Explanation of the Problem to be Addressed

Research Aim

This research arises out of work to create systems to facilitate management of design and cost related knowledge within those organisations, with the aim of using this knowledge to reduce the costs of manufacturing products. This thesis identifies ways that problems arising from the model development process can be addressed by a new way of providing for the creation of software. With experience from projects, which have used a combination of proprietary software solutions and bespoke software, it is possible to identify the approach of User Driven Programming (UDP). This research unites approaches of Object Orientation, the Semantic Web, and Relational Databases and event driven programming. The approach encourages much greater user involvement in software development.

Software development is time consuming and error prone because of the need to learn computer languages. If people could instruct a computer without this requirement they could concentrate all their effort on the problem to be solved. This is termed User Driven Programming (UDP) within this research, and for the examples demonstrated the term User Driven modelling (UDM) is used to explain the application of user driven programming to model development. This research aims to create software that enables people to program using visual metaphors. Users enter information in a diagram, which for these examples is tree based. The program translates this human readable representation into computer languages.

This research demonstrates how a taxonomy can be used to automatically produce software. This technique is most suitable at present to modelling, visualisation, and searching for information. The research explains the technique of User Driven Model Development that could be part of a wider approach of User Driven Programming. This approach involves the creation of a visual environment for software development, where modelling programs can be created without the requirement of the model developer to learn programming languages. The theory behind this approach is explained and also the main practical work in creation of this system. The basis of this approach is modelling of the software to be produced in Ontology systems such as Jena and Prot