Telesis "...an ancient Greek word signifying the achievement of a steady progress towards an objective through careful planning & the intelligent use of resources"
The SEEL Onshore Engineering Programme - the role of EDS
Expert dialogue systems (EDS) are a type of user interface for expert systems. The user can manage the system by responding to questions or providing instructions.
Expert Dialogue Systems
EDS have to be designed with care to ensure coherence between the user's perceptions and understanding of the logic involved as a transparent reflection of what the system is doing.
As part of an economic development initiative called the "Onshore Engineering Programme", EDS has become an important component in reclaiming employment opportunities lost to offshore "call centres" associated with a significant reduction in set up and operational costs of services.
Expert Systems
Expert systems are information systems which automate decision analysis applied to a specific domain. Normally the domain has an established fund of knowledge such as medicine, agriculture, engineering design. These domains have well-established procedures to arriving at decisions such as a cilinical analysis of a patient and a review of symptoms can provide a diagnosis of a medical condition with a high likelihood that the diagnosis is correct. Based upon this diagnoisis, and according to the age, sex and other factors concerning the patient, a medical practitioner can prescribe a specific treatment. All of these diagnostic steps can be built into the logic of an expert system which a medical practitioner can use to arrive at a conclusion. In many cases, especially for an experienced practitioner, the expert system might not be needed. However, expert systems are useful when a doctor encounters a rare condition or where patients are screened by inexperienced doctors or less-qualified technicians.
The user interface of expert systems is often a dialogue which asks a sequence of questions set out within a decision tree. At each node a response might have several optional answers which can be presented as a drop down list. In the case of multi-factor clinical analysis an expert analyser can provide "indications" as to a range of conditions which might create the profile of clinical measurements observed. In this case there is no interaction with a user to arive at this preliminary conclusion but this conclusion is based upon the body of knowledge of the domain based upon medical clinical statistics.
There is an increasing range of expert systems which are embedded as subprograms in larger programs so as to create a sailsafe mode of operation. In such cases expert systems as subcomponents take over the control of a program or feed back decision instructions when unexpected circumstances arise. If the situation is serious the expert system can initiate a complex process of contacting key people with details of what is happening accompanied by advice on the best non-system procedures for recovery. The same systems can enforce a "graceful shutdown" of a failing system whose basic set of instructions are inappropriate to the evolving real situation.
