The user interface of data-intensive information systems may be described as a collection of semi-independent dialogues with underlying procedures accessing databases. It will be shown how to conceptualize dialogues via dialogue objects. These are organized in an object oriented fashion by dialogue classes modelled as extended database views. The description is based on an object oriented model which enables a smooth integration of dialogues with the underlying database schema. The resulting integrated model can serve as a unifying conceptual umbrella encompassing both databases and user-interfaces. The only remaining task for the presentation layer consists of suitable ergonomic presentations of dialogue objects on the screen by means of a general user interface management system. This approach may help in the development of information systems that aim at the support of highly skilled users. The design of such systems has to cope with the specific work conditions as be...

. Interaction of users with computational devices has to meet the users intention on one side and needs to be specified in a formal manner which can be uniquely interpreted by computers. Thus, we need a model of interaction which meets the intensional understanding of users and which has an extensional description that is directly implementable. In this paper we develop a model for interaction on the basis of the notion of interaction objects. We show further how this notion can be specialized to internet-based interaction. In the later case we use media objects for interaction. 1 Introduction Interaction and information both are buzzwords of everyday's life. In our understanding, information, as processed by humans, is data perceived or noticed, selected and organized by its receiver, because of his/her subjective human interests, originating from his/her instincts, feelings, experience, intuition, common sense, values, beliefs, personal knowledge, or wisdom, simultaneously...

. The idea of data warehouses is to provide condensed information in order to support managers in the analysis of business facts such as sales, costs, profits, etc. along various dimensions such as geography, organisation, time, etc. The analysis should allow fast switches between different selected multiple dimensions at different granularity. The task itself is usually called on-line analytical processing (OLAP). We show in this paper how to model data warehouses with OLAP functionality by means of dialogue objects. These are extended and possibly materialised views on collections of operative databases and couple structural and behavioural aspects of application units. 1 Introduction Most information systems in practice have been designed and developed for the purpose of supporting operative tasks. Users invoke actions on selected data which lead to transactions on underlying databases. Thus, from a database point of view a central issue of such systems is on-line transac...

Today, access to information is simply vital. It becomes more and more necessary to provide access to information at any time, from anywhere, to anybody. Different interaction media and different user types must be addressed. It is, therefore, not feasible anymore to confine the modeling of human-computer interaction to explicitely connecting application objects to particular presentations that might work on one medium but not on the other. This paper uses the analogy of human-computer interaction to human interaction. It proposes to raise the modeling of human-computer interaction to a level that abstracts from concrete presentations and that uses linguistically motivated concepts for describing the abstract contents of interaction: data types, data meaning, interdata relations, and properties of data usage. Concrete presentations can then be derived by mappings that translate abstract HCI modeling constructs into concrete target interface constructs. Supported by the German Resear...

In the design of information services for the web, developing navigation structure is one of the most crucial and time consuming tasks. Inappropriate navigation structure usually rejects users who can be considered as an indicator for the service quality. Adapting navigation structure after the implementation of the system is often too expensive (in terms of time and effort). To support the designer in this task, we propose a prototyping approach. The designer is enabled to incompletely specify user scenarios which serve to derive early prototypes, but also to alter and refine them during the design process. As a basis, we use the entity/relationship model. It carries information about data types and semantical knowledge of the application domain as associations between types. Through a specification process, user scenarios are derived from the schema by creating navigation structures. Therefore, we introduce a basis to specify user scenarios, a rule system used for defini...

Interaction of users with computational devices has to meet the users intention on one side and needs to be specified in a formal manner which can be uniquely interpreted by computers. Thus, we need a model of interaction which meets the intensional understanding of users and which has an extensional description that is directly implementable. In this paper we develop a model for interaction on the basis of the notion of interaction objects. We show further how this notion can be specialized to internet-based interaction. In the later case we use media objects for interaction.