Tech Reports
Tech Report kmi-96-02 Abstract
Supporting Evaluation in Design
Techreport ID: kmi-96-02
Date: 1996
Author(s): Nathalie Bonnardel and Tamara Sumner
Design problem-solving requires designers to be creative and to express evaluative judgments. Designers propose successive partial solutions and evaluate these solutions with respect to various criteria and constraints. Evaluation plays a major role in design because each successive evaluation step guides the course of design activity. However, evaluation of design solutions is difficult for both experienced and inexperienced designers because: (1) in complex domains, no single person can know all the relevant criteria and constraints, and (2) design solutions must be evaluated from multiple, and sometimes conflicting, perspectives. Domain-oriented design environments have been proposed as computational tools supporting designers to construct and evaluate design solutions. Critiquing systems embedded in these environments support evaluation activities by analysing design solutions for compliance with criteria and constraints encoded in the system's knowledge-base. To investigate the impact of such systems, we have designed, built, and evaluated a domain-oriented design environment for a specific area: phone-based interface design. Professional designers were observed using the design environment to solve a complex design task. Analyses of these design sessions enabled us to identify reactions common to all designers, as well as reactions depending on the designers' level of domain experience.
Publication(s):
Acta Psychologica 91, (1996) 221-244
Future Internet
KnowledgeManagementMultimedia &
Information SystemsNarrative
HypermediaNew Media SystemsSemantic Web &
Knowledge ServicesSocial Software
Semantic Web and Knowledge Services is...
Our research in the Semantic Web area looks at the potentials of fusing together advances in a range of disciplines, and applying them in a systemic way to simplify the development of intelligent, knowledge-based web services and to facilitate human access and use of knowledge available on the web. For instance, we are exploring ways in which tnatural language interfaces can be used to facilitate access to data distributed over different repositories. We are also developing infrastructures to support rapid development and deployment of semantic web services, which can be used to create web applications on-the-fly. We are also investigating ways in which semantic technology can support learning on the web, through a combination of knowledge representation support, pedagogical theories and intelligent content aggregation mechanisms. Finally, we are also investigating the Semantic Web itself as a domain of analysis and performing large scale empirical studies to uncover data about the concrete epistemologies which can be found on the Semantic Web. This exciting new area of research gives us concrete insights on the different conceptualizations that are present on the Semantic Web by giving us the possibility to discover which are the most common viewpoints, which viewpoints are mutually inconsistent, to what extent different models agree or disagree, etc...
Our aim is to be at the forefront of both theoretical and practical developments on the Semantic Web not only by developing theories and models, but also by building concrete applications, for a variety of domains and user communities, including KMi and the Open University itself.
List all Semantic Web and Knowledge Services Projects
Check out these Hot Semantic Web and Knowledge Services Technologies:
List all Semantic Web and Knowledge Services Technologies
