Turn a rule set into a question and answer session with our Questionnaire interface

The most natural way to communicate with and extract information from people is via a conversation.

Our new questionnaire interface to our web service is an exciting new way of generating question and answer interfaces.
We've integrated this in with our rule based systems. Now you can create rule sets that encapsulate knowledge and then automatically generate question and answer sessions from these rules.

Our web service works out which are the most pivotal input data values required to satisfy the rule sets created and ranks them in order. We call this measure of importance saliency.

Because Metarule asks the rule creator to specify the range and possible values associated with each input, the questionnaire interface can use this information to create a question from an input.
For instance if an input is categorical, the questionnaire displays the choices as a drop down list box containing all the categories defined. It will either automatically generate the question text, or you can specify this in the Metarule as an annotation.

The questionnaire interface displays the most salient questions first. As the user answers questions, any data inputs that have become redundant are removed from the list. 
So the questionnaire asks the most relevant questions first, and never asks any irrelevant questions.

So even with the most complicated rule sets, the questionnaire service asks the minimum number of questions to reach a result. You can define the number of questions asked at a time, from 1 to 10.

As soon as the questionnaire interface has enough information to satisfy the rule set, it will.
This can be used to return a predefined statement based on the outputs of the rule set or to trigger another activity. 
The questionnaire interface acts on processing maps, rather than rule sets, so that you can combine rule sets together to create knowledge structures of arbitrary complexity.

Our questionnaire is a unique way to offer advice, to establish entitlement, to filter or to route users, using the most familiar form-based interface.

Uniquely it separates the process of creating rules from concerns about how the rule set will be used. You need to worry only about representing the logic of your system as rules. The questionnaire service will do the intellectual gymnastics required to turn this into a sequence of questions.

Please note, in common with our other user interface components, you will need silverlight 2.0 installed to use it.