Action Visualizers

DAHN's action visualizers provide a way for human agents to discover and invoke the actions offered by the MAP's active holons. These actions include the presentation actions offered by the DAHN visualizer holons.

There are often natural groupings of actions. For example, the undo/redo buttons naturally go together, as do the set of actions that share a menu. Internally, DAHN organizes actions into action groups that reflect these natural groupings. Action groups may nest (i.e., action groups may contain actions and/or other action groups. Thus, actions can be represented internally as an action hierarchy.

An example of (a fragment of) the action hierarchy rooted at the Canvas Action Bar is shown below.

The designer of the canvas visualizer makes the initial decisions about the makeup of that visualizer. In the example, the designer has determined that the canvas will include a Canvas Action Bar. The Canvas Action Bar is an action group (AG) that consists of (among others) a MAP Action Group, DAHN Action Group, and an Undo/Redo Action Group.

The DAHN Selector Function will pick a visualizer for each component of this hierarchy. Actions and action groups are generally presented to human agents via app bars, buttons and menus. The good news is that, when considering how to quickly bootstrap DAHN, a small number of visualizers can satisfy a broad cross-section of situations. From there we can let the creativity of Human Interface developers and the adaptive "pull" of MAP explorers drive innovation.

For example, Google's open-sourced Material Design System defines the following types of app bars, menus, and buttons. There are nuances to how each is configured to appear and behave, but the main point here is that the initial set of action visualizers can be relatively small.

As noted, an action group could also be rendered via a set of radio buttons or (less frequently) via checkboxes. The DAHN Selector Function could use heuristic rules driven, for example, by the count of actions within an action group to select an appropriate visualizer for that group. This is similar to the rules used to select property visualizers for enumerated property types (see Property Visualizers).

Individual actions can be represented as items within a menu or via separate buttons. Material's button type are shown below.

Sets of Actions could also be represented via radio buttons or check boxes.

For example, the selection of the visualizer for the Canvas Action Bar AG could be based on affinity scores between the DAHN 2D Canvas Visualizer and the available Canvas Acction Bar Visualizers.

Adaptive Features of Action Visualizers

The grouping of actions into action groups is based on an affinity score on the relationship between actions and action groups. The action is treated as belonging to the action group for which it has the greatest affinity. At some point (though probably not initially), DAHN may offer personalization options that allow MAP explorers to alter the membership of these action groups by dragging and dropping actions into different groups. The effect of such an action would be to update both the personal affinity and aggregate affinity scores by increasing the score on the relationship to the action group where the action was dropped and reducing the score on the relationship to the group from which the action was removed. The re-grouping of actions will take place immediately for the person initiating the change, but multiple agents will need to reinforce this grouping before it becomes the default action group for this action.

Ordering and visibility within an action affinity group is determined by salience scores within the group.

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Last updated 2 years ago