This article describes the architecture of an intelligent symbolic object for decision making procedures based on the object-oriented approach. A symbolic object is defined in relation to a database, and with the help of a rule based expert system through a user friendly interface. Its definition invokes some intelligent behavior by activation of rules attached to objects. The rules associated with an object can be activated by local and temporary reasoning processes (forward chaining and/or backward chaining), resulting from distributed access to the inference engine in an object world. When its definition is completed, the symbolic object is compared to the objects of the database in order to generate a classification based on customized schemes. In other words, this paper shows how the design of a symbolic object takes advantage of the object-oriented approach to combine the capabilities of a database, a user interface and an expert system to become an efficient tool dedicated to decision making procedures.

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