Automated integration of external databases: a knowledge-based approach to enhancing rule-based expert systems.
Expert system applications in the biomedical domain have long been hampered by the difficulty inherent in maintaining and extending large knowledge bases. We have developed a knowledge-based method for automatically augmenting such knowledge bases. The method consists of automatically integrating data contained in commercially available, external, on-line databases with data contained in an expert system's knowledge base. We have built a prototype system, named DBX, using this technique to augment an expert system's knowledge base as a decision support aid and as a bibliographic retrieval tool. In this paper, we describe this prototype system in detail, illustrate its use and discuss the lessons we have learned in its implementation.
Berman
L
L
Center for Medical Informatics, Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, CT 06510.
Cullen
M R
MR
Miller
P L
PL
D001249:Asthma; D003658:Decision Making, Computer-Assisted; D005103:Expert Systems; D007256:Information Systems; D009784:Occupational Diseases