End User Modelling


by Peter Hale - Date: 2007-01-08 - Word Count: 543 Share This!

My research arises out of projects to create systems to facilitate management of design and cost related knowledge within aerospace organisations. The aim of using this knowledge is to reduce the costs of designing and manufacturing products. This research identifies ways that problems arising from the model development process can be addressed, by a new way of providing for the creation of software. I have gained experience from projects, which have used a combination of proprietary software solutions and bespoke software. It is possible to identify the approach of User Driven Programming (UDP) as an effective software development technique. This research unites approaches of Object Orientation, the Semantic Web, and Relational Databases and Event Driven programming. The Model Driven Semantic Web [Frankel] explains the opportunities for and importance of this kind of research. The approach encourages much greater user involvement in software development. The advantages of increasing user involvement in software development are explained by [Olsson].

Within this research the terms user, and domain expert are used interchangeably. The user is a domain expert who wants a problem represented and modelled using software. The domain is engineering but this research could be applied to other domains. The users/domain experts may well be computer literate and able to model certain problems using a software tool such as a spreadsheet. For reasons that I be explain throughout my research, this is only sufficient for simpler problems. The reasons that spreadsheets should not be used to represent complex models are connected with difficulties in maintaining, extending, and reusing spreadsheet models. So to be able to model a complex problem, the users/domain experts currently must specify their requirements to other software experts, who may or may not have domain knowledge themselves.

It is difficult to find and afford to employ those who have sufficient expertise in both the software and the domain. Someone without the domain knowledge may not understand the requirements. Putting the right team together is a difficult balancing act, and project teams will not be able to model a problem such as a new design unless all team members can access relevant software, to understand the problem to be modelled and solved [Rodgers et al]. An additional problem is that novice modellers often have little or no training in modelling. 'Little is known about how they go about their tasks and whether they succeed' [Willemain and Powell]. So it is important to make technologies accessible for modellers to use, and to enable the models to be shared and navigated easily so that expert modellers can assist novices to create better models.

More detail on this can be found on this page http://www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/amrc/seeds/Modelling.htm.

References

D. Frankel, P. Hayes, E. Kendall, D. McGuinness, The Model Driven Semantic Web - 1st International Workshop on the Model-Driven Semantic Web (MDSW2004) Enabling Knowledge Representation and MDA(r) Technologies to Work Together (2004).

E. Olsson, What active users and designers contribute in the design process, Interacting with Computers 16 (2004) 377-401.

Rodgers, P. A., Caldwell, N. H., M., Clarkson, P.J., Huxor, A. P, 2001. The management of concept design knowledge in modern product development organizations. International Journal of Computer Integrated Manufacturing, 14(1), pp 108-115.

Willemain, T. R., Powell S. G., 2006, How novices formulate models. Part II: a quantitative description of behaviour, Journal of the Operational Research Society, pp1-12 http://www.palgrave-journals.com/jors/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/2602279a.html.


Related Tags: software, programming, modelling, spreadsheets, user driven programming, models, end users, modeller

I am a Researcher in the final year of my PhD. I specialise in applying Semantic Web techniques. My current research is on a technique of 'User Driven Modelling/Programming'. My intention is to enable non-programmers to create software from a user interface that allows them to model a particular problem or scenario. This involves a user entering information visually in the form of a tree diagram. I am attempting to develop ways of automatically translating this information into program code in a variety of computer languages. This is very important and useful for many employees that have insufficient time to learn programming languages. I am looking to research visualisation, and visualisation techniques to create a human computer interface that allows non experts to create software.

I am a member of the Institute for End User Computing (IEUC).

My Home Page is http://www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/~phale/

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