CERC Technical Report Series

Technical Memoranda

CERC-TR-TM-90-007

Graphical User Interface with Object-Oriented
Knowledge-Based Engineering Environment

S.N. DWIVEDI

Z. KULPA

M. SOBOLEWSKI

1990

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT: This effort has been sponsored by Defense Advance Research Projects Agency (DARPA), under contract No. MDA972-88-C-0047 for DARPA Initiative in Concurrent Engineering(DICE).

Concurrent Engineering Research Center
West Virginia University
Drawer 2000, Morgantown WV 26506

Graphical User Interface with Object-Oriented Knowledge-Based Engineering Environment

Z. KULPA, M. SOBOLEWSKI* and S.N. DWIVEDI

Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering
West Virginia University, Morgantown

Summary

One of the crucial problems in integrating machines and human experts in new-generation engineering design and manufacture systems is the effective man-machine communication. The object-oriented knowledge-based environment requires an appropriate graphical user interface built on the modern principles of object- and constraint-oriented programming, visual languages and hypermedia. The interface should provide semantic-rich graphical presentation of diverse domain-dependent data as well as a direct-manipulation interface easily adaptable to graphical symbology and conventions used in the particular application domain(s). To achieve these goals, the interface incorporates knowledge-base techniques both at the interface design stage and as a part of the interface manager. The interface will serve both the system designer (providing easy access to all the relevant mechanisms of the knowledge base and tools to create an appropriate domain-dependent end-user interface) and the end user (providing data acquisition from the user, system state presentation and control, and presentation of final results). The end-user interface design toolkit includes an extensive data and knowledge visualization subsystem, consisting of parametric, constraint-based image library, qualitative, quantitative (numeric) and structural data visualization modules, and interface-control specification module.