Yukari Shirota

Automatic generation of graphical user interfaces for interactive database applications

This paper presents a system that allows the automatic generation of graphical user interfaces (GUI) for interactive database applications. The system is intended for novice application developers with limited experience in the design and implementation of graphical user interfaces, and with only a basic understanding of the conceptual database schema. The main components of the system are an automatic screen layout generator and a visual specification language in which end-user requirements are described through the direct manipulation of an Entity-Relationship diagram of the database. The visual language provides a series of operators that enable the systematic transformation of the schema diagram into a seeond type of graph, termed application specification diagram, that defines the entities and relationships of interest. An interpreter translates these diagrams into textual descriptions of the application that are used as input to the automatic screen layout generator. This mechanism performs the widget selection and placement tasks associated with the design of the GUI. It also generates the code needed to materialize it.

Personalized digests of sports programs using intuitive retrieval and semantic analysis

Recently, digital broadcasting has experienced rapid growth. Digital broadcasting can deliver additional data as program attachments, which viewers can use to flexibly browse and retrieve parts of the program on their TV-receiving terminals. They can also make personalized digests from the broadcast TV programs. This function is particularly useful for viewers of sports programs because the digests reflect varied viewer preferences, such as favorite teams and players. This paper presents a method for making personalized digests for sports programs using additional data attachments.

Image database construction tools for RICOHBASE

There has been a rapid evolution in image processing technologies while at the same time the facilities/capabilities required/expected of image database systems have also increased. However, the variety of image peripherals and the differences between their data formats make system integration and extension difficult. To overcome this problem, a set of image database construction tools called IMAZONE was developed. A description is presented of IMAZONE and its underlying database management system RICOHBASE.<<ETX>>

Dynamic color allocation method for color-mapped displays

A script language, called Kasuga Script, for writing image application programs which can dynamically manage colormaps easily is presented. The target GUI environment is the X Window System. First, the Kasuga Image Handling System as an object-oriented language, using Kasuga Script widgets and other object classes is discussed. Then, Kasuga Script colormapping, using two types of colormaps, shows how to handle display images changing dynamically. Finally, the dynamic allocation of color cells and the Kasuga Script grammar is discussed. This Script and its colormap management methods promise to greatly ease program writing difficulties and reduce program costs.

A New Type of Fourth Generation Language for Multimedia Databases: Kasuga Script

Creating a high-quality multimedia database application is a complex and labor-intensive process. This problem has become especially acute with the advent of contemporary multimedia systems that have become large and powerful at the expense of programming ease and program maintenance Using traditional relational database fourth generation languages (4GLs), users cannot effectively develop the multimedia database applications of today. Therefore a new type of 4GL is required. In the paper, we introduce a multimedia database application development script called Kasuga Script, which our group has developed from scratch. To help users write applications in Kasuga Script, Kasuga Script offers object classes, both navigational and declarative query functionality, tags, transvalue, and operation process.

AVITAL, a private teaching system by FAX communication

AVITAL is a private teaching system by FAX communication. The database management system is the most important component in the integrated AVITAL system. Integrating diverse and complex operations requires that data be shared across components where multiple users and application processes concurrently manipulate the databases. AVITALs data transmission facilities include automatic FAX transmission according to scheduling data and automatic image recognition by bar code. AVITAL has significantly reduced manual operations and processing time.<<ETX>>

Action Propagation Model for User Interface Programs

In this chapter, we introduce a user interface specification method and define a mathematical model to represent action dependencies that occur on the user interfaces. In spreadsheets, cascades from initiated actions occur and dependent cells and graphical displays are automatically changed. Process constraint retention capability is facilitated in several intelligent CAD systems: Thinglab,(2) Juno,(4) Animus,(3) and GRAFLOG,(5) where user-defined relationships among cells and graphical elements including icons are maintained following value changes. We call such automatic recalculation facilities collectively “action propagation.” The specification method we proposed in Refs. 6 and 7 allows nonprogrammers to specify such action propagations. The purpose of the chapter is to define a general model of the action propagations to analyze and optimize the dependencies of the generated code.