Authors:
Taffarel Brant-Ribeiro
1
;
Rafael Araújo
1
;
Igor Mendonça
1
;
Michel S. Soares
2
and
Renan Cattelan
1
Affiliations:
1
Federal University of Uberlândia, Brazil
;
2
Federal University of Sergipe, Brazil
Keyword(s):
Web Interaction Modeling, Formal Methods, Colored Petri Nets, Human-Computer Interaction.
Abstract:
Interactions are communication acts which take place between at least two agents and result in information
interchange. To represent these activities, formal methods can be used to model interaction flows and Colored
Petri Nets (CPNs) are a handy formal language with graphical notation for modeling systems. This paper
introduces wiCPN (Web Interaction Modeling Using Colored Petri Nets), a language based on CPNs for representing
Web interactions with improved notation. Our proposal is first presented with its proper refinements
over traditional CPNs. Next, we have applied the approach for modeling the interaction of Classroom eXperience’s
(CX)Web front-end, a real u-learning environment. As CX is an educational system developed to assist
instructors and students during academic activities, we verified the developed model’s reachability to ensure
it was able to represent users different access levels. We also validated our proposal with user experiments,
comparing it with UML. Our desi
gned model represented CX’s interaction correctly, considering user access
levels and maintaining an understandable notation. Results indicate advantages of wiCPN over UML for modeling
interactive interfaces. By gathering strengths of Petri Nets with a higher level graphical notation, wiCPN
propitiated better understanding of the model, representing interaction in a structured and intuitive way.
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