2nd Workshop on Semantic Models for Adaptive Interactive Systems

Semantic technologies and, in particular, ontologies as formal, shareable representations of a domain of interest play an increasingly important role also for the design and development of user interfaces and more generally interactive systems. Semantic models can serve a number of different purposes in this context. They can be used as application or interface models in model-driven design, generation, and integration of user interfaces. Ontologies may enhance the visualization and interaction capabilities of user interfaces in various ways, e.g., by providing input assistance, intelligently clustering information, or adapting the user interface according to the user’s context. Especially in the latter case, ontologies can be applied for representing the various kinds of context information for context-aware and adaptive systems. In particular, they have promise to provide a technique for representing external physical context factors such as location, time or technical parameters and ‘internal’ context such as user interest profiles or interaction context in a consistent, generalized manner. Owing to these properties, semantic models can also contribute to bridging gaps, e.g., between user models, context-aware interfaces and model-driven UI generation.

There is, therefore, a considerable potential for using semantic models as a basis for adaptive interactive systems. The range of potential adaptations is wide comprising, for example, context- and user-dependent recommendations, interactive assistance when performing application-specific tasks, adaptation of the application functionality, or adaptive retrieval support. Furthermore, a variety of reasoning and machine learning techniques exist, that can be employed to achieve adaptive system behavior.