Dynamic adaptive navigation via MAIS reflective framework

The wide diffusion of mobile devices and the increasing availability of wireless networks claim applications able to adapt their behaviour with respect to the running context. This paper presents Dynamic Adaptive Navigation (DAN), a novel approach that may be exploited to build context-aware information systems. DAN provides the user with different navigation modalities. The observation of QoS features concerning the users, the devices, and the network drive the selection of the actual navigation modality that is intended as the best available. The navigation modalities are modelled via graphs describing the synthesis/expansion process that must be performed on the information. Applications to be adaptive, either implicitly or explicitly, rely on the reflection paradigm. Since DAN may be used to build adaptive applications, it should rely on reflective mechanisms too. DAN exploits the reflection mechanisms provided by the MAIS (Multichannel Adaptive Information System) architecture. Indeed, MAIS provides via reflective classes the visibility of the QoS-related aspects of the underlying system objects. Finally, to verify the usefulness of the ideas, DAN approach has been chosen to develop a new version of PDBudget, a system that supports the academic administration in analysing and evaluating the didactic workload for each lecturer at the University of Milano-Bicocca.