The Comets Inspector: Towards Run Time Plasticity Control Based on a Semantic Network

In this paper, we describe the Comets Inspector, a software tool that is intended to provide end users (yet, designers and/or developers) with a semantic network in order to control the plasticity of their User Interfaces (UI) at run-time. Thanks to a set of predefined relationships, the semantic network links together various concepts ranging from the final UI (i.e. in terms of available technological spaces) to the concrete UI (i.e., in terms of concrete interaction objects independent of any technological space), to the abstract UI (i.e., in terms of abstract individual components and containers independent of any interaction modality) up to the tasks and concepts of the interactive system. In this way, plasticity can be addressed at each of the four levels of abstraction for forward, reverse, and lateral engineering. The end user exploits the network at run-time to adapt her UI to another context of use by identifying, selecting, and applying plasticity suitable operations.