Representation Aspects of Knowledge - Based Office Systems

The main goal of ESPRIT project 82 is to build an intelligent office workstation (IWS). A knowledge-based approach was chosen to overcome the complexity resulting from the open-endedness of the office domain and the dynamic characteristics of the office environment. The knowledge representation system KRS is used to represent knowledge in the office domain. On the one hand, domain knowledge involves static domain concepts including concrete concepts such as persons and communication-means and more abstract concepts like organisations and roles. On the other hand, it involves a range of office activities which operate on these static domain concepts. In general, two categories of activities can be distinguished: primitive actions which directly operate on the office environment like 'send letter' or 'archive document' and higher level conceptual tasks like 'plan a trip' or 'order a book'. The execution of actions and the translation of tasks into actions must be controlled within the IWS. For this purpose, special office formalisms such as agendas, monitors and a unification mechanism were designed and implemented on top of KRS. The paper presents these office formalisms and illustrates their functionality with the description of a prototype knowledge-based office assistant and with some worked out examples of typical office-tasks.