REVIEWS OF BOOKS

Designing Expert Systems relate expert system research to that findings are abstracted into problem categories (they call them only "intermediate hypotheses") or that hypotheses are refined into subtypes (they say that hypotheses can be organized in a taxonomy, but give no examples). Most importantly, they miss the idea that expert systems often solve a sequence of problems by classification. Common examples are: making a diagnosis and then selecting a repair, characterizing a patient stereotypically and matching this to diseases, and modeling a user's needs and satisfying them (see (Clancey, 1984) for further discussion). Beyond this, Weiss and Kulikowski perpetuate the confusion that classification is a property of problems, rather than a problem solving method. Diagnosis is not inherently a "classification problem."