In the area of human computer interaction, over the last twenty years, we have witnessed considerable progress in an ever-increasing bandwidth from the computer to the user. Application screens evolved from static text only screens to interactive GUI screens. These screens contain numerous graphical element or "widgets", supporting multiple data types, such as text, voice, image, and video. The widgets can range from simple ones like a combo box or slider to more complicated OCX's such as interactive graphs or maps.On the other hand, the tools to program this application are still in the domain of programmers. Although there has been much progress in various RAD tools, visual language and 4GL to improve ease of use, they still mostly target programmers. We believe that in order to allow end-users to develop their own advanced UI applications, it is necessary to create higher-level application abstractions or 'algebra' for stating the application in a declarative manner. This can be compared to the relational algebra operators in the data base area. They were created as abstractions for data base queries, enabling end users to express their own queries in a declarative manner. In doing so, bugs are minimized and program modifications and maintenance becomes trivial. In this paper, we will motivate the reader to see the need for these abstractions and classify them into categories, emphasizing areas ripe for further research.

article Free Access Share on Picture programming project Authors: Nita Goyal Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, Palo Alto, CA Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, Palo Alto, CAView Profile , Charles Hoch Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, Palo Alto, CA Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, Palo Alto, CAView Profile , Ravi Krishnamurthy Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, Palo Alto, CA Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, Palo Alto, CAView Profile , Brian Meckler Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, Palo Alto, CA Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, Palo Alto, CAView Profile , Michael Suchow Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, Palo Alto, CA Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, Palo Alto, CAView Profile , Moshe Zloof Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, Palo Alto, CA Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, Palo Alto, CAView Profile Authors Info & Claims ACM SIGMOD RecordVolume 26Issue 2June 1997 pp 514–516https://doi.org/10.1145/253262.253377Online:01 June 1997Publication History 1citation267DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations1Total Downloads267Last 12 Months3Last 6 weeks1 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteeReaderPDF

Rendering is defined to be a customized presentation of data in such a way that allows users to subsequently interact with the presented data. Traditionally such a user interface would be a custom application written using conventional programming languages; in contrast we propose an application-independent, declarative (i.e., what-you-want) language that we call Rendering By Example, RBE, with the capability to specify a wide variety of renderings. RBE is a domain calculus language over user interface widgets. Most previous domain calculus database languages (e.g., QBE, LDL, Datalog) mainly addressed the data processing problem. The main contribution in developing RBE is to model semantics of user interactions in a declarative way. This declarative specification not only allows quick and ad-hoc specification of renderings (i.e., user interfaces) but also provides a framework to understand renderings as an abstract concept, independent of the application. Further, such a linguistic abstraction provides the basis for user-interface research. RBE is part of the ICBE language that is being prototyped in the Picture Programming project at HP Labs.>

Office-by-Example (OBE) is an integrated office information system that has been under development at IBM Research. OBE, an extension of Query-by-Example, supports various office features such as database tables, word processing, electronic mail, graphics, images, and so forth. These seemingly heterogeneous features are integrated through a language feature called example elements . Applications involving example elements are processed by the database manager, an integrated part of the OBE system. In this paper we describe the facilities and architecture of the OBE system and discuss the techniques for integrating heterogeneous objects.

Query-by-Example is a query language for use by non-programmers querying a relational data base. In an earlier paper, the features of this language were introduced; however, it was assumed that the data base was already defined and available to the user.