One of the major areas of interest in artificial intelligence is the building of expert systems. An expert system contains information, and searches for patterns in problems it is given to find solutions to them. It is called an expert system because it attempts to closely model the manner in which a human expert would seek a solution when faced with the same problem. A human expert would analyze the situation by comparing it with other known and solved cases, or by applying rules or heuristics, in order to reach a conclusion. The expert system attempts to emulate this behavior. Expert systems can be of several kinds: rule-based, fuzzy logic, neural networks, Bayesian networks, etc.

In order to function, an expert system needs a knowledge base consisting of the facts, expertise, rules of thumb, and any other such that a human expert in the domain would...