KNOWLEDGE REPRESENTATION AND INFERENCE ENVIRONMENT: KRINE, --- AN APPROACH TO INTEGRATION OF FRAME, PROLOG AND GRAPHICS.

To develop an expert system for intelligent CAD, entails much difficulty in describing the design knowledge including pattern matching procedures, in applying the design knowledge by trial and error or in displaying design objects dynamically, if only conventional object-oriented or frame-based knowledge representation tools are used. To cope with these problems, the following mechanisms were integrated with the frame-based knowledge representation system: (a) PROLOG programming functions with direct frame data unifier, (b) frame data recovery for backtracking of inference, and (c) design object display functions by interpreting frame data directly. This paper describes the design philosophy, mechanisms and examples of an integrated knowledge representation and inference environment (KRINE).