Utilising context ontology in mobile device application personalisation

Abstract

Context Studio, an application personalisation tool for semiautomated context-based adaptation, has been proposed to provide a flexible means of implementing context-aware features. In this paper, Context Studio is further developed for the end users of small-screen mobile devices. Navigating and information presentation are designed for small screens, especially for the Series 60 mobile phone user interface. Context ontology, with an enhanced vocabulary model, is utilized to offer scalable representation and easy navigation of context and action information in the UI. The ontology vocabulary hierarchy is transformed into a folder-file model representation in the graphical user interface. UI elements can be directly updated, according to the extensions and modifications to ontology vocabularies, automatically in an online system. A rule model is utilized to allow systematic management and presentation of context-action rules in the user interface. The chosen ontologybased UI model is evaluated with a usability study.

Interaction and End-User Programming with a Context-Aware Mobile Application

“…Before evaluating the functional prototype, the user interface of the tool was tested with two iterations of paper prototypes (the latter is briefly described in section 3.1) during the development process, and improved accordingly [12,8]. Nielsen's usabil-ity heuristics [13] were applied during the UI design process.…”

“…The approach to these problems was to let the user decide which context types they wanted to apply to each situation [8], instead of having to define all context types that describe the situation. The tool provided a selection of contextual triggers and application actions, which were presented in a hierarchical folder structure for a scalable representation and to aid the user navigation.…”

“…The experiences from the previous studies [12,8] were utilized in developing the tool user interface. According to the previous experiences, we decided to leave out complex rule structures, including a set of Boolean operators, as they were found to complicate the rule definition for most users.…”

“…The folder hierarchies for actions and triggers are automatically generated based on a context ontology model, described in detail in [8]. The ontology vocabulary hierarchy is transformed into a folder-file model representation in the UI.…”

“…In this paper we present the user interface and usability evaluation of a mobile phone application, Context Studio, the concept of which was originally introduced by Mäntyjärvi et al [12] and further developed by Korpipää et al [8,9]. Context Studio is a tool that enables the user to define context-action rules in order to activate mobile phone functions when the rule conditions are fulfilled.…”