Feasibility of Leveraging an Adaptive Presentation Layer for Cyber Security Visualizations

Abstract

The balance between end user and software engineer is important to the usage and development of software. Finding this balance, in which the end user can access needed information without overly complicated displays, a time-consuming labyrinth of clicks, and the engineer can implement the display concisely is difficult. Typically, end users desire complex displays that allow for fluid movement to the answers they need. However, accomplishing this can be time consuming for the engineer because complex displays require hard-coded GUIs. Depending on the amount of unique end – users, these issues can multiply because every user role could need a unique, complex display that will require hard coding from the engineer. However, through the usage of the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) a solution may exist. This architectural style has been leveraged in developing an “adaptive presentation layer” pattern that allows for complex GUIs to be derived without the need of hard coding. This solution was developed for a domain that needed role specific information for map clients; however, other user interface clients have not been applied to this pattern. Therefore, to examine the viability of this solution, it must be applied in other domains using various UI clients. The cyber security domain provides suitable platform to research this solution because of the necessity to monitor several entities of data concurrently and ensure that those monitoring the data can quickly attain the need information. A successful implementation could provide a viable solution in the development of future cyber security interfaces.