Managing the FAME expert system project

FAME is a long term project within the IBM Research Division, one of whose objectives is to provide a comprehensive advisory system for financial marketing to IBM marketing representatives. At the same time, FAME has served as a test vehicle for a number of ideas relating to knowledge representation, problem solving, and the management of large knowledge based systems. The author describes the FAME expert system, giving particular emphasis to testing and validation procedures that were instituted, and indicates what lessons have been learned. It is concluded that the use of a structured inheritance network, such as K-Rep, as the core knowledge representation service for an expert system provides considerable benefits in its construction. Its enforced semantics encourages a disciplined method of knowledge engineering. This forces system designers to make more careful representation decisions than would otherwise be made in a system without enforced semantics; at the same time, it performs a built-in consistency check as the attributes of objects in K-Rep are assigned values