User Interface Management Systems

The book contains the proceedings and reports of the "Workshop on User Interface Management Systems", held in Seeheim, Federal Re­ public of Germany, November 1-3, 1983. The workshop brought toge­ ther experts in using and developing techniques for managing the dialo­ gue between users and interactive graphics systems. The purpose of the workshop was to produce an agreed report contrasting existing ap­ proaches, and outlining directions for future work. Four different areas were defined and addressed at the workshop, namely a) role, model, structure and construction of a UIMS b) dialogue specification tools c) interface of the UIMS to the application d) user's conceptual model All participants prepared papers each in one ofthose problem areas. The papers have been rewritten in the light of the issues discussed during the workshop. Also a subgroup report was produced for each problem area summarizing the results of the discussions at the workshop. Preface User Interface Management Systems (UlMS) are the mediators between the user and the application programs. As more and more in­ teractive programs become widely available,methods and techniques of designing and implementing acceptable user interfaces have to be inves­ tigated. Since many years, research on the design of user interface mana­ gement systems is going on. This EUROGRAPHICS Workshop follows from the ACM SIGGRAPH Workshop on Graphical Input and Interac­ tion Techniques of May, 1982 in Seattle (see: Computer Graphics 17(1), 1983), and the IFIP WG 5.