Abstract

By studying several cases of expert systems' use, a variety of difficulties were identified as directly depending on specific characteristics of experts and their tasks. This concerns more than the questions: “May experts be replaced by machines?” or “Is experts' knowledge explicable?”. The organisational structure of their work as well as the cyclic, non-plannable way of their task performing have further relevance. The paper introduces the concept of experts' systems to deal with diversities of their expertise and complexities of their work. It draws a distinction between non-monotonic problem solving, exploration, medium and modification, and argues that these modes are not reducible to yet another improved input/output strategy or dialogue style but introduce additional functions supporting the human-computer interaction according to experts' needs. In the first few sections, the paper covers the theoretical and empirical results of our research, whereas Section 4 introduces our design suggestions for experts' systems