Martin Voigt

CRUISe: Composition of Rich User Interface Services

As reuse and technology-independence are key issues of both software and web engineering, web services have gained momentum and are heavily used in modern web-based applications. However, they are only expedient for the business logic layer, while the Web lacks uniform models for the encapsulation and reuse of UI components. Thus, web UIs are usually hand-crafted and static, which complicates both development as well as maintenance and upgrade. We address these issues with a novel approach facilitating dynamic, service-oriented composition of user interfaces for web applications. UI parts therein are provided as reusable services and can therefore be selected, customized and exchanged dynamically with respect to a particular context

A Semantics-Based, End-User-Centered Information Visualization Process for Semantic Web Data

Understanding and interpreting Semantic Web data is almost impossible for novices as skills in Semantic Web technologies are required. Thus, Information Visualization (InfoVis) of this data has become a key enabler to address this problem. However, convenient solutions are missing as existing tools either do not support Semantic Web data or require users to have programming and visualization skills. In this chapter, we propose a novel approach towards a generic InfoVis workbench called VizBoard, which enables users to visualize arbitrary Semantic Web data without expert skills in Semantic Web technologies, programming, and visualization. More precisely, we define a semantics-based, user-centered InfoVis workflow and present a corresponding workbench architecture based on the mashup paradigm, which actively supports novices in gaining insights from Semantic Web data, thus proving the practicability and validity of our approach.

Dynamic Composition of Service-Oriented Web User Interfaces

So far, little research has addressed reuse and context awareness with respect to rich web-based user interfaces. Uniform models for encapsulation and reuse have been developed for the applications’ back ends in the form of Web Services, but this paradigm has not yet been applied to the presentation layer. Thus, UIs are usually hand-crafted and lack flexibility and reuse, which makes their development time- and money-consuming. We address these issues with a system facilitating dynamic, service-oriented composition of user interfaces for modern web applications. UI parts are provided “as-a-service” and can thus be selected, customized and exchanged with respect to the current context.

Weighted faceted browsing for characteristics-based visualization selection through end users

Faceted browsing is a widely spread, intuitive, and interactive search paradigm for information collections based on the metadata of its items. However, it has the problem that every selected criterion is mandatory so that less important ones may reduce the result set and interesting items may be removed unintentionally. On the other hand, choosing only very few facets yields to an unmanageable set of items wherein the best ones do not become obvious. In this paper, we propose weighted faceted browsing, which seamlessly extends the existing faceted browsing paradigm. Besides basic filtering capabilities, it provides a sophisticated relevance ranking of the result set based on the distinction between mandatory and weighted optional search criteria. Further, we show its practicability within an information visualization workbench to facilitate the end users search for visualization components based on their characteristics.

VISO: a shared, formal knowledge base as a foundation for semi-automatic infovis systems

Interactive visual analytic systems can help to solve the problem of identifying relevant information in the growing amount of data. For guiding the user through visualization tasks, these semi-automatic systems need to store and use knowledge of this interdisciplinary domain. Unfortunately, visualisation knowledge stored in one system cannot easily be reused in another due to a lack of shared formal models. In order to approach this problem, we introduce a visualization ontology (VISO) that formally models visualization-specific concepts and facts. Furthermore, we give first examples of the ontologys use within two systems and highlight how the community can get involved in extending and improving it.

Adaptive Rich User Interfaces for Human Interaction in Business Processes

In recent years, business process research has primarily focussed on optimization by automation, resulting in modeling and service orchestration concepts implying machine-to-machine communication. New standards for the integration of human participants into such processes have only recently been proposed [1,2]. However, they do not cover user interface development and deployment. There is a lack of concepts for rich business process UIs supporting flexibility, reusability and context-awareness. We address this issue with a concept for building human task presentations from service-oriented UIs. Those User Interface Services provide reusable, rich UI components and are selected, configured and exchanged with respect to the current context.

Attract me!: how could end-users identify interesting resources?

Recently, the interest in semantic web technologies increased in various domains, e.g., software engineering or biology. Since this technologies address the long tail of information domains with missing content types, the number of linked datasets will grow even more rapidly. Tech-savvy users and scientists benefit from this trend as they have the knowledge to created complex queries, and thus, to retrieve interesting subsets and answers. However, end-users have difficulties to understand the datas paradigm and need appropriate tool support to slice and dice the data to understandable parts or particular resources. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to enable end-users to browse huge semantic datasets, to detect, and to select interesting resources according to their specific tasks. Based on our evaluation results of two user studies using a web-based prototype we explain, which visualization and interaction techniques in combination with automatic filters are well-suited for novices.

Rich communication patterns for mashups

Mashups imply the lightweight combination of distributed web resources --- a paradigm which can be also applied to the presentation layer to build interactive web applications. However, current solutions are limited to very basic composition patterns and do not reflect the coordination needs of the user interface. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel approach for modeling rich communication patterns as part of a mashup composition model, which supports the synchronization between widgets, asynchronous data requests to backend services, and interaction techniques like drag-and-drop. The concepts were realized and validated with a number of sample applications.

Tool support for semantic task modeling

In the domain of Web applications, several model-based approaches have been introduced, supporting user-centered requirements engineering and thereon the identification of presentation elements and interaction techniques. Semantic application modeling and task decomposition provides promising results, especially for Web mashups. However, current tooling support lacks semantics-based and user-driven modeling facilities, making it unsuitable for matching algorithms and semantic mashup composition. This paper presents a novel concept for a task modeling tool, supporting ontology-based requirements specification of enterprise mashups. It smoothly integrates in a Web mashup development process. We show the feasibility of our approach with the help of a prototype that is evaluated by a small user study.

Visualisierungsframework für Bauprojektinformationen in Multimodellen

Mit der Building Information Modelling, BIM, Arbeitsweise werden Gebaudeinformationen in zunehmend komplexeren und mehrere Domanen umfassenden Modellen abgebildet. Dabei werden semantisch explizite Informationen von ihrer visuellen Reprasentation getrennt und die Visualisierung als nachgelagertes Problemfeld betrachtet, obwohl visuelle Reprasentationen essentiell fur den Zugang zu den komplexen Informationen sind. Gleichzeitig eroffnet diese Trennung eine hohe Flexibilitat und ein groses Potential, die komplexe und multidimensionale Information fur unterschiedliche Problemsichten kontextgerecht aufzubereiten. Derzeit existiert jedoch kein generischer und systematischer Ansatz fur die Visualisierung von Bauinformationen, der es ermoglichen wurde, domanenspezifisches Visualisierungswissen nutzbar zu machen. Auf dem Weg zu einem solchen Ansatz leistet dieser Beitrag zweierlei. Zum einen wird mit dem Konzept der Multimodellvisualisierungen der Raum potentieller, komplexer, aus bekannten Einzelvisualisierungen zusammengesetzter Visualisierungen systematisch untersucht. Andererseits wird ein generisches Visualisierungsmodell entwickelt, das die Basis fur die Architektur einer konfigurierbaren Visualisierungskomponente bildet.