Dialogue management reference model

• Authors: Norwood Sisson
• Venue: ACM SIGCHI Bulletin
• Year: 1986

I would like to review and extend the discussion of the layered structure model similar to the ISO Open Systems Interconnect model in the Report on the SIGCHI Workshop on Planning for User Interface Standards published in the October, 1985 SIGCHI Bulletin. First, I would like to compliment the people who worked on the report. They produced a document which I regard as correct, however incomplete. Bullinger and Faehnrich in Germany have published papers on what they regard as the User Interface Management System. I have integrated Figure 3 and Figure 4 from the CHI '85 Report with the diagrams from Bullinger et al to produce Figure 1. The layers added---semantic, syntactic and lexical---are commonly used in the implementation of compilers and interpreters and are supported by many tools referred to as compiler compilers i.e., yacc and lex from the UNIX system. In the ISO OSI reference model, interfaces exist at the vertical arrows between adjacent layers, protocols exist between peer layers. The term "user interface" conflicts with the ISO usage of "interface." I will instead refer to "human-computer dialog rules." Human-computer dialog rules are the set of peer layer protocols along with the user feedback rules, and appear as horizontal arrows on Figure 1. It is the set of human-computer dialog rules that should be standardized by SIGCHI members. Interfaces between the adjacent layers are implementation details and should be standardized by implementors.