Early Specification of User-Interfaces: Toward a Formal Approach

The paper presents our work in the domain of formal specification of user-interfaces. We think that engineering user-interfaces would greatly benefit from the use of formal techniques. To achieve this goal, we need a framework with two properties. First, it must be based on a formal model which expresses interesting features. Second, it must lead to the implementation of tools to help validate the specification. Our approach has been to define and to formalize, with VDM, a model focusing on dialogue structures based on the notion of planning. This model provides us with the semantic foundation of a specification language which can be used as the first formal description of a user-interface. This semantics, in turn, has allowed us to implement a prototyping tool which produces an executable instance of the interface along with an interactive visualization of the dialogue structures. Such prototypes can be used during the validation process of the specification.

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