Ravi Ramdoyal, Jean-Luc Hainaut

The first step of most information systems design m ethodologies consists in eliciting part of the user requirements from various sources such as user inte rviews and corporate documents. Regarding the core of the information system, that is, the database, t hese requirements are formalised into a conceptual schema of the application domain. Despite the intui tiveness and expressiveness qualities of conceptual formalisms, conceptual schemas have proved difficul t to validate due to understandability limitations from the end-users standpoint. On the contrary, ele ctronic forms are known to be a natural and intuiti ve way to express data requirements for laymen. Besides , the necessity to associate end-users of a future system with its specification and development steps has long been advocated. In this paper, we study data requirements elicitation techniques relying on user-drawn electronic forms. We explore the revers e engineering of form-based interfaces to perform an interactive database conceptual analysis, and subsequently present the tool-supported RAINBOW appro ach resulting from this investigation. This user-oriented approach relies on the adaptation and integration of principles and techniques coming from various fields of study, ranging from database forw ard and reverse engineering to prototyping and participatory design.

Magali Ollagnier-Beldame Université Lyon, Laboratoire LIRIS, Bâtiment Nautibus, 23/25 avenue Pierre de Coubertin, Villeurbanne

Designing information systems with adaptation capac ities is a challenge of great importance to improve the appropriation of the system by the users. In th is paper we view visualized digital traces as a mea ns to support reflexive type coupling between the system and the user. We examine the way users make use of digital traces with the objective of identifying po ssible use invariants. This is an indispensable sta ge in the enrichment of a trace system. We present a case study of an instrumented collaborative situation t hat answers this question. This case study uses theoret ical and methodological tools from cognitive ergonomics that enabled us to integrate the subject s’ point of view in the activity analysis. This stu dy allows us to formalize four schemas of trace usage. We discuss these results with regard to the appropriation and adaptation of information systems . This leads us to argue that a trace-based approac h is promising for the design of adaptive information systems.

Jean Caussanel, Ali Mroué

Information Systems adaptation to its users require s to be able to identify real uses made of the syst em. The behaviour models, extracted from System-User interaction traces, provide representations of the real tasks performed in the Information System. We propo se to exploit these representations in order to extract knowledge that can, in turn, help to suppor t users in their activities or to adapt the system to emerging activities. This paper describes such an a pproach we applied in the field of Information Retrieval by navigation in hypermedia. The behaviour models consist of navigational patterns and extracted knowledge is a thesaurus whose content is strongly related to the context of the available information. The paper is focused on the process of relation extraction between terms. It also present s experiments carried out for testing relevance of th ese representations. We show that by using the associations of the thesaurus and

Marco Viviani, Nadia Bennani, Elöd Egyed-Zsigmond Université de Lyon – LIRIS UMR 5205 – INSA de Lyon, Avenue Jean Capelle – Bât Blaise Pascal

Sharing heterogeneous data among distributed enviro nments in a user-centric way represents today the main challenge for personalization. In recent years several techniques have been proposed to support user modeling for multi-application personalization . In this paper we describe G-Profile, our multi- application user modeling system. G-Profile represe nts a way to address some open issues not sufficiently investigated in literature, as the opportunity for a multi-application profile to evolve over the time, together with the possibility to guarantee se curity and privacy in the diffusion of user informa tion among applications. In particular, this paper focus es on user profile data modifications propagation, aiming to reduce the amount of incoherent information about the user over several applications.

Firas Bacha, Káthia Oliveira, Mourad Abed

With the diversity of computer devices and the incr easing number of software systems to support daily activities, personalization became an important req uirement in software development. User interface of such systems should not only be customized in terms of layout, screen resolution, and other design aspects, but should also provide the user with pert inent information that takes into account the conte xt when using the system. We argue that personalized i nformation should guide interface design aspects as well as the choice of the relevant information to b e provided through such interface. To address this idea, we explicitly define a context model to capture all relevant information related to the user. This con text model is generic and could be used in the design of any user interface. To adapt such model to a speci fic application domain, we propose that the context mod el concepts are mapped to the concepts of an ontology that captures the knowledge of an applicat ion domain. In this way, it is possible to indicate which specific application domain information shoul d be provided as input/output in the user interface based on the context. In addition, we embed the con text model and the domain ontology in a model- driven architecture framework to allow semi-automat ic generation of personalized user interfaces. Finally, an illustrative example of the proposed approach is presented.

Pedro Isaías

s have been submitted but only 12 papers have been finally submitted to this special issue. Papers came from various countries: Argentina (1), Belgium (1), France (5), Greece (1), India (1), Morocco (1), Netherlands (1) and Spain (1).