OMT Explainer

Complex visual languages with well-defined semantics are used in a variety of fields, but the notations are often difficult to learn in their entirety.

OMT Explainer provides dynamic hypertext help for understanding a visual language diagram and learning a notation, essentially allowing a reader to point at an unfamiliar construct and ask, "What is this thing here saying?" OMT Explainer explains the construct in terms of the example, with hyperlinks to other explanations and to definitions.

OMT Explainer is a prototype implementation of the "explainers" idea, done in 1996 using Lisp, OMTool, and a Web browser that supported frames and client-side image maps. It was done as my final project in an HCI class taught by Steve Reiss at Brown University. The original idea came while working on SmallToons, in an Andries van Dam seminar class on OOP in CS education.

There was later a conference paper on the idea:

Neil W. Van Dyke, "Generating Hypertext Explanations for Visual Languages," Proceedings of the Ninth ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia, June 1998.

You can also view the slides from the conference.

You can download file oe1.el, the main source code file for the first prototype (released 16-Jan-2002).