| This book is aimed at the Prolog programmer interested in either building expert systems or experimenting with various expert system techniques. Dennis Merritt chooses a step-by-step approach to building systems, explaining the concepts and showing the Prolog code at each stage. The book builds on simple beginning systems and progresses up to relatively sophisticated expert system tools. It does not emphasize techniques of logic programming or the particularities of Prolog, but rather, emphasizes Prolog as an efficient software development tool, and teaches how to build expert systems and design the necessary tools. It is recommended (but not required) that the reader use a Prolog interpreter along with reading this book to experiment with the various Prolog examples given throughout the text.
When I compare the books on expert systems in my library with the production expert systems I know of, I note that there are few good books on building expert systems in Prolog. Of course, the set of actual production systems is a little small for a valid statistical sample, at least at the time and place of this writing – here in Germany, and in the first days of 1989. But there are at least some systems I have seen running in real life commercial and industrial environments, and not only at trade shows.
I can observe the most impressive one in my immediate neighborhood. It is installed in the Telephone Shop of the German Federal PTT near the Munich National Theater, and helps configure telephone systems and small PBXs for mostly private customers. It has a neat, graphical interface, and constructs and prices an individual telephone installation interactively before the very eyes of the customer.
The hidden features of the system are even more impressive. It is part of an expert system network with a distributed knowledge base that will grow to about 150 installations in every Telephone Shop throughout Germany. Each of them can be updated individually overnight via Teletex to present special offers or to adapt the selection process to the hardware supplies currently available at the local warehouses. |
