The Comets Inspector: Towards Run Time Plasticity Control Based on a Semantic Network

Abstract

Abstract. In this paper, we describe the COMETs Inspector, a software tool providing user interface designers and developers with a semantic network in order to control the plasticity of their User Interfaces (UI) at run-time. Thanks to a set of predefined relationships, the semantic network links together various concepts ranging from the final UI (i.e., the UI described in terms of technological spaces) to the concrete and abstract UIs (i.e., the UI respectively described in terms of concrete interaction objects independently of any technological space, and abstract individual components and containers independently of any interaction modality) up to the tasks and concepts of the interactive system. In this way, plasticity can be addressed at four levels of abstraction (task and concepts, abstract, concrete, and final user interface) for forward, reverse, and lateral engineering. The end user exploits the semantic network at run time to adapt his/her UI to another context of use by identifying, selecting, and applying plasticity suitable operations.

Examples galleries generated by interactive genetic algorithms

“…They do not provide codes directly usable to build a UI. Demeure et al [13] explore the use of semantic networks to capitalize UI design know-how. The underlying idea is to combine the know-how of toolkits and patterns in a unified structure.…”

Self-explanatory user interfaces by model-driven engineering

“…A comparative analysis can be found in [9]. Semantic Networks have been also covered for UIs [8]. The Meta-UI concept was firstly proposed in [7] and deeply explored later in many other works.…”

“…of figure 1. Other approaches like semantic networks [8] can be considered in the future. If the end-user asks himself, for instance, Why is the OK button disabled?, by clicking on this button using the special help mode, the system can say that the task is not completed.…”

COMET(s), A Software Architecture Style and an Interactors Toolkit for Plastic User Interfaces

“…2 provides an overview of the global approach. The principles are threefold: (1) a UI is fully defined as a graph of COMETs, (2) the graph can be tuned through transformations, (3) transformations can take benefit from a semantic network [8] to retrieve components (COMETs as well as presentations of COMETs) and update the graph of COMETs accordingly. This paper focuses on the graph of COMETs.…”

“…The transformations are not described because of space. The semantic network is described in [8]. Section 2 presents the related work.…”