A User Interfase Management System for Expert Systems

Abstract

A user interface management system is presented with a new mechanism which reports keyin data completed to event handlers automatically. A problem has been that the user interface often costs much more man power to develop than the rest of the expert system. A user interface management system called UI Builder/UI Frame is developed to overcome this problem. UI Builder is a user interface development tool and UI Frame is a run-time support tool for the user interfaces developed by UI Builder. UI Frames are frames representing the user interface parts. UI Frame employes the mixed-initiative interaction mode, which consists of the program initiative mode and the user initiative mode. In the user initiative mode, user operations to the presented user interface are translated into messages to UI Frames, which invoke methods described to express corresponding actions to the operations. This translation makes user operation handling programs declarative, such as "when X is picked, execute Y." A new mechanism automatically sends messages to report input data in keyboard input fields at the time of switching from the user initiative mode to the program initiative mode. The mechanism enables highly modular program to handle key-in data and not to manage key-in field to read.