This book is aimed at individuals who have a good knowledge of Prolog programming and are interested in using Prolog for either building expert systems or experimenting with various expert system techniques.

The book contains 12 chapters, 7 appendices, a glossary of important terms, a list of references, a predicate index, and a subject index. It covers the following topics: an overview of expert systems and their features; the construction of expert systems using Prolog’s inference engine; backward chaining with uncertainty; the explanation facility; forward chaining; the use of frames in the knowledge base; the integration of frames and forward chaining; the construction of indices to improve the performance of both forward chaining and backward chaining systems; the implementation of windows; menus and forms for simplifying the user interface; construction of two hybrid systems which demonstrate some of the difficulties with shells and the advantages of customized systems; the use of Prolog for rapid prototyping; and a Prolog program to solve Rubik’s cube. The appendices contain the complete Prolog code and the relevant knowledge bases for the systems discussed in the book; the Prolog code and the knowledge bases are also available on diskette from the author.

This book offers a detailed and highly readable treatment of the topics it covers. It has some minor shortcomings: the list of references is short and the number of exercises is small. No solutions are provided for the exercises. On the whole, however, the book is an excellent guide to expert system techniques and their implementation in Prolog.