The XVC Framework for In-Vehicle User Interfaces

XVC (extensible viewer composition) is an in-vehicle user interface framework for telematics applications. It provides a document-oriented applications model that eliminates the requirement for application providers to provide custom clients for their applications. Application providers compose interactive user interfaces through compound documents that specify content for a set of viewers, each oriented to a particular content medium. A viewer's content may define actions on other viewers. This approach offers the additional benefit of offering a higher-level model to application developers, hence reducing application development costs. Our current set of viewers is oriented toward the domain of telematics applications, and includes viewers for map features, HTML-based messages, sound clips, and ticker messages. The framework is extensible to other application domains through the definition of new, domain-appropriate viewers