Selection of an Appropriate Domain for an Expert System

Abstract

This article discusses the selection of the domain for a knowledge-based expert system for a corporate application. The selection of the domain is a critical task in an expert system development. At the start of a project looking into the development of an expert system, the knowledge engineering project team must investigate one or several possible expert system domains. They must decide whether the selected application(s) are best suited to solution by present expert system technology, or if there might be a better way (or, possibly, no way) to attack the problems. If there are several possibilities, the team must also rank the potential applications and select the best available. To evaluate the potential of possible application domains, it has proved very useful to have a set of desired attributes for good expert domain. This article presents such a set of attributes. The attribute set was developed as part of a major expert system development project at GTE Laboratories. It was used recurrently (and modified and expanded continually) throughout an extensive application domain evaluation and selection process.