A User Interface Management System Generator

Much recent research has been focused on user interfaces. A major advance in interface design is the User Interface Management System (UIMS), which mediates between the application and the user. Our research has resulted in a conceptual framework for interaction which permits the design and implementation of a UIMS generator system. This system, called Graphical User Interface Development Environment or GUIDE, allows an interface designer to specify interactively the user interface for an application. The major issues addressed by this methodology are making interfaces implementable, modifiable and flexible, allowing for user variability, making interfaces consistent and allowing for application diversity within a user community. The underlying goal of GUIDE is that interface designers should be able to specify interfaces as broadly as is possible with a manually-coded system. The specific goals of GUIDE are: The designer need not write any interface code. Action routines are provided by the designer or application implementator which implement the actions or operations of the application system. Action routines may have parameters. The designer is able to specify multiple control paths based on the state of the system and a profile of the user. Inclusion of help and prompt messages is as easy as possible. GUIDE\u27s own interface may be generated with GUIDE. GUIDE goes beyond previous efforts in UIMS design in the full parameter specification provided in the interface for application actions, in the ability to reference application global items in the interface, and in the pervasiveness of conditions throughout the system. A parser is built into GUIDE to parse conditions and provide type-checking. The GUIDE framework describes interfaces in terms of three components: what the user sees of the application world (user-defined pictures and user-defined picture classes) what the user can do (tasks and tools) what happens when the user does something (actions and decisions) These three are combined to form contexts which describe the state of the interface at any time

An authoring tool for structuring and annotating on-line educational courses : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Computer Science at Massey University

This thesis studies the design and prototype implementation of a new web-based course authoring system for the Technology Integrated Learning Environment (TILE) project. The TILE authoring system edits the course structure and allows the author to annotate the course structure with meta-data. It makes extensive use of XML technology to communicate structured data across the Internet, as well as for both local and web-side databases. The Authoring tool is designed to support development by multiple authors and has check-in and check - out, as well as version control facilities. It also provides an interface for adopting other multimedia tools such as AudioGraph. The tool has an easy-to-use graphical user interface. The technical problems that have been solved in this project include issues such as cross-platform support, drag and drop functionality using JDK l.l.8, etc. System environments, such as relational database set up, XML database set up, Java swing set up in Mac also have been discussed. The authoring system interface analysis, database analysis and function analysis have been completed for the complete the system as specified. An intermediate system, designed to a reduced specification, has been implemented as a prototype and details of this system, which can work independently of the TILE delivery system, are included. The Full TILE authoring system including InstantDB database access also has been partially implemented. The prototype application has also has been tested on the PC platform

The development of user interface tools for the Computer Aided Prototyping System

The Computer Aided Prototyping System (CAPS) was created to rapidly prototype real-time systems in order to determine if the system requirements can be met early in the development cycle. CAPS consists of several software tools that automatically generate an executable Ada model of the proposed system from a given specification. This thesis describes the development of a user interface for CAPS. The user interface supports the design, modification and execution of the software prototype throughout the entire prototyping life cycle. It makes uses of X Windows and advanced windowing techniques and allows the user to run the tools concurrently. The user interface incorporates a separate tool interface which controls the interaction between CAPS tools and the user interface. The graphic editor uses advanced graphics capabilities to give the user more flexibility in editing a graphical representation of the prototype. It automatically produces a formal representation of the prototype to be used by the other tools in CAPS.http://archive.org/details/thedevelopmentof1094527568National Science FoundationNSWC (ID# CCR-8710737).Civilian, Naval Surface Warfare CenterApproved for public release; distribution is unlimited

Extending snBench to Support a Graphical Programming Interface for a Sensor Network Tasking Language (STEP)

The purpose of this project is the creation of a graphical "programming" interface for a sensor network tasking language called STEP. The graphical interface allows the user to specify a program execution graphically from an extensible pallet of functionalities and save the results as a properly formatted STEP file. Moreover, the software is able to load a file in STEP format and convert it into the corresponding graphical representation. During both phases a type-checker is running on the background to ensure that both the graphical representation and the STEP file are syntactically correct. This project has been motivated by the Sensorium project at Boston University. In this technical report we present the basic features of the software, the process that has been followed during the design and implementation. Finally, we describe the approach used to test and validate our software

NITELIGHT: A Graphical Tool for Semantic Query Construction

Query formulation is a key aspect of information retrieval, contributing to both the efficiency and usability of many semantic applications. A number of query languages, such as SPARQL, have been developed for the Semantic Web; however, there are, as yet, few tools to support end users with respect to the creation and editing of semantic queries. In this paper we introduce a graphical tool for semantic query construction (NITELIGHT) that is based on the SPARQL query language specification. The tool supports end users by providing a set of graphical notations that represent semantic query language constructs. This language provides a visual query language counterpart to SPARQL that we call vSPARQL. NITELIGHT also provides an interactive graphical editing environment that combines ontology navigation capabilities with graphical query visualization techniques. This paper describes the functionality and user interaction features of the NITELIGHT tool based on our work to date. We also present details of the vSPARQL constructs used to support the graphical representation of SPARQL queries