1988

Priha, Ilkka; Hämäläinen, Matti; Hiirsalmi, Mikko; Hyvönen, Eero

Since knowledge based systems (KBS) has reached the level of commercial exploitation, more and more software tools for building such systems have arrived on the market. The range of KBS tools varies from programming languages to generic systems. KBS tool vendors can be well established companies or small "garage" enterprises. The purchase costs of KBS tools start from $ 100,- and go up to $ 100 000,-. The consequence of this development has been that the selection of an appropriate tool for a specific knowledge based application has become a difficult problem. The most reliable method for the selection of a KBS tool is a careful evaluation of several alternatives. The set of possible alternatives can be selected based on published material on KBS tool introductions, evaluations and demonstrations. This publication presents the results of evaluations of five different implementations of Lisp, Prolog and Smalltalk languages, and of two KBS development environments, KEE and Epitool. In addition, the appendices give a brief introduction to over 200 KBS tools and over 200 lCBS tool vendors.