Computer animation data management: Review of evolution phases and emerging issues

The computer animation industry has been booming and prospering in recent thirty years. One of the significant changes faced by this industry is the evolution of computer-animation data and, yet, extant literature has offered very little insights into the evolution process and management issues pertinent to computer-animation data. Hence, many questions have surfaced in the extant literature of computer-animation data management. For example, to what extent has the data content expanded in terms of quantity and quality? To what extent has the information technology used to store and process the data changed? To what extent have the user and the community groups diversified in terms of their nature and number? Knowledge pertaining to these issues can provide new research directions to academics and also insights to practitioners for more effective and innovative management of computer-animation data. This conceptual paper, therefore, takes the pioneering step to address these issues by proposing four factors prudent for examining the evolution phases associated with computer-animation data management: technology, content, users, and community. Next, this paper presents a conceptual framework illustrating the inter-dependent relationships between these four factors together with associated theoretical and managerial issues. This paper, albeit limited by its conceptual nature, advances the extant literature of computer animation, information system, and open-product model

Software maintenance: redocumentation of existing Cobol systems using hypertext technology

One of the major problems associated with the maintenance of existing software systems is their lack of documentation. This can make very large, poorly structured programs very difficult to maintain. Nearly all traditional documentation tools are either designed for use in the development stage of the software lifecycle or are report generators such as cross reference generators. The problems of lack of documentation are compounded when applied to third party software maintenance as the staffs are often initially unfamiliar with the code they are maintaining. This thesis describes these problems in detail and evaluates the feasibility of a tool to help with redocumentation based on current hypertext technology

Surface interaction : separating direct manipulation interfaces from their applications.

To promote both quality and economy in the production of applications and their interactive interfaces, it is desirable to delay their mutual binding. The later the binding, the more separable the interface from its application. An ideally separated interface can factor tasks from a range of applications, can provide a level of independence from hardware I/O devices, and can be responsive to end-user requirements. Current interface systems base their separation on two different abstractions. In linguistic architectures, for example User Interface Management Systems in the Seeheim model, the dialogue or syntax of interaction is abstracted in a separate notation. In agent architectures like Toolkits, interactive devices, at various levels of complexity, are abstracted into a class or call hierarchy. This Thesis identifies an essential feature of the popular notion of direct manipulation: directness requires that the same object be used both for output and input. In practice this compromises the separation of both dialogue and devices. In addition, dialogue cannot usefully be abstracted from its application functionality, while device abstraction reduces the designer's expressive control by binding presentation style to application semantics. This Thesis proposes an alternative separation, based on the abstraction of the medium of interaction, together with a dedicated user agent which allows direct manipulation of the medium. This interactive medium is called the surface. The Thesis proposes two new models for the surface, the first of which has been implemented as Presenter, the second of which is an ideal design permitting document quality interfaces. The major contribution of the Thesis is a precise specification of an architecture (UMA), whereby a separated surface can preserve directness without binding in application semantics, and at the same time an application can express its semantics on the surface without needing to manage all the details of interaction. Thus UMA partitions interaction into Surface Interaction, and deep interaction. Surface Interaction factors a large portion of the task of maintaining a highly manipulable interface, and brings the roles of user and application designer closer