The European Journal on Artificial Intelligence

This paper describes the principles and motives underlying the work of ESPRIT II project 2620 - FOCUS (Front Ends for Open and Closed User Systems) which began in December 1988 and is expected to end after four years in December 1992. In this paper, we state the aim of the FOCUS project, explain the strands of investigation and describe the core element that has emerged from the research into design strategy- a separable, distributed architecture for Knowledge-Based Front Ends (KBFE's). The objective of FOCUS was to develop the tools and techniques that would aid the construction of KBFE's. These in turn would provide users of application software packages and libraries with enhanced interfaces and improved levels of co-operative assistance. The tools and techniques have been integrated into a general FOCUS architecture that has been used to develop several prototype applications.

Dr. Elshout is Professor of Experimental Psychology at the University of Amsterdam. His research is centered on intelligence and its relation to learning to solve problems and knowledge acquisition in science.