The Ignatius environment: supporting the design and development of expert-system user interfaces

The Ignatius user interface management system, with which designers can create user interfaces for conversational and model-based expert systems, is discussed. Because conversational and model-based expert systems require different approaches to user interface management, Ignatius consists of two separate but communicating tools: the surface interaction manager and the session discourse manager. The interaction manager represents user interface components as objects with attributes. The discourse manager manages the discourse structures of conversational expert systems, structures traditionally regarded as side effects of problem solving. Ignatius was tested by building a user interface to the Antibody Analysis Advisor (A/sup 3/), a conversational expert system that helps laboratory technicians choose analysis techniques for finding antibodies in blood samples. The surface interaction objects, session discourse structure, and an example execution in A/sup 3/ are described.<>