Software Research
Lab,
Menkhaus@SoftwareResearch.net
My name is Guido Menkhaus and I am member of the Software Research Lab of the University of Salzburg, Austria. I am looking to attend the workshop on behalf of the Software Research Lab.
The Software Research Lab focuses on software architectures in mobile computing environments. It is engaged in projects concerning location awareness and user interface adaptation to mobile computing device characteristics.
User interface transcoding is the process where content is translated, adapted from one representation to another. However, the content is generally visualized unaltered on each platform, from a compositional, navigational layout point of view. The task of transcoding does not address a main obstacle to device-independent content authoring: the target devices' different presentation capacity (here the different screen size).
Assuming a general model that partitions user interfaces into windows and widgets, we believe that it is insufficient splitting a window uniquely on the basis of the size of the widgets into a new set of windows. Without additional semantic information this process results in a set of windows that can only be navigated in a linear, sequential way. To access the last widget of the original window, each window of the linear set has to be traversed. This process is often called fragmentation [1] or pagination [2].
The challenge is to remodel the widgets of a window into a new composition of windows with a reasonable flow of transitions between them by integrating semantic information between widgets. Semantic information may be expressed with relations such as " A depends on B ", " A contains B " etc.. The semantic information is inserted similar to the integration of link information with XLink [3]. The new structural layout is generated using a clustering mechanism that is based on size and semantic information.
We believe that an intelligent navigation and layout adaptation process requires semantic information about the relation between user interface elements. The Software Research Lab is about to start working on XML Semantic Linking Language (XSLink), a language describing the relation between elements in XML documents.
K.H. Britton, R.Case, A.Citron, R. Floyed, Y. Li, C. Seekamp, B. Topol, and K. Tracey. Transcoding. Extending e-business to new environments. IBM Systems Journal, 40(1):153-178, 2001. http://researchweb.watson.ibm.com/journal/sj/401/britton.html.
Microsoft. Mobile Internet Toolkit - QuickStart Tutorial, 2002. http://www.gotdotnet.com/MobileQuickStart.
W3C. XLink 1.0. In MSteve DeRose, Eve Maler, and David Orchard, editors, W3C Technical Reports and Publications. W3C, 2001. http://www.w3.org/TR/xlink/.