Assessing Quality of Web User Interfaces Using Domain Ontology

User interface (UI) development sees the growing need for auto-assessment of UI quality attributes, such as usability, accessibility, HTML and CSS correctness, aesthetic attractiveness for target users, complexity and clutter, trustworthiness, etc. The two mainstream approaches in the field are analysis of HTML/CSS code and mining of webpage visual representation. The number of related algorithms and tools is already enormous and it continues to grow rapidly - so there's the need for structured representation of this dynamic domain. In the paper we design and implement OWL ontology of web UI quality assessment. First, we provide conceptualization of UI and the related concepts, based on the existing research works and standards, and classify them into groups. Then we design the ontology, whose core is the classes related to UI attributes, metrics, and existing services, which are used to calculate the metrics. Finally, we outline the process of building the ontology in OWL, and provide rationale for its feasibility in evaluating and improving modern web UIs.