Issues of Representation in Conveying the Scope and Limitations of Intelligent Assistant Programs

Success of a knowledge-based program depends on both competence and acceptability. It must perform well for it to be worth using, but is must be acceptable to users for it to be used. There are many dimensions to developing competent and acceptable knowledge based systems which can serve as "intelligent assistants" for problem solvers in science (see Shortliffe and Davis, 1975). One of these is the old AI problem of representation of knowledge. Since most previous work on representation has stressed its importance for problem-solving (e.g.