A Loosely-Coupled Task Model for a Context-Aware Help System

摘要

Task models using in context-aware help systems are absolutely essential for recognizing users' problems and plans, and planning available procedural sequences toward to their individual goals. In many of previous works focusing on the context-aware help systems, predefined determinate structures of the task models allow of those adaptive behaviors. In other words, help designers of such systems are required to understand complicated internal task structures of the applications to build the context-aware help documents. Therefore, considering practical use, the model-based approaches are not appropriate enough to context-aware help systems. In this paper, we describe the loosely-coupled task model dedicated to our previous work of scenario-based design of help documents. In our proposed task model, explicit links between task elements are not defined. Thanks to this, the help designers can acquire task models having flexible structure by just choosing and arranging the task elements. The acquired task models can be expanded consistently depending on the users' contexts at run time. Our proposed loosely-coupled task model allows the help designers without specialized experience about task models to focus on the quality of the contents and create context-aware help documents.