MS

thesisBuilding an expert system in certain domain area involves knowledge acquisition, knowledge programming and knowledge refinement --- the tasks of transforming the experts' knowledge into the system. Therefore, appropriate and efficient tools, which may include high-level languages, debugging aids, and friendly editing facilities and so on, to facilitate these tasks, are very essential to an expert system. The Translator is such a tool developed in the Department of Medical Informatics at the University of Utah. It has been designed to aid the knowledge programming and refinement for a medial expert system named Iliad. It provides users a very friendly high level language, allows user to create, review or modify knowledge frames in nearly free test form and translates them into a computer readable from of another language. The Translator is a compiler-like software tool built on the Macintosh. Developing such a tool involves language translation knowledge, compiler construction techniques and software engineering concept. The successful implementation of this tool will make knowledge programming and knowledge refinement for the Iliad system much easier and fast than before, accelerate the process of building, updating and maintaining medical knowledge in Iliad, and make the Iliad a complete, and stand-alone expert system