Contextual Help for Free with Formal Dialogue Design.
Philippe A. Palanque, Rémi Bastide, Louis Dourte · 1993
This paper presents how the contextual help system for a user-driven application may be generated automatically from the formal specifications of the application. In our case the formal specifications are based on Petri nets and the help system is built by transforming the Petri nets in an augmented transition network. This network is then used by the contextual help system in order to answer users' questions. 1. INTRODUCTION The use of formal methods in the design process of user interfaces has been advocated by numerous research works [1, 2]. They allow for the making of concise, unambiguous and complete specifications of the dialogue part of humancomputer interaction. One formalism, Petri nets, have been used for a long time in the design of human-computer interfaces [3, 4]. In previous papers we have presented such a formal method based on Petri nets and integrated in an object-oriented framework [5, 6, 7]. Building on the huge amount of research work done in Petri net theory, thi...