1GRIP: Toward a Standard GUI for Conceptual Structures

A major advantage of conceptual graphs is their ease of use in the graphical form. This paper is intended to present some general guidelines for building a suitable conceptual graph interface and the details of a particular implementation currently under development. The resulting software is to be completely integrated with the existing PEIRCE code, built to conform with the PEIRCE standards of portability and robustness, and is to be used by the PEIRCE community for representation, acquisition and querying of conceptual graphs. The software under development at the University of Adelaide is the authors' eeorts to provide a deenitive prototype implementation for the drawing and editing of conceptual graphs capable of the providing graphical operations required by the Graphical Editor and Display (GRIP) research group: a subgroup of the PEIRCE project. The software (locally referred to as GrIT) must conform to PEIRCE speciications EL92]. It will arrange and display the core graph ADTs on a graphics view surface and conversely translate graphs constructed with the interface into the core ADT structures. The ADT structures will be derivations of those used by Ellis' (Conceptual Database Subgroup) PEIRCE database Ell93]. Accordingly, GrIT will have direct access to the functionality of the PEIRCE database and maintain complete integration and consistency with any forthcoming release of the PEIRCE code. The \stub" code for the widgets of GrIT were generated using a SunSoft product, Devguide Sun91a], Sun91b]. The XView widget set Hel92], an implementation of the OPEN LOOK standard (the GUI standard supported by Sun and AT&T for X Window System V Release 4) was chosen to implement the graphics because (i) it lends itself naturally to object-oriented programming in C++, (ii) is a public domain software, (iii) is supported by Devguide, (iv) executes expectedly under diierent window managers. The design was based on the guidelines for GUIs presented in FG79]. Previous work (e.g. Ekl88] and EK89] | cf. EL92] pages 36 { 37) gives considerable experience, although the existing software's platforms are at odds with the requirements of PEIRCE.