UsiXML and standardisation
Recently, in the context of the HUMAN project, UCL is responsible to enrich the UsiXML language by modeling aspects into abstractions that are general (e.g., more detailed modeling aspects of graphical UIs in general) but also in order to address aspects that are specific to Advanced Human Machine Interfaces (AHMIs). Therefore, the main goal was to enrich UsiXML in order to become able to describe, specify any AHMI involved in the HUMAN project in a way that will become standard at various organisations. Of course, it is likely that some parts of UsiXML will be transferred to standardisation and not the entire language since the goal of the standardisation consists of extracting the best aspects of existing UIDLs. The next section details the various standardisation actions that have been introduced and in which we participated thanks to the HUMAN project. These actions would not have been made possible without the support of the HUMAN project and the EU.
Current actions
W3C Model-based User Interfaces Incubator Group Charter
This W3C action initiates and pursues efforts of defining a common UIDL. In order to officially create and launch a W3C Incubator Group, we have collaboratively written a charter that is available at the Incubator website. This charter has just been accepted by the W3C and is now open for launching the activities planned in the W3C Incubator Group. In this group, we will submit the new version of UsiXML that has been created during the HUMAN project. The ongoing work and activities can be found in the Model-based User Interfaces Incubator Group wiki page.
Oasis
OASIS is a non-profit, international consortium that creates interoperable industry specifications based on public standards such as XML and SGML, and that drives the development, convergence and adoption of industrial standards. OASIS particularly promotes W3C standards, thus explaining why the W3C standardisation action is prior to the application of this action.
This action is intended to encourage industrial organisations to rely on the same UIDL for any development, thus ensuring interoperability between software and methods.
We have been involved in the creation of the OASIS User Interface Markup Language (UIML) Technical Committee (TC), which is aimed at specifying a XMLcompliant markup language for multimodal UIs. Since 2005, we have been an active member of the OASIS Technical Committee on User Interface Markup Language. For this purpose, UCL has participated in the (bi-)monthly phone/Skype meeting in order to introduce a proposal for a UIDL to the OASIS for standardisation. This resulted into a UIML, V4.0 that has been voted positively by all members of the group.
NexOF-RA
Thanks to the HUMAN project, we have been invited to present the recent advances of UsiXML to the NEXOF-RA European project that directly contribute to the NESSI European platform by introducing NEXOF, a reference architecture in various domains of software engineering such as web services, service oriented architecture, and UIDLs. This last initiative is aimed at identifying a declarative language for user interface authoring to be adopted by the NEXOF-RA European project. UsiXML will contribute to the initiative aimed at identifying a declarative language for user interface authoring and a Context Model and Universal API to be adopted by the NEXOF-RA project. This contribution will be directly submitted to NESSI, the European Technology Platform dedicated to Software and Services. Its name stands for the Networked European Software and Services Initiative.
The ongoing work and activities can be found in the NexOf wiki page.
History
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FP5-IST4-2000-30104 Cameleon project (Context Aware Modelling for Enabling and Leveraging Effective interactiON). From the beginning in this project, we used the XIML (eXtensible InterfaceMarkup Language) language as basic UIDL in the context of this European project.
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Salamandre project (User interfaces for mobile and multi-platform applications), « Initiatives II » research program, under contract n°001/4511. In this project, we continued the effort building UsiXML as a rigorously defined UIDL, namely by incorporating a context model. This model is assumed to capture the context of use in which a user is interacting with a particular computing platform in a given physical environment in order to achieve an interactive task. Therefore, the context model contains three sub-models: user, platform, and environment. The platform model has been defined in a way that is partially compatible with the W3C standard UAProf for regulating devices and platforms.
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FP6-IST1-2003-507609 SIMILAR network of excellence lead by UCL (The European research taskforce creating human-machine interfaces SIMILAR to human-human communication, Open Interface). In this network, we pursued the effort enriching UsiXML by incorporating modeling capabilities for multimodal user interfaces. Basically, the following interaction modalities were introduced and/or refined: graphical, vocal, tactile, haptic, and multimodal. In this NoE, we also created the UsiXML Consortium whose goal is to gather the organizations (e.g., academia, research centers, companies, third party vendors) that were interested by the UsiXML technology. Since its inception, the UsiXML Consortium has registered 71 people from 15 different countries, from which 27 people are actually SIMILAR members, the others being outside.
News
See the press release (La Quinzaine n°254, 1 October 2006).
