Abstract

The Tatami project is building a system to support software engineering over the internet, exploiting recent advances in web technology, interface design, and specification. Our effort to improve the usability of such systems led us into algebraic semiotics, while our effort to develop better formal methods for distributed concurrent systems led us into hidden algebra. We discuss the Tatami system design, especially user interface issues, and sketch an extension of algebraic semiotics for interface dynamics. 1 Introduction The Tatami project has pursued three main goals: 1. explore novel multimedia interface design principles, for easing the use of complex interactive systems; 2. build and use a generic distributed environment for cooperative work; and 3. verify distributed concurrent software. We discuss these goals in turn. The first is motivated by the difficulties many practicing engineers have with formal methods tools. We have taken theorem provers as a typically difficult c...

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