Competent systems: a prescriptive approach to knowledge-based advisors

A prescriptive approach to system design is outlined which breaks from standard expert systems research on two key points. First, the performance of a well-defined task analysis is taken to be a prerequisite for system design. It is the domain, then, and not the manner in which people cope with it, that guides the design phase. Second, an epistemological hierarchy, which recognizes expertise as a (high) range on a competence scale, helps identify the parts of a domain that are relevant to different types of users. This removes knowledge-based systems from the sole proprietorship of experts, and suggests using them as widely available advisors or decision support systems