This paper proposes using chatbots as “tutors” in a learning environment; tutors who are not domain experts but helpers in guiding students through bodies of learning material. The most original contributions are the proposal that conversation should be content-independent (although chatbots speak about content); The production process should allow non-technical actors to customize chatbots and keep the costs of development and deployment low. We specifically discuss conversation customization, which is relevant, especially for learning applications, where users might have specific needs or problems. We achieve the features introduced above via extensive “configuration” (regarding direct programming), making the underlying technology novel and original. Experiments with teachers and students have shown that chatbots in education can be effective and that customization of conversations is relevant and valued by users.

Abstract This paper proposes a general approach for using conversational interfaces such as chatbots to offer adaptive learning of business processes in an environment involving different actors. Adaptivity concerns both the content being proposed, the sequence of learning items, and the way the conversation is conducted. The original approach allows the development of sustainable chatbots and empowers various non-technical actors (authors, teachers, publishers, and learners) to control the chatbot features directly. The aCHAT-WF framework (adaptive CHATbot for WorkFlows), proposed in this paper for managing conversational interfaces, conceptually represents all the aspects related to a conversation about business processes, with different facets for the user, the conversation flow, and the conversation contents, combining them to obtain a flexible interaction with the user. The paper focuses on the different preparation phases for instructional material based on Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) models, separating the different roles involved in the construction of a chatbot for teaching business processes and with the possibility of defining different styles for the interaction with the users. The proposed method is configuration-driven, to facilitate the separation of the different aspects of the control of the interaction and the delivery of contents.

The advent of the Big Data challenge has stimulated research on methods to deal with the problem of managing data abundance. Many approaches have been developed, but for the most part, they attack one specific side of the problem: e.g. efficient querying, analysis techniques that summarize data or reduce its dimensionality, data visualization, etc. The approach proposed in this poster aims instead at taking a comprehensive view: first of all, it supports human exploration as an iterative and multi-step process and therefore allows building upon a previous query on to the next, in a sort of "dialogue" between the user and the system. Second, it aims at supporting a variety of user experiences, like investigation, inspiration seeking, monitoring, comparison, decision-making, research, etc. Third, and probably most important, it adds to the notion of "big" the notion of "rich": Exploratory Computing (EC) aims at dealing with datasets of semantically complex items, whose inspection may reach beyond the user's previous knowledge or expectations: an exploratory experience basically consists in creating, refining, modifying, comparing various datasets in order to "make sense" of these meanings. A crucial challenge of EC lies at the user interface level (data visualization, feedback, relevance of the results, interaction possibilities): how to convey, in an effective manner, all the possible turn-takings of this "dialogue" between the user and the system.

The advent of the Big Data challenge has stimulated research on methods and techniques to deal with the problem of managing data abundance. Many approaches have been developed, but for the most part, they attack one specific side of the problem: e.g. efficient querying, analysis techniques that summarize data or reduce its dimensionality, data visualization, etc. The approach proposed in this paper aims instead at taking a comprehensive view: first of all, it takes into account that human exploration is an iterative and multi-step process and therefore allows building upon a previous query on to the next, in a sort of “dialogue” between the user and the system. Second, it aims at supporting a variety of user experiences, like investigation, inspiration seeking, monitoring, comparison, decision-making, research, etc. Third, and probably most important, it adds to the notion of “big” the notion of “rich”: Exploratory Computing (EC) aims at dealing with datasets of semantically complex items, whose inspection may reach beyond the user's previous knowledge or expectations: an exploratory experience basically consists in creating, refining, modifying, comparing various datasets in order to “make sense” of these meanings.

This paper proposes a set of requirements for a new generation of exploratory portals, fully exploiting and developing the principles and the aims of Exploratory Computing. The first generation of exploratory portals for rich datasets (where objects are classified according to powerful taxonomies) has already provided a way to support effective user experiences, where traditional approaches (like query, search, faceted search, data mining, logical reasoning, data visualizations, . . . ), instead, would only partially satisfy "exploratory" needs. This paper discusses how and why more advanced exploratory features are still needed. A set of requirements is proposed, through examples and formal definitions.

This paper presents PoliCultura, a large-scale initiative introducing collaborative digital storytelling in formal education. PoliCultura has involved more than 17,000 participants from 2006, from pre-school to high school. It engages participants and also fosters the achievement of substantial educational benefits, monitored each year via online surveys, Skype interviews and focus groups. The paper describes the initiative and reports the evaluation's data.

There is a growing interest in the use of cooperative technologies for education. In formal education, however, such an introduction is more difficult than it may look at first sight. There are few successful cases of implementation of cooperative technologies in schools, with proper integration in the curriculum. This paper draws on empirical data from a large-scale project based in Italy, involving the development of digital narratives by school children, as part of their curricular activities. The project is in its fourth year of implementation, and it involved hundreds of classes (and thousands of pupils) every year. The paper examines several different aspects and benefits related to the implementation of digital storytelling at school, focusing upon two specific issues: 1) How digital storytelling can become "collective", i.e. involving the whole class, rather than individuals or small groups; 2) How digital storytelling can be integrated within the regular curricular activities at school, generating substantial learning benefits.

Since the nineties, storytelling has received increasing attention in the HCI, IDC, and AI communities, exploring the potential of interactivity and multimedia as a means to promote engagement, enjoyment, fun, to foster new forms of children's creativity, and to increase the educational benefits of traditional storytelling for this target group. The time seems right to look at the field with critical eyes and validate the claims put forward regarding the positive effects of interactive storytelling technology for children, as well as the effectiveness of existing design and evaluation approaches. The purpose of this full-day IDC 2010 workshop is to bring together researchers from a wide spectrum of disciplines who share a common interest in understanding these challenges and to create a research agenda that can orient application and theory in the domain of interactive storytelling for children.

This paper is about assessing how and under which conditions digital technology interactions and activities can enhance socio-cognitive abilities in children. We address this issue through a comparison between canonical and digital-based narrative activities in a formal educational setting. The paper is based upon a case study carried on in a primary school in Lugano (CH), where children develop educational narratives in both traditional and digital-assisted formats. Three are the main issues addressed: Valorization and enhancement of different capabilities, Socialization and attitude change, Pupils collaboration strategies. Copyright 2010 ACM.

An infosuasive web application is mainly intended to be at the same time informative and persuasive, i.e., it aims at supporting knowledge needs and it has also the (declared or not declared) goal of influencing user's opinions, attitudes and behaviors. Most web applications, in fact, are infosuasive (except those whose aim is mainly operational). In this paper, we investigate the complex set of elements that informs the very early design of infosuasive web applications. We propose a conceptual framework aimed at supporting the actors involved in this process to integrate their different viewpoints, to organize the variety of issues that need to be analyzed, to find a direction in the numerous design options, and to represent the results of this activity in an effective way.

Requirements engineering has traditionally focused on identifying functional and non functional requirements to inform design, and to ensure that the product under development accommodates the needs of the end users, the goals of the different stakeholders, as well as the technological, organizational, and business constraints. For requirements analysis of content-intensive interactive applications, we propose to take a wider perspective driven by the concepts of brand, brand value, and communication goal. We highlight the pervasive impact of this kind of "non functional requirements" on various design dimensions of content-intensive interactive applications - contents, lay-out, information architecture, interaction, services - in order to create not only a functional or informative experience, but also an emotional relationship with the artifact and the brand underneath it. The paper discuss a case study to exemplify our approach, sets the founding elements for brand&communication-driven requirements analysis in content-intensive interactive applications, and provides a modeling framework for representing the results of this process.

Multichannel applications deliver the same content and a "similar interactive experience" using different devices and different technologies(e.g., web sites, palm held devices, car navigators, or interactive TVs). Various channels imply a number of differences, including screen (size), keyboard(size), pointing devices, output devices, performances, and the context of use (standing, sitting, walking, etc.). In most cases, today, applications for different channels are designed and implemented almost "independently", with ineffectiveness for the developers (high costs) and ineffectiveness for the users (loss of consistency across the different channels and the perception that they are "different applications"). This paper presents an interactive dialogue model (IDM), a novel design model specifically tailored for multichannel applications. The background research, moving from linguistic theories and practices, has led us to the development of a "channel-independent" design model (based on dialogue primitives). Design can start in a "conceptual", channel-independent fashion, and then proceed into a further "logical" design oriented toward specific channels of communication. Designing an interactive application in two steps (channel-independent first, and channel-dependent later) allows a number of advantages without making more cumbersome the overall design process. Beside the emphasis on multichannel, IDM has additional distinctive features: it is lightweight, providing a few set of primitives (and a simple graphic notation) which are easy to learn and teach. Moreover, it is suitable for brainstorming and generating ideas at early stage during design (or during the shift from requirements to design); finally, it is cost-effective (it requires little effort from designers) and modular (designers can take the part they wish, not being forced to "all or nothing"). IDM has been validated both in the academic and industry environments,providing excellent results so far.

Requirements analysis for Web applications still needs to employ effective RE practices to accommodate some distinctive aspects: capturing high-level communication goals, considering several user profiles, defining hypermedia-specific requirements, and reusing requirements for an effective usability evaluation. Techniques should be usable, informal, require little training effort, and show relative advantage to project managers. Starting from the i* framework, we present a proposal for defining hypermedia requirements (concerning aspects such as content, navigation and presentation) for Web applications. The model adopts a goal-driven approach coupled with scenario-based techniques, introduces a hypermedia requirement taxonomy to facilitate Web conceptual design, and paves the way for systematic usability evaluation. Particular attention is paid to the empirical validation of the model based on the perceived quality attributes theory. A case study developed with industrial partners is discussed.

Summary form only given. This paper illustrates an innovative approach to the conceptual modeling of a Web site: instead of considering a site as an (interactive) information container we can interpret it as a device capable of generating a dialogue with the user. Activating the selected options represents the user "turns" of the dialogue; the Webs "turns" are represented by the reply to the user selection. Theoretical implications of this approach are the possibilities of applying known dialogue techniques (from linguistic science) to Web design (or Web analysis). Practical implications consist in the possibility of improving the effectiveness of Web applications (e.g. making the dialogue with a Web site closer to a dialogue with a human being) or transforming a visualization supported (standard for a Web site) in a dialogue based only on oral communication (making a Web site accessible to visually impaired users temporarily unable to look at a screen).

It is indubitable that usability inspection of complex hypermedia is still an "art," in the sense that a great deal is left to the skills, experience, and ability of the inspectors. Training inspectors is difficult and often quite expensive. The Systematic Usability Evaluation (SUE) inspection technique has been proposed to help usability inspectors share and transfer their evaluation know-how, to simplify the hypermedia inspection process for newcomers, and to achieve more effective and efficient evaluation results. SUE inspection is based on the use of evaluation patterns, called abstract tasks, which precisely describe the activities to be performed by evaluators during inspection. This article highlights the advantages of this inspection technique by presenting its empirical validation through a controlled experiment. Two groups of novice inspectors were asked to evaluate a commercial hypermedia CD-ROM by applying the SUE inspection or traditional heuristic evaluation. The comparison was based on three major dimensions: effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction. Results indicate a clear advantage of the SUE inspection over the traditional inspection on all dimensions, demonstrating that abstract tasks are efficient tools to drive the evaluator's performance.

Modern Web applications are mainly distributed systems that exploit the Internet as communication means and the Web as neutral interface to access services and data. The addition of services to Web applications poses problems that are usually tackled at the technology level, but that should be addressed during design to deliver quality Web applications. A typical example of these problems is the Amazon bug, an annoying problem that the user could encounter if after adding products to his shopping cart, he rolls back to a page with a previous version of the cart and tries to buy it. This would make the user buy the last version of the cart's contents, which in some subtle cases could be different from what expected.In this paper, we do not want to discuss all design aspects, but only how provided services/operations should jointly be designed with the rest of the system. We propose a new reference model for Web applications: Operations require a more complex model where they are not simply appended to information and navigation elements, but they can cooperate with them. Besides the reference model, the paper proposes the use of assertions to constraint the behavior of designed operations. Assertions do not only predicate on how data should be modified, but must also take into account how presentation and navigation could be affected by the execution of the operation.

We study the effort needed for designing Web applications from an empirical point of view. The design phase forms an important part of the overall effort needed to develop a Web application, since the use of tools can help automate the implementation phase. We carried out an empirical study with students of an advanced university class that used W2000 as a Web application design technique. Our first goal was to compare the relative importance of each design activity. Second, we tried to assess the accuracy of a priori design effort predictions and the influence of factors on the effort needed for each design activity. Third, we also studied the quality of the designs obtained.

SUE inspection is a novel usability evaluation method for hypermedia, which falls into the category of inspection methods. Its primary goal is to favor a systematic usability evaluation (SUE), for supplying hypermedia usability inspectors with a structured flow of activities, allowing them to obtain more reliable, comparable, and cost-effective evaluation results. This is obtained especially due to the use of evaluation patterns, called abstract tasks (AT), which describe in details the activities that evaluators must carry out during inspection. AT helps share and transfer evaluation know-how among different evaluators, thus making it easier to learn the SUE inspection method by newcomers. A further notable advantage provided by the SUE inspection over other existent approaches is that it focuses on navigation and information structures, making evident some problems that other "surface-oriented" approaches might not reveal. This paper describes the SUE inspection for hypermedia. It also reports on a validation experiment, involving 28 evaluators, that has shown the major effectiveness and efficiency of the SUE inspection for hypermedia, with respect to traditional heuristic evaluation techniques.

In the usability inspection of complex hypermedia a great deal is left to the skills, experience, and ability of the inspectors. The SUE inspection technique has been proposed to help usability inspectors share and transfer their evaluation know-how, make it easier the hypermedia inspection process for newcomers, and achieve more effective and efficient evaluations. The SUE inspection is based on the use of evaluation patterns, called Abstract Tasks, which precisely describe the activities to be performed by evaluators during inspection. This paper presents an empirical validation of this inspection technique: two groups of novice inspectors have been asked to evaluate a commercial hypermedia CD-ROM applying the SUE inspection or the traditional heuristic evaluation technique. Results have shown a clear advantage of the SUE inspection over the heuristic evaluation, demonstrating that Abstract Tasks are efficient tools to drive evaluator's performance.

This paper describes a methodology for the development of WWW applications and a tool environment specifically tailored for the methodology. The methodology and the development environment are based upon models and techniques already used in the hypermedia, information systems, and software engineering fields, adapted and blended in an original mix. The foundation of the proposal is the conceptual design of WWW applications, using HDM-lite, a notation for the specification of structure, navigation, and presentation semantics. The conceptual schema is then translated into a “traditional” database schema, which describes both the organization of the content and the desired navigation and presentation features. The WWW pages can therefore be dynamically generated from the database content, following the navigation requests of the user. A CASE environment, called Autoweb System, offers a set of software tools, which assist the design and the execution of a WWW application, in all its different aspects, Real-life experiences of the use of the methodology and of the AutoWeb System in both the industrial and academic context are reported.

This paper presents a systematic approach to the heuristic evaluation of hypermedia that specifically addresses the peculiar features of this class of systems. We propose a set of hypermedia-specific usability attributes and define general "patterns of evaluation activities" called abstract tasks that can be performed by usability experts to check such attributes systematically. The usage of abstract tasks makes application inspection more effective, since it guides the work of evaluators and supports standardization across different evaluators. Our approach is model-based since we use a hypermedia design model (HDM) to identify the constituents of an application that represent the "focus of interest" for the evaluation, to decompose general usability principles into hypermedia-specific attributes, and finally to formulate abstract tasks in a precise way. To show the effectiveness of our method, we discuss the most significant usability problems discovered in eight commercially available hypermedia CD-ROM's.

The use of WWW for training purposes is rapidly growing; in a sense it could be said that training is one of the most important applications for Internet technology, in general and for WWW in particular. The overall organization of the sites, is, however, a difficult task, mostly if a standard structure must be enforced across different sets of content. In addition it is of growing interest the need for a compatibility between off-line training (e.g. CD-ROMS) and on-line training (e.g. WWW sites). A real life experience is described: a set of complex tutorials, for an industrial consortium, had to be delivered both off-line and on-line. At design time, the content was only partially known. It was important also to be able to add new material and to modify access structure, without reprogramming. The solution has been a flexible design schema (through the model HDM) and an advanced set of tools (based on Java), that allow the cost-effective development of advanced multimedia training material.

Hypertext development should benefit from a systematic, structured development, especially in the case of large and complex applications. A structured approach to hypertext development suggests the notion of authoring-in-the-large . Authoring-in-the-large allows the description of overall classes of information elements and navigational structures of complex applications without much concern with implementation details, and in a system-independent manner. The paper presents HDM (Hypertext Design Model), a first step towards defining a general purpose model for authoring-in-the-large. Some of the most innovative features of HDM are: the notion of perspective ; the identification of different categories of links (structural links, application links, and perspective links) with different representational roles; the distinction between hyperbase and access structures ; and the possibility of easily integrating the structure of a hypertext application with its browsing semantics. HDM can be used in different manners: as a modeling device or as an implementation device. As a modeling device, it supports producing high level specifications of existing or to-be-developed applications. As an implementation device, it is the basis for designing tools that directly support application development. One of the central advantages of HDM in the design and practical construction of hypertext applications is that the definition of a significant number of links can be derived automatically from a conceptual-design level description. Examples of usage of HDM are also included.

Abstract Hypertext development is still, for the most part, at the ‘handcrafting’ level, where each hypertext document must be hand‐designed. We present a compiler which takes hyperdocuments designed using a model‐based approach and generates stacks executable in Hyper Card. This compiler is implemented in standard SQL over a relational database representation of a hyperdocument designed using the hypermedia design model (HDM). The compiling approach, even though illustrated with HDM, can be used with any ‘structured’ design methodology.

The paper describes a new type of tool, which has been defined to support complex applications (such as the ones typically found in office environments). The relevant features of this tool are the following:

The problem of translating view updates to database updates is considered. Both databases and views are modeled as data abstractions. A data abstraction consists of a set of states and of a set of primitive update operators representing state transition functions. It is shown how complex update programs can be built from primitive update operators and how view update programs are translated into database update programs. Special attention is paid to a class of views that we call “consistent.” Loosely speaking, a consistent view is a view with the following property: If the effect of a view update program on a view state is determined, then the effect of the corresponding database update is unambiguously determined. Thus, in order to know how to translate a given view update into a database update, it is sufficient to be aware of a functional specification of such a program. We show that consistent views have a number of interesting properties with respect to the concurrency of (high-level) update transactions. Moreover we show that the class of consistent views includes as a subset the class of views that translate updates under maintenance of a constant complement. However, we show that there exist consistent views that do not translate under constant complement. The results of Bancilhon and Spyratos [6] are generalized in order to capture the update semantics of the entire class of consistent views. In particular we show that the class of consistent views is obtained if we relax the requirement of a constant complement by allowing the complement to decrease according to a suitable partial order.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the problem of mapping between different levels of a data base.A data Base is viewed as an Abstract Object upon which it is possible to operate with a given set of operations, the result of which depends both on the "type" of the object and on its state.Following this approach and utilizing some algebraic formalism we analyze the mappings between external views of a data base and the conceptual view of the data base itself. The main result is a requirement on the consistency between the process of deriving an external view from the conceptual view and the translation of external (user) operations into conceptual operations.It is also shown that this requirement is not sufficient to characterize the "interference" arising from a shared use of a Data Base.Informal and formal examples illustrating these concepts are given.