MINID-an experiment in building knowledge bases with textual and nontextual information

Summary form only given. The authors discuss incorporation of non-textual information, such as visual images, speech, sound, etc. into knowledge bases. Some issues covered include: development of an expert system that supports multiple-media; how to use multiple-media in the user interface; development of selection criteria for choosing information types, and development of empirical tests of multimedia expert systems. As an initial test of some of these issues, the authors have built MINID, an expert system for mineral identification that uses both text and images in the user interface. MINID was built using AVIEN, a backwards-chaining inference engine implemented as a C function library, callable from C programs. Results of a classroom implementation of MINID are given, as are additional features to be implemented