This book explores the building of expert systems using logic for knowledge representation and meta-level inference for control. It presents research done by members of the expert systems group of the Department of Artificial Intelligence in Edinburgh, often in collaboration with others, based on two hypotheses: that logic is a suitable knowledge representation language, and that an explicit representation of the control regime of the theorem prover has many advantages.The editors introduce these hypotheses and present the arguments in their favor They then describe Socrates' a tool for the construction of expert systems that is based on these assumptions. They devote the remaining chapters to the solution of problems that arise from the restrictions imposed by Socrates's representation language and from the system's inefficiency.The chapters dealing with the representation problem present a reified approach to temporal logic that makes it possible to use nonstandard logics without extending the system, and describe a general proof method for arbitrary modal logics. Those dealing with the efficiency problem discuss the technique of partial evaluation and its limitations, as well as another possible solution known as assertion-time inference.
