Binnacle: A State-Mechanical Approach to Window-Based Interface Design

The computer-aided design of modular, hierarchical systems has database and interface needs that conventional approaches do not satisfy. A design process centered on components requires an object-oriented structure defined by a layer of semantic metadata; the resulting self-knowledge provides the flexibility to extend the schema over many different design contexts. With the Binnacle utility, such applications can be presented to the user in interactive, window-based environments. The many related components of such a system are represented and implemented by the interface designer as networks of nested automata using a new model of state transition.