---
title: "Explainable (and Maintainable) Expert Systems"
authors:
  - "Robert Neches"
  - "William R. Swartout"
  - "Johanna D. Moore"
doi: ""
url: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1985/72"
pdf: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1985/0072.pdf"
venue: "Proceedings of the Ninth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence"
year: 1985
pages: "382-388"
track: "Expert Systems"
keywords:
---

# Explainable (and Maintainable) Expert Systems

Robert Neches, William R. Swartout, Johanna D. Moore

*Proceedings of the Ninth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence*, pages 382-388.

## Abstract

Principled development techniques could greatly enhance the understandability of expert systems for both users and system developers. Current systems have limited explanatory capabilities and present maintenance problems because of a failure to explicitly represent the knowledge and reasoning that went into their design . This paper describes a paradigm for constructing expert systems which attempts to identify that tacit knowledge, provide means for capturing it in the knowledge bases of expert systems, and apply it towards more perspicuous machine· generated explanations and more consistent and maintainable system organization .