The Intelligent Documentation Advisory System

The IDAS project investigates the design and development of an Intelligent Documentation Advisory System (IDAS). The aim is to develop intelligent on-line technical documentation presented via hypertext and natural language generation and constructed dynamically by expert systems technology using object-oriented techniques. The IDAS being designed is targeted at users of an Automatic Test Equipment (ATE) system and aims to replace part of the current paper-based documentation. The IDAS will represent the ATE using a qualitative model at a level close to linguistic realisation and implemented in an object-oriented framework. It will then present material to the user via a hypertext interface. It is hoped to improve on standard hypertext systems, by giving responses which take account of the user´s problems, skills and privilege. They are progressing towards a prototype implementation using the expert system shell Egeria