On the Pragmatics of Model-Based Design

The pragmatics of model-based design refers to the practical aspects of handling graphical system models. This encompasses a range of activities, such as editing, browsing or simulating models. We believe that the pragmatics of modeling deserves more attention than it has received so far. We also believe that there is the potential for significant productivity enhancements, using technology that is largely already available. A key enabler here is the capability to automatically and quickly compute the layout of a graphical model, which frees the designer from the burden of manual drawing. This capability also allows to compute customized view of a model on the fly, which offers new possibilities for interactive browsing and for simulation

Taming Graphical Modeling

Visual models help to understand complex systems. However, with the user interaction paradigms established today, activities such as creating, maintaining or browsing visual models can be very tedious. Valuable engineering time is wasted with archaic activities such as manual placement and routing of nodes and edges. This report presents an approach to enhance productivity by focusing on the pragmatics of model-based design. Our contribution is twofold: First, the concept of meta layout enables the synthesis of different diagrammatic views on graphical models. This modularly employs sophisticated layout algorithms, closing the gap between MDE and graph drawing theory. Second, a view management logic harnesses this auto layout to present customized views on models. These concepts have been implemented in the open source Kiel Integrated Environment for Layout Eclipse Rich Client (KIELER). Two applications---editing and simulation---illustrate how view management helps to increase developer productivity and tame model complexity

Research Articles in Simplified HTML: a Web-first format for HTML-based scholarly articles

Purpose. This paper introduces the Research Articles in Simplified HTML (or RASH), which is a Web-first format for writing HTML-based scholarly papers; it is accompanied by the RASH Framework, a set of tools for interacting with RASH-based articles. The paper also presents an evaluation that involved authors and reviewers of RASH articles submitted to the SAVE-SD 2015 and SAVE-SD 2016 workshops. Design. RASH has been developed aiming to: be easy to learn and use; share scholarly documents (and embedded semantic annotations) through the Web; support its adoption within the existing publishing workflow. Findings. The evaluation study confirmed that RASH is ready to be adopted in workshops, conferences, and journals and can be quickly learnt by researchers who are familiar with HTML. Research Limitations. The evaluation study also highlighted some issues in the adoption of RASH, and in general of HTML formats, especially by less technically savvy users. Moreover, additional tools are needed, e.g., for enabling additional conversions from/to existing formats such as OpenXML. Practical Implications. RASH (and its Framework) is another step towards enabling the definition of formal representations of the meaning of the content of an article, facilitating its automatic discovery, enabling its linking to semantically related articles, providing access to data within the article in actionable form, and allowing integration of data between papers. Social Implications. RASH addresses the intrinsic needs related to the various users of a scholarly article: researchers (focussing on its content), readers (experiencing new ways for browsing it), citizen scientists (reusing available data formally defined within it through semantic annotations), publishers (using the advantages of new technologies as envisioned by the Semantic Publishing movement). Value. RASH helps authors to focus on the organisation of their texts, supports them in the task of semantically enriching the content of articles, and leaves all the issues about validation, visualisation, conversion, and semantic data extraction to the various tools developed within its Framework

Presentation of XML content using WYSIWYG templates

XML has gained worldwide popularity for its ability to represent very general structured content. It is a platform independent format that has been successfully used for both media and more traditional textual data. However, the presentation of XML content has been an area of research ever since its introduction. We discuss the state of the art in XML content presentation, and then describe a new method for user designed transformation using WYSIWYG templates in HTML, that will allow users to design their own XML presentation format

A Semantics-based User Interface Model for Content Annotation, Authoring and Exploration

The Semantic Web and Linked Data movements with the aim of creating, publishing and interconnecting machine readable information have gained traction in the last years. However, the majority of information still is contained in and exchanged using unstructured documents, such as Web pages, text documents, images and videos. This can also not be expected to change, since text, images and videos are the natural way in which humans interact with information. Semantic structuring of content on the other hand provides a wide range of advantages compared to unstructured information. Semantically-enriched documents facilitate information search and retrieval, presentation, integration, reusability, interoperability and personalization. Looking at the life-cycle of semantic content on the Web of Data, we see quite some progress on the backend side in storing structured content or for linking data and schemata. Nevertheless, the currently least developed aspect of the semantic content life-cycle is from our point of view the user-friendly manual and semi-automatic creation of rich semantic content. In this thesis, we propose a semantics-based user interface model, which aims to reduce the complexity of underlying technologies for semantic enrichment of content by Web users. By surveying existing tools and approaches for semantic content authoring, we extracted a set of guidelines for designing efficient and effective semantic authoring user interfaces. We applied these guidelines to devise a semantics-based user interface model called WYSIWYM (What You See Is What You Mean) which enables integrated authoring, visualization and exploration of unstructured and (semi-)structured content. To assess the applicability of our proposed WYSIWYM model, we incorporated the model into four real-world use cases comprising two general and two domain-specific applications. These use cases address four aspects of the WYSIWYM implementation: 1) Its integration into existing user interfaces, 2) Utilizing it for lightweight text analytics to incentivize users, 3) Dealing with crowdsourcing of semi-structured e-learning content, 4) Incorporating it for authoring of semantic medical prescriptions