Technical Notes

FLUIDS favours a knowledge-based approach for the development of intelligent user interfaces for real-time decision support. The FLUIDS software environment offers the necessary means to enable an active participation of the domain experts during the process of application-specific knowledge engineering. Moreover, this support for declarative modeling is complemented by providing additional functionality to aid developers with remaining programming tasks, too. In FLUIDS , dedicated Artificial Intelligence programming languages (Lisp, Prolog) are employed to enable efficient and effective knowledge processing. In addition, the emerging Java technology is utilized as a common platform for more conventional programming tasks. Given its technical advantages, the Java framework will be able to play two important roles:

• The Abstract Window Toolkit (AWT) and the upcoming application programmer interfaces for sophisticated multimedia support provide the necessary source and target platform for coupling media-specific analyzers and generators with media objects.
• Java technology may serve as a powerful integration platform for the FLUIDS software environment in order to support modularization ($\leftarrow$ object-oriented, multi-threading), scalability ($\leftarrow$ distributable), openness ($\leftarrow$ connectivity), and to make the user interface operable over the Internet/Intranet ($\leftarrow$ platform-independent, applet technique).

The FLUIDS software end product can be regarded as a new generation of user interface development environment (UIDE) and user interface management system (UIMS). The complete development environment currently comprises the following software packages:

• Knowledge Structure Manager Environment, KSM v. 3.0
  - requires Sicstus Prolog v. 2.1.8 and Tcl/Tk v. 7.6/4.2
• Planner for intelligent multimedia dialog management, DFKI-Preplan v. 3.2
  - requires Allegro Common Lisp v. 4.3
• FLUIDS Java Class Libraries v. 1.0
  - requires Java Development Kit (JDK) v. 1.02
• FLUIDS On-line Documentation Preparation Toolkit v. 1.0
  - requires javadoc (JDK v. 1.02), Perl v. 5.0, and LaTeX2HTML v. 96.1g

In order to make the best use of the on-line documentation provided with the FLUIDS software environment a new generation WWW browser like Netscape Navigator v. 3.0 or Microsoft Explorer v. 3.0 is needed. The runtime version of a FLUIDS user interface management system currently requires Prolog, Lisp, and a Java interpreter compatibel with JDK v. 1.02.