The glass box user model for filtering

The first requirement on an interactive system in a domain such as information filtering is to be an interface to knowledge, rather than just a knowledgeable interface. We borrow the computation instruction metaphor of a system as “a black box in a glass box” as a means to conceptualize the problem of giving a user control over the actions of an interactive system. The application domain we work in is that of information filtering. In the “black box”, we hide complex knowledge of the domain objects such as facts and assumptions about text genre identification, while the “glass box”, which is what the user sees, only shows the neat top level knowledge of the domain conceptual categories such as e.g. categorization rules.