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AsbruView: Capturing Complex, Time-Oriented Plans — Beyond Flow Charts

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Abstract

Flow charts are one of the standard means of representing actions or algorithms in many domains. However, applying flow charts in dynamically changing environments, like clinical treatment planning, reveals their limitations. Flow charts do not include the temporal dimension in their design, do not allow complex paths through many components, and scale very badly. These are only some of the requirements for a means of communicating clinical therapy plans. As an alternative, a plan-representation language called Asbru was designed, which overcomes all the limitations of flow charts. It is, however, impossible for a domain expert to work with Asbru directly. Therefore, a visualisation called AsbruView is presented here, which uses three-dimensional diagrams and metaphors — running tracks and traffic signs — to make the parts of Asbru easily understandable and usable. Even very complex clinical plans are easy to understand with AsbruView.

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© 2002 Springer-Verlag London

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Kosara, R., Miksch, S., Shahar, Y., Johnson, P. (2002). AsbruView: Capturing Complex, Time-Oriented Plans — Beyond Flow Charts. In: Anderson, M., Meyer, B., Olivier, P. (eds) Diagrammatic Representation and Reasoning. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-0109-3_30

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-0109-3_30

  • Publisher Name: Springer, London

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-85233-242-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4471-0109-3

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