Structure oriented user interface generation and adaptation model and frameworks

The Web has currently become a tremendous source of information and has brought many social benefits. Users can conveniently obtain information and knowledge anywhere and at anytime. At a higher level, the Web Services approach is becoming the standard for wrapping the information and software as services to provide reuse and easy composition. One important factor in Web and Web Services is user interaction. A good user interface helps users to effectively interact with the Web, Web applications, or Web Services and achieve the desired tasks. However, user interface design for Web and Web Services can be a burden, especially when considering the increasing diversity of devices users use to access Web and Web Services. Thus, it is desirable to automatically generate user interfaces or adapt existing user interfaces for different display devices. However, existing research in user interface adaptation and generation have limitations. For user interface adaptation, existing approaches focus on object level adaptation techniques without considering structure adaptation. For example, consider an interface designed using the "table" layout structure. If the structure is not adapted, the table will not fit the display and the user will need to scroll both vertically and horizontally to see the whole table. As can be seen, effective interface adaptation should consider adaptation of layout structures. For user interface generation, existing approaches do not provide sufficient automation. Designers have to either specify the layout at a high level or specify the constraints to achieve the desired layout. Writing such specifications can be difficult and tedious. Thus, it is desirable to automatically derive the layout information from existing interface specification documents. This requires a better interface structure specification model to bridge the gap between the specification documents and the layout design.;In this Dissertation, we focus on structure-oriented methods for interface adaptation and generation. For interface adaptation, we focus on developing methods for structure-level adaptation to achieve better layout design for various displays. For interface generation, we develop a novel layout specification model based on logical structures of the interface. Logical relationships bring the layout specification to a higher level and, hence, make automated derivation of the structure information from interface specifications documents easier. Also, logical relationship specifications can result in better user interface designs.;We have conducted experimental investigations that demonstrate that our structure-oriented techniques achieve better web interface adaptation and fully automated interface generation that are not possible in conventional approaches. The research results significantly contribute to the state-of-the-art user interface adaptation and generation.