A context-aware infrastructure for supporting applications with pen-based interaction

Pen-based user interfaces which leverage the affordances of the pen provide users with more flexibility and natural interaction. However, it is difficult to construct usable pen-based user interfaces because of the lack of support for their development. Toolkit-level support has been exploited to solve this problem, but this approach makes it hard to gain platform independence, easy maintenance and easy extension. In this paper a context-aware infrastructure is created, called WEAVER, to provide pen interaction services for both novel pen-based applications and legacy GUI-based applications. WEAVER aims to support the pen as another standard interactive device along with the keyboard and mouse and present a high-level access interface to pen input. It employs application context to tailor its service to different applications. By modeling the application context and registering the relevant action adapters, WEAVER can offer services, such as gesture recognition, continuous handwriting and other fundamental ink manipulations, to appropriate applications. One of the distinct features of WEAVER is that off-the-shelf GUI-based software packages can be easily enhanced with pen interaction without modifying the existing code. In this paper, the architecture and components of WEAVER are described. In addition, examples and feedbacks of its use are presented.