The prototype of an expert system for the selection of high-speed steels for cutting tools

Experience gained by a team of researchers developing a database system designed as an aid for engineers and students who work out the tools made from the high-speed steels shows that this sort of system needs a flexible yet powerful user interface. To solve this task a front-end expert system module is being designed. Present design parameters assume that the intelligent add-on shall consist of some 500 divided by 1000 rules enabling the user to compare the characteristic properties of various high-speed steels in respect to given applications, more, the technology generating module shall include the what-if option. To make all these new features as user friendly as possible it has been decided that the work should start with development of the linguistic task-oriented processor to enable the user to contact with the system in a subset of the natural language. To this end a prototype of a user interface was written in PROLOG and is presently being tested. In order to set the limits to the above mentioned task the dictionary was developed including all the necessary nouns, verbs, adjectives, numerals and sentence structures that are allowed to appear in the interface domain specific language.