Case-based reasoning approach for form interface design

Redesigning process occurs occasionally in the global design. Redesigning is a cognitive process - which requires developers to remember the earlier designs. This paper proposes a system to support the design process to help the cognitive process in form based user interface by utilizing case based reasoning (CBR) approach. The cases consist of problems (form specifications) and their solutions (form designs). In addition to case library, additional information extracted from prior design cases are also included in knowledge base in order to improve the efficiency during case adaptation process. These additional knowledges consist of information about fields (component) grouping, fields ordering as well as group layout. The system also maintains a dictionary of various terms that are commonly used to denote form fields. The system takes user´s form specification as input. It then applies normalization to the user´s specification to ensure that all field requirements can be precisely identified. The form specification resulting from the normalization process is matched with the stored form specifications in case library. The best match case in library is retrieved and its form-design is used as the initial form design. It then undergoes form-design adaptation process to meet with the user form specification. Adaptation consists of transformation and composition. The composition requires form fields (component) grouping, fields sorting and fields group lay outing.