  During the ongoing debate over the representation of uncertainty in
Artificial Intelligence, Cheeseman, Lemmer, Pearl, and others have argued that
probability theory, and in particular the Bayesian theory, should be used as
the basis for the inference mechanisms of Expert Systems dealing with
uncertainty. In order to pursue the issue in a practical setting, sophisticated
tools for knowledge engineering are needed that allow flexible and
understandable interaction with the underlying knowledge representation
schemes. This paper describes a Generalized Bayesian framework for building
expert systems which function in uncertain domains, using algorithms proposed
by Lemmer. It is neither rule-based nor frame-based, and requires a new system
of knowledge engineering tools. The framework we describe provides a
knowledge-based system architecture with an inference engine, explanation
capability, and a unique aid for building consistent knowledge bases.
