Kelly offers some practical suggestions to people who face the problem of building commercial expert systems.

This book is organized in 11 chapters, three appendices, a bibliography, and a subject index. The first two chapters introduce the topic by giving information about knowledge engineering activities and answering questions most often asked by knowledge engineers. The other chapters analyze the stages of development typical of an expert system project simply and from a commercial point of view. At the end of some chapters, pages from the author’s notebook are reproduced. The appendices are devoted to analysis of a specific expert system development project, examination of factors that intervene in the evaluation of tools for building expert systems, and practical advice on how to select a knowledge engineer to build a team. The bibliographical references are rich and organized in sections, but it is not always clear why a book is included in one section rather than another.

The book is well written and well organized. The language is colloquial, and the author makes ample use of a question and answer format. The book is intended as an overview of problems connected to the development of expert system projects, and it is written for an engineering audience. The overall organization, the style of writing, and the approach to the contents appear to be suitable for reaching the author’s purpose: to communicate to the reader the experience gained through 10 years of work in building commercial expert systems.