| Abstract |
In recent years, computers have evolved from a specialist's tool, to a pervasive medium for communication and exchange of information and knowledge. To meet the increasing needs, software systems need to be able to cater for the abilities, skills, requirements and preferences of their ever increasing user base. The development of interactive systems that are capable of adapting themselves has long been advocated as a plausible approach to meeting this objective. However, only recently have there been reported efforts towards developing frameworks that fa-cilitate the employment of adaptation techniques in the development of universally accessible user interfaces. This thesis presents an object-oriented, platform-, and programming language-independent architecture that can be used to develop adaptable and adaptive user interfaces, supporting adaptation at all three levels of human-computer interaction, namely the lexical, syntactic and semantic levels. The architecture is described and rationalised in detail, and is in-tended as a guide in the development of generic, adaptation-capable user interface development frameworks (or in the incorporation of adaptation capabilities in existing frameworks, such as the C++ "Mi-crosoft Foundation Classes" framework, or the Java "Swing" frame-work), as well as in the development of stand-alone adaptable and adap-tive interfaces. The merits of the proposed architecture lie with its simplicity and independence from interaction platforms and toolkits, as well as with the comparative ease of user interface implementation that it ensures. The thesis also presents an example of the employment of the proposed architecture in the development of an adaptable and adaptive Web browser. The example demonstrates both the practical issues of em-ploying the adaptation architecture, as well as specific choices made in incorporating it in the overall system architecture. Some preliminary re-sults of the evaluation of the resulting adaptation capabilities of the sys-tem are also presented.
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Αρχιτεκτονική για την Ανάπτυξη Στατικά και Δυναμικά Αυτοπροσαρμοζόμενων Διεπιφανειών Χρήσης
