Systems Analysis and Synthesis

9.3. Expert Systems

A key distinction can be made between declarative knowledge and procedural knowledge. A familiar example of this distinction is provided by a GPS navigation system in a car. The navigator takes declarative knowledge in the form of a map and plans a route that is relayed to the driver as series of procedural steps: ‘turn left’, ‘turn right’, and so on. In this way, the navigator takes a finite amount of knowledge and can plan an almost infinite number of possible routes.

The important part of this process is some kind of inference engine, or planner . This is what gives life to the knowledge base.

Let us suppose that the National University of Technology and Science wants to take the knowledge of the programme advisors and replace ...