Cascading Dialog Modeling with UsiXML

This paper discusses multi-level dialog specifications for user interfaces of multi-target interactive systems and it proposes a step-wise method that combines a transformational approach for model-to-model derivation and an interactive editing of dialog models for tailoring the derived models. This method provides a synthesis of existing solutions for dialog modeling using a XMLbased User Interface Description Language, UsiXML, along with State-WebCharts notation for expressing the dialog at a high level of abstraction. Our aim is to push forward the design and reuse of dialog specifications throughout several levels of abstraction ranging from task and domain models until the final user interface thanks to a mechanism based on cascading style sheets. In this way, it is expected that the dialog properties are not only inherited from one level to another but also are made much more reusable than in the past.