Formal Specification Of Interactive Graphics Programming Languages

Documents a method for specifying all parts of interactive graphics programming languages. Contributions include a language framework that facilitates specification & a new specification technique that encompasses interactive control constructs.

Formal methods have already been shown to improve the development process and quality assurance in system design and implementation. This volume examines whether these benefits also apply to the field of human-computer interface design and implementation, and whether formal methods can offer useful support in usability evaluation and obtaining more reliable implementations of user requirements. Its main aim is to compare the different approaches and examine which particular type of implementation and problem each one is best suited to. To enable the reader to compare and contrast the approaches as easily as possible, each one is applied to the same case study: the specification of an ideal Netscape-like web browser and html page server. The resulting volume will provide invaluable reading for final year undergraduate and postgraduate courses on user interfaces, user interface design, and applications of formal methods.

ISO Standards for Computer Graphics: The First Generation discusses the expected standards in the quality of computer graphics; the aspects and examples of said standards; and the materials from the standards being described. The book is divided into six parts. Part 1 covers topics such as the applicability of first-generation ISO standards; software architecture; application program interface, device interface, metafile, archive, and language binding standards; and the ISO and its related bodies. Part 2 deals with topics such as output primitives and attributes, coordinate systems, and storage mechanisms. The third part talks about language bindings, encodings, and formal specifications. The fourth part tackles validation and testing; conformance testing of graphic standards; and the registration of graphical items. The book also discusses the status and future direction of ISO standards for computer graphics; it also presents in the last part the bibliography of the included topics, glossary on related bodies, and the formal specification of a part of GKS. The text is recommended for computer engineers, IT experts, and graphic designers who would like to know the ISO standards for computer graphics and its implications in their practice.

This book is a collection of several tutorials from the EUROGRAPHICS '90 conference in Montreux. The conference was held under the motto "IMAGES: Synthesis, Analysis and Interaction", and the tutorials, partly presented in this volume, reflect the conference theme. As such, this volume provides a unique collection of advanced texts on 'traditional' com puter graphics as well as of tutorials on image processing and image reconstruction. As with all the volumes of the series "Advances in Computer Graphics", the contributors are leading experts in their respective fields. The chapter Design and Display of Solid Models provides an extended introduction to interactive graphics techniques for design, fast display, and high-quality rendering of solid models. The text focuses on techniques for Constructive Solid Geometry (CSG). The follow ing topics are treated in depth: interactive design techniques (specification of curves, surfaces and solids; graphical user interfaces; procedural languages and direct manipulation) and display techniques (depth-buffer, scan-line and ray-tracing techniques; CSG classification techniques; efficiency-improving methods; software and hardware implementations).

The Mathematical Structure of Raster Graphics presents a mathematical characterization of the structure of raster graphics, a popular and diverse form of computer graphics. The semantics and theory of the mathematical structure of raster graphics are discussed. Notations that help to clarify some of the concepts generally considered to be fundamental to computer graphics are included. Comprised of seven chapters, this book begins with a description of a general framework for specifying and manipulating scenes. Basic graphic entities, called primitive graphic objects, are defined using a simple notation over a Euclidean space. The reader is then introduced to a semantics of visibility; a mathematical semantics of rendering, developed using the very basic notion of measure; and a mathematical formalization of bit-mapped graphics. A framework for specifying illumination models is also described, along with the complexity of abstract ray tracing. This monograph will be a useful resource for undergraduate and graduate students, researchers, and practitioners in the fields of mathematics and computer graphics, and to those with some basic computer graphics background.

The book contains the proceedings and reports of the "Workshop on User Interface Management Systems", held in Seeheim, Federal Re public of Germany, November 1-3, 1983. The workshop brought toge ther experts in using and developing techniques for managing the dialo gue between users and interactive graphics systems. The purpose of the workshop was to produce an agreed report contrasting existing ap proaches, and outlining directions for future work. Four different areas were defined and addressed at the workshop, namely a) role, model, structure and construction of a UIMS b) dialogue specification tools c) interface of the UIMS to the application d) user's conceptual model All participants prepared papers each in one ofthose problem areas. The papers have been rewritten in the light of the issues discussed during the workshop. Also a subgroup report was produced for each problem area summarizing the results of the discussions at the workshop. Preface User Interface Management Systems (UlMS) are the mediators between the user and the application programs. As more and more in teractive programs become widely available,methods and techniques of designing and implementing acceptable user interfaces have to be inves tigated. Since many years, research on the design of user interface mana gement systems is going on. This EUROGRAPHICS Workshop follows from the ACM SIGGRAPH Workshop on Graphical Input and Interac tion Techniques of May, 1982 in Seattle (see: Computer Graphics 17(1), 1983), and the IFIP WG 5.

Formal Methods for Protocol Engineering and Distributed Systems addresses formal description techniques (FDTs) applicable to distributed systems and communication protocols. It aims to present the state of the art in theory, application, tools an industrialization of FDTs. Among the important features presented are: FDT-based system and protocol engineering; FDT application to distributed systems; Protocol engineeering; Practical experience and case studies. Formal Methods for Protocol Engineering and Distributed Systems contains the proceedings of the Joint International Conference on Formal Description Techniques for Distributed Systems and Communication Protocols and Protocol Specification, Testing, and Verification, which was sponsored by the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) and was held in Beijing, China, in October 1999. This volume is suitable as a secondary text for a graduate level course on Distributed Systems or Communications, and as a reference for researchers and industry practitioners.