Staging Transformations for Multimodal Web Interaction Management

Multimodal interfaces are becoming increasingly ubiquitous with the advent of mobile devices, accessibility considerations, and novel software technologies that combine diverse interaction media. In addition to improving access and delivery capabilities, such interfaces enable flexible and personalized dialogs with websites, much like a conversation between humans. In this paper, we present a software framework for multimodal web interaction management that supports mixed-initiative dialogs between users and websites. A mixed-initiative dialog is one where the user and the website take turns changing the flow of interaction. The framework supports the functional specification and realization of such dialogs using staging transformations -- a theory for representing and reasoning about dialogs based on partial input. It supports multiple interaction interfaces, and offers sessioning, caching, and co-ordination functions through the use of an interaction manager. Two case studies are presented to illustrate the promise of this approach.Comment: Describes framework and software architecture for multimodal web interaction managemen

mSpace meets EPrints: a Case Study in Creating Dynamic Digital Collections

In this case study we look at issues involved in (a) generating dynamic digital libraries that are on a particular topic but span heterogeneous collections at distinct sites, (b) supplementing the artefacts in that collection with additional information available either from databases at the artefact's home or from the Web at large, and (c) providing an interaction paradigm that will support effective exploration of this new resource. We describe how we used two available frameworks, mSpace and EPrints to support this kind of collection building. The result of the study is a set of recommendations to improve the connectivity of remote resources both to one another and to related Web resources, and that will also reduce problems like co-referencing in order to enable the creation of new collections on demand

A usability approach to improving the user experience in web directories

PhDWeb directories are hierarchically organised website collections that offer users subjectbased access to the Web. They played a significant part in navigating the Web in the past but their role has been weakened in recent years due to their cumbersome expanding collections. This thesis presents a unified framework combining the advantages of personalisation and redefined directory search for improving the usability of Web directories. The thesis begins with an examination of classification schemes that identifies the rigidity of hierarchical classifications and their suitability for Web directories in contrast to faceted classifications. This leads on to an Ontological Sketch Modelling (OSM) case study which identifies the misfits affecting user navigation in Web directories from known rigidity issues. The thesis continues with a review of personalisation techniques and a discussion of the user search model of Web directories following the suggested directions of improvement from the case study. A proposed user-centred framework to improve the usability of Web directories which consists of an individual content-based personalisation model and a redefined search model is then implemented as D-Persona and D-Search respectively. The remainder of the thesis is concerned with a usability test of D-Persona and D-Search aimed at discovering the efficiency, effectiveness and user satisfaction of the solution. This involves an experimental design, test results and discussions for the comparative user study. This thesis extracts a formal definition of the rigidity of hierarchies from their characteristics and justifies why hierarchies are still better suited than facets in organising Web directories. Second, it identifies misfits causing poor usability in Web directories based on the discovered rigidity of hierarchies. Third, it proposes a solution to tackle the misfits and improve the usability of Web directories which has been experimentally proved to be successful