How to Print a File: An Expert System Approach to Software Knowledge Representation

Knowledge representation of software and software systems is an important research area with implications for other AI problems and for knowledge representation of real-world domains in general. The representation of knowledge needed to print a file in a UNIX environment is a real- world example of the complexities of software systems and one with surprising richness. We have developed and implemented a set of knowledge representations and a control structure which, using software knowledge, will automatically print files and achieve other goals specified by the user. This work is a first step towards the representation of software knowledge for information retrieval, automatic programming, and maintenance of large software systems.