THE CURRENT STATE OF HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERFACE TECHNOLOGIES FOR USE IN DAIRY-HERD MANAGEMENT

The current state of three human-computer interface areas was reviewed, and potential dairy herd management applications were proposed. Alternative input devices (e.g., touch-sensitive screens and speech recognition) can provide more intuitive communication with computers. Several user interface designs have been developed that narrow the dichotomy between ease of use and ease of learning. Information technologies can provide dairy herd managers with more complete and immediate access to management information for decision making: 1) natural language interfaces, which allow users to query a structured database to retrieve information; 2) full text retrieval systems, which retrieve pertinent passages from a collection of documents; and 3) hypertext, which is a means of linking related passages of text so that they can be browsed in a logical, nonlinear fashion. The third area of human-computer interface concerns methods of integrating decision support systems into a management workstation that could contain independent systems, systems integrated through a user interface manager, or systems integrated through an intelligent dialogue manager. Advances in human-computer interfaces, if incorporated into dairy management software, should significantly increase the use of computers for dairy management and improve the decisions made by dairy herd managers.