A Relational Database Interface for Design Expert Systems

Most of the software so far developed that is based on expert systems uses a rule-based representation of the domain knowledge. Expert System applications in the engineering design process, however, frequently require access to a large static knowledge base that is easily represented in a database. This article presents the details of a relational database module to represent such static knowledge that is callable as a function by a rule-based expert system. The software implemented on a microcomputer using a C compiler, can be accessed by any inference engine with external C function calling capability. It has been used in developing an expert system for the design of steel structural elements.