ISML: an interface specification meta-language

In this paper we present an abstract metaphor model situated within a model-based user interface framework. The inclusion of metaphors in graphical user interfaces is a well established, but mostly craft-based strategy to design. A substantial body of notations and tools can be found within the model-based user interface design literature, however an explicit treatment of metaphor and its mappings to other design views has yet to be addressed. We introduce the Interface Specification Meta-Language (ISML) framework and demonstrate its use in comparing the semantic and syntactic features of an interactive system. Challenges facing this research are outlined and further work proposed

Agent-Based Team Aiding in a Time Critical Task

In this paper we evaluate the effectiveness of agent-based aiding in support of a time-critical team-planning task for teams of both humans and heterogeneous software agents. The team task consists of human subjects playing the role of military commanders and cooperatively planning to move their respective units to a common rendezvous point, given time and resource constraints. The objective of the experiment was to compare the effectiveness of agent-based aiding for individual and team tasks as opposed to the baseline condition of manual route planning. There were two experimental conditions: the Aided condition, where a Route Planning Agent (RPA) finds a least cost plan between the start and rendezvous points for a given composition of force units; and the Baseline condition, where the commanders determine initial routes manually, and receive basic feedback about the route. We demonstrate that the Aided condition provides significantly better assistance for individual route planning and team-based re-planning

Towards an understanding of corporate web identity

No abstract available

Human computer interaction for international development: past present and future

Recent years have seen a burgeoning interest in research into the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in the context of developing regions, particularly into how such ICTs might be appropriately designed to meet the unique user and infrastructural requirements that we encounter in these cross-cultural environments. This emerging field, known to some as HCI4D, is the product of a diverse set of origins. As such, it can often be difficult to navigate prior work, and/or to piece together a broad picture of what the field looks like as a whole. In this paper, we aim to contextualize HCI4D—to give it some historical background, to review its existing literature spanning a number of research traditions, to discuss some of its key issues arising from the work done so far, and to suggest some major research objectives for the future

Geoscience after IT: Part J. Human requirements that shape the evolving geoscience information system

The geoscience record is constrained by the limitations of human thought and of the technology for handling information. IT can lead us away from the tyranny of older technology, but to find the right path, we need to understand our own limitations. Language, images, data and mathematical models, are tools for expressing and recording our ideas. Backed by intuition, they enable us to think in various modes, to build knowledge from information and create models as artificial views of a real world. Markup languages may accommodate more flexible and better connected records, and the object-oriented approach may help to match IT more closely to our thought processes

Reshaping dominant stories : a poststructuralist approach to online role play

Online role play is an increasingly popular teaching/learning technique in higher education (Wills & McDougall 2009) but there has been little research into ways a poststructuralist approach may be supported in this format. This paper describes two very different means of incorporating a poststructuralist approach into role plays in higher education to problematise dominant assumptions in the language and content of the subject matter. The first method was a series of interventions in a face-to-face role play in which medical students practised consultations with adolescent school students. The consultations were interrupted repeatedly with activities designed to interrogate assumptions and the school students acted as coaches to improve the medical students\u27 technique. Although this role play was performed face-to-face, some of its activities may be redeveloped to suit an online role-playing format. The second method was a feature of an online role play involving Middle-East politics and journalism students, in which daily online newspapers provided a reflecting and distorting mirror to the political events simulated by the politics students. Indications of ways in which the two methods produced changes in understanding were gathered using a mixture of qualitative and quantitative methods: questionnaires, focus groups, interviews, participant observation and analysis of online discussions and artefacts