Chowdhury, G.G. (PhD)Fissaha, Sisay (PhD)Admassie, Tesfaye2020-06-232023-11-182020-06-232023-11-181997-05http://etd.aau.edu.et/handle/12345678/21812Information Technology (IT) has brought significant changes in the business world. The business community in Addis Ababa can get significant benefit from the appropriate use of IT. Integration of hypertext and expert systems technology has brought a new dimension to modern information retrieval, because it can help expert users in browsing and navigating while non-expert users can get an expert guidance to retrieve relevant information. Definition, components, historical developments of hypertext and its differences with conventional information retrieval systems have been discussed followed by a discussion on the expert systems technology. The benefits of integration of these two technologies have been discussed along with brief description of some software tools with particular reference to Knowledge Pro Addis Ababa Chamber of Commerce (AACC) provides trade information to its members. However, almost all the respondents in a survey underlined that their information requirements are not met by the existing facilities. This result is found to be statistically significant at any acceptable significance level (;(2,,)=878370, p=O.O). Information requirements of various business sectors have been identified. More than seventy percent of the business houses surveyed possess IT equipment ranging from fax, computers and communication facilities though computer usage is mostly related to word processing applications. Most respondents of the survey indicated their willingness to expand the IT facilities and were willing to pay for their required business information Design considerations of an integrated expert and hypertext business information system have been discussed and a quick prototyping approach has been used to develop a prototype business information system. Hardware and software requirements and the implementation issues have been discussed. The prototype system consisting of a hypertext database coupled with an expert user interface would improve the business information facilities in AACCenInformation ScienceThesis