The paper describes attempts to provide a shell for building intelligent systems in consideration of a tight integration of the knowledge representation, the inference mechanism, the methodology of construction and the development environment. The Shell is called HyperAuk: Shell for building Intelligent Systems. It is a knowledge engineer's assistant tool that provides the graphical development environment to support the construction process, that includes planning, editing, debugging and testing phases.
HyperAuk enhances the object oriented knowledge representation auk: autonomic knowledge representation, we proposed. The methodology behind HyperAuk provides the concept of the top-down planning, the bottom-up construction and the phaseless development, and defines the sequence of its construction process. According to this concept, HyperAuk constructs the development environment to support the whole development process. This environment is also including the function of the graphical user interface construction. HyperAuk provides a uniform framework by generalization of top-down planning from the methodology view. So the environment for top-down planning is able to be used in any cases.
HyperAuk is now operational using Smalltalk-80, and its environment is constructed using the user interface management system Talkie, we also developed.