User Interface Service Software Developerís Guide - Hitech Projects

January 2008
Public
• Operation mode: The interaction has been initiated by the user. He wants to change
something. So the goal of the interaction has to be told to the system or has to be
discovered by the system. Using a GUI or speech the user has to select the operation
out of the offered functionalities of the whole services. He has also to specify values
needed for the responsible service. Because there could be more than one hundred
functionalities offered by the services of one home, these functions have to be sorted
into groups and an arbitrary number of subgroups to give the user a structured
overview. The functions and its groups could then be represented for example by a
menu hierarchy either by GUI or speech. The operation mode includes also the
possibility to check the status of different services and the values of parameters of this
service. To be used by the operation mode a service has to describe itself, to define
possible user interaction functionalities and to give a model of its internal structure to
the UIS. The UIS will use data models, dependency-graphs and user dependent menu
logic descriptions to build a personalised menu structure.
• Event mode: The event mode offers the system the possibility to initiate an interaction
with the user. The dialog flow and the requested input parameters are fully controlled
by the application interacting with the user. The event mode can be used for warnings,
messages, questions etc.
3.3.3.2 Integration with the Context Management Service
User interactions form relevant context information, especially when considering implicit user
interactions. For instance, an application can react to specific contextual information, including
user location, but also user gestures and user speech. Two options may thus exist: the first
one is that every user interaction service implements the Context Source interface. We have
not opted for this solution, as this may impact the performances of the overall UIS.
Furthermore, it dramatically increases the variety of context sources related to user interfaces,
and context consumers may have difficulties to choose the most relevant one.
The second option consists in providing only one context source, namely the dialogue
manager. Then, every user interface provider and consumer interacts with the dialogue
manager, which centralizes all the contextual information related to user interaction.
A typical usage scenario can take the form (Figure 2):
Figure 2. Typical DM user scenario.
Possible issues: The time delay induced by the CMS broker and the web service eventing
mechanism may not be acceptable from the user point of view
Amigo IST-2004-004182 84/114