Dialogs as a Mechanism for Specifying Adaptive Interaction in Database Application Design 1 Context and Motivation of This Work

The following paper illustrates my ongoing research on the design of adaptive interaction (dialogs) in the context of database applications. I propose a separation between content (focus) and presentation and the use of guidelines rather than explicit speciications in order to achieve adaptive dialog descriptions. The resulting design process is far more complex than that for static interaction. This research, therefore, is concerned with the formalisation and support of adaptive dialog design. Here, a model of dialog components and an outline of design issues are shown. The process of database application design ideally should unify design eeorts along certain, well distinguishable aspects. Our notion of application design as a many-facetted, yet cooperative design eeort consisting of schema design, view design, process design and dialog design is shown in Figure 1. It is our group's goal to provide a theoretical and practically applicable foundation for database application design in terms of each individual design aspect as well as of their integration and cooperation under the term of integrated codesign 7, 25]. This integrating view on application design so far has been vastly neglected. Even the understanding of the individual design aspects is quite heterogeneously developed. The static dimension of design is covered by the design of the global schema and of local views. Those structural aspects of application design are well understood and provided with a suucient theoretical background 2, 4]. When it comes to an application's dynamics as complementing the static design dimension, the various research on global behaviour aspects (function specii-cation) with regard to database applications is often lacking a unifying design methodology. What has been almost completely neglected are a profound insight into and a methodical approach to the speciication of local behaviour.