A development shell for cooperative problem-solving environments

The papers in this special issue were compiled from responses to the announcement in the July 1984 issue of the SIGART newsletter and notices posted over the ARPAnet The interest being shown in this area is reflected in the sixty papers received from over six countries About half the papers were received over the computer network

AI in engineering

Impulse-86 provides a general and extensible substrate upon which to construct a wide variety of interactive user interfaces for developing, maintaining, and using knowledge-based systems. The system is based on five major building blocks: Editor, Editor Window, PropertyDisplay, Menu, and Operations. These building blocks are interconnected via a uniform framework and each has a well-defined set of responsibilities in an interface.Customized interfaces can be designed by declaratively replacing some of the building blocks in existing Impulse-86 templates. Customization may involve a wide range of activities, ranging from simple override of default values or methods that control primitive operations (e.g., font selection), to override of more central Impulse-86 methods (e.g., template instantiation). Most customized interfaces require some code to be written—to handle domain-specific commands. However, in all cases, the Impulse-86 substrate provides considerable leverage by taking care of the low-level details of screen, mouse, and keyboard manipulation.Impulse-86 is implemented in Strobe, a language that provides object-oriented programming support for Lisp. This simplifies customization and extension.

Impulse-86: a substrate for object-oriented interface design

The Dipmeter Advisor system [11] attempts to emulate human expert performance in an important and specialized oil well-log interpretation task. The system is currently being used in a small number of Schlumberger Field Log Interpretation Centers as an aid to human dipmeter interpreters.In this paper, we describe the problem just enough to establish the vocabulary for discussing the program and the characteristics of the domain. We then present the internal structure of the program and attempt to put it in perspective with respect to first-generation expert systems. We discuss ways in which characteristics of the task domain impose constraints on the design or" signal interpretation programs, and attempt to extract knowledge useful to future expert system developers.

The design of the Dipmeter Advisor system

The user interface building blocks of any User Interface Management System (UIMS) have built-in assumptions about what information about application programs they need, and assumptions about how to get that information. The lack of a standard to represent this information leads to a proliferation of different assumptions by different building blocks, hampering changeability of the user interface and portability of applications to different sets of building blocks. This paper describes a formalism for specifying the information about applications needed by the user interface building blocks (i.e. the UIMS/Application interface) so that all building blocks share a common set of assumptions. The paper also describes a set of user interface building blocks specifically designed for these standard UIMS/Application interfaces. These building blocks can be used to produce a wide variety of user interfaces, and the interfaces can be changed without having to change the application program.

/pdf/standardizing-the-interface-between-applications-and-uim-s-4wc4fai1ma.pdf

Standardizing the interface between applications and UIM's

One of the problems that often faces the user of a large software system is a lack of uniformity or consistency in the user interface. Responses that elicit the desired system behavior in one context may fail completely in another— often accompanied by an obscure error message. As a result, the user may be well aware that the user interface is a disparate collection of programs written by different programmers, each with a different view on interface design. A related problem faces developers of an application intended to fit into an existing system. All too often they have to construct “system-tailored,” low-level user interface routines, usually without the benefit of the facilities and documentation available to the original system developers. This situation almost encourages the disorder and inconsistency that so often plagues an end user. We have adopted the view that these problems arise primarily when implicit knowledge about individual tasks is encoded in the user interface. What results is an unclear separation between actual computations involved in the execution of a task and data acquisitions (often from an end user) needed to execute a task. We have therefore experimented with a system design in which the user interface has a minimal a priori knowledge of individual tasks. The interface has facilities for acquiring data using interaction mechanisms relevant to a particular task domain but has no knowledge of any particular task in that domain. To effect this separation, we have used hierarchical, symbolic descriptions of computation of the type that has been applied in automatic programming, fault diagnosis, and digital hardware design. These descriptions incorporate a modular, object-oriented encapsulation of the information necessary to execute a task, an explicit representation of control and data flow, a formal description of the function, and the facilities for viewing computation at a number of levels of abstraction. Existing formalisms, however, have not been generated with the user interface in mind. Several types of input data information are usefully added for the purpose of structuring the user interface. For example, producing extensive descriptions of input data for the user interface has a two-fold result: the descriptions function as both constraints on the input data and as guidelines to the user interface concerning appropriate interaction mechanisms. The advantages of this approach to user interface design are:

Declarative Task Description as a User-Interface Structuring Mechanism

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Declarative Task Description as a User-Interface Structuring Mechanism