The Expert System of IPCI - KnowledgeWright
KnowledgeWright is an embeddable, extendable expert system and knowledge engineering
environment. It can be embedded in everything from web servers to Visual Basic. The reasoning
engine can be extended to accommodate a wide variety of knowledge structures and reasoning
algorithms. And KnowledgeWright has a full graphical user interface for developing your own
knowledge bases called the Workshop.
KnowledgeWright Architecture
KnowledgeWright is designed to be easily molded to any sort of domain expertise, type of reasoning,
collection of supporting data, types of actions triggered, and deployment. This means
KnowledgeWright can be configured to provide a near-perfect knowledge development, test, and
deployment environment for a given domain of expertise.
KnowledgeWright Architecture
Knowledgebase
A Knowledgebase is composed of a number of different types of knowledge objects. These objects
contain the actual knowledge. Examples of knowledge objects include: question objects, for asking the
user questions; rule set objects for expressing relationships; table objects similarly used; and text
objects for dynamically composing documents. Different jigs might support different types of objects.
Each object has properties that define that object. For example, a question has a "prompt" property
which is the query to display to the user. A text object, not surprisingly, has a "text" property which is
the document or a piece of a document.
Workshop
The Workshop is a graphical environment and contains both editing tools and testing/debugging tools.
These allow for the creating and maintenance of a knowledgebase, and for the test execution of that
knowledgebase.
The editing tools are driven by a schema describing the particular knowledge objects used in a
particular jig.
The test and debug tools make use of the particular reasoning strategy used for a particular jig. They
access that reasoning engine through a standard KnowledgeWright API (Application Program
Interface) that provides a uniform dialog for runtime communication.
Runtime
Because the knowledgebase and reasoning engine communicate via the standard KnowledgeWright
API, it is possible to have a variety of runtime deployment options. A Web CGI interface and standalone Java and Visual Basic interfaces are included with the package, as well as samples for how to
embed KnowledgeWright in applications written with other development tools.