An Information Presentation System

AIPS is a system for graphically presenting information. It promotes a high degree of interactivity between a user and a knowledge base or knowlege-based system, and is designed to be utmost domain independent and extensible. This paper describes the concept of an Information Presentation System (IPS), the intimate relationship between IPS goals and knowledge representation issues, and some of the architecture of AIPS. Interactive graphics is an indispensible technique for putting people in touch with a large knowledge base or knowledge-based system. Graphic output is the best way to communicate a substantial amount of information to a human user because it exploits the high-bandwidth human visual channel. Graphic input (i.e. user input which points at or otherwise indicates components of a graphic display) is an extremely economical way to describe something; it is much easier to designate an existing depiction than to generate some other descriptor. The descriptional economy of graphic input promotes a feeling of immediacy; the user has the sense of interacting directly with information rather than dealinq with an intermediary. For these reasons, interactive graphics can play an important role in larqe knowledge-based systems, whether at the interface to the end user or at the interface to the implementor or maintainer. That role is not diminished by progress in natural The views and conclusions contained in this paper are those of the authors and should not he interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency or the U. S. Government. language or even speech understanding. Graphics and natural language do not compete in terms of functionality; rather, they complement each other. A problem which limits the use of interactive graphics is the expense of implementing such interfaces. The composition of a graphic display involves a vast number of decisions ranging over issues of format, content, layout and style. Anyone who has prepared diagrams for a publication or a talk (even with the help of a skilled draftsman) understands something of the effort that goes into good graphic presentation. The tools ("graphics languages") commonly used for building interactive graphics address this problem only at its lowest level: displays must be described in terms of primitive elements such as points, lines and regions. In effect, interactive graphics is costly because the implementor is forced to assume the draftsman's drudgery. Additionally, the resulting interface is usually heavily involved with representational …