Bücher der Reihe Topics in Information Systems

Information systems are large repositories of factual and inferential knowledge intended to be queried and maintained by a wide variety of users with different backgrounds and work tasks. The community of potential information system users is growing rapidly with advances in hardware and software technology that permit computer/communications support for more and more application areas. Unfortunately, it is often felt that progress in user interface technology has not quite matched that of other areas. Technical solutions such as computer graphics, natural language processing, or man-machine-man communications in office systems are not enough by themselves. They should be complemented by system features that ensure cooperative behavior of the interfaces, thus reducing the training and usage effort required for successful interaction. In analogy to a human dialog partner, we call an interface cooperative if it does not just accept user requests passively or answer them literally, but actively attempts to understand the users' intentions and to help them solve their applica- tion problems. This leads to the central question addressed by this book: What makes an information systems interface cooperative, and how do we provide capabilities leading to cooperative interfaces? Many answers are possible. A first aspect concerns the formulation and accep- tance of user requests. Many researchers assume that such requests should be formulated in natural language.

Current experimental systems in industry, government, and the military take advantage of knowledge-based processing. Currently, knowledge-based system technology lacks the means to provide efficient and robust knowledge bases, while database system technology lacks knowledge representation and reasoning capabilities.

The term "Office Automation" implies much and means little. In this book we will take the approach that "Office Automation" is much more than just better tools, but falls significantly short of replacing every person in an office. activities and to evaluate the potential of Office Information Systems for office procedure automation.

Object-oriented database systems have been approached with mainly two major intentions in mind, namely to better support new application areas including CAD/CAM, office automation, knowledge engineering, and to overcome the `impendance mismatch' between data models and programming languages.

Knowledge Base Management Systems (KBMSs) are being proposed that provide user-friendly environments for the construction, retrieval, and manipUlation of large shared knowledge bases.

Particular topics of"interest include the design of type systems appropriate for database work, the representation of persistent objects such as data types and modules, and the provision of orthogonal persistence and certain aspects of transactions and concurrency.

The growing demand for systems of ever-increasing complexity and precision has stimulated the need for higher level concepts, tools, and techniques in every area of Computer Science.

Particular topics of"interest include the design of type systems appropriate for database work, the representation of persistent objects such as data types and modules, and the provision of orthogonal persistence and certain aspects of transactions and concurrency.