Design and implementation of an oriental medicine expert system

This paper describes the design and implementation of an oriental medicine expert system. During the development of the first prototype system, several problems and required facilities for supporting the diagnosis of the oriental medicine have been identified. Especially the importance of increasing the ‘visibility’ and the ‘changeÂability’ of the expert system is identified during this development. Intuitively, high visibility means that an expert system is open enough to users, and that users can see what is in the knowledge-base and what is going on in the expert system. High changeability means that users have much freedom in deciding the system’s inference mechanism and the knowledge-base actually used. This paper, first, proposes a conceptual architecture for realizing an expert sysem with high visibility and changeability. This architecture consists of (1) ‘conceptual schema’ based on is-a and part-of relationships, (2) ‘rule-base schema’, and (3) ‘object-oriented’ user interface. Next, the paper describes the prototype oriental medicine expert system which was implemented based on the above conceptual architecture. [In Japanese.]