Generating multimodal user interfaces for Web services

Web services are gaining momentum as a standard interface to a rich variety of services in ubiquitous computing environments. To improve access to Web services, convenient user interfaces should be provided. This paper presents a method that automatically constructs multimodal user interfaces from WSDL files of Web services. The proposed method appropriately produces user interfaces based on context information. To describe context information, including the characteristics of devices, the proposed context model is developed based on the CC/PP standard. The proposed method extracts operations and their input message types, which are in the form of XML Schema, and chooses the most suitable input controls according to input message types and context information. Experiment results with a usability test show that the proposed method successfully generates multimodal user interfaces from the description files of Web services.