Research And Implementation Of Customized User Interface Based On Ontology

User interface represents the interaction between users and software application directly, which also plays very important role in the process of software development. To help users operate the software and the devices correspondingly it's necessary to develop user-centered user interface.Nowadays functions of the same kinds of devices are almost the same and the user interfaces are designed based on graphic user interface. However the layout and the representation of functions are always different because of the personalities of vendors. Therefore, users have to suit themselves to different interfaces in order to use the devices.To develop user-oriented interfaces the first thing we need to solve is to allow users to customize their own interface and develop ubiquitous user interfaces.The main purpose is to develop a customized user interface system in ubiquitous environment. Therefore users can not only customize functions but also use the single user interface to control devices of the same categories. The core of the system mainly discusses how to unify domain functions, interaction among functions and the relations between functions and user interfaces.By comparing with the methods of UI design the paper chooses the function based UI design mode. By comparing the UI description language the paper selects ontology engineering technique to unify domain functions. The unified functional terminologies are defined in the function ontology in the same structure. Otherwise UI ontology is built to identify functions provided by different vendors. Finally the paper discusses how to help users choose suitable devices by using the relations of the UI ontology. Meanwhile the relations among UI ontology and function ontology represent how to set right parameters.A prototype system has been implemented based on the Microsoft visual studio 2005. Meanwhile the system has been tested in the domain of printers and can achieve the purpose of the project. Therefore the system can not only customize functions but also design ubiquitous user interfaces.