The Unified Modeling Language (UML) has been widely accepted by application developers, but not so much by user interface (UI) designers. For this reason, the Unified Modeling Language for Interactive Systems (UMLi) has been proposed to improve UML support for UI design. UMLi introduces a diagram notation for modeling UI presentation and extends activity diagram notation to describe collaborati...

User interfaces (UIs) are essential components of most software systems, and significantly affect the effectiveness of installed applications. In addition, UIs often represent a significant proportion of the code delivered by a development activity. However, despite this, there are no modelling languages and tools that support contract elaboration between UI developers and application developer...

User models (UM)the explicit representation of all relevant aspects of a user's preferences, beliefs, etc. form the basis of virtually all adaptive systems. While early approaches relied on explicit interviews to fill in the details of such a UM, more recent systems unobtrusively observe their users and automatically infer the contents of the UM. This reduces the workload for the user, but it...

Considering that there are many different syntactic and semantic theories, this article is concerned with entering enough information into a generic lexicon to provide each of these theories with what it needs to work. Providing information for different uses implies organizing that information into a hierarchy of pieces of information. The first part of the article is devoted to this question....

For intelligent interactive systems to communicate with humans in a natural manner, they must have knowledge about the system users. This paper explores the role of user modeling in such systems. It begins with a characterization of what a user model is and how it can be used. The types of information that a user model may be required to keep about a user are then identified and discussed. User...

The Unified Modeling Language (UML) can be used for modelling both the structure and behaviour of software applications. However, although UML supports many different modelling notations, minimal support is provided for user interface (UI) design. The Unified Modeling Language for Interactive Applications (UMLi) is an extension of UML that provides support for UI design. UMLi has a user interfa...

Modeling and simulation of processing plants are widely used in industry. Construction of a mathematical model for a plant is a time-consuming and error-prone task. In light of extensive advancements in computer science (both hardware and software), computers are becoming a necessary instrument in industrial activities. Many software tools for modeling, simulation and optimization of proces...

The move of constraint-based 3-D modeling into the mainstream of engineering design and manufacturing has been coupled with an increase of publishing activity in 3-D modeling instructional texts. Unfortunately, there is a lack of a clear overarching framework for teachers to understand what are the common themes which tie all of these different modeling tools together. This paper uses Shneiderm...

Variable structure refers to the ability of a system to dynamically change its structure according to different situations. It provides component-based modeling and simulation environments with powerful modeling capability and the flexibility to design and analyze complex systems. In this paper, we discuss variable structure, specifically the structure and interface change capability, in DEVS-b...

The incorporation of plastic and adaptive user-interfaces into the model-based paradigm requires a new, more flexible modeling formalism. Rather than modeling the user-interface as a set of static structures and mappings, the UI should be modeled as a set of design preferences. Preferences are frequently many-toone or many-to-many relationships that elude conventional UI modeling, which has lar...