Providing Explanation for Different Classes of Users

There exist many companies where the employees are drawn from diierent backgrounds, for example an engineering company will employ engineers, physicists and management staa who must work together. The main problem which arises when trying to introduce an expert system into such a domain is that each class of employee (and potential user) has a diierent mental model of any given situation. This may be due to training (the diierence between the engineer and physicist) or because an employee is not trained in the domain and has some naive model (some member of management staa, for example). There are, therefore, two possibilities when introducing an expert system into such a domain: Create a large (and probably ineecient) expert system. Create a specialist expert system for one class of employee. This paper discusses a mechanism for allowing an expert system to be tailored to the diierent classes of employee who may use it | the viewpoint. Essentially a viewpoint is a way of looking at an underlying concept, allowing it to be presented diierently for diierent users. This allows one expert system to be created, which can provide explanation for diierent classes of user, by using diierent viewpoints on the knowledge base. This paper will describe the viewpoints mechanism, and show how it can be implemented. It will show how this allows the development of an eecient expert system which can cater for multiple classes of user and will also describe beneets for the single-user expert system.