Providing end-user facilities to simplify ontology-driven web application authoring

This is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in Interacting with Computers. 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. A definitive version was subsequently published in Interacting with Computers, Interacting with Computers 17, 4 (2007) DOI: 10.1016/j.intcom.2007.01.006Generally speaking, emerging web-based technologies are mostly intended for professional developers. They pay poor attention to users who have no programming abilities but need to customize software applications. At some point, such needs force end-users to act as designers in various aspects of software authoring and development. Every day, more new computing-related professionals attempt to create and modify existing applications in order to customize web-based artifacts that will help them carry out their daily tasks. In general they are domain experts rather than skilled software designers, and new authoring mechanisms are needed in order that they can accomplish their tasks properly. The work we present is an effort to supply end-users with easy mechanisms for authoring web-based applications. To complement this effort, we present a user study showing that it is possible to carry out a trade-off between expressiveness and ease of use in order to provide end-users with authoring facilities.The work reported in this paper is being partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology (MCyT), projects TIN2005-06885 and TSI2005-08225-C07-06

An integrated approach to preparing, publishing, presenting and preserving theses

[Abstract]: This paper describes progress on a project funded by the Australian government to create Free software; the Integrated Content Environment for research and scholarship (ICE-RS). ICE-RS is a multi-faceted project which will add value to finished theses by making them available in both HTML and PDF, as well as providing a mechanism for packaging multimedia theses. The project will also concentrate on providing services for thesis production, with version control, automated backup and collaboration services. The paper begins with the established content management system that is the basis for the project, ICE-RS , originally developed to create courseware packages. ICE includes distributed, version controlled collaboration, using word processing software and works on multiple platforms, with standard document formats. We survey other approaches to content authoring and publishing for ETDs. We showcase exploratory work on integration of the thesis writing process with Institutional Repository software including publishing theses in both PDF and HTML with preservation and descriptive metadata. The presentation will include demonstrations of thesis production at all stages of development from proposal to completion. In a more speculative vein, we will discuss opportunities for institutions to provide new levels of support for candidates via automated thesis “dashboard” progress reports, supervisor and examiner annotation and comment and support for copyright considerations as early as possible in the process

Mavo: Creating Interactive Data-Driven Web Applications by Authoring HTML

Many people can author static web pages with HTML and CSS but find it hard or impossible to program persistent, interactive web applications. We show that for a broad class of CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) applications, this gap can be bridged. Mavo extends the declarative syntax of HTML to describe Web applications that manage, store and transform data. Using Mavo, authors with basic HTML knowledge define complex data schemas implicitly as they design their HTML layout. They need only add a few attributes and expressions to their HTML elements to transform their static design into a persistent, data-driven web application whose data can be edited by direct manipulation of the content in the browser. We evaluated Mavo with 20 users who marked up static designs---some provided by us, some their own creation---to transform them into fully functional web applications. Even users with no programming experience were able to quickly craft Mavo applications

Intelligent assistance in authoring dynamically generated Web interfaces

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11280-008-0043-3Since its emergence in the early 1990s, the WWW has become not only an information system of unprecedented size, but a universal platform for the development of services and applications. However, most of the advances in web technologies are intended for professional developers, paying poor attention to end-users with no programming abilities but with explicit needs of creating and customizing web-based presentations. This provides a strong motivation for end-users to act as designers at some point, leading to an emerging role of new computing-related professionals to be considered. This paper is an effort to leverage such difficulties by providing intelligent mechanism to assist end-users in web-based authoring tasks. To carry out such a challenge, intelligent user-monitoring techniques are exploited to obtain high-level information that will be used to infer the user’s preferences and assist him throughout the interaction. Furthermore, we report on how iteration patterns can be applied to avoid repetitive tasks that are automatically carried out on behalf of the user. In order to bring off a feasible trade-off between expressivity and ease of use, a user experiment to obtain the user’s perception and evaluate the hit-rate of our system is also presented.The work reported in this paper is being partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology (MCyT), project number TSI2005-08225-C07-0

An End-User Development Perspective on State-of-the-Art Web Development Tools

We reviewed and analyzed nine commercially available web development tools from the perspective of suitability for end-user development to compare and contrast alternative and best-of-breed approaches for particular problem areas within web application development (Getting Started, Workflow, Level of Abstraction, Layout, Database, Application Logic, Testing and Debugging, Learning and Scaling, Security, Collaboration, and Deployment). End-user development involves the creation of dynamic websites with support for features like authentication, conditional display, and searching/sorting by casual web developers who have some experience creating static websites but little or no programming knowledge. We found that current tools do not lack functionality, but rather have a variety of problems in ease of use for end users who are nonprogrammers. In particular, while many tools offer wizards and other features designed to facilitate specific aspects of end-user development, none of the tools that we reviewed supports a holistic approach to web application development. We discuss the implications of these problems and conclude with recommendations for the design of improved web development tools that would lower the entry barrier into web programming