The product information contained in these sources frequently becomes obsolete and out of synch with the engineering drawings. Inaccurate orders, when combined with products that are so highly technical in nature, cause delays in order processing and manufacturing and can result in billing discrepancies. These operators were chosen at least in part to avoid intractability in the underlying subsumption algorithm (Levesque and Brachman 1987). In particular, the description language lacks true disjunction and has no way to express negation. Nevertheless, we have not encountered major problems when we encoded the product knowledge for our AT&T Network Systems products.

PROSE is a knowledge-based configurator platform for telecommunications products. Its outstanding feature is a product knowledge base written in C-classIC, a frame-based knowledge representation system in the KL-ONE family of languages. Unlike previous configurator applications, the PROSE knowledge base is in a purely declarative form that provides developers with the ability to add knowledge quickly and consistently. The PROSE architecture is general and is not tied to any specific telecommunications product.