Bernhard Stüber
Das GERSHWIN-Konzept
Die Konzeption einer adaptiven planbasierten Hilfekomponente für Softwaresysteme
GERSHWIN – A concept of an adaptive help system for software systems

In spite of their advantages compared with conventional hypertext help systems, adaptive help systems are very rarely used in commercial software products. This is mainly due to the lack of a generally applicable concept for designing adaptive help systems and missing software tools which support the development of help systems based on such a concept.

GERSHWIN, a concept for the development of an adaptive help system, is presented as a solution to this problem. The research report describes a procedure for developing an adaptive help system and also provides a program library for implementing this procedure. The precondition for the implementation of the concept is access to the source code of the application which should embody an adaptive GERSHWIN help system. If a help system for the application already exists, it is replaced by the GERSHWIN help system. In addition to a visual plan editor for the development of a knowledgebase of plans, the GERSHWIN program library contains all the functions needed for plan recognition and visualization of the help information. The interface between the GERSHWIN help system and the application is based on just four functions in the GERSHWIN program library, thus making it easy to integrate in an application.

The GERSHWIN concept is the result of a cooperation between the GESIS-department Social Science Information Centre (GESIS-IZ), Bonn, and the University of Koblenz-Landau. The research report was accepted as a dissertation at the University of Koblenz-Landau.