A simple knowledge system environment for engineering problem solving

In this paper, we describe Spartan, a simple environment for developing engineering knowledge systems. The design of Spartan is motivated by the observation that many development environments incur computational overhead that buy us largely unneeded sophistication. Spartan provides only a simple set of building blocks but offers a convenient way to extend its functionalities. We offer both anecdotal and analytical support for some example applications constructed using Spartan. We conclude that Spartan can be used to construct some fairly straightforward knowledge systems. A more surprising result is that even some moderately large knowledge systems can be constructed using Spartan.