A Meta-Model for the Dialog Flow Notation

While the separation of presentation and application logic is widely practiced in web-based applications today, many do not cleanly separate application and dialog control logic, which leads to inflexible implementations especially when multiple presentation channels shall be served by the same application logic. We therefore present a notation for specifying the complete dialog flow of an application separately from the application logic and show how to construct a formal metamodel for it using the OMG’s Meta-Object Facility (MOF). This allows the validation of dialog flow models, as well as the generation of machine-readable dialog flow specifications from graphical models.