Thursday, December 2, 2010

Reading #30: Tahuti: A Geometrical Sketch Recognition System for UML Class Diagrams (Hammond)

Comment Location:
https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=19209095&postID=1751249688937523606&isPopup=true

Summary:
UML is Unified Modeling Language and it is used to create flow charts of software design.  There is already software for creating UML diagrams (they're a little "bulky" to use), but a combination of a sketch recognition and Powerpoint-esque system would be a welcome addition.  This is exactly what Tahuti does.  The users can draw the necessary boxes and lines and type in the necessary characters.

The users were required to perform 4 tasks and rank the difficulty in accomplishing them.  The users performed the tasks on Rational Rose, a UML diagram creation software, and Tahuti.  At the end of the study, the users were interviewed.  Users expressed a higher satisfaction with Tahuti that with other UML diagram creation software and to a paint program.  Some users complained Rational Rose was non-intuitive and it was difficult to perform the desired actions.

Discussion:
The author had a very good thing working in his favor.  With the exception of letters, nearly every single shape in a UML diagram is composed of straight lines.  This makes pre-processing of the sketch and identification of the sketch a much simpler matter than it would be otherwise.  The only possible complaint I can see here is wondering if the user tasks were geared towards Tahuti's favor rather than a general set of tasks.

2 comments:

  1. I guess Reading #19 Diagram Structure Recognition by Bayesian Conditional Random Fields giving a far better appraoch than this........

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  2. I agree that this is a relatively simple domain because of the straight like figures, however the work done is novel and the set of tasks is the common set of tasks in this domain. I see it valid to limit the tasks to a particular domain to have a system that actually works.

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