WYSIWYM

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WYSIWYM is an alternative to WYSIWYG. The acronym refers to slightly different things depending on the context of use.

1 The WYSIWYM paradigm in software engineering
2 The WYSIWYM paradigm in research
3 See also
4 References

[edit] The WYSIWYM paradigm in software engineering

In applied software engineering, WYSIWYM is spelt What You See Is What You Mean and refers to the paradigm created for LyX. It means that the things displayed on a computer screen should accurately display the information that one intends to convey, rather than the stylistic formatting. In other words, LyX favors logical markup as opposed to purely graphical markup.

The term WYSIWYM is also used for XML editors^[1] that do not display the formatting of the XML Data. Since XML does not define the stylistic formatting of the XML content, these editors are very useful in visually creating the data.

[edit] The WYSIWYM paradigm in research

In the knowledge engineering and natural language processing (NLP) research community, WYSIWYM has a slightly different meaning: What You See Is What You Meant, and it refers to a very specific research paradigm developed at ITRI^[2] that allows users to create abstract knowledge representations such as those required by the Semantic Web using a natural language interface^[3]. Interestingly, no attempt at natural language understanding (NLU) is made. Instead, natural language generation (NLG) technology is used in a highly interactive manner:

A specialized editor lets a user repeatedly select and refine spans of an initially more or less vacuous text, such as the sentence An event occurs. Using a mouse, place-holders in the initial text can be further refined by choosing options that are generated by natural language generation technology based on an ontology. During this process and invisible to the user, an underlying knowledge representation is created which can be used for multilingual document generation, formal knowledge formation, or any other task that requires formally specified information.

The team that developed WYSIWYM at Brighton University has moved to the Open University in 2005 and is now generalizing the approach to something they call Conceptual Authoring^[4].