Knowledge Representation Environments: An Investigation of the CASSMs between Creators, Composers and Consumers

Abstract

Abstract. Many systems form 'chains' whereby developers use one system (or 'tool') to create another system, for use by other people. For example, a web development tool is created by one development team then used by others to compose web pages for use by yet other people. Little work within HumanComputer Interaction (HCI) has considered how usability considerations propagate through such chains. In this paper, we discuss three-link chains involving people that we term Creators (commonly referred to as designers), Composers (users of the tool who compose artefacts for other users) and Consumers (end users of artefacts). We focus on usability considerations and how Creators can develop systems that are both usable themselves and also support Composers in producing further systems that Consumers can work with easily. We show how CASSM, an analytic evaluation method that focuses attention on conceptual structures for interactive systems, supports reasoning about the propagation of concepts through Creator-Composer-Consumer chains. We use as our example a knowledge representation system called Tallis, which includes specific implementations of these different perspectives. Tallis is promoting a development culture within which individuals are empowered to take on different roles in order to strengthen the 'chain of comprehension' between different user types.

Creators, Composers and Consumers: Experiences of Designing a Digital Library

“…However, when it comes to considering usability, the focus narrows immediately to the end users of the system under consideration. Blandford et al [2] present a framework for considering 'chains' of developers and users of products, which they term 'creators' (commonly referred to as designers or toolsmiths), 'composers' (users of the tool who compose artefacts for other users) and 'consumers' (end users of artefacts). In this paper, we use those concepts to frame our experience of developing and testing digital library components for creating collections to be used by Humanities scholars.…”