Greetings,

I posted a message about old Pick Hits, ... , etc...

Little more detail:

I am looking for a software product that was written prior April 1986.
Trying
to help out a friend.

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/4835683.html

If you look at the diragrams, you can see we have been doing this very
eary
in the Pick community.

Abstract:

An expert information system with which a decision maker in the
construction, or a related industry, can generate a decision record
and related control instructions in a facile manner without
significant omissions while ensuring that substantially all of the
options available for making the decisions have been considered. The
expert system includes a microcomputer which executes a system control
program to select information units from the expertise of a data base
and to concentrate individual information units until an entire
decision record has been generated. The process is enhanced by a
multiwindowed display which displays possible selections from the
expert data base while contrasting that data with data in another
window having a list of data indicating the decisions or selections
already made. A display pointer with a controllable position is
employed to select lines and phrases of the expert information from
that portion of the data base displayed in the selection window. The
selection of such informaiton causes the line or phrase from the data
base, an information unit, to be transferred to the decision record
and to the display of the selected decisions window.

Thanks for all the help.

Hank, I'm confused. Maybe I just need more/less coffee. Are you
trying to find software that you were using a long time ago? Did you
write this software and you lost it? Are you looking for Pick Hits in
the hope of finding software that matches the patent, or was the code
you describe an implementation of the patent?

The application sounds remarkably similar to what these days is called
work-flow management. There are many applications built around WFM,
each allowing processes to be defined along with rules to enforce that
the processes are implemented. I recall one Canadian package that was
written for MV, but don't recall the name at the moment - I don't
think it's the one you're looking for (trying to ring a bell). There
are tools/utilities like InfoPath, a new component of Microsoft
Office. And there is Microsoft Project which is the management
component of a process that's already been defined by experts.

The intelligent aspects of the software you describe seems to require
artificial intelligence code. There are many products claiming to
include AI for business applications, and the US government (which
lacks both intelligence and the ability to make expert decisions)
occasionally releases code like this into the public domain (along
with some other fascinating algorithms and utilties).

HTH,
Tony

henryrj2003 (AT) yahoo (DOT) com (Hank) wrote: