Horton, Thomas

Since the publication of the book Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software by the Eric Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, and John Vlissides, there has been substantial interest in design patterns in the software engineering community. One of the goals of design patterns is to capture design expertise developed by some of the most experienced developers so that it can be reused even by less experienced programmers. Like other engineering disciplines, the authors presented their materials using a catalog format. That format can present problems for students and practitioners. As an alternative, we suggest to first replace the text-based description with a web-based description to make it easier to browse through the information. Second, we suggest using more graphical design representations for pattern descriptions to reduce the amount of necessary textual details. Using the process of reverse engineering, we recreate the original design representations of various pattern implementations. Third, we provide additional graphical representations to relate the general pattern description to specific implementations. Finally, we provide a web-based prototype of the new representation and shows how a user can take advantage of such representations.

Information access systems have traditionally focused on retrieval of documents consisting of titles and abstracts. The underlying assumptions of such systems are not necessarily appropriate for full text, structured documents. Context and structure should play an important role in information access from full text document collections. When a system retrieves a document in response to a query, it is important to indicate not only how strong the match is (e.g., how many terms from the query are present in the document), but also how frequent each term is, how each term is distributed in the text and where the terms overlap within the document. This information is especially important in long texts, since it is less clear how the terms in the query contribute to the ranking of a long text than a short abstract. This thesis does research in the application of information visualization techniques to the problem of navigating and finding information in XML files which are becoming available in increasing quantities on the World Wide Web (WWW). It provides a methodology for presenting detailed information about a specific topic while also presenting a complete overview of all the information available. A prototype has been developed for visualization of search query results. Limitations of the prototype developed and future direction of work have also been discussed.