i-SOLERES: A methodology for the retrieval and exploitation of environmental information through evolutive and cooperative user interfaces

Project Areas

  • Model-Driven Development
  • Component-based Systems
  • Trading
  • User Interfaces

Summary of the project

In a more open and changing world, where information globalization and knowledge society are spreading in Internet, the modern Web-based information systems must be flexible and ready to be easily adaptable, extendable, accessible and manipulable in real time. The WIS (Web-based Information Systems) techniques are directed to this objective. However, there has recently been a special interest in the information globalization through a common vocabulary, by means of ontologies, and standardized way in which the information is retrieved in the Web using powerful search engines based on ontologies and intelligent software agents. Nevertheless, most WIS user interfaces’ proposals are still being built based on traditional development paradigms, without taking into account the main criterion of the globalization for their construction: they have to be distributed, open and auto-adaptable.

This Project is a continuation of research works already started in the SOLERES project (TIN2007-61497). Here we aim to study and develop a methodology and an experimental frame to work with WIMP-type simple user interfaces for WIS (Windows, Icons, Menus and Pointers), based on “bottom-up” composition in real time of widgets-type COTS interface components. The proposed methodology consists of two phases, which allow simulating auto-changeable (evolutive) user interfaces in real time. This kind of evolutive interface is intended to be solved with a two-phase methodology based on elementary principles of adaptative and convergent systems (i.e., WIS, intelligence, ontologies, agents and mediation) and inspired in basic principles of changing models in the scope of MDD (Model-Driven Development). Moreover, we aim to look into the use of neural networks in evolutive user interfaces to get a more extended intelligent mediation service than the already developed by the SOLERES team in previous works.