1992 Fiscal Year Final Research Report Summary
An Experimental Study on Icon Semantics for Iconic User-Interface
| Project/Area Number |
03680032
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| Research Category |
Grant-in-Aid for General Scientific Research (C)
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| Allocation Type | Single-year Grants |
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| Research Field |
Informatics
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| Research Institution | Yamaguchi University |
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Principal Investigator |
TANAKA Minoru Yamaguchi Univ.,Fac.Engineering,Professor, 工学部, 教授 (40112023)
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| Project Period (FY) |
1991 – 1992
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| Keywords | Icon / User Interface / Semantics / Visual Information / Visual Programming / Object-oriented / Graphic Interface / Iconic System |
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| Research Abstract |
Icons are widely used for user-interface. It is easy for the user to recognize what an icon is but difficult to understand how it works. Users sometimes accept different meanings of icons from their definition given in an iconic system. The purpose of this study is to investigate icon semantics through using an iconic system.
(1)A development environment for application iconic-systems has been implemented on a workstation. Each icon in the system is an object and has both functions and data. When two icons are overlapped, an appropriate function is selected by bidirectional message-passing and applied to data. (2) The environment provides facilities to generate application icon as a construct of "resources"which are objects with smaller granularity than an icon. The application system designer can define icons close to users' intuitional understanding. (3)By exchanging resources the system holds consistency and provides unique interface for data exchange between icons. (4)Meaning of a set of icons selected by the user is discussed based on a set of messages of the selected icons. We show a probability of applying a function to a set of data and a set of different functions to a single data. (5) Semantic distance between icons is discussed based on co-occurrency and history of icons used. On the basis of semantic distance the system can provide a set of icons which are applicable in the later operations.
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