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From: steve@nikki.demon.co.uk (Steve Burnham)
Subject: Smart Elements
Message-ID: <steve-2311941347510001@nikki.demon.co.uk>
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Date: Wed, 23 Nov 1994 13:47:51 GMT
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Sorry it's taken a while to get back to you on this one..

I used Smart Elements about six months ago, during a post grad. course.
Firstly the manuals were totally incomprehensible and frequently
incorrect. I cannot remember the exact occurrences but there are a number
of GUI functions  that either do not exist or the stages shown in the
manual produce errors in the actual shell. 

With regard to the GUI I found that it took far too long (about 3 x time
taken to encode KB) to produce even the simplest of interfaces. This also
had a nasty habit of causing segmentation violations at the most
inconvenient moments.

There are also problems with linking to databases, and general error
handling. I remember a number of occassions where entire knowledge bases
were lost due to the lack of error recovery. Oh yes .. theres no way of
representing degrees of certainty either.

Hope this helps 

Steve
