INTRODUCTION TO ACUITy

Adaptive Work-Centered User Interface Technology (ACUITy) is an open-source framework and architecture for developing semantically-enabled mixed initiative user interfaces. 

ACUITy is motivated by the need for more flexible user interfaces, particularly in knowledge work domains where it is difficult to specify information and presentation requirements up-front in the design process. We employ emerging standards for the semantic web (e.g. OWL) to provide a model-based user interface, in which information requirements can be learned by the system as the user interacts with it.

Using semantic technology to implement and maintain customizable and adaptive applications reduces development time and effort, increases the probability of user acceptance, and reduces the effort required to support, modify and extend the application as the work domain changes.

Recent Items of Interest

Release of ACUITy 1.2 with design templates and an enhanced tutorial is available on SourceForge.

Recent Conferences:

ACUITy has three major components: the ACUITy Problem-Vantage-Frame (APVF) ontology, the ACUITy Controller and the User Interface (UI) Engine.  The APVF ontology, which is represented in the Web Ontology Language (OWL), represents the core principles of Work-Centered Design, a human-centric approach to systems design.  It models domain-independent information display and behavioral entities and is nested within a hierarchy of upper-level and domain-dependent ontologies for application deployment.  The ACUITy Controller provides special-purpose reasoning over this knowledge base to determine and access the set of information and application behaviors relevant to the problem at hand or the context of the user’s work.  It is built on Jena, which provides persistent ontology store, tell/ask capabilities, and transitive reasoning.  The User Interface Engine accepts information and metadata from the ACUITy Controller and renders the information display and provides for user interaction with the application. Using ontology instance data, ACUITy can learn the preferences of particular users or groups of users and modify information content and presentation in future sessions.