AUTOMATED FORMS PUBLISHING SYSTEM AND METHOD USING A RULE-BASED EXPERT SYSTEM TO DYNAMICALLY GENERATE A GRAPHICAL USER INTERFACE

摘要

A system and method includes a rule-based expert system that uses high level rules for determining what graphical interface features should be displayed to a user. The rules can be written in a language such as PROLOG and used in an inference engine to drive the graphical user interface. The rules can be changed without recoding and testing of computer software, and without specialized computer software knowledge. Consequently, people other than programmers can customize and change a graphical user interface easily and without errors. Certain embodiments include a scanner and related software that captures data fields from existing paper forms; a database for storing field definitions and their relationships together with rules for determining which user interface features to display at a particular point in a data entry sequence and an inference engine for executing the rules.