The story so far
(click on the links to see a screen dump of the appropriate view)

We have achieved a great deal in Release 1. We have developed two web-based interfaces in PHP - an operator interface and an administrator interface. The operator has an easy to use interface designed to allow quick searching of and adding to the knowledge base. The administrator has the added functionality of being able to delete topics and questions.

The PHP interfaces call C functions to provide most dynamic elements of the interfaces, and also to provide all the connectivity to the database.

The PostgreSQL database contains three tables - User, Topic and Question. The User table is not utilized in this release. The Topic table stores the names and descriptions of topics. The Question table stores question names, descriptions, answers, parent answer, attached help and other relevant attributes.

Within our C code we have developed a general tree structure. Each tree node has one parent node (unless it's a root node) and can have multiple children. This tree structure is used to store the questions and their associated topics. The topic and question trees are displayed on both interfaces for user's convenience. In the interfaces, the user is able to expand nodes to view child nodes. The user can select a particular node and then edit its attributes or add child nodes to it.

The keyword extractor in Release 1 is reasonably simple as it does not utilize any AI techniques. The extractor separates sentences into a list of words and extracts those keywords that are not part of the "garbage" dictionary. The "garbage" dictionary contains words such as "at", "the", "I" and so on.

Release 1 interfaces make good use of the keyword extractor as they have two separate searching functions. First of all, the user is able to search for topics (based on topic names) within his chosen knowledge domain. Secondly, the user is able to search for questions within a chosen topic or within all topics.

The interfaces provide the user with full control over their developed help desk system. Users can add or edit (and remove if they are an administrator) topics. The same applies to questions, they can be added, edited or removed. Once all questions and solutions for a particular problem have been recorded, the user is able to go through any given solution path they desire. This way, the user can check the correctness of the system.