International Journal of Web Engineering and Technology Upcoming Special Issue
Special Issue on User Interface Description Languages

Edited by Marc Abrams, Quentin Limbourg, Kris Luyten, and Guido Menkhaus

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Call for Papers: Raising the Level of Abstraction of User Interface Specification with XML User Interface Description Languages

Background

For many years, Human-Computer Interaction has witnessed a continual race for the ultimate User Interface Description Language (UIDL) that would ideally capture the essence of what a UI could be or should be.

In the early 80's, UI Management Systems (UIMS) were at the root of model-based UI development. UIMS were an important concept defining high-level abstractions on top of low-level concepts. As a result, low-level mechanisms and implementation details could be abstracted away. UIMSs enabled UI developers to write specifications with high-level specification languages. Subsequently, in the late 90's, new classes of devices for accessing services on the Web emerged. Because of this diversity of devices, model-based UI authoring gained importance and allowed designers to specify the different aspects of the UI separately. XML appeared as a natural choice to capture the specification of this wide variety of UIs. A new family of UIDLs was born, that seek the achievement of the following goals:
  • Capturing UI requirements for an abstract definition that remains stable across different deployment contexts.
  • Making a single UI design for multiple devices, modalities, platforms, appliances.
  • Improving the reusability of UI design.
  • Supporting evolution, extensibility and adaptability of the UI.
  • Using a UI description to enable automated generation of UI code.


The UIDL research area has reached a degree of maturity demonstrating sound roots and extensive development. The proliferation of ideas, concepts, and solutions proposed around UIDLs is a space that needs to be explored and debated. This special issue of the International Journal of Web Engineering and Technology (IJWET) provides the seed of such a space.

If you are involved in the design, development, evaluation or usage of UIDLs we invite you to submit a paper for this special issue.

Envisioned Papers

This special issue is dedicated to XML-based UI description languages. Topics of interest include:
  • New and innovative concepts in UIDLs.
  • UIDLs for describing novel UI types such as, but not limited to, pervasive UIs, multi-context UIs, rich internet applications, 3D UIs, UIs for mobile devices, UIs for ambient intelligence, and plastic UIs.
  • UIDLs supporting frameworks or particular development activities such as transformation techniques for UI development, model-driven architecture for UI and UI code generation.
  • Comparisons of UIDLs in terms of goals, hypotheses, requirements, foundations, scope of the language, expressiveness of the language, modeling capabilities, range of obtainable UIs, and tool support.
  • Lessons learned, industry experiences, and design issues in the conception and use of UIDL.
All papers should clearly motivate and assess the benefit of using a high level XML description of the UI with respect to the type of UI/process in the scope of the contribution. Papers submitted for this special issue should contain original material, should be unpublished, and not under submission to any other venue.

Submissions

Contributions are to be sent to xmluidl2006@edm.uhasselt.be. Submitted papers should be no longer then 20 pages. Authors should format a submission following the IJWET instructions for authors at http://www.inderscience.com/papers/about.php.
All papers will be subject to a thorough peer review process.

Important dates

Paper submission: (Deadline extended!) March 14, 2006
Acceptance / rejection notification: June 16, 2006 (postponed)
Final version due: July 16, 2006 (postponed)
Special issue publication: Second half of 2006

Program Committee

Marc Abrams, Harmonia Inc., USA
Gaëlle Calvary, University of Grenoble I, France
Karin Coninx, Hasselt University, Expertise Centre for Digital Media, Belgium
Peter Forbrig, Universitaet Rostock, Germany
Quentin Limbourg, Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium
Víctor M. López Jaquero, Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, Departamento de Informática, Spain
Kris Luyten, Hasselt University, Expertise Centre for Digital Media, Belgium
Guido Menkhaus, University of Salzburg, Austria
Roland Merrick, Ease of Uses Strategy, IBM, UK
Jeffrey Nichols, Carnegie Mellon University, Human-Computer Interaction Institute, USA
Nuno Jardim Nunes, Universidade da Madeira, Portugal
Oscar Pastor, Valencia University of Technology, Department of Information Systems and Computation, Spain
Fabio Paternò, C.N.R, ISTI, Italy
Manuel Pérez-Quiñones, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Department of Computer Science, USA
Johan Plomp, VTT, Finland
Martin Gonzalez Rodríguez, The HCI Research Group, University of Oviedo, Spain
Marco Antonio Alba Winckler, LIIHS-IRIT, University Paul Sabatier, France
Thomas Ziegert, SAP, Germany

Issue editors

Marc Abrams, Harmonia Inc., USA
Quentin Limbourg, Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium
Kris Luyten, Hasselt University, Expertise Centre for Digital Media, Belgium
Guido Menkhaus, University of Salzburg, Austria

Contact address

Send questions to xmluidl2006@edm.uhasselt.be