Integrating Ontologies and User Interfaces - The XGC Approach

In domains where several and different systems are working jointly, the integration of them via graphic interfaces is necessary to improve their employ and the user acceptance degree. In the transportation domain the interfaces are basically based on object control that allows to the road operator to manage the different traffic elements. The most usual interfaces are proprietary and they use different vocabularies to work with the same concepts. In this paper traffic ontology is presented. It is used to develop a Generic interface: the eXtensible Graphic Container-XGC. This user interface allows to create a standard interface able to integrate different systems. The system presents several good features: 1) traffic ontology is used to develop the object systems and to provide semantic knowledge; 2) the container is developed in Java which allows to use it in different platforms; 3) open source approach.