Integrate the Exsys Corvid® Inference Engine with Adobe Flash

Adobe Flash has changed the way Web sites look, and now you can greatly enhance those sites to deliver the situation-specific advice and recommendations your Web site visitors' need. Corvid lets you create Web-enabled knowledge automation expert systems that use Flash for the end user interface. The powerful analytical power of Exsys Corvid can be combined with many graphic, animation and video capabilities to produce systems that are not just graphically beautiful, but beautiful and smart.

Adobe Flash is widely used to provide the sophisticated graphics, animation and complex user interaction that have become the standard in commercial web sites. However, trying to implement complex analysis or expert decision-making logic in Flash's underlying programming language, Action Script, is both very difficult to write and requires hard coding the logic into the system - a maintenance nightmare. Exsys Corvid is a well proven tool for describing the logic of complex decision-making tasks. Now the Exsys Corvid Servlet Runtime can be directly integrated with Flash applications putting the full analytical power of Corvid into the RIA interfaces Flash provides.

Corvid allows the development of the system logic to be independent of the Flash interface. Domain experts can describe the logic and process they use to solve a problem in the proven Exsys Corvid Development Tools without any knowledge of Flash. The Corvid Inference Engine running as a Java Servlet processes the logic and drives an end user interface that can be developed by Flash programmers. Systems can use one or more Flash SWF files to ask questions and send data to the Corvid servlet which sends back XML data. The XML data can contain information on the next question(s) to ask. The SWF file uses the XML data to present the next screen to the end user. This may be a matter of reconfiguring the screen from the current SWF, or it may involve calling another SWF file and passing it data. This process can be repeated as many times as needed, making it very easy to build highly interactive systems that emulate a conversation with an expert. At the end of a session, the returned XML will contain the results and recommendations of the system that can then be presented via the Flash interface.

Corvid's development interface makes it easy to integrate, enhance and maintain complex logic into systems, including support for multiple languages, independent from the design of the Flash end user interface. Existing Flash systems benefit by adding far more complex analytical and logical processing than is practical to do in Flash. In addition to the Flash interface, Corvid's other end user interface options are also available and the same system logic can be delivered via Java applets, HTML forms, standalone Java applications or Flash - whatever the situation calls for.

Exsys Corvid knowledge automation expert systems are ideal for customer support, pre-sales advice, CRM, tech support, regulatory compliance, web-site concierge systems and any other area where complex decision making knowledge needs to be delivered to end users in a way that emulates a conversation with a human expert to produce situation specific advice.

Corvid's documentation provides all of the Action Script commands needed to implement the interface, and they can easily be added to existing Flash applications that use Action Script 3. The Flash portion of a system can be designed with the standard Adobe Flash development tools that support Action Script 3.

Contact us today for a free Web conference. We'd be happy to discuss how Exsys Corvid can be integrated with Flash to provide practical, realistic solutions.

Full technical details of the Exsys / Adobe Flash Interface

Check out these Exsys Corvid / Flash systems

W.I.N.K. (What I Need to Know) - Exsys Web-site interactive concierge system. Exsys software has been used for an incredibly wide range of problem types, across many industries. This system asks a potential customer a few questions about their interests and builds a custom HTML page of information tailored to their needs, including case studies probabilistically selected to match their industry and interest area. Flash is used to drive an animated user interface that asks the questions.

Caribbean Vacation Advisor - This system asks the end user what activities are most important to them on their vacation, and uses the Corvid Inference Engine to probabilistically select the best Caribbean islands for them to visit.  Each island is described with the pros and cons based on their particular interests.  This system extensively uses Flash's ability to make interactive controls, presenting an attractive, easy-to-use interface for a complex advisory system, that can still run in a single window.

Simple Flash Samples - The following link demos a variety of simple Flash screens showing how the various graphical and rich media capabilities of Flash can be used to ask questions.  This system uses multiple Flash SWF files for different types of interfaces with data passed between them.  This system does not do any real analysis, but is aimed at showing some ways to ask questions with Flash.

Give it a try. Download the Evaluation version of Exsys Corvid and contact us for a temporary Corvid Servlet Runtime activation code that will let you integrate the systems you build with a Flash interface.