Parlepraatje 9 april 2001, 15:45, room 2126

Speaker: Boris van Schooten

Title: specifying multimodal and multiagent user interfaces using
entity-relationship models

Abstract:

This talk describes part of my Ph.D. work on user interface specification.  A
specification technique is proposed for specifying user interfaces with
complex structure and interaction, such as multimodal user interfaces and
(distributed) multi-user systems.  Such systems impose both difficult
usability constraints and technical constraints.

Though various specification languages for such systems exist, they often have
the following problem: either they are too abstract, i.e. too far away from
the full system being developed, or they show too much detail for some
specification purposes.

The proposed technique is an attempt to address this problem in the following
ways.  Firstly, it provides multiple specification languages with well-defined
interrelationships, and secondly, it provides specialized high-level
programming languages that map closely to the other specification languages.
Specifications are split into two levels: the configuration level
(representing system architecture) and the component level (representing the
behaviour of a component).  This should facilitate independent development of
the individual components and the system structure.

The technique is centred around entity-relationship (E/R) modelling.  This is
already a well-established technique for specifying application domain data,
with relational databases providing suitably high-level programming facilities
for implementing the E/R models.  As will be argued here, E/R modelling is
also an effective way to specify both the structure and state of the user
interface itself.  

A software toolkit has been developed that provides a database engine and
programming languages for use with the technique.  Applications built using
the toolkit may readily be used with the Web.  The technique is illustrated
with some examples and a demo.

http://wwwhome.cs.utwente.nl/~schooten/vetk/

(by the way, the talk will be given in English)