Physical Knowledge Base Representation for Web Expert System Shell

Web applications have developed rapidly and have had a significant impact on the application of systems in many domains. The migration of information systems from classic desktop software to web applications can be seen as a permanent trend. This trend also applies to the knowledge based systems. This work is a part of the KBExplorator project – the main goal of this project is to provide a complete and easy to use web-based tool for the development of expert systems. The evaluation of the rules searching effectiveness in the proposed physical rule base model is the first experimental aim of this work. Experiments will be conducted to determine the duration of retrieving a single rule or group of rules in large rules sets. Decomposition of the rule knowledge base into the relational database is also a crucial issue of this work and therefore the presentation of the data model is the second goal of this work. The usage of a relational database in the web-based application is obvious, but its usage as the physical storage for the rule base is described in relatively small number of publications. Proposed decomposition conception and the model presented in this work has not been previously described. The positive results of experiments presented in this work allow us to continue the development of the system – in the next revision, the database interface layer will be implemented with the usage of a specialized API. This proposed software architecture allow us to transparently change the database engine as well as the programming language currently used in the application layer of the system.