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Towards a situated action calculus for modelling interactions

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Book cover People and Computers XII
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Abstract

Formal modelling of situated actions and context is a worthwhile endeavor if it provides a framework for verifying requirements correctness and generates principles for building interfaces for fluid interactions. The paper argues that action sequences, rather than states, are a suitable representation for this problem, and proposes a situated action calculus based on a new material implication relation among contexts. The situated action calculus extends in two respects a story-telling theory for embedding the user requirements in meaningful contexts. First, it provides a formalism and a set of operators that allow the designer to verify that stories told by different actors generate a safe and live representation; and second, it allows partitioning such representation in a succession of scenes which can be aggregated to define for each actor an interface that unfolds with the task and the context.

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© 1997 Springer-Verlag London

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Faro, A., Giordano, D. (1997). Towards a situated action calculus for modelling interactions. In: Thimbleby, H., O’Conaill, B., Thomas, P.J. (eds) People and Computers XII. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-3601-9_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-3601-9_7

  • Publisher Name: Springer, London

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-76172-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4471-3601-9

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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