Vance Maverick

EECS Department, University of California, Berkeley

Technical Report No. UCB/CSD-97-947

, 1997

http://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/1997/CSD-97-947.pdf

Every interactive system requires a presentation mechanism, to show the user the data it handles. Often, the relationship between the data and its presentation is complex; further, it is often mediated by a style mechanism, allowing the user or a designer to describe how the data should be displayed. It is a standing engineering challenge to develop a presentation model that is flexible, handling many kinds of data and layout; powerful, giving the user extensive control over appearance; and efficient enough for interactive work. <p>In this thesis, we propose a model of presentation by tree transformation. Because information often has a hierarchical logical structure, trees are widely used to represent documents and other data. The layout or presentation of a document is also often modeled as a computation over a tree. But these trees are not generally identical. In other words, presentation can be seen as a mapping between trees. Casting it as a formal tree transformation offers both expressive, compact style specifications and efficient implementation. <p>We present a general framework for presentation by tree transformation. It has been implemented as part of Ensemble, a software development environment and multimedia document system developed in our research group at Berkeley. We describe the tree-transformation mechanism, and a language for specifying presentation styles as transformations. In addition, we have developed several distinct output tree languages or "media": a pretty-printer for formatting programs, a graphing tool for presenting numerical data as x,y plots, and a general tree viewer for displaying the structure of any document. <p>We define four measures of efficiency that are important for interactive presentation. These are startup time, the time taken to bring up a document for the first time; refresh time, the time to redraw a document; change time, the time to process a simple change such as a character insertion; and the size of presentation data in memory. We show that the implementation can be tuned to provide good performance according to each measure.

Advisors: Michael A. Harrison

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BibTeX citation:

@phdthesis{Maverick:CSD-97-947,
    Author= {Maverick, Vance},
    Title= {Presentation by Tree Transformation},
    School= {EECS Department, University of California, Berkeley},
    Year= {1997},
    Month= {Sep},
    Url= {http://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/1997/5886.html},
    Number= {UCB/CSD-97-947},
    Abstract= {Every interactive system requires a presentation mechanism, to show the user the data it handles.  Often, the relationship between the data and its presentation is complex; further, it is often mediated by a style mechanism, allowing the user or a designer to describe how the data should be displayed. It is a standing engineering challenge to develop a presentation model that is flexible, handling many kinds of data and layout; powerful, giving the user extensive control over appearance; and efficient enough for interactive work. <p>In this thesis, we propose a model of presentation by tree transformation. Because information often has a hierarchical logical structure, trees are widely used to represent documents and other data. The layout or presentation of a document is also often modeled as a computation over a tree. But these trees are not generally identical. In other words, presentation can be seen as a mapping between trees. Casting it as a formal tree transformation offers both expressive, compact style specifications and efficient implementation. <p>We present a general framework for presentation by tree transformation. It has been implemented as part of Ensemble, a software development environment and multimedia document system developed in our research group at Berkeley. We describe the tree-transformation mechanism, and a language for specifying presentation styles as transformations. In addition, we have developed several distinct output tree languages or "media": a pretty-printer for formatting programs, a graphing tool for presenting numerical data as x,y plots, and a general tree viewer for displaying the structure of any document. <p>We define four measures of efficiency that are important for interactive presentation. These are startup time, the time taken to bring up a document for the first time; refresh time, the time to redraw a document; change time, the time to process a simple change such as a character insertion; and the size of presentation data in memory. We show that the implementation can be tuned to provide good performance according to each measure.},
}

EndNote citation:

%0 Thesis
%A Maverick, Vance 
%T Presentation by Tree Transformation
%I EECS Department, University of California, Berkeley
%D 1997
%@ UCB/CSD-97-947
%U http://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/1997/5886.html
%F Maverick:CSD-97-947