Supporting Organizational Problem Solving with a Work Station

Abstract

An approach to supporting work in the office is described. Using and extending ideas from the field of artificial intelligence (AI) we describe office work as a problem-solving activity. A knowledgeembedding language called OMEGA is used to embed knowledge of the organization into an office worker's work station in order to support the office worker in problem solving. A particular approach to reasoning about change and contradiction is discussed. This approach uses OMEGA's viewpoint mechanism, which is a general contradiction-handling facility. Unlike other knowledge representation systems, when a contradiction is reached the reasons for the contradiction can be analyzed by the deduction mechanism without having to resort to search mechanisms such as a backtracking. The viewpoint mechanism is the heart of the problem-solving support paradigm, a paradigm which supplements the classical AI view of problem solving. An example is presented in which OMEGA's facilities are used to support an office worker's problem-solving activities. The example illustrates the use of viewpoints and of OMEGA's capabilities to reason about its own reasoning processes. © 1983, ACM. All rights reserved.