Towards reasoning visualization in expert systems

Preliminary results are presented of ongoing research to develop visualization paradigms for expert systems reasoning processes. The results are based in part on a prototype implementation that is being developed to visualize the reasoning processes of a rule-based forward chaining expert system. The research is based on the premise that the presentation of information at the highest applicable conceptual level will enhance the assimilation of that information. Hierarchical levels in both the syntactic and semantic levels of reasoning in expert systems are described in detail.