CSCI 541: Expert Systems and Logic Programming
OFFICIAL CATALOG DESCRIPTION
Expert systems and knowledge engineering. Computer systems to emulate human expertise. Rule-based and other knowledge representation techniques. Knowledge engineering as a model for expert systems development; logic programming for expert systems implementation.
Prerequisites: CSci 211 and Math 301 or graduate standing.
Note: This is a course created and taught by Dr. Steven Schoenly quite a few years ago. Dr. Cunningham is reviving the course for Spring 2008.
The main language used in programming for the "logic programming" portion of the course will be Prolog, in particular the SWI Prolog implementation, which is freely available at http://www.swi-prolog.org.
Accordingly, the following textbook has been chosen for the course:
Ivan Bratko
Prolog Programming for Artificial Intelligence, third edition
Addison-Wesley, 2001.
Even though the Prolog language has been around since the 1970s, it is likely a new language for many students, except perhaps some exposure in a programming language organization class. The logic programming paradigm offers programmers different ways of thinking about problem solving and programming than conventional imperative and object-oriented languages.
For the "expert systems" part, the primary focus is on how rule-based programming and similar techniques can be applied in modern applications to encode and process "business rules" and "business logic". This part of the course will likely use a Java-based language called Jess (Java Expert Systems Shell) or perhaps the enterprise rules system called JBoss Rules.
There is no separate textbook planned for the expert systems part of the course at the present time.