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4.10. ASK THE BUYERSThe prior sections discussed some of the more important features to consider when choosing a shell. How important a specific feature is to a given application is also a point of consideration. One way to determine this is to ask expert system developers. A survey of close to 300 developers was conducted, where each was given a list of shell features and asked to judge the importance of each feature based on a five-point scale, with 5 representing critical and 1 not important (Stylianou et al., 1995). The questionnaire also asked each developer to consider a specific problem-solving paradigm for which they have expert system design experience when evaluating shell features. Table 2 shows an adaption of part of the results from this survey. Several observations are notable.
Historically, most developed expert systems have been rule-based. According to the survey, rules continue to be the knowledge representation technique of choice. Though most shells offer a poor explanation facility, designers feel that this is an important feature to consider. Rule-tracing appears to be the most popular debugging tool. Being able to embed the developed system into an existing software environment and have the system exchange information with that software, particularly with a database, is favored.
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