INTERFACER: A user interface tool for interactive expert-systems

From the user interface point of view, expert-systems are different from conventional applications in some features. First, the user query sequence highly depends upon input data up to that time. Second, any change in query sequence requires highly complicated data modification routines. Thus, user interface implementation is a bottleneck in the same manner as knowledge acquisition is the bottleneck for expert-systems. To resolve this problem, this paper proposes the user interface tool ''INTERFACER'' for interactive expert-systems. INTERFACER automatically generates a user interface screen according to the data input query requirement from the inference engine, and requires no user data modification routines in expert-system development. We applied the proposed INTERFACER to a practical middle-scale business system: The General Employee Affairs Expert-system. Program amount was decreased 50% compared to the conventional procedural implementation.