Andrea Marcante

DESIGNING CUSTOMIZED AND TAILORABLE VISUAL INTERACTIVE SYSTEMS

This paper presents a novel participatory approach to the design of customized and tailorable visual interactive systems; it includes end users as domain experts in the design team. A design method is described which leads to two different visual specifications, one suitable for end users and the other suitable for software engineers. It is also shown how this second specification is directly mapped to the implementation architecture, based on XML technology. The discussion is supported by the description of an example in the mechanical engineering domain.

A multimodal interactive system to create and explore graph structures

This work introduces a multimodal interactive system to create, edit and explore graph structures through direct manipulation operations. The system being designed is based on audio-haptic interaction, supported by visual feedback. A star life design and development cycle was undertaken. The main design choices and early implementation and evaluation results are illustrated.

e-Document management in situated interactivity: the WIL approach

Complex organizations need to manage a large amount of information that their employees produce and use in the form of documents: therefore, information systems are adopted to access these documents in electronic format (e-documents) through Intranet or Internet. These documents are composed, organized and annotated in different ways according to the rules adopted by specific professional communities. Such rules reflect the different and peculiar culture and skills of the communities producing them. The large amount of information available today can be potentially accessed in real time. This has increased the need for syntactic and semantic characterization of documents and for tools that allow their effective access and exploitation on the Net, their easy retrieval and management, their annotation to adapt and personalize them on the base of users’ characteristics and diversities. This paper describes the approach adopted for the Web Indexing Language (WIL) system, a system conceived for supporting users interactivity during editing, indexing, and annotating e-documents on the basis of conventions adopted for their production and distribution. In particular, the approach capitalizes on the notion that the document layout reflects the relationships among the different semantic components of the document. The model and the architecture of the WIL system aim at improving e-document indexing, searching, editing and annotating, and at exploiting the description of the logical structure of the document itself to squeeze the information about the document content which are usually grasped by a reader at a glance.

Meta-design to face co-evolution and communication gaps between users and designers

The paper presents a meta-design approach to the design and development of interactive systems, which bridges the communication gaps arising among the members of an interdisciplinary design team including different experts: software engineers, human-computer interaction experts, end users as domain experts. Each experts is a stakeholder that proposes design solutions from her/his perspective. The approach, which relies on a novel model of Interaction and Co-Evolution processes, also supports co-evolution of users and systems.

Toward haptic mathematics: why and how

Understanding a mathematical concept, expressed in a written form, requires the exploration of the whole symbolic expression to recognize its component significant patterns as well as its overall structure. This exploration is difficult for visually impaired people whether the symbolic expression is materialized as an oral description or a Braille expression. The paper introduces the notion of Haptic Mathematics as a digital medium of thought and communication of mathematical concepts that adopts the nomenclature and language of Mathematics and makes its expressions perceptible as sets of haptic signals. As a first step toward Haptic Mathematics, the paper presents a system adopting an audio-haptic interaction whose goal is to enable visual impaired or blind people to reason on graph structures and communicate their reasoning with sighted people. The paper describes a first system prototype and some preliminary usability results aimed at evaluating the effectiveness of the proposal.

A Design Methodology for Multimodal Interactive Systems: A Pragmatical Approach

A methodology is described to design and generate virtual environments that a) support the activities of practitioners skilled with the experimental knowledge of their specific domain; b) offer multimodal interaction styles customized to the culture and skills of the target community of practitioners; c) are tailorable, customizable and adaptive to the context of activity; d) support the exchange of information among users of different communities; e) support the gathering of usability data from the field and from the designers work. The methodology is based on a network of software shaping workshops for designing and developing multimodal interactive systems. Each workshop can be customized to and tailorable by the members of a community according to their performing task. In the methodologypsilas perspective, each member of the design team (software engineers, HCI experts and domain-experts) is provided with an appropriate workshop, a virtual environment which can be accessed both from desktop and mobile devices and allows workers to manage and share a knowledge repository. The implemented workshops are described using an XML-based language, which permits the functional specification of e-documents: this specification is materialized in different ways and with different languages (SVG, HTML) according to the device in use. The network of workshops which is at the base of the methodology, has been developed following a pragmatical path through different specific pilot domains which suggested functionalities to be added step by step.

Multimodal interactive systems to manage networked human work

This paper proposes a holistic approach to enhance human knowledge in distributed and strictly linked contexts Current semantic web technologies focus their attention only on the machine side of the interaction process Our approach considers both the human and the machine working together to accomplish a task, stressing the importance of adapting data, tools and interactions to the different skills, contexts and tasks of the users Multimodal interactive systems based on Semantic Web technologies support the sharing of knowledge among co-workers in different real networked environments We present a scenario in the building sector, in which mobile systems are needed to reduce loosing of information on technical drawings from the building yard to the office The paper presents a specification method and its link to semantic web technologies to satisfy the emerging requirements.