Semantic User Interfaces

With the diversity of computer devices and the increasing number of software systems to support daily activities, personalization became an important requirement in software development. User interface of such systems should not only be customized in terms of layout, screen resolution, and other design aspects, but should also provide the user with pertinent information that takes into account the context when using the system. We argue that personalized information should guide interface design aspects as well as the choice of the relevant information to be provided through such interface. To address this idea, we explicitly define a context model to capture all relevant information related to the user. This context model is generic and it can be used in the design of any user interface. To adapt such model to a specific application domain, we propose that the context model concepts are mapped to the concepts of an ontology that captures the knowledge of an application domain. In this way, it is possible to indicate which specific application domain information should be provided as input/output in the user interface based on the context. In addition, we embed the context model and the domain ontology in a modeldriven architecture framework to allow semi-automatic generation of personalized user interfaces. Finally, an illustrative example of the proposed approach is presented.

Advanced Information Systems Engineering, 2005

During the past years, a lot of user interface descrip-tion languages, most of them based on XML, have been introduced. At the same time, the use of formal ontolo-gies for describing user interfaces has been discussed for a number of use cases. This paper discusses the differences between a formal ontologies and user inter-face description languages and and points out how both research directions can benefit from each other.

2005

Web services can be presented to end-users via user interfaces (UIs) that facilitate the invocation of these services. Standardized, interoperable mechanisms for describing Web service interfaces enable the generation of UIs automatically and dynamically, at least in principle; the emergence of Semantic Web services opens the possibility of improving the generation process. In this paper, we propose a scheme that extends the OWLS ontology, an emerging standard for Semantic Web services, to better enable the creation of such dynamic interfaces. Semantic Web services go beyond "classical" Web services in enabling enhanced discovery, invocation and composition. In our scheme, the integration of semantic descriptions of Web services with semantic models of the user's locally available data enables context-based personalization of dynamically created user interfaces, allowing us to minimize the number of necessary inputs. The need for this is compelling on mobile devices with limitations on input methods and screen size and where context data is readily available. The use of an underlying semantic model enables better accuracy than traditional form-filling techniques. We propose an architecture for the creation and personalization of dynamic UIs from Web service descriptions. The key idea is to exploit the semantic relationships between type information of Web service input fields, and their association with information the system has about the user (such as the user's current context, PIM data, context history, usage history, corporate data etc.), in order to personalize and simplify the invocation of Web services.

… of Workshop on …, 2001

Proceedings of the …, 2004

Professionals working in organizations that conduct any user interface development life cycle are more and more involved in a collaborative setup where competences and resources are distributed in time and space. In order to support this shift of practice, a service-oriented architecture is defined and developed according to principles of model management. In this paradigm, user interaction development is decomposed into activities, which could be supported by model management operations. These operations are in turn converted into services, developed according to the service-oriented architecture. A distributed user interaction development life cycle consequently involves the following steps: a method engineer defines the activities to be conducted for the user interface of a project, the method definition is imported in the software architecture to enact the method by assigning responsibilities to team members, and these members then perform their responsibilities through the services corresponding to the operations. This paper also presents a taxonomy of services for supporting the user interface development life cycle that is unique.

Data & Knowledge Engineering, 2010

Integration of software applications can be achieved on different levels: the data level, the business logic level, and the user interface level. Integration on the user interface level means assembling the user interfaces of existing applications in a framework allowing seamless, unified interaction with those applications. While integration on the user interface level is desirable both from an software engineering as well as from a usability point of view, most current approaches require detailed knowledge of the integrated applications and make the implementation of a common interaction that involves different applications a difficult issue.

2009

The Web is constantly evolving into an unprecedented and continuously growing source of knowledge, information and services, potentially accessed at by anyone anytime, and anywhere. Yet, the current uptake rates of the Web have not really reached their full potential, mainly due to the design of modern Web-based interfaces, which fail to satisfy the individual interaction needs of target users with different characteristics. A common practice in contemporary Web development is to deliver a single user interface design that meets the requirements of an “average” user. However, this “average” user is in fact an imaginary user. Often, the profiles of a large portion of the population, and especially people with disability, elderly people, novice users and users on the move, differ radically. Although much work has been done in the direction of providing the means for the development of inclusive Web-based interfaces that are capable to adapt to multiple and significantly different user profiles, the current evolution towards the semantic web poses several new requirements and challenges for supporting user and context awareness. Building upon existing research in the field of semantics-based user modeling, this paper aims to offer potential new directions for supporting User Interface Adaptation on the Semantic Web. In this context, the benefits gained from supporting semantically enabled ontology based profiling are highlighted, focusing on the potential impact of such an approach to existing UI adaptation frameworks.