Inference Corp, El Segundo, California has come out with a Unix version of its Automated Reasoning Tool for Information Management. ART-IM/Unix is claimed to be the only major expert system tool to support the Motif windowing graphic user interface and will be out for IBM’s RS/6000, Sun Microsystems’ Sun-3 and Sparcstations, Hewlett-Packard’s Series 9000, 300 and 800, Apollo 2500, 3500, 4500 and 10,000 systems and Data General’s AViiON workstations this month. The product is designed for information-intensive applications such as diagnostics, scheduling, computer-aided engineering, computer integrated manufacturing and computer-aided drafting and applications developed using it can be distributed across other operating environments without recoding. It is already available on all DEC VMS and Ultrix operating systems under DECwindows; there are also versions for MS-DOS, OS/2 and IBM MVS with IMS and CICS. The Unix version costs $12,500. Inference also added Version 3.0 of ART-IM for MS-DOS and IBM mainframes, which includes new Inference Knowledge Builder and Inference System Builder to make the C-based expert system tool easy to use for any level user. At each step in the menu-driven windowed interface, the user is guided to write only valid rules. And System Builder provides an open object-oriented architecture to enable users to integrate knowledge-based applications into traditional software environments. The new features are included in the Unix version; the MS-DOS version is $8,000, this quarter, the IBM mainframe version is $160,000 and follows next quarter.
