SKETCH-BASED CSCW SYSTEM FOR UML DESIGN
This work is supported by a grant from National Natural Science Foundation of China (Project No. 69903006 and 60373065) and the Program for New Century Excellent Talents in University of China.
This paper introduces a novel sketch-based CSCW (Computer Supported Collaborative Works) system for UML design. Being different from traditional CSCW and CAD systems, our system uses free hand sketch as user interface, which will fully exploit the advantages of sketch — natural, convenient, and more capable of handling brainstorm. When using sketch as interface in CSCW systems, two problems have to be solved first: (1) how to store, edit and exchange sketch-based document consistently; (2) how to visualize sketch-based document. To solve the first problem, we propose a new document format SKETCH, which is able to represent sketches and related semantics. To solve the second problem, we propose an ontology-based conceptual model which is helpful of recognizing sketches and providing uniform visualization of sketches. To demonstrate our ideas, we have developed a prototype system that can support simple UML Class Diagram design in collaborative environment. It shows us good results, but still, more works are going to be done in the future.
