THE ANSWER GARDEN

(See the file COPYRIGHT for copyright and trademark information.)

This is prototype software for a help/consulting system called Answer
Garden.  There is a description of the purpose of Answer Garden in the
Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Office Information Systems, 1990.
I will be happy to send you a copy of this or later research papers if
you email me at the address below.  Below is a very short description:

   Answer Garden allows groups to develop databases of commonly asked
   questions that grow "organically" as new questions arise and are
   answered.  It is designed to help in situations (such as field service
   organizations and customer "hot lines") where there is a continuing
   stream of questions, many of which occur over and over, but some of
   which the group has never seen before.  The system includes a
   branching network of diagnostic questions, as well as facilities for
   other retrieval engines, to help users find the answers they want.  If
   the answer is not present, the system automatically sends the question
   to the appropriate expert, and the expert returns the answer as well
   as inserts it into the branching network.  Thus, the information
   database of answers and diagnostic questions grows over time.  Experts
   can also modify this network and database in response to users'
   problems.

Answer Garden has been tested extensively on Decstations, Sparcs, and
Sun 3s.  It has been built and run on Vaxen, IBM PC-RTs, Sonys, and some
Encore flavors.  The Sonys are System V machines.  If you port Answer
Garden to a new machine, please let me know.

*NOTE*:  For the MIT contrib tape,this is version .79.  It is 
well past beta stage in terms of code maturity - but it is missing:

	- a full database.  I am releasing only a sample
	  database in this round.  It is missing, for example,
	  the Frequently Asked Questions from xpert.  Contact 
	  me if you wish to become a research site or for later
	  releases.  
	- the surrounding programs.  There is a suite
	  of authoring/design agents and information
	  retrieval engines that are not ready for
	  prime time yet (hence this being release .79).
        - a real connection to experts.  For research sites,
	  I have experts standing by (actually sitting by)
	  to answer questions.  This release does *not*
	  have real mail addresses for these global addresses. 
          If you are interested in being a research site,
	  please contact me.

In addition, the filenames for the information database have been
changed to fit some OS' filename length limitations.

*NOTE*:  I will be releasing later version of the software and
the database to the net.  I am placing this version here mostly
for people who do not have access to the net.  If you want to know
about later releases, please send mail to 

	ag@xv.mit.edu



You need to do 3 things to install AnswerGarden besides make'ing it:

1.  Change the resource file (called AnswerGarden) in the following
	ways:

   a.  You should change the AnswerGarden*Directory resource in
   the AnswerGarden resources file (called AnswerGarden) to be
   the correct address of the information files.  This needs to
   be an absolute address, and I will be happy to take
   suggestions on a less crufty way of doing this.
   
   b.  You should point the AnswerGarden*StatisticsFile
   resource in the Answer Garden resources file to be the
   correct address of the statistics file that will be saved.
   
   c.  You should change the AnswerGarden*mailerType resource
   in the AnswerGarden resources file to be one of the set {mh,
   binmail}.  I have set it to 'binmail' because that is faster
   to evoke than is mh.  You may need to change it if you don't
   run (for some reason) /bin/mail.  Capitalization doesn't
   matter on "mh" and "binmail".
   
   d.  In general, you should follow the directions in the
   AnswerGarden resource file.  There are instructions at the
   top of the file.

2.  You should check permissions on the files.  I always get them wrong.

3.  You will probably want to alias AG or ag to be similar to
the following shell script:

#
setenv XAPPLRESDIR /u2/ack/rel.75
/u2/ack/rel.75/ag

where /u2/ack/rel.75 is the location of both the binary and the AnswerGarden
resources file.  If you install the AnswerGarden resources file in 
/usr/lib/X11/app-defaults, you do not need to set the XAPPLRESDIR 
environment variable for users (hint, hint).

If there are any problems, send me email so I can correct these
instructions (and fix any problems).

Thanks

			Mark Ackerman
			("Ack")
			MIT/Center for Coordination Science 


