Rule Behavior

In addition to the physical characteristics of entities, there is an important part concerning their behavior in terms of reactive choreographies that has been addressed here by means of rule specifications. In the context of this thesis, a rule model has been specified enhanced with dataflow expressions. It relies on visual dataflows, intended as assignment expressions embedded in the rules as a formalism to facilitate the use of natural interaction techniques. Before the design and implementation of a user interface prototype, an empirical study has been conducted on the comprehension of dataflows versus textual expressions. Several requirements have been considered in the designed editor such as support for the construction of general expressions and possibility for co-operation and natural interaction on a digital tabletop.

Currently, we are working on a refined and improved version of the rule editor prototype and conducting an empirical user study to evaluate it.

For more information and details please refer to Chapter 4. Some of this work has been published in the following papers:

•    Alejandro Catalá, Patricia Pons, Javier Jaen, Jose A. Mocholi, Elena Navarro. A Meta-Model for DataFlow-Based Rules in Smart Environ-ments: Evaluating User Comprehension and Performance. Special issue “Software Engineering for Ambient Intelligence” in Science of Computer Programming Journal. [Download]
•    Alejandro Catalá, Patricia Pons, Javier Jaén, Jose A. Mocholí. Evaluating User Comprehension of DataFlows in Reactive Rules for Event-Driven AMI Environments. In Proc. V International Symposium on Ubiquitous Computing and Ambient Intelligence (UCAmI’11), pp. 337-344, 2011. [Download]
•    Patricia Pons, Alejandro Catalá, Javier Jaén, Jose A. Mocholí. DaFRule: Un Modelo de Reglas Enriquecido mediante Flujos de Datos para la Definición Visual del Comportamiento Reactivo de Entidades Virtuales. Actas de las Jornadas de Ingeniería del Software y Bases de Datos,“JISBD 2011”, pp. 989-1002, 2011 (ISBN: 978-84-9749-486-1). [Download]