This thesis presents DSKETCH, an approach to sketching of diagrams. The term sketching means to have a user draw something and have the computer interpret the drawing in some appropriate way. The advantage of sketching over traditional WIMP-based user interfaces is a more natural and intuitive way of interaction with the computer. The user first draws a diagram, and then DSKETCH derives the syntactic and semantic information conveyed in the drawing. The semantic information can be used for subsequent processing. The approach is fully generic, i.e., it is not tailored to a specific diagram language. There is a prototypically implemented system which serves as proof-of-concept. As an example, the user draws a class diagram from the UML. The system then derives the semantics of the diagram, and creates skeleton class files. The user can subsequently create an actual implementation with these skeletons. Reaching this goal depends on two subsequent stages, applied after the user is finished drawing. The first is recognition, which means to identify the single shapes that make the complete diagram. The other step is analysis, which means to inspect each shape in the context of other shapes, thus being able to derive a syntactical structure first, and the semantics afterward. Recognition is subject to much current research in the field of sketching. Still, no satisfying solution could be found yet. State-of-the-art approaches mostly constrain the user and impose restrictions regarding how to draw. Thus, the task of recognition is simplified to a point where it becomes bearable, but the user is forced to concentrate on his drawing style. Analysis, on the other hand, is rarely discussed in publications on sketching. However, analysis should be an important aspect of approaches to sketching, as the user is usually not interested in recognized shapes, but in the semantics of the diagram. The contribution of this thesis lies both in the recognizer and the analysis. The recognizer allows for multiple representations of the same stroke at the same time, and is capable of identifying shapes from a complete drawing without prior assignment of strokes to shapes. The analysis is based on a formal approach. Ambiguities are solved automatically based on the syntactic structure of the diagram language. Therefore, ambiguities are explicitly modelled for the analysis.    «

This thesis presents DSKETCH, an approach to sketching of diagrams. The term sketching means to have a user draw something and have the computer interpret the drawing in some appropriate way. The advantage of sketching over traditional WIMP-based user interfaces is a more natural and intuitive way of interaction with the computer. The user first draws a diagram, and then DSKETCH derives the syntactic and semantic information conveyed in the drawing. The semantic information can be used for subse...    »