Formal Verification of Plastic User Interfaces Exploiting Domain Ontologies

This paper presents a formal model to check the interaction plasticity on a user interface (UI). An interaction is seen as an implementation (achievement) of a user task by means of interaction devices and modes of a given platform. The interaction plasticity is the ability of UI to support several interactions to perform the same task. In this work, two task models, containing different sets of interactions, are observed to check if they describe interactions that perform the same task. Each task model is represented by a labelled state-transitions system (lts). Due to the use of different interaction modes and devices, the obtained lts have different set of labels. Weak bi-simulation relationship is revisited to handle these transition systems by defining a relation on labels. This relation is borrowed from an ontology of interaction modes and devices. Model checking techniques are set up to automatically establish such a bi-simulation. A case study is used to illustrate how the approach works.