Tangible Mashups: Exploiting Links between the Physical and Virtual WorldJo Vermeulen
The link between corresponding physical and virtual worlds has been the subject of research for many years now. The instantiation of this link was often a complex task that involved special purpose techniques to identify and search for the virtual information that belongs to a selected physical object. It is since the conception of physical tagging technologies such as RFID that physical objects can carry their own virtual information. In this paper we show a simple yet effective approach to extract the virtual information of physical objects and aggregate it in a sensible way for the user. We rely on Web 2.0 techniques to accomplish this. A useful side-effect of our approach is the fact that a set or mashup of physical objects leads to a mashup of their related information in the virtual world.
Presented at the first International Workshop on
System Support for the Internet of Things (WoSSIoT '07), Lisbon, Portugal, March 20, 2007.
A Generic Approach for Multi-Device User Interface Rendering with UIMLJo Vermeulen
We present a rendering engine for displaying graphical user interfaces on multiple devices. The renderer interprets a standardized XML-based user interface description language: the User Interface Markup Language (UIML). A generic architecture for the renderer is defined so that deployment of the engine on different devices implies only little effort. We show that our rendering engine can be used on iDTV set-top boxes, mobile phones, PDAs and desktop PCs, and smoothly integrates with both local and remote application logic. As a test bed for the UIML specification we also explore support for extensions to UIML that enable the user interface designer to maximize accessibility and target multiple devices and different types of users at once.
Best talk award at CADUI 2006, the 6th International Conference on Computer-Aided Design of User Interfaces.
Tangible Mashups: Exploiting Links between the Physical and Virtual WorldJo Vermeulen
The link between corresponding physical and virtual worlds has been the subject of research for many years now. The instantiation of this link was often a complex task that involved special purpose techniques to identify and search for the virtual information that belongs to a selected physical object. It is since the conception of physical tagging technologies such as RFID that physical objects can carry their own virtual information. In this paper we show a simple yet effective approach to extract the virtual information of physical objects and aggregate it in a sensible way for the user. We rely on Web 2.0 techniques to accomplish this. A useful side-effect of our approach is the fact that a set or mashup of physical objects leads to a mashup of their related information in the virtual world.
Presented at the first International Workshop on
System Support for the Internet of Things (WoSSIoT '07), Lisbon, Portugal, March 20, 2007.
A Generic Approach for Multi-Device User Interface Rendering with UIMLJo Vermeulen
We present a rendering engine for displaying graphical user interfaces on multiple devices. The renderer interprets a standardized XML-based user interface description language: the User Interface Markup Language (UIML). A generic architecture for the renderer is defined so that deployment of the engine on different devices implies only little effort. We show that our rendering engine can be used on iDTV set-top boxes, mobile phones, PDAs and desktop PCs, and smoothly integrates with both local and remote application logic. As a test bed for the UIML specification we also explore support for extensions to UIML that enable the user interface designer to maximize accessibility and target multiple devices and different types of users at once.
Best talk award at CADUI 2006, the 6th International Conference on Computer-Aided Design of User Interfaces.
Service-interaction descriptions: augmenting services with user interface modelsJo Vermeulen
Semantic service descriptions have paved the way for flexible interaction with services in a mobile computing environment. Services can be automatically discovered, invoked and even composed. On the contrary, the user interfaces for interacting with these services are often still designed by hand. This approach poses a serious threat to the overall flexibility of the system. To make the user interface design process scale, it should be automated as much as possible. We propose to augment service descriptions with high-level user interface models to support automatic user interface adaptation. Our method builds upon OWL-S, an ontology for Semantic Web Services, by connecting a collection of OWL-S services to a hierarchical task structure and selected presentation information. This allows end-users to interact with services on a variety of platforms.
Presented as a shorter version of my EIS 2007 talk at Laboratoire d'Informatique Fondamentale de Lille (LIFL) in Lille on March 27th, 2008.
How to Survive Multi-Device User Interface Design with UIMLJo Vermeulen
Talk given at the DSP Valley seminar "Exploring GUI design for embedded systems" together with Jan Meskens on June 9, 2009.
See also: http://www.dspvalley.com/upload/event/site/5270/index.html
Abstract:
The User Interface Markup Language has been around for 10 years now and it is still evolving. The language did not reach a large audience yet and there are few publicly known cases where the language is used. Nevertheless, UIML is probably one of the most generic and flexible user interface markup languages available, mainly because it is in fact a meta-language that is not limited to a particular domain, device, platform or widget set. The design of the language makes it an ideal candidate to support future evolutions in user interface techniques and guarantees the survival of user interface designs over time.
At the dawn of the 4.0 version of the UIML specification—which will be released soon—this talk provides an overview of the language, the novelties of the 4.0 specification and some tools that we have built and are available today.
We also provide an overview of our work to integrate UIML in a multi-device user interface design process that allows designers to create user interfaces for multiple devices without having to deal with an abstract user interface specification.
Finally, we will highlight our experiences with designing tailored user interfaces for embedded platforms with UIML, and discuss the pros and cons of using a high-level user interface description language on devices with limited resources.
Semantic web technologies pop up frequently in current computer science research, in particular in fields related to HCI. Although the semantic web itself has not yet been fully realized, the supporting technologies are mature enough to be used for other applications.
The semantic web initiative centers around knowledge representation and automated reasoning about knowledge. This concept is general enough to find its use in many different fields (ambient intelligence, service oriented computing, etc.).
I will give an overview of the basic concepts of the semantic web. Important semantic web standards such as RDF, RDFS and OWL will be covered as well.
Presented during a HCI chit-chat session at our institute on September 8th, 2006.