A Notation and Framework for Dialog Flow Control in Web Applications

The usability of web applications today often suffers from the page-based medium’s lack of intrinsic support for hierarchical dialog sequences mirroring the parent-child relationships between dialog boxes in window-based user interfaces. For multi-channel applications, an additional challenge lies in reconciling the device-independent business logic with the device-specific interaction patterns necessitated by different clients’ input/output capabilities.We therefore present a graphical Dialog Flow Notation that allows the specification of nestable dialog sequences for different presentation channels. These specifications serve as input for a Dialog Control Framework that controls the dialog flows of complex web applications

Experiences with a dialog-driven process model for Web application development

We present a dialog-driven process model for the development of web-based applications that uses a graphical notation to model and iteratively refine the application’s dialog flow, and communicate with non-technical stakeholders in the development process. This way, the user interface can drive the design and implementation of the application logic and data model instead of being dictated by it. After an introduction of the underlying notation and dialog control framework, we present how these tools can support the phases of the development process and discuss experiences gained from the implementation of a web application that was built using this approach

A Dialog Flow Notation for Web-based Applications

Increasingly, client-server applications are implemented as web-based applications with user interfaces consisting entirely of web pages or equivalent renderings on other presentation channels (e.g. mobile or speech-based devices). However, the page-based medium and the stateless pull communication impose restrictions on the user interface that often manifest themselves in unsatisfactory dialog control, i.e. possibly severely diminished usability. We therefore present a Dialog Flow Notation that allows developers to encapsulate sequences of multiple dialog steps into reusable dialog modules that can be nested arbitrarily, and to specify different interaction patterns for different devices. The notation is complemented with a Dialog Control Framework that manages dialog flows on multiple channels, leaving only the tasks of implementing the device-independent application logic, designing the interface pages, and specifying the dialog flow to the developer

Staging Transformations for Multimodal Web Interaction Management

Multimodal interfaces are becoming increasingly ubiquitous with the advent of mobile devices, accessibility considerations, and novel software technologies that combine diverse interaction media. In addition to improving access and delivery capabilities, such interfaces enable flexible and personalized dialogs with websites, much like a conversation between humans. In this paper, we present a software framework for multimodal web interaction management that supports mixed-initiative dialogs between users and websites. A mixed-initiative dialog is one where the user and the website take turns changing the flow of interaction. The framework supports the functional specification and realization of such dialogs using staging transformations -- a theory for representing and reasoning about dialogs based on partial input. It supports multiple interaction interfaces, and offers sessioning, caching, and co-ordination functions through the use of an interaction manager. Two case studies are presented to illustrate the promise of this approach.Comment: Describes framework and software architecture for multimodal web interaction managemen

Mobile Business Processes

Today’s global markets demand global processes. Increasingly, these processes are not only distributed, but also contain mobile aspects. We discuss two challenges brought about by these mobile business processes: Firstly, the need to specify the distribution of processes across several sites, and secondly, the need to specify the dialog flows of the applications implementing those processes on mobile devices. To remedy the first challenge, we give an overview of the Process Landscaping method with its support for refining processes across multiple abstraction layers and associating their activities and objects with distinguished locations. Next, we present a Dialog Flow Notation and Dialog Control Framework for the specification and management of complex hypertext-based dialog flows. These tools allow developers to build user interfaces for mobile client devices with different input/output capabilities, which all access the same application logic on a central server

Supporting user-oriented analysis for multi-view domain-specific visual languages

This is the post-print version of the final paper published in Information and Software Technology. The published article is available from the link below. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. Copyright @ 2008 Elsevier B.V.The integration of usable and flexible analysis support in modelling environments is a key success factor in Model-Driven Development. In this paradigm, models are the core asset from which code is automatically generated, and thus ensuring model correctness is a fundamental quality control activity. For this purpose, a common approach is to transform the system models into formal semantic domains for verification. However, if the analysis results are not shown in a proper way to the end-user (e.g. in terms of the original language) they may become useless. In this paper we present a novel DSVL called BaVeL that facilitates the flexible annotation of verification results obtained in semantic domains to different formats, including the context of the original language. BaVeL is used in combination with a consistency framework, providing support for all steps in a verification process: acquisition of additional input data, transformation of the system models into semantic domains, verification, and flexible annotation of analysis results. The approach has been validated analytically by the cognitive dimensions framework, and empirically by its implementation and application to several DSVLs. Here we present a case study of a notation in the area of Digital Libraries, where the analysis is performed by transformations into Petri nets and a process algebra.Spanish Ministry of Education and Science and MODUWEB

Beyond Control-Flow: Extending Business Process Configuration to Roles and Objects

A configurable process model is an integrated representation of multiple variants of a business process. It is designed to be individualized to meet a particular set of requirements. As such, configurable process models promote systematic reuse of proven or common practices. Existing notations for configurable process modeling focus on capturing tasks and control-flow dependencies, neglecting equally important aspects of business processes such as data flow, material flow and resource management. This paper fills this gap by proposing an integrated meta-model for configurable processes with advanced features for capturing resources involved in the performance of tasks (through task-role associations) as well as flow of data and physical artifacts (through task-object associations). Although embodied as an extension of a popular process modeling notation, namely EPC, the meta-model is defined in an abstract and formal manner to make it applicable to other notations

Fine-Grained Specification and Control of Data Flows in Web-based User Interfaces

When building process-intensive web applications, developers typically spend considerable effort on the exchange of specific data entities between specific web pages and operations under specific condi- tions, as called for by business requirements. Since the WWW infrastructure provides only very coarse data exchange mechanisms, we introduce a notation for the design of fine-grained conditional data flows between user interface components. These specifications can be interpreted by a data flow controller that automatically provides the data entities to the specified receivers at run-time, relieving developers of the need to implement user interface data flows manually