There is an increasing request by organizations to allow people outside the IT department to create, shape and adapt the software artifacts they use as they do with real ones in their work practice. Moreover, organizations have recently become aware that they are part of a complex network of connections with partners, customers, and suppliers. This new consciousness has led them to the need for new ways to share their knowledge outside the organization borders. This paper capitalizes on the experience gained in the collaboration with a certification institution to propose a novel network of software environments, i.e., the Task Management System (TMS) network, and a web-service based architecture to support end users to exploit their knowledge and expertise in their daily work activities. In particular, the network allows the end users of an organization to design, execute, and check the execution of a workflow. The goal is not to automate the skills of the end users, but to assist them in their activity, permitting them to use the knowledge and expertise they possess. A prototype for the proposed architecture is currently under development, starting from the software environment dedicated to the design of workflows.

End-User Development (EUD) has traditionally been focusing on non-programmers tailoring or even creating software artifacts, often in organizational context. Some examples of successful EUD concepts include spreadsheet and word processing macros and the specification of e-mail filters by means of rules. Recent developments, such as Web 2.0 and Semantic Web, which enable end users to be contributors rather than just consumers of information on the WWW, have renewed interest in EUD research and applications. This trend is now moving from content and personalization to functionality in the direction of user-generated web services. Various on-going projects are already considering this new trend, but primarily from a technology perspective. The workshop aims at establishing a new forum for discussion and fruitful cross-fertilization of ideas among all the communities that can contribute to and benefit from allowing end users to generate web services: human-computer interaction, software engineering, artificial intelligence, computer-supported cooperative work and innovation management.

Understanding a mathematical concept, expressed in a written form, requires the exploration of the whole symbolic expression to recognize its component significant patterns as well as its overall structure. This exploration is difficult for visually impaired people whether the symbolic expression is materialized as an oral description or a Braille expression. The paper introduces the notion of Haptic Mathematics as a digital medium of thought and communication of mathematical concepts that adopts the nomenclature and language of Mathematics and makes its expressions perceptible as sets of haptic signals. As a first step toward Haptic Mathematics, the paper presents a system adopting an audio-haptic interaction whose goal is to enable visual impaired or blind people to reason on graph structures and communicate their reasoning with sighted people. The paper describes a first system prototype and some preliminary usability results aimed at evaluating the effectiveness of the proposal.

The ever increasing use of interactive software systems and the evolution of the World Wide Web into the so-called Web 2.0 determines the rise of new roles for users, who evolve from information consumers to information producers. The distinction between users and designers becomes fuzzy. Users are increasingly involved in the design and development of the tools they use, thus users and developers are not anymore two mutually exclusive groups of people. In this paper types of users that are between pure end users and software developers are analyzed. Some users take a very active role in shaping software tools to their needs, but they do it without being aware of programming, they are unwitting programmers who need appropriate development techniques and environments. A meta-design participatory approach for supporting unwitting end-user development through advanced visual systems is briefly discussed.

This paper presents a novel participatory approach to the design of customized and tailorable visual interactive systems; it includes end users as domain experts in the design team. A design method is described which leads to two different visual specifications, one suitable for end users and the other suitable for software engineers. It is also shown how this second specification is directly mapped to the implementation architecture, based on XML technology. The discussion is supported by the description of an example in the mechanical engineering domain.

This paper is the result of the clashing but fruitful collaboration of experts of two different cultures - Computer Science and Archaeology _ and reports on the design and development of the T.Arc.H.N.A System, a new system of accessibility towards Cultural Heritage of the Etruscan culture. The first important result of the collaboration is the rise of an interdisciplinary team of cultural operators, which emerged from the confrontation of the different experiences acquired in each proper field of common research. As a consequence of such a confrontation process, the team was in need of new tools of expression, and communication. An ontology was defined as a new medium for communication between Computer Scientists and Archeologists. New media to record the results of the archaeological researches were introduced to disseminate knowledge to a large public in a novel, context adaptive way. The setting of these media are the base for the implementation of the working seed of the T.Arc.H.N.A System. The paper presents this open and participatory system where different actors cooperate to create and disseminate knowledge about cultural assets.

This paper is about the development of systems whose end users are professional people working in a specific domain (e.g., medicine, geology, mechanical engineering); they are expert in that domain, but not necessarily expert in nor even conversant with computer science. In several work organizations, end users need to tailor their software systems to better adapt them to their requirements and even to create or modify software artifacts. These are end-user development activities and are the focus of this paper. A model of the interaction between users and systems, which also takes into account their reciprocal coevolution during system usage, is discussed. This model is used to define a methodology aimed at designing software environments that allow end users to become designers of their own tools. The methodology is illustrated by discussing two experimental cases.

Meta-design has been recently proposed as a technique for creating the socio-technical conditions empowering users to perform end-user development (EUD) activities. Current techniques and methodologies for designing interactive systems do not stress meta-design. In this paper, we show how the Software Shaping Workshop (SSW) methodology actually follows a meta-design approach in that the teams of designers, including end-user representatives, are supported in their reasoning on software design and development by software environments tailored to their needs, notations and experience.

Electronic document and electronic annotation evolve and complement the traditional document and annotation in recording, developing and making available community knowledge. This paper discusses electronic annotation and its importance as a tool for two way exchange of ideas among humans pursuing a common goal. The discussion is performed by presenting an example in the Earth science field.

This paper discusses a model-based approach to the design of complex interaction environments like virtual worlds, mixed and augmented reality. The environment a user interacts with is seen as a virtual environment populated by virtual entities, created and maintained active by a program interpreted by the computer, which can be described by specifying the behavior of the population. The specification of the behavior occurs along three dimensions; 1) programming languages to specify system computations; 2) user activity languages to specify user activities; 3) perceptual languages to deal with the physical characteristics of the messages from the machine to the user. These dimensions define an interaction modeling space which constitutes the frame in which the virtual environment is specified

Visual Languages for Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) are a good basis for the development of software environments to be used by professional people such as engineers, geologists, medical doctors, etc. The research we have conducted, along with the experience we have gained working with these people, has compelled us to develop software environments that not only are easier to learn and use, but also allow their users to tailor them to their own needs, and to even create or modify software artifacts. The design methodology that we have developed is refined in this paper, giving insights emerging from our recent experiences, and emphasizing how it supports human centric-computing and end-user development.

This paper presents an approach to support the designer of Visual Interactive Systems (VISs) in adapting a VIS to the evolution of its users. This process is called co-evolution of users and systems. The approach is based on the identification of the patterns of interaction between the user and an interactive system and on their use for the evolution of the system to facilitate novel usages introduced by the user. The approach is focused on WIMP systems and is based on the recently introduced PCL (Pictorial Computing Laboratory) model of interaction, within which we provide a novel definition of interaction pattern. The proposal assumes that the VIS is observed by an external system called SIC (Supporting Interaction Co-evolution), which is in charge of recording the interactions between the user and the VIS and of analyzing the relevant interaction patterns. In particular, SIC exploits a UML-based statechart specification of the VIS in order to associate observed user activities with the states of the interactive process. This information provides a useful basis for a variety of pattern recognition techniques. Two techniques called usual state and recurrent sequence recognition are illustrated and the results of a first experiment are discussed. © 2009 ACM.

Visual interaction processes are modeled in this paper as sequences of visual sentences in which for each visual sentence only a limited set of user actions is possible. We introduce the notion of "dynamic visual language" as a weakly ordered set of visual sentences characterized by the presence of common elements. We present a formal model of derivation of visual sentences in a dynamic visual language in which each visual sentence specifies the possible actions which can be performed on it and the possible transformations it can go through. In this way, we offer a formal setting in which the interaction process can be formally specified. A user interface can be derived from the formal specification, so that it embeds proper context elements which limit user disorientation. The concepts are illustrated by the user interaction with a prototype of a digital library developed at the University of Bari.

We continue the study of pictorial languages as formalized in Ref. 1 (based on the operations of shifting and superposing elementary pictures). If the pixels are superposed without composing their colors, then we produce only recursive languages. When the colors of the superposed pixels can be composed, then any array grammar can be simulated (hence, all recursively enumerable languages can be obtained). Bidimensional pictorial frameworks with a nonrecursive membership problem are obtained in the restricted case when (1) we do not allow the superposition of nontransparent pixels, excepting the fact that (2) for each color there is a complementary color, which, superposed on the original one, leads to a transparent pixel.

Computers are increasingly being seen not only as computing tools but more so as communication tools, thus placing special emphasis on human-computer interaction (HCI). In this article, the focus is on visual HCI, where the messages exchanged between human and computer are images appearing on the computer screen, as usual in current popular user interfaces. We formalize interactive sessions of a human-computer dialogue as a structured set of legal visual sentences, i.e., as a visual language, and show how rewriting systems can be generalized to specify both the pictorial and the computational aspects of visual languages. To this end, Visual Conditional Attributed Rewriting (VCARW) systems are introduced, and use for specification of visual languages. These specifications are given as inputs to a procedure illustrated in the article as a system of algorithms, which automatically generates control mechanisms of the interaction, thus favoring the design of more reliable and usable systems.

A visual environment for end-user visual programming and computing with populations of agents is presented.

The paper addresses the problem of controlling situated image understanding processes. Two complementary control styles are considered and applied cooperatively, a deliberative one and a reactive one. The role of deliberative control is to account for the unpredictability of situations, by dynamically determining which strategies to pursue, based on the results obtained so far and more generally on the state of the understanding process. The role of reactive control is to account for the variability of local properties of the image by tuning operations to subimages, each one being homogeneous with respect to a given operation. A variable organization of agents is studied to face this variability. The two control modes are integrated into a unified formalism describing segmentation and interpretation activities. A feedback from high level interpretation tasks to low level segmentation tasks thus becomes possible and is exploited to recover wrong segmentations. Preliminary results in the field of liver biopsy image understanding are shown to demonstrate the potential of the approach.

A novel definition of visual languages allows a uniform approach to satisfying the needs of visual reasoning faced in visual human-computer interaction. The way the machine associates a computational meaning with an image, and conversely, the way it generates an image on the screen from a computation are formally described. A definition of a visual sentence and of a visual language as a set of visual sentences is discussed. A hierarchy of visual languages is derived in relation to the requirements for intelligible, manageable and trustable interaction between humans and computers.

Two complementary control styles, deliberative and reactive types, are applied to account for unpredictability of situations and variability of local properties in image interpretation processes. Deliberative control is based on attributed grammars and local variability is managed by a variable organisation of agents. Feedback from interpretation to segmentation becomes possible and is exploited to recover wrong segmentation. Experimental results illustrate the potential of the approach.

The paper introduces the concepts of image interpretation by form feature and interpretation strategy as a fall out of observing human interpreters at work. It discusses the need for flexible control in an automatic interpreter, outlining an automatic interpretation process and the required meta (or reflective) mechanisms.>

A method for identifying and counting cells and biological structures in histological liver tissue sections is presented. The method uses several image processing operators. The final classification results from contextual fusion of different clues. The overall flow of information among the active components of the cell description procedure (CDP) is outlined. The CDP is constructed and validated by a sequence of exploration and confirmation phases. Exploration takes place when a set of known images that is progressively improved until the results are satisfactory is worked out through the CDP. The confirmation phase may then start, working out a new set of images (of the same type but not analyzed before) and proceeding until acceptable sets of agents are generated. The completion of a first exploration phase has identified some major fields of improvement such as the identification of revision criteria for the refinement of the F-nuclei class.>

An automatic system which sets up high-level descriptions of the ECG, based on its medical shape features, from the low-level descriptions of the numerical techniques is discussed. These descriptions are organized into a description scheme, thus making it possible for physicians to use visual interpretation to control the whole description process. At each moment during an interpretation activity, the content of the data structure can be shown to the user in a graphical manner. Using this method, the progress of the process and the reasons why an interpretation strategy is followed can be controlled by the user.>

The problem addressed in this work is the construction of a description of a digital image using a kind of parallel rewriting system, the conditional attributed L-system. To this end, descriptions of digital images and digital structures are first defined. Then, attributed conditional L-systems capable of parallel rewriting are introduced. These systems are concise and readable, and their suitability for image description is shown by an example. Advantages and disadvantages of their use are discussed.>

This paper describes an interactive drafting system based on two dimensional primitives and logic operators.