Expert Systems?

[Alex Rice]

On Tuesday, October 8, 2002, at 01:04  PM, Dan Shafer wrote:
>
> Yeah, HyperCard had several expert system tools that would probably be 
> portable to RR. I suspect they relied fairly heavily on externals, 
> though, and that could make them somewhat less useful.

That's true.

CLIPS is cross platform, has a flexible license, and I was thinking it 
would be a good candidate for a Rev External.

Any good URLs or book references on writing metacard/rev externals? My 
C skills are adequate but not great.

> What specific ES features are you looking for?

Not sure! I just ordered a book on CLIPS. I'm pretty sure an ES is what 
we need though.

The company does estimation modeling for construction projects, school 
districts, national parks, and others. By asking a series of questions 
about the spaces needed, who will be using the spaces and how, formulas 
are applied, and space and cost estimates are produced. Or for school 
districts, enrollment estimates are produced. School districts, too.

The problem is that currently my coworkers are working in MS Excel and 
their estimation models and their data sets are all munged together, as 
Excel files are wont to be. It has caused many headaches as projects 
evolve and they attempt to apply similar models to different clients or 
projects, different data sets.

> How fast does it need to be?

Speed probably won't be an issue... we're not predicting the stock 
market here :-)

Alex Rice, Software Developer
Architectural Research Consultants, Inc.
alrice at swcp.com
alex_rice at arc.to