The user interface is a central component of any mo de rn application program. It determines how well end users accept, learn, and effi ciently work with the application program. The user interface is very difficult t...The user interface is a central component of any mo de rn application program. It determines how well end users accept, learn, and effi ciently work with the application program. The user interface is very difficult to design, to implement, to modify. It takes approximately 70% of the time requ ired for designing an application program. All the existing tools for user interface design can be divided into two basic c ategories-Interface Builders and Model-based Interface development tools, whic h trace their roots from user interface management systems. Interface Builders a re the most widespread and excellent to create layouts and manipulate widgets. H owever, Interface Builders have the follow demerits. An interface designed using Interface Builders can contain hundreds of procedures. Interface Builders give us no possibility to develop different pieces of the same interface separately. They do not help us in managing user tasks and can be used only by programmers. Model-based interface development tools have attracted a high degree of interes t in last few years. The basic premise of model based technology is that the interface development can be fully supported by declarative models of all user interface characteristics such as their presen tation, dialogue, domain of application etc, and then the user interface develop ment can be centered around such models. The high potential of this technology has not been realized yet. This fact has the following reasons. The known interface models are partial representations of interfaces. They cannot be readily modified by developers, and are not publicly available to the HCI community. The central ingredient for success in model-ba sed systems is a declarative, complete, versatile interface model that can expre ss a wide variety of interface designs. Therefore tool developers have to avoid the following disadvantages of current interface models: inflexibility, system- dependence, and incompleteness. The main idea to achieve these model character istics mention above is to use ontologies. This broadened interest in ontologies is based on the fact that they provide ma chine-understandable representation of semantics for information, and a shared and common understanding of a domain that can be communicated between people and across application systems. Support in data, information, and knowledge exchang e becomes the key issue in current computer technology. At the moment we are on the brink of the second Web generation called Semantic Web or Knowledgeable Web. Given the increasing amount of information available on-line, this kind of sup port is becoming more important day by day. The main idea of the proposed approach is to replace interface models by appropr iate ontologies. Some parts of these ontologies will be available from the Inter net; the other parts will be built by developers. As a result of the Semantic We b development we will have increasing the number of ontologies formally describe d in the Internet. The terminology and content of these ontologies will be inter nationally standardized. Reusing these ontologies will bring down the cost of de velopment and improve the quality of user interface. The parts of a user interface model are-a domain ontology model, a dialog ontol ogy model, presentation ontology model, "business- logic" variable ontology mod el and correspondences between these parts. Thus, the user interface development based on ontologies is an evolution of th e model-based approach, where appropriate ontologies are used instead of models .展开更多
文摘The user interface is a central component of any mo de rn application program. It determines how well end users accept, learn, and effi ciently work with the application program. The user interface is very difficult to design, to implement, to modify. It takes approximately 70% of the time requ ired for designing an application program. All the existing tools for user interface design can be divided into two basic c ategories-Interface Builders and Model-based Interface development tools, whic h trace their roots from user interface management systems. Interface Builders a re the most widespread and excellent to create layouts and manipulate widgets. H owever, Interface Builders have the follow demerits. An interface designed using Interface Builders can contain hundreds of procedures. Interface Builders give us no possibility to develop different pieces of the same interface separately. They do not help us in managing user tasks and can be used only by programmers. Model-based interface development tools have attracted a high degree of interes t in last few years. The basic premise of model based technology is that the interface development can be fully supported by declarative models of all user interface characteristics such as their presen tation, dialogue, domain of application etc, and then the user interface develop ment can be centered around such models. The high potential of this technology has not been realized yet. This fact has the following reasons. The known interface models are partial representations of interfaces. They cannot be readily modified by developers, and are not publicly available to the HCI community. The central ingredient for success in model-ba sed systems is a declarative, complete, versatile interface model that can expre ss a wide variety of interface designs. Therefore tool developers have to avoid the following disadvantages of current interface models: inflexibility, system- dependence, and incompleteness. The main idea to achieve these model character istics mention above is to use ontologies. This broadened interest in ontologies is based on the fact that they provide ma chine-understandable representation of semantics for information, and a shared and common understanding of a domain that can be communicated between people and across application systems. Support in data, information, and knowledge exchang e becomes the key issue in current computer technology. At the moment we are on the brink of the second Web generation called Semantic Web or Knowledgeable Web. Given the increasing amount of information available on-line, this kind of sup port is becoming more important day by day. The main idea of the proposed approach is to replace interface models by appropr iate ontologies. Some parts of these ontologies will be available from the Inter net; the other parts will be built by developers. As a result of the Semantic We b development we will have increasing the number of ontologies formally describe d in the Internet. The terminology and content of these ontologies will be inter nationally standardized. Reusing these ontologies will bring down the cost of de velopment and improve the quality of user interface. The parts of a user interface model are-a domain ontology model, a dialog ontol ogy model, presentation ontology model, "business- logic" variable ontology mod el and correspondences between these parts. Thus, the user interface development based on ontologies is an evolution of th e model-based approach, where appropriate ontologies are used instead of models .
