An Ontology-Based Approach for User Interface Adaptation

Abstract

With the evolution of a wide variety of mobile devices, computing is not limited to the desktop mode. The traditional User Interface (UI) is often not appropriate for ubiquitous computing and mobile applications and thus new challenges are emerging. The concept of Adaptive User Interface (AUI) is a new search direction in the field of human-machine interaction that aims at supporting the interaction between the user and the interface. In fact, AUI is an interface which adapts itself according to user’s profile, platform and environment. Most of the existing work in adaptation of UI relies on manual declarative rules definition using combinations of context criteria (user experience, user motivation, age, etc.) and the interface characteristics (density, color, etc.). However, there is no standard definition of context criteria based on their equivalents interface characteristics. In fact, the same interface attributes could be associated with many context criterion. This paper presents an ontology of UI adaptation process and how it is used for the personalization container of user interfaces by using SWRL rules. We evaluate our approach on AUIs of project called HandicraftWomen. It aims to support handcraft women in their business activities. The obtained results confirm the efficiency of our technique with an average of more than 77 % of precision and recall.