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In order to ensure the health and safety of occupants, buildings must be inspected to check their compliance to current regulatory requirements prompted by occupancy changes, renovations and building code revisions. Recent inspections conducted by Public Works Canada have identified about 1700 occurrences of code violations in 19 buildings. There is an enormous amount of information that can be extracted from the study mentioned above to implement a knowledge‐based expert system to assist in future building inspections. The philosophy of this expert system is to integrate both knowledge‐based and hypertext representation techniques to enable building inspectors to quickly identify code violations, refer to the code text and provide case study information that can assist in resolving a problem. The present paper describes the development framework and details of a prototype implementation known as the Health and Safety Expert System (HASES). The HASES currently addresses the requirements of ‘Section 3.4: Requirements for Exits’ of the 1990 National Building Code of Canada. The software architecture consists of an external database of building details, an object hierarchy and a rule‐base representing the code requirements, hypertext user‐interface for code text and case study information. The ultimate objective is to make this system available for field inspections using notepad computers.