Report 83 06 Graphical Access to the Knowledge Base

The time-sharing systems that were used to develop them are largely inadequate due to the burden placed upon computing and storage resources. Consequently, some of this research is being shifted to personal workstations which provide a sophisticated graphics interface in addition to satisfying the requirements for computational speed and memory. This paper examines the use of that graphics interface in the development of a tool for a system builder. Introduction Medical expert systems are consultation programs designed -..o give advice using both formal knowledge and the judgmental expertise of clinical specialists. When these systems first began to appear in the 1970's, many observers doubted their future role because their size and complexity placed an inordinate burdenlin - the processing and storage resources of conventional time-sharing systems.