A generic uiml vocabulary for device- and modality independent user interfaces

Abstract

We present in this poster our work on a User Interface Markup Language (UIML) vocabulary for the specification of device-and modality independent user interfaces. The work presented here is part of an application-oriented project. One of the results of the project is a prototype implementation of a generic platform for device independent multimodal mobile applications. The poster presents the requirements for a generic user interface description format and explains our approach on an integrated description of user interfaces for both graphical and voice modality. A basic overview of the vocabulary structure, its language elements and main features is presented.

A transformational approach for multimodal web user interfaces based on UsiXML

“…A multitude of multimodal interactive systems has already been developed as off-line applications (e.g., [15,17]) or on-line applications for the Web (e.g., [11,20,21]). Several separate requirements have been identified in these works: usage of models to produce the multimodal interface (e.g., [2,6,18]), description of these models with a specification language (e.g., CTL [1], UIML [19], XISL [10]), explicit design options for multimodal dialog (e.g., for help, CARE properties [5]), task-based design of multimodal applications [4]). We are not aware of any work that combines all these requirements into one single systematic approach.…”

“…This markup will be used primarily as a standard data interchange format between the components of a multimodal system; in particular, it will normally be automatically generated by interpretation components to represent the semantics of users' inputs, not directly authored by developers. As such, EMMA does not represent a specification language such as UIML [19] or XISL [10], and does not contain any transformational approach that initiates a progressive development from different models.…”

“…The foundation of the transformational approach for MWUIs that is presented in this paper is that all the information pertaining to the models describing the future MWUI is specified in the same User Interface Description Language (UIDL) throughout the de Contrarily to UIML [19] and XISL [10], UsiXML [13] enables the specification of all models and the transformations between them until a final MWUI is obtained. UsiXML is able to specify various UIs with the four modalities of interaction defined in Section 1.…”

“…2. Type B: multimodal and multi-device authoring (e.g., X+V [19] and SALT (http://www.saltforum.org)). 3.…”

“…While graphical [19] and vocal user interfaces for the Web [2] have been largely deployed according to those three types, Multimodal Web User Interfaces (MWUIs) remain less researched, investigated, and deployed [17]. Partly because they involve yet another new markup language that forces developers to (re)deploy applications according to this language.…”