Towards a Framework for Hypermedia Scenarios

Scenarios have been used in many disciplines, such as software engineering, cognitive science, and HCI (HumanComputer Interaction) to aid in decision making, comprehension, design, and training. Scenarios are instances of behavior of the systems, or "stories" about how the system will or should look. These scenarios are used largely as points of discussion in each of these cases. Building new scenarios or analyzing existing scenarios orient the discussion in collaborative activities and increase understanding in single user tasks. How can a scenario structure be de ned that will support the widest range of discussion/comprehension activities and remain contentand access-independent? Scenarios can be structured as a document. In some ways, it is similar to a screenplay document from the lm industry. The use of a markup language will allow scenario documents to take advantage of hypermedia representations of the components. Building appropriate tools to interpret the Scenario Markup Language (SCML) will support the creation of di erent representations of scenarios (such as storyboards, audiovisual segments, narratives, etc.) from the same data. Interactions between SCML and tool functionality will also support scenario authoring, dependency analysis, and structured walkthroughs.