Multimodal Software Engineering

Abstract

Ubiquitous computing with its multitude of devices certainly makes it necessary to supplant the desktop metaphor of graphical user interfaces by other kinds of user interfaces. Applications must adapt themselves to many modalities: they must support a wide variety of devices and interaction languages. Software engineering methods and tools also need to embrace this change so that developers can build usable adaptive applications more easily. This chapter will present three different software engineering approaches that address this challenge: extensions to Web-based approaches, abstract user interface definitions that add a level of abstraction to the user interface definition, and model-based approaches that extend model-based application development to integrate user interface issues as well.