A presentation manager based on application semantics

We describe a system for associating the user interface entities of an application with their underlying semantic objects. The associations are classified by arranging the user interface entities in a type lattice in an object-oriented fashion. The interactive behavior of the application is described by defining application operations in terms of methods on the types in the type lattice. This scheme replaces the usual “active region” interaction model, and allows application interfaces to be specified directly in terms of the objects of the application itself. We discuss the benefits of this system and some of the difficulties we encountered.