Abstract
An international workshop on Distributed Expert-Based Information Systems (
DEBIS) was held at Rutgers University in March 1987. The aims of the workshop were to discuss problems and issues in the design of such systems, and to develop research and implementation strategies for them. The workshop attendees discussed both models and implementations of
DEBIS. A prototypical implementation operates on one or more workstations and connects an end-user to an information source after invoking multiple expert functions. The design of these functions depends in part on careful study of end-user and search intermediary behavior. Such studies suggest a dozen basic functions which must be incorporated in a
DEBIS. including ones to model the user, generate search strategies, and manage the interface. The favored methods of implementation use blackboards to simplify communications between functional modules. Two large systems, I
3R and CODER, have been developed which illustrate the complexity but also the feasibility of
DEBIS.