Language and Tool Mapping

My Research Area - This aim of my research is to try to bring together the areas of End User Programming, Modelling and the Semantic Web. So I'm examining the area marked in yellow. These research areas are enabled by a visual interface with the end user.

My intention is to examine tools and technologies that can translate from a domain representations and/or and abstract representation of a problem into program code, and examine a systematic way to make this possible. Technologies to enable this, with links to explanations of them are shown below :-

Please let me know if you think a particular tool or technology is represented wrongly.

Domain Representation	Modelling/Programming	Abstract Representation	Structured Data File
ACUITy
KAON
Metatomix M3t4
TopBraid Composer
	Jena
	Ontolingua
	Protégé
	Semantic Wikis
PSL, STEPml, PMXML, XML with domain schemas	AspectXML, AJAX/Web2.0, XQuery, XForms, SPARQL	RDF, RDFS, DAML+OIL, OWL, RSS, SVG, VRML, UML, XMI, MathML, RuleML	XML, Databases

The intention of this research is to enable users to navigate between tools such as these without necessarily being aware of which tool or technology they are using. The way to achieve this is through an end-user programming environment that makes use of these technologies. A person should be able to model their domain using a visual modelling language, this modelling language should then translate the representation to an abstract representation, which can be translated to open standard formats, able to be held as structured data files that can be understood by computer software. The Modelling/Programming layer provides a translation service and can perform calculations, therefore converting a source tree to a result tree. The intention is for the user to be able to use the domain layer tool without having to interact directly with any of the layers below. The results are then fed back to the user, who can drill down through the result tree in order to find the reasoning behind the results.

Relevant Conferences/Events

Where 2.0 Conference - http://conferences.oreillynet.com/where2007/ - The third annual O'Reilly Where 2.0 Conference brings together the people, projects, and issues building the new technological foundations and creating value in the location industry. There's no better place to meet the people behind the mash-ups and platforms, and the folks looking ahead to the future of geospace. - San Jose - California - May 29-30.

ESTC2007 - http://www.estc2007.com/ - 1st European Semantic Technology Conference initiates a new conference series in Semantic technologies in Europe. ESTC2007 is a new European meeting ground for customers, developers and researchers to discuss the applicability and commercialization of Semantic technologies in corporate settings - May 31st - June 1st - Vienna - Austria.

ICE 2007 the 13th International Conference on Concurrent Enterprising - http://www.ice-conference.org/ - Sophia-Antipolis, France, June 04 - 06, 2007.

History of Programming Languages Conference (HOPL-III) - http://research.ihost.com/hopl/ - The Third ACM SIGPLAN - History of Programming Languages Conference (HOPL-III) - San Diego, California, June 9-10, 2007 - (co-located with FCRC 2007, June 9-16, 2007) - in cooperation with ACM SIGSOFT.

8th Annual Enterprise Architecture Conference - Designing a flexible foundation - IRM UK - Enterprise Architecture Conference Europe 2007, 11-13 June 2007, London.

GC 2007expo - http://www.gcexpo.com/ - 12-13th June 2007 - Earls Court One - London - GC 2007 is simply THE most exciting and dynamic public sector ICT exhibition and conference event of the year for public sector technologists.

SOAWorld 2007: Enterprise Open Source: http://www.soaeosconference.sys-con.com/ - June 25-27 2007 - New York.

IADIS Multi Conference on Computer Science and Information Systems 2007 http://www.mccsis.org/ - Lisbon, Portugal 3 - 8 July 2007.

Summer School on Ontological Engineering and the Semantic Web (SSSW'07) - http://knowledgeweb.semanticweb.org/sssw07/frames.jsp - July 8, 2007 - July 14, 2007. Cercedilla (Spain).

ISPE - The 14th ISPE International Conference on Concurrent Engineering:Research and Applications - http://ce2007.lit.inpe.br/ - ISPE - http://www.ispe-org.net/ - July 16-20, 2007 - São José dos Campos, SP, Brazil.

ACM - DocEng 2007 - http://doceng07.cs.umanitoba.ca/ - ACM Symposium on Document Engineering - 28-31 August 2007 - Winnepeg, Canada.

Engineering the Semantic Desktop (SemDeskEng 2007) - http://semdeskeng2007.semanticdesktop.org/ - 1st Workshop on Engineering the Semantic Desktop - co-located with ESEC/FSE 2007 - 3 September 2007, Dubrovnik, Croatia.

SVG.Open - http://www.svgopen.org/ - SVG.Open 2007 Conference, Tokyo, Japan - 4 -7 September 2007 - The SVG Open 2007 conference will be held in Tokyo, Japan, organized by Opera and Keio University, the Asian W3C host. The conference will be hosted September 4-7 at a university campus of Keio University. A call for papers and contributions will be issued later on this webpage.

VLC'2007 - International Workshop on Visual Languages and Computing - http://www.ksi.edu/seke/vlc07.html - Hotel Sofitel, San Francisco Bay, 6-8 September 2007 - Organized by Knowledge Systems Institute - Digital Arts and Sciences Lab, UF, and Visual Computing Lab, UT-Dallas.

IEEE International Conference on Semantic Computing - http://icsc2007.eecs.uci.edu/ - September 17-19, 2007 - Irvine, California, USA - The field Semantic Computing applies technologies in natural language processing, data and knowledge engineering, software engineering, computer systems and networks, signal processing and pattern recognition, and any combination of the above to extract, access, transform and synthesize the semantics (contents) of multimedia, texts, services and structured data.

2007 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing - http://vlhcc07.eecs.wsu.edu/ - Coeur d'Alène, Idaho, USA - 22-26 September 2007.

ESM'2007, October 22-24, 2007 - European Simulation and Modelling Conference - Westin Dragonara Hotel, St. Julian's, Malta.

Web 2.0 Conference - http://www.web2con.com/web2006/ - November 7-9 2007 - San Francisco.

The 6th International Semantic Web Conference and the 2nd Asian Semantic Web Conference, 2007 - http://iswc2007.semanticweb.org/ - Busan, Korea - November 11 (Sunday) - 15 (Thursday), 2007.

IASTED 2008 - Software Engineering - http://www.iasted.org/conferences/home-598.html - SE 2008 - as part of the 26th IASTED International Multi-Conference on APPLIED INFORMATICS - February 12 - 14, 2008 Innsbruck, Austria.

Links

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

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

Semantic Web - http://www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/amrc/seeds/PeterHale/RDF/RDF.htm

Semantic Web Modelling - http://www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/amrc/seeds/ModellingSemanticWeb.htm

Modelling - http://www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/amrc/seeds/Modelling.htm

End User Programming - http://www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/amrc/seeds/EndUserProgramming.htm

XML - http://www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/amrc/seeds/PeterHale/XML/XML.htm

SVG - http://www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/amrc/seeds/PeterHale/SVG/SVG.htm

Meta-Languages and their usefulness for User Driven Programming

Meta-languages describe the structure of information to enable this information to be searched more easily by software systems. XML (eXtensible Markup Language) has emerged as the most important of these Meta-languages and is the base for many languages. XML standards are important for the Semantic Web, many computer based reasoning systems, and for communication between different software applications. Alternative representations of information should not be used in any system being developed now unless the author has examined XML based standards and found them insufficient. Such a situation is highly unlikely. Any software system that does not use these standards will have difficulty communicating with other software systems. Use of a generic standard keeps open the possibility of communication with the widest possible range of other software systems. Use of a domain specific standard targets the communication to a particular domain.

Extensible Markup Language XML is an important standard in the development of ontologies. This language allows for the construction of text documents in which the relationship between concepts is represented. Because it is an accepted standard it is possible to use XML on any type of computer. Further developments such as Resource Description Framework RDF add a layer of standardisation of semantics, above the standardised syntax of XML. It is also possible to represent diagrammatic, and graphical information using a variety of XML called Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG).

These open standard languages can be used for developing the program code of models. It is proposed that software and information represented by the software, be separated but represented in the same open standard searchable way. Software and the information it manipulates are just information that has different uses, there is no reason why software must be represented differently represented differently from other information. So XML can be used both as the information input and output by the application, and for the definition of the model itself. The model can read or write information it represents, and the information can read from or write to the model. This recursion makes 'meta-programming' possible. Meta programming is writing of programs by other programs. The purpose of this is to provide a cascading series of layers that translate a relatively easy to use visual representation of a problem to be modelled, into code that can be run by present day compilers and interpreters. This is to make it easier for computer literate non-programmers to specify instructions to a computer, without learning and writing code in computer languages. To achieve this, any layer of software or information must be able to read the code or the information represented in any other. Code and information are only separated out as a matter of design choice to aid human comprehension, they can be represented in the same way using the same kinds of open standard languages.

Meta Language Links

Dmitriev, S. (2004). Language Oriented Programming: The Next Programming Paradigm, http://www.onboard.jetbrains.com/is1/articles/04/10/lop/.

Mens, K., Michiels, I., Wuyts, R. (2002). Supporting Software Development through Declaratively Codified Programming Patterns, Expert Systems with Applications, 23: 405-413.

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 - http://www.ieuc.org/home.html.

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

A web page for this article is at http://www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/amrc/seeds/PeterHale/EndUserHistory.htm.

History of End User Programming

1960s

In the 1960s Dartmouth BASIC programming language [7] was designed and implemented at Dartmouth College by John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz. Over time BASIC became a popular language for home users, and business use, it introduced many people to programming as a hobby or career. Many of the modern concepts of computer graphics, dynamic objects and object oriented programming were prototyped by Ivan Sutherland in 1963 in Sketchpad [13][14]. In the mid 1960s Seymour Papert, a mathematician who had been working with Piaget in Geneva, came to the United States where he co-founded the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory with Marvin Minsky. Papert worked with the team from Bolt, Beranek and Newman, led by Wallace Feurzeig that created the first version of Logo [25] in 1967. In the late sixties Alan Kay [2][3][17] used the term 'personal computer' and created a concept prototype, the FLEX Machine, he also envisaged a 'Dynabook' machine, the sketches for this look very similar to the laptop computers of recent years. The Simula [28] language was developed by Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard and this included Object-Oriented concepts. Douglas Engelbert's worked on a project to augment the human intellect, as part of the Augment [8] project he demonstrate Hypertext and video conferencing.

1970s

Alan Kay joined the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) [17][19] California in 1971. Throughout the seventies the group at PARC led by Dr. Kay developed an integrated programming language and programming environment called Smalltalk [10]. In the early seventies the Alto personal computer was created at the PARC. The Alto eventually featured the world's first What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get (WYSIWYG) editor, a commercial mouse for input, a graphical user interface (GUI), and bit-mapped display, and offered menus and icons, and linked to a local area network. The Alto provided the foundation for Xerox's STAR 8010 Information System. There was still a need to find a common use for a personal computer that would increase the demand for it. In 1978, Harvard Business School student, Daniel Bricklin, came up with the idea for an interactive visible calculator. Bricklin and Bob Frankston then co-invented the software program VisiCalc [1]. VisiCalc was a spreadsheet, and the first 'killer' application for personal computers as this application provided a justification for using personal computers as a productive tool.

1980s

During the 1980s ownership of personal computers became increasingly popular and many home users programmed using BASIC. In the early eighties IBM developed the first personal computer built from off the shelf parts (called open architecture) [15]. This included a command line operating system written by Microsoft and the Microsoft BASIC programming language. Apple developed the GUI further for the Lisa [5] that later became the Macintosh (Mac). The IBM style PC became most popular for business applications, while the Apple Mac was often used for Desktop publishing.

1990s

End User Programming research has continued to the present day. Research has continued in techniques of Visual Programming [9] e.g. Alice [4], Programming by Example [2][21], programming with automated assistance [20], and Natural Language Programming [27]. Squeak and Croquet[6] have developed from the early work in Smalltalk.

Tim Berners-Lee [23] developed HyperText Markup Language (HTML), and has been involved with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) [29] in developing standards base languages for the Web. This has encouraged the growth of the 'Semantic Web' [11] which allows both humans and computers to search and interact with pages more and so encouraged the development of interactive web pages and communities.

2000s

Recent, present and future research can enable the use of semantic web technologies, (developed from HTML by Tim Berners-Lee [23] and others), to enable End User Programming. This fusion of research and technologies is illustrated by Henry Lieberman's home page [12] which has explanations of both areas of research. Examples of this fusion include Protégé [22], Jena [16], TopBraid Composer [24], and OpenCyc [18]. Information about these technologies is available in my semantic web page - http://www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/amrc/seeds/PeterHale/RDF/RDF.htm. A related development is that of web 2.0. Visual development environments based on AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript And XML) [26] aim to reproduce on the web, the functionality provided by office tools such as Excel (which is often used as an End User Programming Environment). Information about Ajax and Web 2.0 is available in my Ajax/web2.0 page - http://www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/amrc/seeds/Ajax/ajax.htm.

References

1. A Brief History of Spreadsheets - http://dssresources.com/history/sshistory.html - Decision Support System Resources - by D. J. Power, Editor, DSSResources.COM.

2. Alan Kay - http://www.acypher.com/wwid/FrontMatter/index.html - Watch What I Do - Programming by Example.

3. Alan Kay ETech 2003 presentation - http://www.lisarein.com/alankay/tour.html - Lisa Rein's Tour Of Alan Kay's Etech 2003 Presentation.

4. Alice v2.0 - http://www.alice.org/ - Learn to Program Interactive 3D Graphics.

5. Apple Lisa - http://fp3.antelecom.net/gcifu/applemuseum/lisa2.html - The First Affordable GUI - Lisa 1 Jan-83 Jan-84, Lisa 2 Jan-84 Apr-85.

6. Croquet - http://www.opencroquet.org/ - a new open source software platform for creating deeply collaborative multi-user online applications.

7. Dartmouth BASIC - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dartmouth_BASIC - Wikipedia.

8. The Demo - http://sloan.stanford.edu/mousesite/1968Demo.html - Stanford University.

9. Dmoz Open Directory Project - http://dmoz.org/Computers/Programming/Languages/Visual/ - Visual Languages - Programming Languages Reference - Visual Languages.

10. The Early History Of Smalltalk by Alan Kay - http://www.smalltalk.org/smalltalk/TheEarlyHistoryOfSmalltalk_II.html - 1967-69--The FLEX Machine, a first attempt at an OOP-based personal computer - Alan Kay - Smalltalk.org.

11. Fifteen Years of the Web - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/5243862.stm - Internet Timeline - BBC Technology.

12. Henry Lieberman - http://web.media.mit.edu/~lieber/ - Research Scientist - MIT Media Laboratory.

13. History of HCI - http://www.idemployee.id.tue.nl/g.w.m.rauterberg/presentations/HCI-history - Key systems, people and ideas - Presentation by Matthias Rauterberg.

14. History of HCI - Sketchpad (1963) - http://www.idemployee.id.tue.nl/g.w.m.rauterberg/presentations/HCI-history/sld020.htm - Ivan Sutherland - MIT Lab - Presentation by Matthias Rauterberg.

15. Inventors of the Modern Computer - http://inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aa031599.htm -The History of the IBM PC - International Business Machines.

16. Jena - http://jena.hpl.hp.com/juc2006/proceedings.html - First Jena User Conference - Proceedings.

17. Kyoto Prize Laureates 2004 - http://www.kyotoprize.org/commentary_kay.htm - 2004 Kyoto Prize Laureates - Dr. Alan Curtis Kay (U.S.A., b. 1940) - Computer Scientist, President, Viewpoints Research Institute.

18. OpenCyc - http://www.opencyc.org/ - OpenCyc.org - General knowledge base and commonsense reasoning engine.

19. Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) - History - http://www.parc.xerox.com/about/history/default.html - PARC History.

20. The Programmer's Apprentice - http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=87912&dl=ACM&coll=GUIDE - The ACM Digital Library.

21. Programming by Example - http://web.media.mit.edu/~lieber/PBE/index.html.

22. Protege - http://protege.stanford.edu/ - Protégé Home - Ontology Development Environment.

23. Tim Berners - http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/Lee - Tim Berners-Lee.

24. TopBraid - http://www.topbraidcomposer.com/ - Semantic Modeling Toolset - Visual modeling environment.

25. What is Logo? - http://el.media.mit.edu/Logo-foundation/logo/index.html - MIT Logo Foundation, What is Logo.

26. Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajax_(programming) - Ajax (programming).

27. Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_language_and_computation - Natural language processing.

28. Simula - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simula - Simula.

29. World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) - http://www.w3.org/ - Leading the Web to Its Full Potential....

Useful End User Programming Links

"A History of Haskell: being lazy with class", Paul Hudak (Yale University), John Hughes (Chalmers University), Simon Peyton Jones (Microsoft Research), Philip Wadler (Edinburgh University), http://research.microsoft.com/~simonpj/papers/history-of-haskell/index.htm - The Third ACM SIGPLAN History of Programming Languages Conference (HOPL-III) San Diego, California, June 9-10, 2007.

Alan Blackwell - University of Cambridge - Human Computer Interaction - End User Programming.

BBC Technology news - Free tool offers 'easy' coding - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6647011.stm - A free programming tool that allows anyone to create their own animated stories, video games and interactive artworks has been developed - Jonathan Fildes - 14 May 2007.

Celebrating the creator of Cobol - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6168489.stm - BBC News - Mark Ward December 11th 2006.

The Centre for Advanced Learning Technologies - The Centre for Advanced Learning Technologies - studying the impact of new media and technologies on the business environment.

Computer History Museum - Exhibits - Timeline.

Computer Languages History - http://www.levenez.com/lang/ - Computer Languages Timeline - Éric Lévénez. - O'Reilly Poster based on Éric Lévénez diagram.

Constructivist Computer Assisted Learning: Theory and Techniques - http://www.ascilite.org.au/conferences/adelaide96/papers/21.html - Barney Dalgarno - Information Services Division - University of Canberra - The changes that have occurred in accepted approaches to teaching and learning in recent years have been underpinned by shifts in psychological and pedagogical theory, culminating in moves towards a constructivist view of learning.

Dmoz Open Directory Project - Programming Languages - Programming Languages Reference - Alphabetic List of Programming Languages - Definitions and Links.

DSpace - http://www.dspace.org/ - The DSpace digital repository system captures, stores, indexes, preserves, and distributes digital research material.

Euses End Users Shaping Effective Software research collaboration - Welcome to EUSES - Research Collaboration.

Euses Presentation - End User Programming - Invited Research Overview - Brad Myers, Andrew Co, Margaret Burnett - Carnegie Mellon, Oregon State Universities.

Generative Programming - Generative Programming - Methods, Tools, and Applications - Krzysztof Czarnecki and Ulrich W. Eisenecker - Addison-Wesley, June 2000.

Hackety Hack - http://hacketyhack.net/ - In this century, you may have dozens of programming languages lurking on your machine. But how to use them?? A fundamental secret! Well, no more. We cannot stand for that. Hackety Hack will not stand to have you in the dark!!

History of Computing - http://www.ieuc.org/end-user-computing/references/notes/HistoryofComputing.html - One of the best works in this regard can be found in the volumes devoted to The History of Programming Languages. - The Insititute for End User Computing.

History of End User Programming - Article - Peter Hale.

History of Haskell - http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/History_of_Haskell.

How the internet transformed business - BBC Business - By Steve Schifferes Business editor, BBC News website.

How the Spectrum began a revolution - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6572711.stm - In April 1982 a small British company, lead by Sir Clive Sinclair, launched the ZX Spectrum computer and sparked a revolution. - 23 April 2007 - BBC News Technology.

How the web went world wide - BBC Technology - Mark Ward Technology Correspondent, BBC News website.

IBM developerWorks Interviews: Rod Smith - http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/podcast/dwi/cm-int062806.html - IBM vice president of Emerging Internet Technologies on the business of watching, encouraging, and leveraging new technologies.

IBM QED Wiki - IBM eyes programming for the masses - By Martin LaMonica - CNET News.com.

I think, therefore I Woz - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6077374.stm - BBC News - Technology - Steve Wozniak,Apple - 25th October 2006.

In pictures: Commodore computers - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_pictures/6454113.stm - The rise, fall and rise again of gaming icon Commodore - 15 March 2007.

ISTI-CNR, Pisa, Italy - Model-based Tools for Pervasive Usability - Fabio Paternò.

John Backus (1924-2007) - John W. Backus, who built and led the IBM team that created Fortran, the first widely used programming language, which helped to open the door to modern computing, died on 17 March at his home in Ashland, Oregon, USA. He was 82.

Journal of Visual Languages and Computing - Journal Home Page - Elsevier.

Network of Excellence on End User Development - Network of Excellence on End User Development - EUD-Net

Oregan State and Houston University - Automatic Generation and Maintenance of Correct Spreadsheets - Martin Erwig, Robin Abraham, Irene Cooperstein, Steve Kollmansberger.

Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) - http://www.parc.com/ - Palo Alto.

Raskin Center - http://rchi.raskincenter.org/index.php?title=Home - Exploting New Interface Directions.

Science Museum - http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/collections/subject_themes/computing.asp - Computing and Information Technology.

Semantic Information Processing - Semantic Information ProcessingMarvin L. Minsky - The MIT Press.

Software Abstractions - Resources and Additional Materials - Book with sample chapters online - Daniel Jackson.

Socratic Arts - http://www.socraticarts.com/ - Online learning services.

Software componentry - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_componentry - Wikipedia - Software componentry.

The beauty of software - British Computer Society Turing Lecture March 2007 Grady Booch - Full write up - http://www.bcs.org/server.php?show=ConWebDoc.10367 - This year's Turing Lecture was given by Grady Booch under the title 'The promise, the limits, the beauty of software.' - 13 March 2007

The Dangers of End-User Programming - Portland State University - Warren Harrison.

The Geometer's Sketchpad:Programming by Geometry - http://www.acypher.com/wwid/Chapters/13Sketchpad.html - R. Nicholas Jackiw and William F. Finzer - from Watch What I Do: Programming by Demonstration - edited by Allen Cypher co-edited by Daniel C. Halbert, David Kurlander, Henry Lieberman, David Maulsby, Brad A. Myers, and Alan Turransky.

The History of Computer Programming Languages - http://www.princeton.edu/~ferguson/adw/programming_languages.shtml - Stephen Ferguson - Princeton University Library.

The History of Computing Project - http://www.thocp.net/.

The Institute for End User Computing, Inc. The Chronicles of End User Computing... http://www.ieuc.org/home/chronicles.html as edited on Saturday, January 22, 2005.

The Institute for End User Computing, Inc. The IEUC Homepage - http://www.ieuc.org/home.html - as edited on Wednesday, May 17, 2006.

The Institute for End User Computing - The Market's Failure to Meet End User Needs - http://www.ieuc.org/home/market-failure.html.

The Magic of the 80's - http://www.ieuc.org/end-user-computing/references/notes/themagicofthe80s.html - For a wonderful cultural history of the early days of the PC revolution, see S. Levy, Hackers : heroes of the computer revolution - The Insititute for End User Computing.

Twenty five years of the IBM PC - BBC News - Technology.

UK home computer pioneer honoured - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6217447.stm - BBC News - British technology pioneer Andrew Hopper becomes a CBE in the New Year Honours list.

Universidad Autónoma de Madrid - Dr José A. Macías - publications - Research - End User Development (EUD).

University of the West of England - UWE Student Project - http://www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/amrc/seeds/Web%20Semantic/Index.html - Investigating and implement the idea of 'ModConsWest' (Modelling and Constructionism with Web based E-Learning Semantic Tools)" - Lee Ediagbonya and Awaab Eltahir.

Where does the web go from here? - BBC Technology - Bill Thompson.

Useful Publications

A Computer Program to Model and Stimulate Creative Thought, Smith, D. C. (1977), Basel: Birkhauser. 187p.

A History of Haskell: being lazy with class, Paul Hudak (Yale University), John Hughes (Chalmers University), Simon Peyton Jones (Microsoft Research), Philip Wadler (Edinburgh University), http://research.microsoft.com/~simonpj/papers/history-of-haskell/index.htm - The Third ACM SIGPLAN History of Programming Languages Conference (HOPL-III) San Diego, California, June 9-10, 2007.

Estimating the Numbers of End Users and End User Programmers, Scaffidi, C., Shaw, M., Myers, B. (2005). IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing, (VL/HCC'05): 207-214 Dallas, Texas.

Example-based Programming: a pertinent visual approach for learning to program (2004) - University of Poitiers - Nicolas Guibert - Patrick Girard - Laurent Guittet - Proceedings of the working conference on Advanced visual interfaces - Pages: 358 - 361 - ISBN:1-58113-867-9.

History of Programming Languages, Bergin T J, Gibson R G, 1996, Volume 2, ISBN-10: 0-201-89502-1; ISBN-13: 978-0-201-89502-5.

Interaction-Oriented Software Development (2001) Huhns M N, International Journal of Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering 11 3 259-277.

Model-based tools for pervasive usability, 2005, Paterno Fabio, Interacting with Computers 17, 291-315.

The Programmer's Apprentice, 1990, Rich C, Waters R C, The ACM Digital Library - ISBN:0-201-52425-2.

Watch What I Do: Programming by Demonstration - Cypher, A, 1993, MIT Press, ISBN:0262032139.

http://www.acypher.com/wwid/ - Watch What I Do: Programming by Demonstration - The entire text of this book is included on this web site. Access it through the Table of Contents.

http://www.acypher.com/wwid/FrontMatter/index.html.

Your Wish is My Command: Giving Users the Power to Instruct their Software - http://web.media.mit.edu/~lieber/Your-Wish/ - Henry Lieberman, editor.

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 - http://www.ieuc.org/home.html.

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

A web page for this article is at http://www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/amrc/seeds/PeterHale/EndUserHistory.htm.

Programming with Semantic Web Languages

For my PhD thesis in User Driven Programming I've been experimenting with using Semantic Web Languages as programming languages. The two approaches I've used are:-

Option 1 - To put all the data in Semantic Web languages e.g XML, SVG, RDF/XML, OWL, and then display them using a programming language such as Flash, or Java (applets) -http://www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/~phale/Flash/FlashHCI.htm

http://www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/amrc/seeds/PeterHale/JavaTree/AutomaticaOutputSpar/classes/TreeOutput.html.

Option 2 - To use the above languages as meta languages for actual programming -

http://www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/amrc/seeds/PeterHale/SparMenu.xml

http://www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/amrc/seeds/PeterHale/SparMenu.html

Some of these solutions have used aspects of both approaches. These examples use SVG and JavaScript -http://www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/~phale/InteractiveSVGExamples.htm.

It is becoming increasingly practical to program completely in the Semantic Web languages. These languages enable declarative programming where we tell the computer what we want to do, and a translation is performed either using languages such as JavaScript or Java, or into JavaScript or Java.

The advantages of this form of declarative programming are that we can use a language that is at a much higher level of abstraction, closer to the way people think. I have been creating these programs by editing them in Protege (ontology editor) and using a translator to convert them to whatever code is needed. This makes it possible to perform visual programming in a meta language (OWL) Web Ontology Language (option 2), without needing to worry about how it's implemented. The possibilities for this are that it becomes sufficiently intuitive, so that people can eventually create their own software for a wide variety of tasks, in a point and click way and using similar tools to web page editors. This would enable anyone who is computer literate to program the computer themselves to do their tasks, and if this is of interest to others, they can release their solution over the web.

Technologies such as XForms - http://www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/amrc/seeds/Ajax/ajax.htm#XForms, XQuery - http://www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/amrc/seeds/PeterHale/XML/XML.htm#XQuery, and SPARQL - http://www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/amrc/seeds/PeterHale/RDF/RDF.htm#SPARQL

make it possible to provide the sort of collaborative interactivity that Tim Berners-Lee calls 'Intercreativity' in Weaving the Web - http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/Weaving/. In this book he also discussed the use of Semantic Web Languages as programming languages. He makes the point that it isn't the power of the language that is important in providing this intercreativity. The simplicity of a language such as RDF makes it easier to provide interconnected solutions to complex problems, without becoming bogged down with the complexity of the language itself, and interoperability problems. Tim Berners-Lee sums up the advantage of a Semantic Web program over programs in other languages. He writes "The advantage of putting the rules in RDF is that in doing so, all the reasoning is exposed, whereas a program is a black box: you don't see what happens inside it." If these rules are also visualised, they are exposed to everyone, including non-programmers.

These advances make it practical to develop a high level visual interface that can allow people to develop open source, open standard, interoperable programs and share them. This can allow the development of open source communities similar to those developing software currently, but only requiring the level of skill it takes to get started in visual collaboration tools such as MySpace.

In Weaving the Web Tim Berners-Lee writes "The Semantic Web, like the Web already, will make many things previously imposible just obvious". I think visual Semantic Web programming is one of those obvious things.

Semantic Web Languages could also be a useful programming tool for creation and editing of E-Learning objects (Stutt and Motta, 2004).

References

Bechhofer, S., Carrol, J., 2004. Parsing owl dl: trees or triples?. In: Proceedings of the 13th international conference on World Wide Web, NY, USA, pp 266-275.

Berners-Lee, T., Fischetti, M., 1999. Weaving the Web. Harper San Francisco; Paperback: ISBN:006251587X - http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/Weaving/.

Stutt, A., Motta, E., 2004. Semantic Learning Webs. Journal of Interactive Media in Education, 2004 (10). Special Issue on the Educational Semantic Web. ISSN:1365-893X - http://www-jime.open.ac.uk/2004/10.

World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), 2007. Extensible Markup Language (XML) http://www.w3.org/XML/.

World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), 2007. Resource Description Framework (RDF) http://www.w3.org/RDF/.

World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), 2007. Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) XML Graphics for the Web http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/.

World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), 2006. SPARQL Query Language for RDF http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-sparql-query/.

World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), 2006. XQuery 1.0: An XML Query Language http://www.w3.org/TR/xquery/.

Translation for Visual End User Programming

Research Theory influencing this Translation Mechanism

The use of the Semantic Web in my thesis is to be a means for open standard representation of information (built on XML), transformation into different representations as required, and for provision of a high level interface as a tool for model creation, and translation to program code. An 'elaborator', is used, this is a translator that converts the diagrammatic representation of the problem into software code. Translations can be performed into any programming or meta-programming language or open standard information representation language, the visualisation of the model created can be displayed on the web. This translation builds on research in program and model transformation. The translation software performs transformations as required between different programming languages and visual model views. This has been prototyped, but it is important to further this research in order to establish a user base, and make the translation generic. Figure 1 shows the process.

Figure 1 - Translation Process

Implementation

Translation Process

This research involves finding alternative ways of representing models, which do not require the user to write code. The intention is to make it easier to interact with and change the models, and to share information with colleagues. The information used in the models resides in an ontology, and from this ontology models can be automatically produced via a recursive translation tool that has been prototyped.

The research for my thesis uses a technique of interpreting information in order to create decision support programs automatically in response to user choices. This technique is then extended for use in the automatic creation of programs in other computer languages and systems. This can be achieved by automated translation of the Vanguard Studio information into other languages. The basis of this is that elaborators are nodes in the tree, which are automatically created and dynamically write objects. This allows the wing box definition to be translated to the decision support system for costing and then to other software such as web pages for further processing or visualization. An open standard semantic editor Protégé created by Stanford University (2007) was used to structure this information into related taxonomies. This ontology holds the definitions of nodes representing information, and calculations to be performed. Taxonomies are created in Protégé for 'Parts', 'Materials', 'Consumables', 'Processes', 'Rates', and 'Tooling' for a prototype costing system. 'Parts' is the core taxonomy. New categories can be produced as required. Domain experts would edit the taxonomies; these experts can specify the relationships of classes and the equations to be used via a visual user interface in Protégé. These relationships are evaluated and translated to produce computer code. Figure 2 illustrates how code is produced from the semantic relationships.

Figure 2 - Translation Process Implementation

This model can be used as it is, or be a template for the generation of a further model(s). An example interface, a section from a model produced automatically, is shown in figure 3. This information is saved using a generic structure based on keys that define all relationships, into a relational database. This enables storage of hierarchical data in a relational database and also allows for separation of information into tables according to category, and the use of SQL (Structured Query Language) to automatically query and structure the information as required. Vanguards' tree based decision support tool Vanguard Studio (2007) reads this information and represents it as colour-coded nodes. The code written for this thesis automatically queries the taxonomies that make up the ontology and links the information as required for the model. The code builds in all the links required for the equations and thus links up information from different taxonomies, the information is colour coded according to which taxonomy it is from. This same code can be reused for any modelling problem, it builds the equations and follows the links to build each equation tree, and attach this to the rest of the tree. The decision support tool can perform calculations and so output results. Figure 3 shows how the decision support tool can automatically construct and represent a branch in the tree, visualize an equation and calculate a result. Red nodes represent processes, green nodes represent the part definition and magenta nodes represent resources. This illustrates how 3 taxonomies have been automatically linked because they are needed in this calculation. In this prototype hundreds of calculations have been related to each other, this example illustrates that 'Area' was also calculated, and that this forms part of the tree for the 'Hand Layup Tool Cleaning Cost', which in turn is passed into other calculations. Hundreds of calculations using information from all the taxonomies are linked as required in this costing example. The time taken to perform the translation from the ontology and to perform all the calculations is a less than a second.

Figure 3 Ontology to Model Conversion

References

Stanford University, 2007. Welcome to protégé - http://protege.stanford.edu/.

Vanguard Studio, 2007. Global Knowledge Portal http://wiki.vanguardsw.com/.

My Research - http://www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/~phale/.

Modelling - http://www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/amrc/seeds/Modelling.htm

Semantic Web Modelling - http://www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/amrc/seeds/ModellingSemanticWeb.htm

Visualization - http://www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/amrc/seeds/Visualisation.htm

End User Programming Implementation Using Semantic Web Technologies

This article is about research to provide an environment for computer literate non-programmers to create software. Technologies that assist with this are Semantic Web languages, visualization, and modeling. Visualization of Semantic Web information can make it possible to use this information as a programming environment to be used without the need to write code.

It is possible to create an end-user programming environment using Semantic Web technologies, especially for modeling of information, where this approach is well suited. This can make translation from humans to computers easier and more reliable than current software systems and languages. The use of Semantic Web languages as programming languages would assist greatly with interoperability as these languages are standardized for use in a wide range of computer systems. To provide this solution, a translator will be created using pure XML or RDF/XML (Resource Description Framework) (World Wide Web Consortium, 2007) programming so the entire solution would be in XML based languages. This needs to be combined into a comprehensive application that is usable for end user programming of a large range of modeling problems. This involves programming with Semantic Web languages rather than just using them for information representation. This will make translation from humans to computers easier and more reliable than current software systems and languages, and further improve the maintainability of the whole system. The use of Semantic Web languages as programming languages would assist greatly with interoperability as these languages are standardized for use in a wide range of computer systems. A flexible interface built with Semantic Web Languages will provide an interactive programming environment for computer literate non-programmers to manipulate information and construct their own solution oriented models.
The metaphor behind the provision of this End-User programming environment is that of visual representation of interlinked information snippets. These snippets will be visualised as nodes or translated to other views. The nodes can be linked via equations. An example of this is an engineering component, which can be viewed as interconnected nodes of information or as a diagram. The same information can be viewed and translated both ways. The information can be further translated into computer languages to make use of compilers and interpreters that can run models that perform calculation. This research is a test case for a whole new approach that could be possible, of collaborative end user programming by domain experts. The end user programmers will be enabled to use a visual interface where the visualization of the software exactly matches the structure of the software itself, making translation between user and computer, and vice versa, much more practical. Berners-Lee and Fischetti (1999) stated "the world can be seen as only connections, nothing else. We think of a dictionary as the repository of meaning, but it defines words only in terms of other words. A piece of information is really defined only by what it's related to and how it's related." He also writes "There is really little else to meaning. The structure is everything." So connectivity and structure are the crucial factors, enabling users to create and follow the information connections that are required for solving a problem and specify this to the computer. These are the main factors in taking this research and enabling end user programming.
This research is a test case for a whole new approach that could be possible, of collaborative end user programming by domain experts. The end user programmers can use a visual interface where the visualization of the software exactly matches the structure of the software itself, making translation between user and computer, and vice versa, much more practical. Jackiw and Finzer (1993) describe an example where a diagram is translated to a graph representation, the authors explain this as 'spatial programming'. Jackiw and Finzer explain that this type of programming removes the distinction between programmers and users, and helps people to 'understand how a geometric construction can be defined by a system of dependencies'. The thesis research has tended to work the opposite way around, translating graph and tree representations to diagrammatic visualisations, but this translation is valid in either direction. Semantic Web languages are ideal for representing graphs and trees in an open standard way. The spatial, and tree/graph forms both have the same underlying semantics, and therefore can both be translated to computer languages. In fact it would be much better in the long run to use the Semantic Web languages as standardised programming languages for such problems as this would avoid the need to further translate into other programming languages, and systems. The advantage to this is in using Semantic Web languages for representation of information, meta programming, and translation to a visual display for users. The use of Semantic Web languages as a connectivity environment for connecting information, and for connecting users to the information held in Semantic Web data sources enables an environment that could be made easy to use, install and maintain.

References
Berners-Lee, T., Fischetti, M., 1999. Weaving the Web. http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/Weaving/ - Harper San Francisco; Paperback: ISBN:006251587X

Jakiw, R. N., Finzer, W. F., 1993. The Geometer's Sketchpad:Programming by Geometry. In: A. Cypher, ed. Watch What I Do: Programming by Demonstration. MIT Press, Chapter 1 -http://www.acypher.com/wwid/Chapters/13Sketchpad.html - ISBN:0262032139.

World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Resource Description Framework (RDF) - http://www.w3.org/RDF/

My Research - http://www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/~phale/.
Modelling - http://www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/amrc/seeds/Modelling.htm
Semantic Web Modelling - http://www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/amrc/seeds/ModellingSemanticWeb.htm