Reference: Puerta, A. R.; Eriksson, H.; Gennari, J. H.; & Musen, M. A. Beyond Data Models for Automated User Interface Generation. Knowledge Systems Laboratory, The University of Glasgow, 1993.
Abstract: Researchers in the area of automated design of user interfaces have shown that the layout of an interface can, in many cases, be generated from the application's data model using an intelligent program that applies design rules. The specification of interface behavior, however, has not been automated in the same manner, and is mostly a programmatic task. Mecano is a model-based user-interface development environment that extends the notion of automating interface design from data models. Mecano uses a domain model--a high-level knowledge representation that augments significantly the expressiveness of a data model-- to generate automatically both the static layout and the dynamic behavior of an interface. Mecano has been applied successfully to completely generate the layout and the dynamic behavior of relatively large and complex, domain-specific, form- and graph-based interfaces for medical applications and several other domains.
Notes: Updated June 1994.
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