Abstract: An analysis protocol embodied in an expert system is articulated into portions to provide optimization of ease of use consistent with ease of design and updating of expert information contained therein. These portions include presentation of a fixed, invariant inquiry sequence and storage matrices which are accessed on the basis of responses to the inquiry sequence, a portion in which a decision tree is traversed efficiently under control of an inference engine based on user selections, preferably from a menu or a hierarchy of menus and a portion in which the analysis sequence is carried out by parsing text from an expert database into queries which are also preferably in the form of menus. Capture of the decision trees traversed together with corresponding user input data for at least selected analyses performed by the Expert system provides for capture of additional rules and business practices and facilitates correction of determinations, consistency of user intervention and expansion of the expert system.