Affiliations: Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya, Departament de Estadística, E.T.S.E.I.B., Avda. Diagonal 647, 08028 Barcelona, SPAIN, E-mail: sangi@sunrai.upc.es
Note: [] FOCUS, “Front Ends for Open and Closed User Systems” is an ESPRIT II project N. 2620 partially funded by the EEC through ESPRIT II (project 2620) and by the CICYT (Spanish Government, TIC 880643).
Abstract: 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.
Keywords: Knowledge-Based Systems, Intelligent interfaces, User interfaces, Front Ends, User system
