Current thoughts and doubts

Dear colleague,

after our last telco I took some time to think about the current situation
in our working group and the current draft documents. In the last telco
several members (e.g., Joelle, Gaelle, Fabio) expressed that they could not
fully follow the current discussions concerning the meta-model for the AUI
specification. Therefore I started a discussion with Fabio (as co-chair) and
Dave (as W3C contact) at the end of last week. Here're our thoughts.

We think that we're running too much into scientific discussions with only
little practical relevance. In the last telco we had in-depth scientific
discussions concerning the AUI meta-model. It seems to be that the AUI
meta-model is now getting too complex rather than to be easily useful for
industrial companies. We have to distinguish between scientific work and
work for practical standardization. It would be better to have a clean AUI
meta-model, understandable, focused on the AUI concepts, without introducing
too many additional things related to other models or issues. Furthermore
the goal of our charter is to develop a standard that can be readily
exploited by industry for interchange of UI designs between different
editing tools (http://www.w3.org/2011/01/mbui-wg-charter). An overly complex
meta-model may harm the realization of that goal and we would rather start
from a simpler core set of features and allow for future extensions in
response to industry need rather than second guessing what those might be.

To draw a conclusion I would suggest to try to publish a first les complex
AUI meta-model which could be easily used in industry. An extended version
could then be published in future. The current AUI specification must not be
perfect, but we have to remember the target audience of the specification:
practitioners in industry. Perhaps the way forward is to see if we can
prioritize the features and try to get a feel for which ones are core and
which ones have only marginal interest? Would it even be worth thinking
about how we could reach out to industry via a survey of some kind?

I would be happy to get your opinions. Thanks.

Best regards
Gerrit

========================
Dr.-Ing. Gerrit Meixner
Head of the Human-Machine-Interaction group

German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI)
Innovative Factory Systems (IFS)
Trippstadter Strasse 122
67663 Kaiserslautern, Germany

Tel./Fax/Mobile/E-Mail/Web
+49 (0) 631 / 205 75 3415
+49 (0) 631 / 205 75 3402
+49 (0) 157 / 725 95 865
Gerrit.Meixner@dfki.de
http://www.dfki.de
========================
Legal statement: 
Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz GmbH
Trippstadter Strasse 122
67663 Kaiserslautern

Geschäftsführung: 
Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. mult. Wolfgang Wahlster (Vorsitzender), Dr. Walter
Olthoff 
Vorsitzender des Aufsichtsrats: 
Prof. Dr. h.c. Hans A. Aukes
Amtsgericht Kaiserslautern, HRB 2313
========================

Received on Monday, 26 November 2012 12:26:41 UTC