UsiXML: A User Interface Description Language for Context-Sensitive User Interfaces

This paper presents USIXML (USer Interface eXtensible Markup Language), a User Interface Description Language aimed at de-scribing user interfaces with various levels of details and abstrac-tions, depending on the context of use. USIXML supports a fam-ily of user interfaces such as, but not limited to: device-independent, platform-independent, modality independent, and ul-timately context-independent. This paper consequently details how context-sensitive user interfaces may be specified and pro-duced from the USIXML specifications. USIXML allows specify-ing multiple models involved in user interface design such as: task, domain, presentation, dialog, and context of use, which is in turn decomposed into user, platform, and environment. These models are structured according to the four layers of the Came-leon framework: task & concepts, abstract user interface, concrete user interface, and final user interface. To support relationships between these models, a model for inter-model mapping is also introduced that cover forward and reverse engineering as well as translation from one context of use to another.