Explanation, trust, and transparency are concepts that are strongly associated with information systems. The ability to explain reasoning processes and results can substantially affect the usability and acceptance of a software system.

Within the field of knowledge-based
systems, explanations are considered
as an important link between humans and machines. There, their main purpose is to increase the confidence of the user in the system's result (persuasion) or the system as a whole (satisfaction), by providing evidence of how the solution was derived (transparency). Explanations are part of human understanding processes and part of most dialogues, and, therefore, need to be incorporated into system interactions to improve interactive decision-making processes and, thus, making such systems more robust and dependable.

As information systems grow more and more complex it becomes increasingly important for those systems to have advanced explanation capabilities.

This website documents the quest for explanation-awareness in the design and implementation of complex information processing systems.