Thoughts on Topic Maps Driven UIs

During his open space session on a possible Topic Maps driven Web 3.0 (or whatever one may want to call it) at TMRA 2007, Graham Moore rushed past a slide that mentioned ontology driven user interefaces.

To my knowledge, researchers have already touched upon this problem (see for example Furtado et. al., 2001) but I don’t really know whether anyone has been successful in generalizing or implementing such an approach.

Perhaps this is a problem more easily solved using Topic Maps than alternative technologies..? The concepts of a given UI can of course be represented in an ontology (using e.g. ontology annotation as supported by the OKS). Combining UI-ontologies, or fragments thereof, with Topic Maps’ scope could perhaps be a way of realizing “multiple UIs”?

Most web application use a specialized UI, targeted towards a primary user group. The layout of the UI is probably dictated by a single template, or by a collection of “static” template fragments. What if one used scope to support “switching” between various types of “templates”? Certain template fragments for certain topics under a certain scope?

An application could, for example, “learn” from the user’s behavior and present an alternative UI based on the user’s interests … in some way. Accordingly, one - especially public service providers - could, for instance, create alternative, more accessible interfaces optimized for disabled users (and thus avoid Section 508 lawsuits, if located in the US :D). This would bring “Skip to content” to a whole new level. One could of course also offer alternative views based on user type, interests, preferred form of visualization (e.g. text centric vs. image centric), etc.

Hmmm…

This entry was posted on Monday, October 15th, 2007 at 21:18 and is filed under Topic Maps. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.