AISA: a knowledge `alter ego´ for the administrator

AISA is an ongoing research project whose long-term goal is the development of an intelligent computer counterpart to a business executive or administrator. Every piece of data in administration is viewed as a plan in some stage of preparation or implementation. A contribution to knowledge acquisition offered by AISA in its current stage of development consists in the establishment of an automatic procedure for extracting expertise. Traditional knowledge-engineering techniques can be effectively combined with innovative approaches for gatherings relevant information while it is being created, thus circumventing the risk of basing everything on human experts´ memory during late retrieval. This feature magnifies the advantage of ASIA´s being a symbiotic system, in which the computer partner to the administrator can supervise actions at the workstation in real time. A further contribution stems from the fact that rules expand plans in a methodic fashion