Design and implementation of a database design aid using VP-Expert

The design and implementation of a database modeling aid called Database Designer (DBD) using VP-Expert are discussed. The DBD expert system is intended to help novice users design a proper database by asking questions of the user and thus incrementally building a structure for an extended entity relationship (ER) diagram. The authors discuss their approach to system design for DBD and implementation issues specific to VP-Expert, such as combining backward chaining and forward chaining, procedural techniques, and transparency and visibility of VP-Expert statements. This study indicates that applying a systematic, structural approach, properly commenting the code, and logically grouping rules can make an expert system programming approach viable for designing a complex procedural design application like DBD