Research :: Tasklib

About

The tasklib is a free Java library for processing ConcurTaskTree specifications. It allows you to read and process a CTT model saved as an XML document. It also provides a command-line tool for processing task specification created with the ConcurTaskTrees Tool. Two kinds of algorithms are included:

1. Calculating the Enabled Task Sets
2. Calculating the related dialog specification (this will also show the ETS)

The description of the algorithm used to extract the dialog specification can be found in the article Derivation of a Dialog Model from a Task Model by Activity Chain Extraction.

This tool was written by Tim Clerckx and Kris Luyten as part of the research conducted at the Expertise Centre for Digital Media @ Limburgs Universitair Centrum.

Usage

First, make a CTT specification in the CTT CASE tool and save it as an XML file. This can be used as an input for our algorithm in one of the following ways (Sometimes you'll have to remove the DTD entry from the XML file to make it work):

• Version 0.0.3 an higher:
  • Generate the dialog specification (also shows the ETS): java -jar tasklib-0.0.x.jar -dialog cctspecification.xml
  • Only show all ETSs: java -cp tasklib-0.0.x.jar -ets cctspecification.xml
  • Show more extensive help: java -jar tasklib-0.0.x.jar -help
• Version 0.0.2:
  • Generate the dialog specification (also shows the ETS): java -jar tasklib-0.0.2.jar cctspecification.xml or java -cp tasklib-0.0.2.jar examples.ReadDialog cctspecification.xml.
  • Only show all ETSs: java -cp tasklib-0.0.2.jar examples.ReadETS cctspecification.xml

Download

The package also contains some Apache Xerces classes for parsing the XML documents. These classes are made available under the Apache Software License by the The Apache Software Foundation. The source code is released under the GNU General Public License Software License.

• Version 0.0.4

  Source code: [.tar.gz] [.tar.bz2], Binary jar: [.jar] ChangeLog

• Version 0.0.3

  Binary jar: [.jar] ChangeLog

• Version 0.0.2

  Binary jar: [.jar]

Requirements

Java SDK 1.2 or higher.

Screenshots

No eye-candy here since it only provides textual output. Here is a screen dump. The input was the file example.xml.

Bugs

• The Enabled Task Sets of the task specification "nomadic-teresa.mobile.ctt", which is included in the Examples directory of the Teresa tool, are not completely correct (The Teresa tool gives the correct results).

Contact

Kris Luyten
Expertisecentrum Digitale Media - Limburgs Universitair Centrum
email: kris.luyten@luc.ac.be
url: http://lumumba.luc.ac.be/kris

Links

Related work:

• Dygimes
• The SEESCOA project

CNUCE@Pisa Resources:

• ConcurTaskTrees CASE tool
• Teresa
• Model-Based Design and Evaluation of Interactive Applications