bundy@edxa@sri-unix.UUCP (10/14/83)
From: BUNDY HPS (on ERCC DEC-10) <bundy@edxa>
The UK government has set up a the Alvey Programme as the UK
answer to the Japanese 5th Generation Programme. One part of that
Programme has been to identify and promote research in a number of
'themes'. I am the manager of one such theme - on 'Intelligent Front
Ends' (IFE). An IFE is defined as follows:
"A front end to an existing software package, for example a finite
element package, a mathematical modelling system, which provides a
user-friendly interface (a "human window") to packages which without
it, are too complex and/or technically incomprehensible to be
accessible to many potential users. An intelligent front end builds a
model of the user's problem through user-oriented dialogue mechanisms
based on menus or quasi-natural language, which is then used to
generate suitably coded instructions for the package."
One of the theme activities is to gather information about
IFEs, for instance: useful references and short descriptions of
available tools. If you can supply such information then please send it
to BUNDY@RUTGERS. Thanks in advance.
Alan Bundy