Task Models for Proactive Web Applications

In this paper, we propose a task modeling language for augmenting web applications with a proactive user interface (PUI). PUIs cooperate with the user to accomplish his tasks and facilitate the usage of web applications. They provide user-sensitive support mechanisms and adapt the interface to the user’s needs and preferences. Further, they can suggest which data to enter by inferring it from the context or previous interactions. For these purposes, the required knowledge about the application is stored in a task model. We propose a task modeling language that allows to easily enriching the automatically created initial task model with additional semantics. We define requirements for such a language and show that none of the existing languages fulfils all of them. As UML statecharts meet the most requirements, we use them as basis for our task modeling language. We show the applicability of this language and the capabilities of PUIs by enhancing an existing web application