Selection of an Appropriate Domain for an Expert System

This article discusses t,he selection of the domain for a knowledge-based expert system for a corporate application The selection of the domain is a critical task in an expert system development At the st,art of a project looking into the development of an expert, syst,em, the knowledge engineering project team must investigate one or several possible expert system domains They must decide whether the selected application(s) are best suited to solution by present expert system technology, or if there might he a hettel way (or, possibly, no way) to attack the problems. If there arc several possibilities, the team must also rank the potential applications and select the best availahlc To evaluate the potential of possible application domains, it has proved very useful to have a set of desired at,trihutes for a good expert system domain. This art,iclc presents such a set of attrihut,es The at,trihute set was developed as part of a major expert system development project at GTE Lahorat.ories. In particular, it focuses on selecting an expert system domain for a corporate application. One of the prime arcas of corporate interest is expert systems.