User interfaces: A proposal for automatic adaptation

Abstract

In previous works we have been developing a tourism support prototype that offers a proven solution for aspects of multi-platform, personalisation and spatial-awareness. The aim of this paper is to analyse its drawbacks and limitations, and to propose an architecture that solves these problems relying on the principle of abstraction. It consists of a reflexive architecture based on models, and component-oriented, that allows specifying the user interface independently of the rest of the implementation. Thus, developers only have to focus on modelling the functionality of the application -which resides at a base level-, leaving the interface to a meta level, constructing thereby applications without apparent interface. The generation of the UI is not carried out until run-time, applying an automatic translation from abstract interaction components to concrete ones according to the device and the user's features and current state. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003.