Interaction design for domains that involve complex abstractions can present significant challenges. This problem is particularly acute in domains where users lack effective means to conceptualise and articulate relevant abstractions. In this thesis, we investigate the use of domain-specific conceptual metaphors to address the challenge of presenting complex abstractions, using tonal harmony as...

forthcomming 2005, Journal of Visual Languages and Computing (JVLC), prefinal draft, pls quote original 2 Abstract. The emergent interest in ontological and conceptual approaches to modeling route information results from new information technologies as well as from a multidisciplinary interest in spatial cognition. Linguistics investigates verbal route directions; cartography carries out resea...

Recent advances in molecular biology and computation have enabled evolutionary biologists to develop models that explicitly capture molecular structure. By including complex and realistic maps from genotypes to phenotypes, such models are yielding important new insights into evolutionary processes. In particular, computer simulations of evolving RNA structure have inspired a new conceptual fram...

A route map depicting a path from one location to another is a powerful tool for visualizing and communicating directions. However, it can be difficult for a computer to automatically render route maps that meet the four design goals of effective route maps: readability, clarity, completeness, and convenience. Achieving all of these goals requires trade-offs. We survey the cartography, graphic ...

Today’s technology has reached new heights that have not been fully implemented. One of the areas where technology has not yet reached its full potential is in education. This study examined the effects of concreteness of location names and contiguity of location names with textual information on learning from computer-based reference maps. The research was designed to be a 3 concreteness (conc...

Many of today's significant research challenges, such as resource management and environmental monitoring, depend upon capturing, analysing and representing dynamic geographic processes. The ability to recognize and track changes in complex physical systems is essential to developing an understanding of how these systems work (Yattaw, 1999). For thousands of years cartographers have been perfec...

Although there has been considerable computer-aided conceptual design research, most of the proposed approaches are domain-specific and can merely achieve conceptual design of energy flows-processing systems. Therefore, this research is devoted to the development of a general (i.e., domain-independent) and knowledge-based methodology that can search in a wide multi-disciplinary solution space f...