Abstract
Formal models of user interfaces are widely popular in the literature, and various user interface description languages exist. For several use cases, the use of ontologies as models for user interfaces has been discussed, leveraging the advantages of a machine-interpretable semantics of user interface components. However, a comprehensive ontology of user interfaces and interactions is not available. In this chapter, we discuss the UI 2 Ont ontology, an ontology of user interfaces and interactions, which reuses many concepts defined in different user interface description languages and grounds them in the formal top level ontology DOLCE. We discuss the rationales of developing the ontology, give an overview of its basic concepts, and show its application in a framework for application integration on the user interface level.
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Notes
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The fourth level, the final user interface level, consists of the interface as such, i.e., binary code, and therefore usually does not involve any model.
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Image sources: http://www.flickr.com/photos/anachrocomputer/2574918867/, http://zetcode.com/tutorials/javaswttutorial/widgets/, accessed April 20th, 2011.
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Paulheim, H., Probst, F. (2013). UI2Ont—A Formal Ontology on User Interfaces and Interactions. In: Hussein, T., Paulheim, H., Lukosch, S., Ziegler, J., Calvary, G. (eds) Semantic Models for Adaptive Interactive Systems. Human–Computer Interaction Series. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-5301-6_1
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