Graphical notations, narratives and persuasion: a Pliant Systems approach to Hypertext Tool Design

The Adelard Safety Case Editor (ASCE) is a hypertext tool for constructing and reviewing structured arguments. ASCE is used in the safety industry, and can be used in many other contexts when graphical presentation can make argument structure, inference or other dependencies explicit. ASCE supports a rich hypertext narrative mode for documenting traditional argument fragments. In this paper we document the motivation for developing the tool and describe its operation and novel features. Since usability and technology adoption issues are critical for software and hypertext tool uptake, our approach has been to develop a system that is highly usable and sufficiently "pliant" to support and integrate with a wide range of working practices and styles. We discuss some industrial application experience to date, which has informed the design and is informing future requirements. We draw from this some of the perhaps not so obvious characteristics of hypertext tools which are important for successful uptake in practical environments.

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