The intelligent documentation advisory system

Discusses the IDAS project, a collaborative project investigating and developing an intelligent documentation advisory system (IDAS). The authors´ aim is to develop intelligent on-line technical documentation, presented via hypertext with 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 display material to the user via a hypertext interface, but where the contents and connectivity of the hypertext nodes are partially determined dynamically according to the system´s knowledge of the user´s and their goals. In this way, it is hoped to improve on standard hypertext systems, by giving responses which take account of the users problem, skills and privilege