(A) storyboard-based abstraction method for end-user task authoring

Abstract

As the users and their needs are getting more various, it is difficult to meet those needs by developing a limited set of applications that provided by a few number of software developers. It implies the necessity for end users to create and customize applications that they need. Ubiquitous computing focuses on supporting everyday activities of various users. It has engaged more diverse types of users and computing resources in ubiquitous computing environments. Considering these characteristics, it is essential to support to make end-users actively participating in ubiquitous computing environments based on high level goals of the users. In this sense, the application authoring tool should be easy to use, and efficient. Furthermore, it should support the reuse of existing software assets for improving the quality of applications. We devise storyboard-based application authoring method. Main elements of our approach are the storyboard model to be fit in ubiquitous computing environments and semantic-based abstraction method to represent the complex ubiquitous computing applications which are defined in meta-level onto the storyboard. Through our research, we provide an environment to let end-users develop ubiquitous applications without technical knowledge by providing a compound structure model to represent non-sequential relationships without the collapse of storyboards which sequentially arrange elementary services. In addition, we improve existing visual programming paradigms which are mostly too much fine grained visual programming by connecting task-oriented application framework. Moreover, we provide an easy way for end-users to understand ubiquitous computing applications by supporting semantic-based abstraction method.