and
Prolog programmers who require extra functionality and structures.
What are expert systems?
Expert systems (or knowledge-based systems) allow the scarce and expensive
knowledge of experts to be explicitly stored into computer programs and
made available to others who may be less experienced. They range in scale
from simple rule-based systems with flat data to very large scale, integrated
developments taking many person-years to develop. They typically have a
set of if-then rules which forms the knowledge base, and a dedicated
inference engine, which provides the execution mechanism. This contrasts
with conventional programs where domain knowledge and execution control
are closely intertwined such that the knowledge is implicitly stored in the
program. This explicit separation of the knowledge from the control
mechanism makes it easier to examine knowledge, incorporate new
knowledge and modify existing knowledge.
flex toolkit