FROM DECISION TABLES TO EXPERT-SYSTEM SHELLS

Building and maintaining high quality knowledge based systems is not a trivial task. Decision tables have sometimes been recommended in this process, mainly in verification and validation. In this paper, however, it is shown how decision tables can also be used to generate, and not just to validate, knowledge bases and how the transformation process from decision tables to knowledge bases can be organized. Several options to generate rules or other knowledge representations from decision tables are described and evaluated. The proposed generation strategy enables the knowledge engineer to concentrate on the acquisition and modeling issues and allows him to isolate the knowledge body from its implementation. The generation process has been implemented for two commercial tools, AionDS and KBMS and has been applied to real world applications.