An object-oriented user interface management system

Abstract

The George Washington User Interface Management System (GWUIMS) has been designed as a test bed for comparing user interface models, as a tool for rapidly prototyping highly interactive graphic user interfaces, and as a vehicle for investigating the applicability of knowledge-based technology to user interface design. The GWUIMS was designed and implemented using the object-oriented programming paradigm and consists of a variety of object classes representing different levels of abstraction, Responsibility for lexical, syntactic, and semantic levels of both input parsing and feedback are distributed throughout these classes. We include a description of the GWUIMS and a brief scenario to demonstrate its capabilities. A description of the implementation is followed by a discussion of the future application of knowledge representation techniques and the evolution towards an intelligent assistant for the user interface designer.