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Dynamic User Interface Architecture for Mobile Applications Based on Mobile Agents

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On the Move to Meaningful Internet Systems: OTM 2016 Workshops (OTM 2016)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 10034))

Abstract

Developing Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) for mobile applications is a difficult task. Modern applications frequently need to interact with humans that use several devices with different characteristics (such as screen size or operating system). Any application that creates a specific GUI (surely designed for a certain device family) is likely to be rendered and/or behave incorrectly on many other user devices. Moreover, user interactions also need to be adapted to the preferences of each specific user and be learned from user context. The above challenges delegate every single application to have multiple versions of its GUI to be correctly executed on every possible device and operating system combination, in addition to consider user preferences and context.

In this paper, we propose an architecture based on mobile agents for developing adaptive user interfaces for multiple devices and applications. This architecture makes it possible to further separate GUIs from their underlying logic, allowing GUIs to be specified once and automatically be adapted to different platforms and user preferences without further development. Moreover, our architecture enables GUIs to be composed in a collaborative way by multiple agents and across different devices by automatically adapting them to each device capabilities and user preferences. Thus every application developer is relieved of considering these issues.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Definitive data and analysis for the mobile industry, https://www.gsmaintelligence.com/, last accessed 12th September 2016.

  2. 2.

    ADUS stands for ADaptive User interface for mobile deviceS.

  3. 3.

    Note that XAML is thus not used only for mobile devices, but for a broad family of heterogeneous devices (e.g., desktop computers, surfaces, consoles, ...).

  4. 4.

    We refer the interested reader to our previous work [20], where a discussion about the benefits and drawbacks of other possible alternative agent architectures are presented.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the CICYT project TIN2013-46238-C4-4-R and DGA-FSE.

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Correspondence to Nikola Mitrović .

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Mitrović, N., Bobed, C., Mena, E. (2017). Dynamic User Interface Architecture for Mobile Applications Based on Mobile Agents. In: Ciuciu, I., et al. On the Move to Meaningful Internet Systems: OTM 2016 Workshops. OTM 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10034. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-55961-2_29

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-55961-2_29

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