Abstract: A quality driven expert system maps answers input by a user in a user questionnaire into a set of qualities descriptive of a desired output entity. A library of output entities, such as network architectures is provided, each described by values for various ones of the qualities. The qualities derived by the expert system from the user's answers are matched against the qualities of the various output entities in the library to determine which entities match the specified qualities. A score for each output entity is determined by an associative matching algorithm as a function of the degree of match between each entity and the specified qualities, along with an explanation of the degree of match between each specified quality and the qualities of the output entity. A selected number of the highest scoring entities are returned to the user to further inspection and comparison.