User talk:Jean-Philippe de Lespinay/La Maieutique

La Maieutique is the knowledge engineering method invented by Jean-Philippe de Lespinay in 1986. It showed its effectiveness the same year, producing the expert system Josephine (1000 rules and several external programs) which surprised the business world at the time. This software was developed by a former bank employee with virtually no knowledge of computing and Artificial Intelligence: Michel Le Séac'h, who reported this experience, and more, in a book. An industry first because at this time - as today in 2011 - development of experts systemes was a complex, long and expensive procedure requiring whole teams of IT specialists. Other innovation, Josephine dialogued with the end user on-premise. As it was installed in bank agencies to be available to clients, journalists could test it incognito, which leads to some bad articles in the press

It allows to program without computer training, developing in fact the program as an expert system, since it is easier to develop an expert system than a classical program, provided it has a reasoning engine (zeroth order engine). Any program is divided into three parts that must be programmed : an expertise (or a knowledge), [Data|data]] and human-machine interfaces.

There are user friendly]] tools in the market to manage data (Excel, SQL, online tools, etc.) and interfaces. The non computer scientist developer doesn't need to develop again that two parts. By cons, the expertise automation is a very difficult task in programming and, more, in software Maintenance|maintenance. Any method to accelerate these two phases is welcome. Precisely the collection of knowledge is the specialty of expert systems. By combining the knowledge automation with La Maieutique, an interface generator and a database tool, Jean-Philippe de Lespinay said he obtained the equivalent of a programming language. For him, La Maieutique was also a method of conventional program developing.

The process of La Maieutique is original because it does not ask experts to describe the knowledge to put in the program, they are generally not able. It asks them to tell "how they do" to solve the same problem that the program should do. This is very easy for them and produces decision trees in the expert language, representing his know-how. La Maieutique extracts from these trees the underlying knowledge and expresses it in the form of expert system rules,. With a reasoning engine, expert system is working from the generation of the first rule. Experts can thus control developing from the first minutes of their interview.

From 1986 to 1991, this method was manual. Developers drew the trees and extracted the rules. Josephine and Createst were developed like that. From 1991 with the birth of Maieutica, expert interview was guided by software, which itself drew trees, extracted rules and run the expert system, all in one operation. Hundreds of expert systems were developed in this way. The software produced was naturally conversational, asking the right questions at the right time what a classical program can not do. To integrate the expert system in a conventional application, it was necessary to produce interface with a standard interface generator or a computer language. To manage a database, it was necessary to use a database manager or a computer language.

In 2001, Maieutica was replaced by T. Rex (Tree Rules EXtractor), a software generator containing the needed interfaces to allow a not computer scientist to develop himself a program (as an expert systems), to integrate it in applications and to manage database by reasoning, all without programming language.