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Expert systems are being effectively applied to a variety of engineering problems. A growing number of languages and development tools are available for their building. Expert systems building tools (shells) are not so flexible as the high‐level languages, but they are easier to use. The problem is that there are too many development tools on the market today, no standards for their evaluation are available, so it is quite difficult to choose the ‘best’ tool for the developer's/user's needs. This paper is an attempt to review the situation on the confused market. Eighty‐six development tools are described in a table form for easy comparisons. Tools implemented on the AI machines only are not included in this survey.

The commercial use of the logic programming language PROLOG is reviewed, with reference to applications in legal document preparation, advice to medical practitioners, natural language processing and analysis of social networks. Natural language processing is applied to story generation with extension to a flexible scheme for production and editing of documents, and in a separate scheme to computer programming. PROLOG is also the basis of a means of network analysis that has been applied in the study of business alliances and in analysis of terrorist networks.

The aim is to review developments accessible through the internet, especially those of general cybernetic interest.

Reference is made to tested practical applications and it is shown that logic programming continues to be a live topic. There are implications for its relationship to human mental processes, but these are not explored here.

In a large class of application areas, the use of logic programming allows rapid and relatively error‐free program development, possible with modest hardware requirements.

It is hoped this is a valuable periodic review.

Developing macro queries in software systems is a complex task for many users. Geographical information systems (GIS) are large software systems that require much effort to develop expertise in. A functional programming design approach has a number of distinct strengths that can be represented in a graphical query language interface to aid users in macro query development. A visual functional query language (VFQL) for Geographical Information Systems is presented and its strengths and weaknesses discussed. The system is based on a visual functional programming design approach. This offers a consistent, non‐procedural, strongly typed environment where users can develop their own higher order functions. The approach integrates functional programming, visual programming and knowledge and rules. VFQL’s effectiveness is evaluated compared with a text based command language for GIS macro query development. The results of an experiment indicate that users could develop solutions to simpler tasks more quickly and with fewer errors than a comparative text based command language. On more complex tasks there was no significant difference. From this we deduce that VFQL demonstrates certain design features to help the development of macros or small programs for users but that the complexity of the problem in difficult tasks is likely to be the most important determinant of the error rate and time to complete the task.

The trend in computer‐based risk and reliability assessment is foreseen as moving away from current algorithmic methods, towards information systems built around human‐like reasoning processes. Here a trial Computer‐Aided Risk Evaluation system under development at Cranfield Institute of Technology is outlined. The system is being programmed using the logic programming language, PROLOG. The method of representing materials failure knowledge within the system is described, and problems associated with endowing the system with a measure of intelligence are discussed. Ideas for future development of such systems are presented.

Reactive rules are used for programming rule-based Web agents, which have the ability to detect events and respond to them automatically and can have complex structure and unpredictable behavior. The aim of this paper is to provide an appropriate formal framework for analyzing such rules.

To achieve this goal, the authors give two alternative semantics for the basic reactive rules’ families which allow us to specify reactive rule-based agents and verify their intended behavior. The first approach expresses the functionality of production and event condition action rules in terms of equations, whereas the second methodology is based in the formalism of rewriting logic. Both semantics can be expressed within the framework of CafeOBJ algebraic specification language, which then offers the verification support and have their advantages and downsides.

The authors report on experiences gained by applying those methodologies in a reactive rule-based system and compare the two methodologies.

Finally, the authors demonstrate a tool that translates a set of reactive rules into CafeOBJ rewrite rules, thus making the verification of reactive rules possible for inexperienced users.

Expert database system (EDS), which is still in its infancy, is developed and demonstrated for a business function by coupling expert systems (ES) and database systems.

An EDS for inventory management (EDSIM) using the fifth generation artificial intelligence (AI) language, Prolog, is developed. The convergence of logic programming and database techniques is focused in achieving the objective. EDSIM development is based on modular design and integration of several intelligent modules, with own knowledge base and shared dynamic database.

EDSIM developed demonstrates the peculiarities of such an EDS over a system developed using conventional procedural language. It shows that development of such systems has great deployment potential in the next generation enterprise systems where embedded intelligence is inevitable.

Though no attempt is made to demonstrate distributed processing and interaction among various intelligent autonomous modules, an initiative in that direction definitely can kindle reengineering of today's enterprise system.

The language chosen for the development of EDSIM is Turbo Prolog™ and can be easily converted to a program in Visual Prolog™ which is the newer version of Turbo Prolog™. The advantage of such a conversion is that it will enable web readiness of the EDS there by facilitating e‐business in the web environment.

The benefits of the application of EDS, by the integration of ES and database systems in a fifth generation AI language, Prolog, paves way for capturing developments in AI and databases, simultaneously. This technology demonstrator has the potential to bring in an optimal mix of the above technologies in achieving major milestones while reengineering enterprise systems.

This review reports on the current state and the potential of tools and systems designed to aid online searching, referred to here as online searching aids. Intermediary mechanisms are examined in terms of the two stage model, i.e. end‐user, intermediary, ‘raw database’, and different forms of user — system interaction are discussed. The evolution of the terminology of online searching aids is presented with special emphasis on the expert/non‐expert division. Terms defined include gateways, front‐end systems, intermediary systems and post‐processing. The alternative configurations that such systems can have and the approaches to the design of the user interface are discussed. The review then analyses the functions of online searching aids, i.e. logon procedures, access to hosts, help features, search formulation, query reformulation, database selection, uploading, downloading and post‐processing. Costs are then briefly examined. The review concludes by looking at future trends following recent developments in computer science and elsewhere. Distributed expert based information systems (debis), the standard generalised mark‐up language (SGML), the client‐server model, object‐orientation and parallel processing are expected to influence, if they have not done so already, the design and implementation of future online searching aids.

Namibian principals are usually placed in leadership positions without orientation and are found to lack skills to supervise teachers in delivering instruction using the English language. Studies conducted elsewhere in the world found that effective school leadership is needed for the success of professional development programmes. The purpose of this paper is to explore principals’ lived experiences with regard to their roles in the implementation of the English Language Proficiency Programme (ELPP).

This paper followed a qualitative inquiry with multiple case study designs to explore principals’ lived experiences during the implementation of the ELPP. Ten schools were selected for the analysis, two from each of the five regions. The schools were selected on the basis of remoteness, the total number of teachers who participated in the ELPP, school phases (i.e. primary and combined) and pre-test scores. Principals were interviewed using exploratory open-ended questions, and data analysis produced five categories under which the results were presented.

The findings indicate that principals applied their individual logic to accommodate and implement the programme. They applied their individual productive leadership habitus to contextualise ELPP activities to ease their workload and appear corporative. Principals had significant influence on teacher learning and ensured successful implementation of a ministerial programme. Moreover, their leadership skills influenced the ways in which teachers received instruction and created a conducive learning environment. Owing to principals’ administrative, instructional and transformational leadership, many teachers participated and transcended upward and some were declared proficient in English.

This study research the effectiveness of leadership regarding English professional development programmes in achieving goals, explore power relations between school principals and education officials when developing and implementing professional development programmes and establish more efficient ways of providing a better leadership model for professional development programmes to achieve goals.

This paper was limited to a few principals at rural schools in selected regions, therefore findings could not be generalised.

There is a need for creating opportunities for interactions among all stakeholders who are involved in the development and implementation of English proficiency programmes and to build power relations and work as a team to benefit schools. In order to enhance programme implementation and improve learning outcomes, there is also a need to provide feedback at intervals and find solutions to challenges as a team.

Placing principals in situations without orientation triggered the need for specific leadership logic and particularities to be applied in a context for the success of the programme, which resulted in participation of more teachers in the ELPP. They applied their particularities and productive habitus through administrative, instructional and transformational leadership to enhance learning. Principals appointed English language teachers to instruct and mentor others, and consequently enabled some principals and teachers to exit the programme. Principals achieved these short wins upon realising that one has to cooperate with the authority to ensure achieving desired outcomes.

Although software systems used to automate business processes have been becoming rather advanced, the existing practice of developing and modifying graphical process models in those software systems is still primitive: users have to manually add, change, or delete each node and arc piece by piece. Since such manual operations are typically tedious, time‐consuming, and prone to errors, it is desirable to develop an alternative approach. This paper aims to address this issue.

In this paper, a novel, human‐understandable process manipulation language (PML) for specifying operations (e.g. insertion, deletion, merging, and split) on process models is developed. A prototype system to demonstrate PML is also developed.

The paper finds that manipulation operations on process models can be standardized and, thus, can be facilitated and automated through using a structured language like PML.

PML can improve manipulation operations on process models over the existing manual approach in two aspects: first, using PML, users only need to specify what operations are to be performed on process models, and then a computer carries out specified operations as well as performs other routine operations (e.g. generating nodes and arcs). This feature minimizes user effort to deal with low‐level details on nodes and arcs. Second, using PML, users can systematically specify operations on process models, thus reducing arbitrary operations and problems in process models.

A web service is a software system designed to support interoperable machine‐to‐machine or application‐to‐application interactions over networks. Descriptions enable web services to be discovered, used by other web services, and composed into new web services. Web service composition is a mechanism for creating new web services by reusing existing ones. In order to compose a web service, the right primitive services have to be discovered. A matchmaking technique enables discovering these services. Web services have functional, non‐functional, behavioral, and semantic characteristics. These four aspects of web services provide different key information about the service; therefore they have to be considered for description, matching, and composition. The purpose of this paper is to propose a formal description framework and a formal matchmaking technique that allows describing and discovering web services by considering their four characteristics.

In this paper, the description framework combines two existing languages for functional, semantic, and behavioral description, along with a simple and new language for non‐functional description.

A case study is used to illustrate the description framework and the matchmaking technique. The implementation and performance evaluation of the matchmaking technique is presented. The framework formalizes and integrates the languages in a common semantic domain in order to match and manipulate the different aspects together and formally. Isabelle is used by the matchmaking technique for discovering the partially and fully matched services.

The contribution of this paper lies in the new description framework and the new matchmaking technique.