Supporting organizational problem solving with a work station

Abstract

Permission to copy without fee all or part of this material is granted provided that the copies are not made or distributed for direct commercial advantage, the ACM copyright notice and the title of the publication and its date appear, and notice is given that copying is by permission of the Association for Computing Machinery. To copy otherwise, or to republish, requires a fee and/or specific permission. An approach to supporting work in the office is described. Using and extending ideas from the field of artificial intelligence (AI) we describe office work as a problem-solving activity. A knowledge-embedding language called OMEGA is used to embed knowledge of the organization into an office worker's work station in order to support the office worker in problem solving. A particular approach to reasoning about change and contradiction is discussed. This approach uses OMEGA's viewpoint mechanism, which is a general contradiction-handling facility. Unlike other knowledge representation systems, when a contradiction is reached the reasons for the contradiction can be analyzed by the deduction mechanism without having to resort to search mechanisms such as a backtracking. The viewpoint mechanism is the heart of the problem-solving support paradigm, a paradigm which supplements the classical AI view of problem solving. An example is presented in which OMEGA's facilities are used to support an office worker's problem-solving activities. The example illustrates the use of viewpoints and of OMEGA's capabilities to reason about its own reasoning processes. Categories and Subject Descriptors: H.3.4 [ Information Storage and Retrieval ]: Systems and Software— information networks ; H.4.1 [ Information Systems Applications ]: Office Automation; I.2.1 [ Artificial Intelligence ]: Applications and Expert Systems— office automation ; I.2.4 [ Artificial Intelligence ]: Knowledge Representation Formalisms and Methods— semantic networks