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VIL
the program

This page explains the VIL program and gives screenshots. We will do this by composing the following message:

"I gave most of those flies to the spider."

VIL is written in Visual Basic 5.0 and runs on a Windows NT 4.0 and a Windows 95 platform. It makes use of ActiveX component technology (the VIL Icons, and VIL toolbar icons are ActiveX controls). All the information, including the images are stored in an Access database. At this point not all words in VIL have icons representing their meaning yet. This has been compensated for by having icons with just the word itself in it (BitmapGenerator courtesy of Rex Engel). These will eventually be substituted by real icons. Also, due to time constraints, not all terminal icons are equally consistent; a lot are scanned from books or gotten of the internet (using WebSucker! (TM), a tool written by Paul Leemans and Rex Engel for automatically sucking images from an internet site). However, and this is far more important, the icons representing categories and visual elements are consistent, and designed with great care by Larissa de Hoogd. She has a BA in Fashion and Illustration from the Art Academy in Rotterdam and studied Graphic Design at Clark University in Worcester. Furthermore, we have tried not to use color as much as we could, but sometimes it was inevitable and we had to use it (to enhance recognition). This, however, concerns only terminals. All icons for categories are black and white, and almost all terminals representing abstract meaning are black and white as well. are

The program will almost exactly follow VIL's grammar. See my dissertation for a detailed description of VIL's grammar. For now, I will suffice by saying that it is verb centered. The verb determines what its arguments are. Composing a message in VIL is not just picking some icons from the Iconicon and putting them in some order. The grammatical elements in VIL are order independent, i.e. there is no rule stating that the subject must precede the verb in placement on the screen. Unlike spoken/written languages, VIL is non-linear. For consistency and speed of encoding and decoding, the icons will be placed in a predefined (default) location. If wished, they may be moved around, since clear visual elements will specifiy which icon represents which grammatical entity. The only order that vil knows is that the verb has to be picked before other grammatical entities, like the subject or direct object. This is because VIL is verb centered and the verb determines which arguments will be shown on the screen for the user to instantiate. So, composing a message consists of a sequence of steps. This also makes VIL less prone to syntactical errors than normal languages, i.e. it is for instance not possible for one message to have two verbs as in the syntactical incorrect "I give swim a book".

When composing a message in VIL, several step need to be taken:

  • Logon to VIL
  • Select a message type
  • Select a verb
  • Select NP's with selected verb
  • Select a time when the message takes place
  • Select a location where the message takes place
  • Fill out remaining parts of message
  • finish the message

    • Please take the tour by starting at the login screen.