A prototype Spatial Data Management System Herot, Christopher F.; Carling, Richard; Friedell, Mark ...
International Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques: Proceedings of the 7th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques : Seattle, Washington, United States; 14-18 July 1980,
07/1980
Conference Proceeding
Open access
Spatial Data Management is a technique for organizing and retrieving information by positioning it in a spatial framework. Data is accessed in a Spatial Data Management System (SDMS) via pictorial ...representations which are arranged in space and viewed through a computer graphics system. These pictures can be created by an interactive graphical editor, allowing an SDMS to serve as a personal repository of diagrams, text, and photographs. Pictograms can also be generated from data in a symbolic database management system, allowing SDMS to be used as an interface to large, shared databases.
A prototype SDMS has been constructed which employs a set of color, raster scan displays driven by a large minicomputer. The user can create and examine data surfaces which are larger than the display screen, traversing a surface and zooming in and out to control the level of detail displayed. The prototype system provides a uniform mechanism for accessing a wide variety of data types in a manner which does not require the use of a formal command or query language.
PICTUREBALM Goates, Gary B.; Griss, Martin L.; Herron, Gary J.
International Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques: Proceedings of the 7th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques; 14-18 July 1980,
07/1980
Conference Proceeding
PICTUREBALM is a portable, interactive, LISP-based language system for graphics applications programming. PICTUREBALM's design and initial experimental implementation is described from the point of ...view of both the user and the language system implementor. The approach of extending a LISP-based language by adding graphical operations was chosen because many of the recognized requirements for graphics programming languages are standard features of LISP-like systems. Future work is proposed.
A human factors experiment was conducted that compares three color notation systems for use in computer graphics. Two of the systems (those in common use) represent colors as triples of real numbers ...in (0, 1). The third system is based on natural language color categories in English. It was found that users of the natural language-based system were significantly more accurate in specifying colors, despite the coarse granularity of that system as compared to the other two. This demonstrates that giving a user choice from a small set of values that are carefully chosen and based on human factors principles works better than providing a much larger and apparently more flexible set of values that are not based on such principles.
Coding a large and diversified graphics application system is a difficult task. We suggest an approach to this problem in which programs are built up using Objects (e.g., Classes, Modules) newly ...generated or drawn from a library. Each Object has an Aid which supports an interactive dialogue with the programmer resulting in the insertion of the appropriate references to the Object into the developing code. An Aid can display graphical Objects and accept sketching and picture editing. An Association capability allows the programmer to generate code corresponding to the displayed graphical material. The Association can be literal, with numerical values being inserted, or symbolic, with variable arguments inserted. A Programming System that is so structured implements an Intrinsically Graphical Language because the code can be "written" using both textual and graphical dialogues.
