The formal definition of human/ machine communications

The specification of human/machine dialogues for general purpose terminals and special purpose consoles in a natural language is difficult and frequently leads to ambiguities and misinterpretations between terminal and dialogue constructors and users. In this paper, the problem of operator console definition is related to the problem of language and language translator definition. An efficient metalanguage tool (TBNF) for the handling of the latter problem is applied to the solution of the first problem. An example from the Telecontrol of a Power Network, being developed at ENHER (Barcelona, Spain), is described as an illustration.