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| Title: | Intelligent Context-Sensitive Help for Dynamic User and Environment Contexts |
| Authors: | Ramachandran, Ashwin |
| Advisors: | Dr. R. Michael Young, Committee Chair
Dr. James Lester, Committee Member
Dr. Robert St. Amant, Committee Member |
| Keywords: | Planning
Intelligent Help |
| Issue Date: | 29-Oct-2004 |
| Degree: | MS |
| Discipline: | Computer Science |
| Abstract: | The problem of providing help for complex application interfaces has been a source of interest for a number of researcher efforts. As the computational power of computers increases, typical applications not only increase in functionality but also in the degree of interaction with the computational environment in which they reside. There are powerful software tools available today used for both specialized and non-specialized tasks that are often used by novice users who attempt tasks without significant training or knowledge of the application's interface. These kinds of applications are diverse and complicated in the variety of functionality they provide, often interacting with other applications on the user's system. With current platforms (Windows, Macintosh, Linux etc) providing extensive multi-tasking facilities, interaction with these applications is sometimes affected by the context of the environment itself (e.g., application windows being minimized, maximized or obscured by those of other applications). The interdependencies between applications and their environments increase the difficulty of providing effective context-sensitive help when building an application's help documentation. The purpose of this research is to create an Intelligent Help System, which incorporates these interactions and affecting factors when providing help. The SmartAidè system, which was developed as part of this effort, works on the premise that the user has a goal when interacting with the application. This document will provide a detailed overview of the architecture of the system along with the underlying design decisions. The system was then evaluated against traditional application help documentation to test its effectiveness. The results and analysis of this evaluation have been enumerated. |
| URI: | http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/resolver/1840.16/321 |
| Appears in Collections: | Theses
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