PROBLEM SOLVING SUPPORT BY THE MULTI-LAYER HYPERMEDIA MODEL

Hypermedia is a suitable tool to describe knowledge and to support the problem solving process. Hypermedia nodes contain information elements and links represent relations between them. The users of present electronic materials, however, cannot modify the contents of the materials and include their individual knowledge. A new hypertext model, called Multi-Layer Hypermedia Model (MLHM) was developed to support the manipulation of the presented knowledge. With applying this model, electronic materials can be created that express writer´s as well as user´s knowledge and support the problem solving process. When using HTML as the basic layer of the model, the hypermedia system can expand the usability of HTML based materials

Measuring Interaction Design before Building the System: a Model-Based Approach

Early prototyping of user interfaces is an established good practice in interactive system development. However, prototypes cover only some usage scenarios, and questions dealing with number of required steps, possible interaction paths or impact of possible user errors can be answered only for the specific scenarios and only after tedious manual inspection. We present a tool (MIGTool) that transforms models of the behavior of a user interface into a graph, upon which usage scenarios can be easily specified, and used by MIGTool to compute possible interaction paths. Metrics based on possible paths, with or without user navigation errors, can then be computed. For example, when analyzing four mail applications, we show that Gmail has 3 times more shortest routes, has twice more routes that include a single user error, has routes with 13\ufewer steps, but has also optimal routes with the smallest probability to be chosen. Without MIGTool, this kind of analysis could only be done after building some prototype of the system, and then only for specific scenarios by manually tracing user actions and relative changes to the screens. With MIGTool the exploration of suitability of a design with respect to different scenarios, or comparison of different design alternatives against a single scenario, can be done with just a partial specification of the user interface behavior. This is made possible by the ability to associate scenarios steps to required user actions as defined in the model, by an efficient strategy to identify complete execution traces that users can follow, and by computing a range of diverse metrics on these results

Second ECOOP Workshop on Precise Behavioral Semantics (with an Emphasis on OO Business Specifications)

Business specifications are essential to describe and understand businesses (and, in particular, business rules) independently of any computing systems used for their possible automation. They have to express this understanding in a clear, precise, and explicit way, in order to act as a common ground between business domain experts and software developers. They also provide the basis for reuse of concepts and constructs ("patterns") common to all - from finance to telecommunications -, or a large number of, businesses, and in doing so save intellectual effort, time and money. Moreover, these patterns substantially ease the elicitation and validation of business specifications during walkthroughs with business customers, and support separation of concerns using viewpoints.Comment: 21 pages, 0 figure