Modelling Methodology - User Driven Modelling

The User Driven Programming approach advocated in this research has the advantages that it is using a modelling approach for creating modelling solutions and involves creating systems to create systems. This makes it possible to solve the problem by breaking it down into stages and allowing software developers to concentrate on the most complex software problems and domain experts to be able to concentrate on their domain problem. The standardisation possible in this approach can allow software developers to create modelling systems for generic purposes that can be customised and developed by domain experts to model their domain. This methodology can be facilitated by :-

* Modelling Tools - Building an end-user interface and extending the translation capabilities of UML (Unified Modelling Language) and/or other modelling tools (Johnson, 2004).

* Spreadsheets - Improving the structuring and collaboration capabilities of spreadsheets, and enabling customisation of spreadsheet templates for particular domains and users.

*Ontology Tools - Extending the modelling capabilities and equation calculations in ontology tools and providing an end-user interface.
Semantic Web/Web 2.0 - Extending the capabilities of Semantic Web and Web 2.0 style web-based development tools to allow collaborative modelling.

* These possible solutions are not mutually exclusive and their combination could be the best way of providing usable collaborative modelling tools for computer literate end-users and domain experts. The link between these alternative ways of advancing current research is translation and User Driven Modelling/Programming.

This diagram shows the solutions, and how these could make User Driven Modelling/Programming possible :-

Methodology Diagram - Enabling User Driven Modelling/Programming

Johnson, P., 2004. Interactions, Collaborations and breakdowns. In: ACM International Conference Proceeding Series; Proceedings of the 3rd annual conference on Task models and diagrams Vol 86 Prague, Czech Republic.

Barriers to enabling end user programming

Please excuse the long gap since my last post, I was injured, and in hospital.

Now I'm out, I've been thinking about what the barriers are that hinder research into end user programming.

I think the essence of the problem is that organisations and individuals have many problems resulting from the lack of facilities to allow users to program. This causes many issues, which need to be urgently tackled in the short term. This creates an ironic dilemma, that the problems caused by lack of end user programming facilities cause there to be a need to tackle these problems via quick fixes because they are so urgent. This makes it difficult to secure funding for longer term end user programming research.

As an example - many people use Excel for financial modelling, and engineering, business, and science models. As these models become large, the short term solution is to use Excel Visual Basic to aid navigation through the model. However, though this helps with the immediate problem, in the longer term it can be difficult to reuse the model, as the Excel spreadsheet creator has to go through his or her code and remember what they have done, this problem is worse if a different user is trying to reuse the spreadsheet.

A longer term solution would be to provide a visual programming environment where the structure of the code is visualised, to make it easier to track the formulae, and so navigation is a central part of the program design, this also minimises the need for code.

The problem with this is that when organisations have urgent needs to produce models for a particular deadline, all their effort goes into this. Once a deadline is met or missed, there will be a new deadline for something else. So all the effort goes into meeting these deadlines, and there are little or no resources for providing a better solution that makes it easier in the long run to meet the deadlines.

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