Navigation  without Java Scripts

When Expertice Makes the Difference

In your organization there are people who know almost everything about specific subjects. Take for instance old Mr. Breitman (who by the way will be retired next summer) -- quite often it seems that many people need his assistance. Yet he is almost impossible to get hold of... If someone had only written down and formalized some of this man's knowledge! Then other people could access it whenever they needed it, and Mr. Breitmanīs invaluable knowledge wouldn't be lost when he retires! What is it then Mr. Breitman knows so much about? It could be any of the following.

A Forest of Documentation

Finding the right piece of information in large body of documentation can be critical for people to carry out their jobs. Some people in your organization know the information space or at least parts of it - how it is organized,- how to find information, and how to make use of it. This kind of knowledge transforms raw data into valuable information, and having this knowledge available in a ready-to-use fashion for the people who don't know the documentation saves a lot of time and ensures that all the right pieces of information are retrieved. This is essential in application areas such as on-line help, help-desk systems and document management.

Complex Configuration

Examples of configuration tasks include: selecting the right peripherals for a computer, furnishing a kitchen in a functional way, selecting the right combination of economic services in the bank to meet a customers needs. Configuration is often a complex task, with so many rules and options that it is impossible to comprehend them all. For this reason, it is often desirable to employ an electronic system that uses the rules to ensure not only a valid but also an optimal solution.

Diagnostics and Fault Isolation

Finding out: why the car won't run, what kind of product the customer really needs, what illness a person has, what's wrong with the laser printer, which person in the organization to call to solve a specific problem - these are all diagnostic / fault finding activities. By engaging you in a dialog, a human expert would be able to give you the right advice, and an electronic system works the same way but makes the expert's knowledge available for everyone.

And a lot more....

Educational systems are often constructed using a combination of the above-mentioned techniques, as indeed, any system whose genesis is the need to formalize knowledge about a particular discipline can be profitably implemented in ESTA.

Why Expert Systems ?

An Expert System is a software tool that helps a human expert make better decisions and, in some cases, help a nonprofessional make limited decisions without the help of an expert.

In today's world it is sometimes difficult for the human mind to store or manage the knowledge required to make good or optimal decisions. Therefore an expert system could be your solution when manuals are inadequate, knowledge is undocumented, a key figure is overworked, when you are training newly hired personnel or when you are dealing with complex technical/human knowledge.

Knowledge is very often formulated using rules expressed in plain English. Consider just how many times a day, for example, we consult textual knowledge bases, be it in the instructions accompanying self-assembly furniture, trouble shooting a malfunction of some technical apparatus, reading a bus time table, or trying to understand the income tax return form.

Expert systems are intended to enliven such knowledge by enabling it to be presented in an "easy-to-work-with" fashion, and they are commonly used in applications involving consultation, instruction, diagnosis, prediction, control and interpretation.