An Adaptive User Interface Generation Framework for Web Services

Abstract

In a service chain, one web service invokes another based on the WSDL definition. For some Web services, the invoker may be a user. The ways for a service to interact with an application and a user should be different. When the service interacts with a user, it is preferable to provide a friendly graphical user interface (GUI). Also, users may access a web service from different devices, such as desktops and various handheld devices, and the GUI should be designed differently to fit different characteristics of the devices. However, it would be a burden to the web service designer to manually develop the interfaces for potential user interactions or even manually design various interfaces to fit potential user devices. In this paper, an adaptive user interface generation framework is presented to automate the task. The framework takes the WSDL interface specification as input to generate customized GUI for the specific user device. Additional specifications, such as the OWL specification for interface object semantics, can be provided to guide the generation of better GUI.The framework generates GUI in two stages. First, based on input specifications and device characteristics, it generates display preferences and constrains. Then, it invokes a decision algorithm to make the optimal GUI layout decision that satisfies all the display constrains and maximizes the preference values. A case study has been explored and it shows that the framework can effectively and adaptively generate appropriate GUIs for various user devices.