Towards a framework to develop plastic user interfaces

Abstract

In previous works we have been developing a tourism support prototype that offers a proven solution for aspects of multiplatform, personalization and spatial-awareness. The aim of this paper is to analyze its drawbacks and to propose a framework and the underlying architecture, inspired by the model-based approach, to solve those relying on the principle of abstraction. It consists of a reflexive architecture that allows specifying a generic user interface (UI) independently of the rest of the implementation, fulfilling the plasticity property. Developers only have to focus on modelling the functionality of the application -residing at a base level-, leaving the interface to a meta level, constructing thereby interfaces "on the fly". The generation of the UI is not carried out until run-time, translating automatically abstract interaction components to concrete ones according to the device, the user's features and the current context, accordingly reusable in other applications. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003.