Abstract :
The paper proposes that regulations can be a useful source of material for building a knowledge base to support expert and technical advisor systems. It describes the results of a research project using Prolog to code the Building Regulations into a frame-based format. Prolog is a declarative programming language, eminently suitable for representing knowledge and prototyping using what can be a subset of natural language. The close similarity between Prolog code and normal language can sometimes be confusing so that it may be necessary to add a degree of artificiality to prevent misunderstanding. In practice any user would work with the core knowledge base through some sort of natural language front-end to query and modify data
