DIF Knowledge Management System: Bridging Viewpoints for Interactive System Design

Interactive systems have begun to adopt embedded and ubiquitous computing technologies in an attempt to effectively distribute information and functions in our activity space. Because of the pervasive nature of those technologies, it becomes critical to pursue deeper understanding of user needs and consistent incorporation of those needs into the system from a wide range of viewpoints. In order to enhance integration of multiple viewpoints throughout system development, the concept of the Design Information Framework (DIF) was previously introduced as a common information representation platform for interactive system development. This paper reports the development of the DIF Knowledge Management System (DIF-KMS) that provide a common information and tool platform for interdisciplinary collaboration for human-centered interactive system development. The DIF-KMS provides the following functions: 1) defines a set of DILs to establish an evolutionary but consistent ontology of the project, Project DIF (P-DIF), by incorporating different disciplinary viewpoints involved in the development, 2) manages multimedia information resources such as video, photo, sound, graphic, and text documents, 3) encodes data into different representation formats for different viewpoints, 4) translates the encoded data to an aspect model representation by selecting a viewpoint, and 5) composes composite aspect models and other types of representations such as scenarios to integrate information from different views. The DIF-KMS has been implemented as an Internet-based collaboration environment to support development resource sharing among remotely distributed users during interactive system development. Proceedings of 11 Human Computer Interaction International Las Vegas, Nevada USA, July 22-27, 2005