Thesis - Instituto de Telecomunicações

38 CHAPTER 3. INFORMATION SOURCESvisualized by the user, and a computer server. The exchanged data is mainly related to theuser interaction comprising the keyboard and mouse events, along with relevant contextualinformation. In the case of the cognitive tests the description of the game progressioninformation is the contextual information additionally recorded. In section 3.4.7, we presentthe set of tests developed, with the associated contextual information, that is passed viathe WIDAM system.3.2.1 Web Interaction Display and MonitoringThe developed system, WIDAM, is a client-server application for web pages monitoring,analysis and display. The system can be called as a remote display system that enables therecording and real-time user interaction observation.The WIDAM allows interaction recording system directly over a web page, based onthe DOM [103] of the web page. The system works in a normal web browser with Java andJavascript capabilities, without the need of any software installation. WIDAM is a lightweight networked application using low bandwidth, comparatively to image based remotedisplay systems.Figure 3.1: The WIDAM Architecture.The WIDAM Architecture is composed of client and server applications as depicted infigure 3.1.The user accesses the WIDAM application via a web browser that connects to theserver. Then the server sends back to the user a web page that is capable of monitoringand displaying the user interaction. This page creates a connection to the server and theclient and the server exchange messages using a protocol designed for this purpose.