Unifying views of interactors

Interactors are components in the description of an interactive system that encapsulate a state, the events that manipulate the state, and the means by which the state is made perceivable to users of the system (the presentation). This paper concerns the relationship between the models of interactors that are being developed, at York and Pisa, in the context of Esprit Basic Research Action 7040 (Amodeus-2). The models differ in their expression of the three components of an interactor, and after relating the models to the informal notion of interactor we describe the context in which the view of interaction afforded by each model is appropriate. © 1994 ACM.