The first ASK system ILS built was ASK Tom. It was a "proof of concept" system intended to demonstrate the value of video-based ASK systems. The idea was to record one expert so well that anything you might think to ask him would be readily available. Tom was an expert in bank trust consulting who gave us two days of his time, allowing us to build a fairly extensive system. But, alas, although Tom knew more than two days worth of stuff about banking, we were not able to get access to him again.
To test the idea of a solely text-based ASK system, we built ASK Michael, an ASK system totally constructed from an existing text. Business Week found that Michael Porter's Competitive Advantage of Nations was full of good stories, but that it did not hang together all that well as a book. Books are, after all, linear: one page follows another. However, because Michael Porter's book contains a series of stories connected in complex ways not readily captured in the linear form of the book, it was better presented as an ASK system.
Where am I in the content of the book?
