Designing a Tool for Configuring an Intelligent and Flexible Web-Based System

Abstract

Several intelligent Web-based systems need complex reasoning mechanisms and problem solving capabilities in order to perform their tasks. These systems should protect their users against the complexity of their inference engine. Such a protection should be offered both to the final users and to the domain experts that instantiate the Web systems on the different particular domains. We claim that to this purpose an intermediate representation layer, with the role of filling the gap between the implementation-oriented view of the domain (needed by the reasoning module) and the human-oriented view of the same domain (suitable both for the final users and for the domain experts), is required. This intermediate layer also provides a representation which is independent from the specific reasoning approach adopted. In the paper we discuss these issues by referring to a specific example, i.e. the STAR system (a Web-based system which exploits a configuration engine to support the user in organizing a personalized tour) together with STAR-IT, a tool that supports the instantiation of STAR on different domains.