Study of Extension of Functions of Iconic Workspace

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Icons are widely used for user interface. This research project has been developing iconic systems which provide workspace utilizing icons. The purpose of this study is to investigates methods for extending functions of iconic systems and to develop applications of the systems.(1) Extending functions of iconic system ... Icons having own data and functions are primary objects in an application domain. Extension of an iconic system is achieved by adding new icons which have new functions or data. We have developed a copy-based approach to generate new icons during execution, and also implemented a user environment with extention facility.(2) User support facility of iconic system ... In order to improve the user friendliness of an iconic system, we have proposed a method on the basis of Genetic algorithm for rearranging icons in accordance with a history of user's operations of icons. An iconic system utilizing the method an arrange icons into groups to be used in jobs automatically.(3) Workflow management system ... We have developed a multi-user iconic system which manages workflow and displays states of tasks. The system examines consistency of exception handling based on an organization structure, while users handle exceptions interactively. We also have proposed an approach to improving a workflow automatically by replacing workflow components.(4) Iconic data-retrieval system ... This system provides facility for users to retrieve data shown as icons in the way of try-and-error. We introduce a group layr between user-interface and database layrs. The system can find common properties of data in a given group and make groups of data having the same properties. It also extracts relationships among groups automatically.