Model Driven Ecological Interface Creation: The Constraints Model

An ecological interface (EI) consists in a user interface (UI) displaying the constraints of a specific environment in order to support a user’s decision-making process. The design gap problem can be decomposed in three broad categories: incomplete process description, confusing and lacking representations, lack of integration with a software internal structure. In order to address these problems, a model driven engineering approach is applied to the EI creation process, resulting in a model driven EI creation method. One component of this method is the constraints model. This paper presents both the abstract and concrete syntaxes of its modeling language. The abstract syntax enables a more formal definition of EI concepts for which the EI literature does not offer an operational definition making their translation into software components difficult. While many application of domain specific modeling (DSM) emphasize an increase in productivity, this application shows that DSM efforts enable a better understanding of an ill-defined domain.