Adaptive applications for ubiquitous collaboration in mobile environments

The wide availability of networked devices has become one of the main challenges for designers of collaborative applications. Mobile devices are not as "standardized" as stationary computers but much more diverse with respect to computing resources, connection bandwidth and display capabilities. This paper presents a framework for development of applications adaptive to the client's computing platform. The framework supports adaptation of both shared data and user interface to user preferences and display characteristics. Shared data and the user interface are each specified by an XML document. The user interface XML document species the interface by a generic "interface graph", which also includes the list of the valid data types. The generic interface graph is transformed into a device-dependant interface graph for individual client devices, using predefined device-specific mapping rules.