User-driven visual composition of service-based interactive spaces

Abstract

ObjectiveThe idea is to replace fixed, pre-packaged applications with flexible composition environments that, thanks to a separation among data, functions and presentations, make interactive environments "emerge" at run-time based on composition actions performed by end users. MethodsThis paper describes an approach for the lightweight construction of integrated, situational work-spaces pervasively accessible and sharable through a variety of devices. Specific emphasis is posed on the adoption of a composition paradigm that abstract from technical details and can be thus used by non-technical users. Thanks to the separation of concerns on which we ground the composition paradigm, the overall approach and its enabling platform are also amenable to customization with respect to the requirements of specific domains. ResultsA platform, based on service composition technologies, has been developed; it implements a meta-design approach to allow end users, not necessarily experts of technologies, to extract contents from heterogeneous sources and compose Personal Information Spaces (PISs) that satisfy their information needs and that can be pervasively executed on different devices. ConclusionWe proposed an approach where the composition platform enables the extraction of content from heterogeneous services, and the integration of the extracted content into situational applications where content presentation is flexibly managed through different visualization templates. PracticeThe developed prototypes have been evaluated in studies in which real users (e.g. guides of an archaeological park) were observed in action. ImplicationsThe results provided hints for refining the prototypes, and pose the basis for future work related to the identification of design principles that can make composition technologies more useful and usable for the end users.

End-user composition of interactive applications through actionable UI components

“…Some field studies that we conducted in the past to validate our prototypes [4,5] revealed that mashups generally lack data manipulation functions that end users would like to exploit in order to "act" on the extracted contents, e.g., functions that allow to perform tasks such as collecting&saving favourites, comparing items, plotting data items on a map, inspecting full content details, organizing items in a mind map in order to highlight relationships. In this section, we remark another very innovative feature of EFESTO: it offers tools that enable specific tasks, allowing users to manipulate the information in a novel fashion, i.e., without being constrained to pre-defined operation flows typical of pre-packaged applications.…”

“…The model clarifies the main ingredients that are needed to design a platform that enables non-technical end-users to create component-based interactive workspaces by aggregating and manipulating data available on distributed online resources. The main goal is to highlight the features that can lead to frameworks able to reduce the end-users' effort for the development of interactive workspaces [5], by maximizing the reuse of UI components.…”

“…The efforts of many research projects have thus focused on letting laypeople, i.e., users without expertise in programming (also called non-technical users), access and reuse the available content [2,24]. In this respect, the reuse of easily programmable UI components is a step towards the provision of en vironments facilitating the End-User Development (EUD) of service-based interactive workspaces [5]. In general, EUD refers to allowing end users to modify and even create software artifacts while using an interactive system [19,31].…”

“…Over the last years, we have been working extensively on a mashup platform called EFESTO that, by exploiting end-user development principles, addresses the creation of component-based interactive workspaces by non-technical end users, via the aggregation and manipulation of data fetched from distributed online resources [5,6,17]. This platform also enables the collaborative creation and use of distributed interactive workspaces [4].…”

On the Role of Context in the Design of Mobile Mashups

“…Our approach is characterized by the adoption of design environments that, in line with recent approaches to visual programming of mashups, make intensive use of high-level visual abstractions [15,4]. Visual paradigms indeed hide the complexity typical of service composition, data integration and the programming of context-aware mobile apps, and assist CAMUS designers (even if non-experts in these technologies) in the creation of multi-device personalized applications.…”