Trellis information

The Trellis project investigates the structure and semantics of human-computer interaction in the context of hypertext/hypermedia systems, program browsers, visual programming notations, and process models. A Trellis "hyperprogram" (the Trellis information structure) integrates user-manipulatable information (the hypertext) with user-directed execution behavior (the process). In other words, the hyperprogram integrates task with information. The design work, which has been ongoing since 1988, is guided by a "simplicity-over-all" principle--we develop as simple a model as practical at first and study how far towards the general solution it will take us before we add more capability, or "features", to the formalism. As a result, the interaction models strike a balance between fully-programmable/non-analyzable (like Apple's Hypercard product) and fully-analyzable/non-programmable (static directed graphs).

Trellis is based on the Petri net formalism. Implementation work over the past few years have extended the basic model to include colored Petri nets. Recent investigations have examined Trellis' use in representing software process models, on the applicability of automatic graph layout techniques to Petri-net-based representations, and higher-level visual languages for the representation and specification of Trellis hyperprograms.

The following items contain information pertaining to the Trellis Hypertext Project, a project under the joint supervision of Richard Furuta of the HRL/CSDL and David Stotts of the University of North Carolina.

(Dave also lists some Trellis resources at UNC. See there for information about an ftp-able prototype.)

Here's what we have here (with more to come soon):

A cumulative list of project papers.
The following technical reports:

TAMU-HRL-93-005
Stotts, P. D. and Furuta, R. 1993. "The Trellis Project: Process Modeling for CSCW." Department of Computer Science Technical Report No. TAMU-HRL-93-005, Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas.
(Available in compressed Postscript and PDF formats.)

TAMU-HRL-93-006
Stotts, P. David and Furuta, Richard. 1993. "Modeling and Prototyping Collaborative Software Processes." Department of Computer Science Technical Report No. TAMU-HRL-93-006, Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas.
(Available in compressed Postscript and PDF formats.)

TAMU-HRL-94-003
Richard Furuta and P. David Stotts. 1994. "A Hypermedia Basis for the Specification, Documentation, Verification, and Prototyping of Concurrent Protocols". Department of Computer Science Technical Report No. TAMU-HRL-94-003, Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas.
(Available in compressed Postscript and PDF formats.)

TAMU-HRL-94-007
Richard Furuta and P. David Stotts. 1994. "Trellis: A Formally-defined Hypertextual Basis for Integrating Task and Information." Department of Computer Science Technical Report No. TAMU-HRL-94-007, Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas.
(Available in compressed Postscript and PDF formats.)

This area of the site is still under construction. As time and disk space permits, we will be adding Postscript versions of more papers to this directory in the future.

See also publications relating to caT for more recent related work.

Richard Furuta, furuta@cs.tamu.edu
August 20, 1999