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Visual Prolog 7.0 Examples and DemosESTA (Expert System Shell for Text Animation)
DescriptionPDC's expert system shell, ESTA, is easy to use and a great stand-alone environment for constructing advisory and decision support systems. Building advanced knowledge bases with ESTA requires no previous programming experience and it is suitable for many problem domains. ESTA is the perfect tool for structuring of knowledge, for instance in help desks and these structure can now be accessed directly from over the Internet. The web-version of ESTA could be the answer to the needs of your support teams for automatic support functions. You can use ESTA to build advisory systems that ensure:
ESTA includes an interface to Visual Prolog, which means that you can go beyond the built in functionality - you can build your own extensions to ESTA or integrate ESTA into an existing Visual Prolog application. This will require some programming experience. In addition to advisory systems, ESTA is a great prototyping tool. A knowledge base in ESTA has a hierarchical structure from which a tree display is automatically drawn. You can edit or expand your knowledge base directly from the tree. This way you can easily get an overview of your knowledge. And, you can easily interface ESTA to 3rd-party applications like spreadsheets, databases, word processors etc. ESTA includes an interface to Visual Prolog, which means that you can go beyond the built in functionality - you can build your own extensions to ESTA or integrate ESTA into an existing Visual Prolog application. In addition to advisory systems, ESTA is a great prototyping tool. A knowledge base in ESTA has a hierarchical structure from which a tree display is automatically drawn. You can edit or expand your knowledge base directly from the tree. In this way you can easily get an overview of your knowledge. The DialogESTA is designed so that a dialog with an expert system running under the shell resembles having a chat with an actual expert in the subject area. The user initially provides some information - in the form of replies to questions posed by the system- and then he receives the appropriate advice. A record of the dialog can be logged in a window and it can be stored in a file for later reference. For some questions, the user responds by selecting from a menu (e.g. "What is the problem with your car") in other cases, the user can click with the mouse on some part of a picture (e.g. "Point on the place where the noise comes from") and in some cases it is necessary to type in the answer (e.g. "What is your name"). If requested by the user, the system will elaborate on questions not readily understood, as well as provide a more general explanation of the course of the consultation and how conclusions have been reached. ESTA is an easy-to-use expert system shell and a programming tool designed especially for constructing advisory and decision support systems. Through an easy-to-use Windows dialog, these systems provide the user with expert assistance in the shape of general advice and guidance. No previous programming experience is required to make advanced knowledge bases with ESTA. ESTA Features and FunctionalityAll language-specific parts of ESTA are stored in a special file that lets you make your own version of ESTA in any language with a minimum of effort. ESTA includes provisions for generating royalty-free, consultation-only versions of the system, which may be distributed to end-users. In addition to knowledge representation, ESTA includes useful features from traditional programming languages, such as procedure calls and mathematical functions. ESTA is configurable - menus, startup-pictures, and other UI-functionality can be customized to match the needs of the specific application.. ESTA includes facilities for the knowledge base to call general purpose routines written in PDC Prolog and thereby also routines written in C, Assembler or other languages. You can even integrate ESTA into your own PDC Prolog, C or Assembler applications via the Visual Prolog interface. ESTA provides the knowledge engineer with a number of views of the knowledge base, including a hierarchical tree-menu representation, where clicking on a node in the tree presents you with the corresponding rules. The knowledge is automatically translated and syntax checked when you finish editing it, and errors are pointed out directly in the source code. Furthermore, ESTA has a validate command allowing you to check for type errors, circular references, undefined or unused knowledge elements. ESTA also includes facilities to explain why a question is being asked or why an answer has been given, or to repeat advice given earlier in a consultation. In addition, advice can be given as a few simple sentences, large text files, graphic pictures, or even using Windows hypertext help files. ESTA also enables the user to suspend the dialog, change the answer to a previously asked question, or bring up new questions (which have not yet been asked) to answer. NoteThe example requires Visual Prolog 7.0 Commercial or Personal Edition, Build 7001 or higher. Users of previous versions of Visual Prolog are welcome to upgrade to the current version of Visual Prolog to use the latest versions of the Visual Prolog examples. Use the WEB|Check for Update IDE menu command for upgrade information. Examples for previous versions are still available. |
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