Experimental Actions With Conceptual Objects

In the previous Chapter, we described the direction of decreasing the differences between interactions of a human with natural and computer environments. The basic feature of this direction is to create appropriate conditions for the real-time intertwining of both types of interactions in designer's activity. In this Chapter, we pay our attention to such kind of designer's activity as solving the project tasks at the conceptual stage of designing. We consider these tasks as a dynamic system described as a project theory of a substantially evolutionary type. Such position leads to useful inheritances from the scientific practice. The basic inheritances are the becoming of the theory of the project and applying the thought experiments. The becoming of the theory is coordinated with the use of the stepwise refinement (based on question-answer analysis) and design thinking in their applications to the solving the project tasks. Conceptual experiments are considered as means for verifying the theory constructs.

Trials of the Late Roman Republic

The Trials of the Late Roman Republic (TLRR) project is building an XML database with information about criminal and civil legal proceedings in the period 149 to 50 BC; it is a revision of a work first published in book form in 1991. TLRR is a SAND: a small, arcane, non-trivial dataset. It exhibits in acute form problems also seen in other XML projects and offers a convenient medium for experimenting with solutions to those problems, including partial and uncertain data, relatively heavy annotation of data by means of notes, potential links to other resources with information about people and other entities appearing in TLRR, a distributed project team, and sparse resources. The paper describes the initial translation of the data into XML form and the stepwise refinement of the markup, the creation of Web-based XML editing interfaces for the data, and the treatment of uncertain data in query interfaces.