Details of the Consultation System

In this chapter MYCIN's implementation is presented in considerable detail. Our goals are to explain the data and control structures used by the program and to describe some of the complex and often unexpected problems that arose during system implementation. In Chapter 1 the motivations behind many of MYCIN's capabilities were mentioned. The reader is encouraged to bear those design criteria in mind throughout this chapter. This chapter specifically describes the Consultation System. This subprogram uses both system knowledge from the corpus of rules and patient data entered by the physician to generate advice for the user. Furthermore, the program maintains a dynamic data base, which provides an ongoing record of the current consultation. As a result, this chapter must discuss both the nature of the various data structures and how they are used or maintained by the Consultation System. Section 5.1 describes the corpus of rules and the associated data structures. It provides a formal ...