Metaphors of Movement - User Interface for Manipulating Time-Oriented, Skeletal Plans

This thesis introduces a user interface that supports the understanding and manipulation of time-
oriented, skeletal plans.
This user interface is called AsbruView, and is based on the plan representation language
Asbru, which is used for medical therapy planning. Clinical protocols are seen in Asbru as time-
oriented, skeletal plans.
AsbruView utilizes Metaphors of running tracks and traffic control to communicate important
concepts and uses glyphs to depict the complex time annotations used in Asbru. Two different
views show different aspects of the same set of plans: One shows the topology of plans and
which parts have been defined, the other captures the temporal dimension and the structure of
plans.
We present a number of existing visualization approaches to different problems that we faced
and discuss their usefulness for our purpose. We also show why we did not use a knowledge
acquisition tool for editing Asbru plans.
We have evaluated AsbruView with six domain experts (physicians), who judged it as usable
and easy to understand. The findings of that evaluation are presented and discussed.