ABSTRACT
One of the central goals of the Assisting Computer (AC) research program carried out at GMD’s Institute of Applied Information Technology over recent years was to break ground for computer systems that realized a new division of labor between human and machine. To reach this goal, work in the AC program has identified a number of properties or capabilities that computerized assistants should possess so they can effectively cooperate with humans. The central principle of the balanced cooperative modeling paradigm, and thus the central idea behind MOBAL’s assistance services, is the idea of balanced cooperation, that is, for every kind of knowledge source that can be entered by the user, there should be system components that are capable of a working on this kind of knowledge and if possible, capable of automatically generating and revising this kind of a knowledge.
