An Efficient Context-based User Interface by Exploiting Temporality of Attributes

by M. Kumara Swamy, P Krishna Reddy

in 2009 16th Asia-Pacific Software Engineering Conference

Report No: IIIT/TR/2009/246

Centre for Data Engineering International Institute of Information Technology Hyderabad - 500 032, INDIA November 2009

2009 16th Asia-Pacific Software Engineering Conference

An Efcient Context-based User Interface by Exploiting Temporality of Attributes

M. Kumara Swamy and P. Krishna Reddy Center for Data Engineering International Institute of Information Technology (IIIT-H), Hyderabad, India kumaraswamy@research.iiit.ac.in and pkreddy@iiit.ac.in

AbstractInformation systems receive data through the user interface forms. Improperly designed user interface form increases navigational burden which in turn increases dataentry cost and data-entry errors. Research efforts are going on to investigate the improved methods for user interface design. Normally, context-based approach is followed to design user interfaces. In this approach, the input attributes are divided into several contexts based on the functionality and user interface form is designed for each context. It can be observed that, in some information systems, some attributes receive values only during certain time duration. We term this property as temporality of the attribute. In this paper, we have proposed an approach to exploit the temporality of attributes for identifying the active-contexts to design improved user interface. The implementation results on a real system show that the proposed method reduces the navigational burden signicantly as compared to the existing context-based approach. Keywords-User Interfaces; Temporality; Graphical User Interfaces; Form-based User Interfaces; Context-aware Computing.

I. I NTRODUCTION In information systems, several user interfaces (UIs) are required to enter data. The design of user interface is an important activity of information system development. The improper UI increases navigational burden, increase dataentry errors, reduces the efciency of the user, and increases the cost of both data-entry and data maintenance. Normally, user expects an effective, easy-to-learn and easy-to-operate UI. Currently, context-based approach is well-known approach to design UIs to enter both task and functionality related data [1]. A context covers a particular functionality or task for entering data into one or more relational tables [2] in an information system [3]. Developing an efcient UI using context-based approach is a challenge, as the behavior of a system is known based on the contextual factors (such as the background knowledge of a user, the specic goals and objectives of a user, the work context etc.) [4]. Research efforts are going on to investigate the design of efcient UIs [5][6] under context-based framework. In the context-based approach, the input attributes are divided into several contexts based on the functionality and task. The user interface form is designed for each context. Normally, it is assumed that the system
1530-1362/09 $26.00 2009 IEEE DOI 10.1109/APSEC.2009.34 205

receives data values on all days for all the attributes in the context. It can be observed that, in some information systems, some attributes receive values only during certain time duration. Therefore, the attribute is not required in the UI for the remaining time. For example, eCommerce systems such as eBay (http://www.ebay.com), pointshop (http://www.pointshop.com) and shopsofweb (http://www.shopsofweb.com) offer discounts and free gifts during the period of festivals and celebrations. The attributes related to discounts and free gifts are lled-in for a limited time duration and these attributes do not receive values during the remaining time period. We term such property of the attribute as temporality. So, for several such information systems, there is a scope to exploit the temporality of attributes for the efcient UI design. In this paper, we have proposed an approach to exploit the temporality of attributes for identifying the contexts to design improved UI. The temporality values can be xed by analyzing the system functionality and task. By taking attributes and temporality values of a given context, we have proposed an approach to cluster the attributes into several active-contexts where each active-context can be considered as an independent UI for certain time period. By following the proposed approach, we have designed UIs for a real system eSaguT M [7] (eSaguT M is an IT-based personalized agro-advisory system). The implementation results show that it is possible to improve the navigational burden signicantly with the proposed approach as compared to the existing context-based approach. The proposed method brings several advantages. It can reduce the the size of UI by dividing into multiple small UIs. Instead of large UI, one small UI can be active at a given point of time. As a result, the navigational burden could be reduced signicantly. The data-entry speed can be improved with less data-entry errors which also reduces data-entry cost and maintenance. The proposed approach provides signicant advantages, if the context contains numerous attributes. By exploiting the temporality of attributes, there is a scope to reduce the UI size signicantly using with the proposed approach. The rest paper is organized as follows. In the next section we discuss the related work. In section 3, we present the proposed approach. In section 4, we explain the experiment

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results. The last section consists of summary and conclusions. II. R ELATED WORK In this section, we discuss the related work in the area of UI design tools and approaches. A. UI design tools Brad Myers [5] surveys the state of the art of UI software tools. The existing UI design tools are classied into categories viz. language-based tools, interactive graphical specication tools and model-based generation tools. All these models are based on the dynamic behavior of a UI as well as the way as to how the designer can specify the layout. There exist tools which allow to design UI interactively, or which automatically generate the UI from a high-level model or specication. These tools also enable the UI developer to customize their design-output. User Interface Management Systems (UIMSs) consists of UI construction tools which are used mainly to construct the dialogue component of the interface. The UIMS signicantly reduces the time required to develop an interface and also the chances of errors to a minimum because the designer is dealing with a compact and higher level of specication. A high-level UIMS which automatically generates the lexical and syntactic design of GUIs is presented in [8] based on the given description and user preferences. Similar approaches have been used in the Menu Interaction Kontrol Environment (MIKE) [9] and User Interface Design Environment (UIDE) [10]. MIKE automatically generates textual interfaces from a description of the semantic commands supported by the application. The designer then adds the graphical interaction facilities to the interfaces generated by MIKE. UIDE provides a high-level conceptual design tool in which the designer describes the UI as a knowledge base. UIDE can algorithmically transform the knowledge base into a number of functionally equivalent interfaces, each of which is slightly different from the original interface. The transformed interface denition can then be input to a UIMS which implements the UI. The declarative model, MASTERMIND [11], is one of the common representation tools that can assist system builders in the creation of the model, which automatically provide context sensitive help and other run-time assistance to users. The components of the system share the knowledge in the model which promotes interface consistency within and across systems and also the re-usability in the construction of new interfaces. This model allows system builders to more easily understand and develop systems. Egbert Schlungaum [12][13] summarizes the area of model-based UI software tools in order to prepare a basis for automatic UI generation. Efforts are made to create a common declarative model to specify the necessary information for automatic UI generation by combining various
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model-based UI approaches. A system called TADEUS was developed that takes requirement analysis as the input and it demonstrated the automatic development of UIs. B. UI design approaches A robust content creation with form-oriented user interface is proposed in [6] [14]. Forms are the editable parts of the UI and are made of input elements. UIs are employed to create or modify the web content dynamically using the form-oriented analysis. The web content is populated or updated using these UIs (also called web interfaces) and is displayed with recently updated content all the time. The notion of referential integrity is always ensured while creating the web content. A survey has conducted on context-aware system in [15]. In this survey presented common architecture principles of context-aware systems and derive a layered conceptual design framework to explain the different elements common to most context-aware architectures. These design principles are used to introduce various existing context-aware systems focusing on context-aware middleware and frameworks, which ease the development of context-aware applications. A survey has conducted by Dey [1] to understand context and context-aware applications. Dey redened the concepts such as context and context-aware computing with the help of existing denitions. These denitions assist to understand the boundaries of context-aware computing, and facilitate application designers select context to use, structure context in applications, and decide what context-aware features to implement. Task analysis [16] used to describe the most detailed level in which a task is decomposed into steps and decisions. In task analysis, the job/work is divided into tasks and these tasks are further divided into sub-tasks. The sub-tasks are generated at various granularity levels. However, dening granularity level is an unsolved problem in task analysis. The procedure or method is not clearly dene to nd the granularity level of sub-tasks. Finally, sub-tasks are used to dene the UI forms. In the proposed approach we have come up with an algorithm to nd the active-contexts from the given contexts. And also demonstrated the procedure to generate the UIs for active-contexts. In the eld of relational database, the notion called functional dependency is introduced to decompose large relational table to small relational tables. A functional dependency is a constraint between two sets of attributes in a relation from a database. Normalization is a systematic way of ensuring that a database structure is suitable for general-purpose querying and free of certain undesirable characteristics (insertion, update, and deletion anomalies) that could lead to a loss of data integrity [2].

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The work presented in this paper is different from the preceding approaches as follows. The major focus of the systems such as MIKE, UIDE, MASTERMIND etc., was on the generation of automated UIs. In some of the systems, graphical user interface components were also included in UI and allowed the UI developer to modify the components wherever necessary. That means the focus was on the generation of UIs either through automated or semi-automated manner. These tools were helped the UI developer to prepare the UI quickly and with minimum efforts. In the context-based approach, the main issue is the method employed to dene the context. So far, the temporal property has not been explored to dene the context and design the UI. III. P ROPOSED A PPROACH Let the existing approach be called as context-based approach (CA). We call the proposed approach as contextbased approach with attribute temporality (CAAT). In this section, we rst explain about CA. Next, we discuss the proposed approach. A. Context-based Approach Dey [1] redened the concepts such as context and context-aware computing with the help of existing denitions. Context is any information that can be used to characterize the situation of an entity. An entity is a person, place or object that is considered relevant to the interaction between a user and an application, including the user and application themselves. The term context-aware is dened as, a system is contextaware if it uses context to provide relevant information and/or services to the user, where relevancy depends on the users task. Generally, UI is a place where user interact with the database systems to populate the data. These UIs are designed for an actor or a role or a situation of an information system. We can consider an actor or a role or a situation as a context. Normally UI forms are designed for the context. Existing design of UI forms can also be called as context-based (also called as context-aware) [1] systems. The contexts are identied during the use case analysis phase of information system building. A context contains a set of input attributes. The UI is developed by including all the attributes of the corresponding context. B. Context-based Approach with Attribute Temporality In information system, UI is designed to receive data for each task or activity. Some of the tasks/activities repeat in a cyclical manner. So, for each task a xed number of attributes are employed to receive data in a given cycle period. Here, the value of cycle period is number of days which depends on the dynamics of the task. It can be
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observed that for certain types of tasks, all the attributes do not receive values during entire duration of a cycle. That is, the values for some attributes are not entered everyday in UI. We term such property of the attribute as temporality. Note that if we employ CA and design UI, all the attributes of corresponding UI are shown to the user. As a result, user browses all the attributes, even though few attributes receive values. It can be observed that attribute temporality provides a scope for a better UI design. The temporality of attributes is captured during the requirement analysis phase of information system development. Alternatively by observing the past data-entry patterns, information regarding temporality of attributes can also be extracted. The following notations are employed to explain the approach.

Context (C): It is a set of attributes. ai indicates an attribute of a context C where 0 i n. Temporality of the attribute (ti ): It refers to the time duration during which the attribute receives data. The temporality of attribute ai is indicated with ti which is equal to eti -sti , where sti indicates the starting of time duration and eti indicates the ending of time duration. Active-context (ACi ): It is also a set of attributes. The notation ACi indicates ith active-context of C, where 0 i s and s is the number of active-contexts. A context C contains several active-contexts. Note that, ACi C. Distinct temporality of an active-context ACi : It refers to the time duration eti -sti with following condition. There is no other ACj such that, stj sti and etj sti or stj eti and etj eti .

The problem is as follows. Given C, divide C into k (where k > 1) active-contexts such that temporality of each active-context is distinct and average number of attributes per active-context is minimum. We now discuss the simple algorithm to form activecontexts employing clustering approach. The input to this approach is the context C which contains a set of n attributes with the corresponding temporality values. We can expand C into a list of < ai , ti > pairs where ti is the temporality of ai where 0 i n. Divide C into k active-contexts AC such that temporality of each activecontext is distinct. The main problem is to nd the optimum number of active-contexts from the given context. As the worst case scenario, we can consider each day as an active-context, i.e., the set of attributes valid on a particular day constitute

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the active-context. However, dividing the context into daywise active-contexts will have several disadvantages viz., difculty of the user in remembering the attributes and increase in the external costs associated with printing of forms and others. So we present an approach to form the large active-contexts by taking the day-wise active-contexts as an input. To compute the similarity between two active-contexts, Jaccard coefcient [17] [18] similarity criterion is employed. It is a distance function used for boolean and categorical attributes. Jaccard coefcient similarity criterion gives the distance between clusters and produces similarity value between 0 and 1. If the similarity value is near to 1, it indicates the given clusters are more similar and if the similarity value is nearer to 0 then the given clusters are dissimilar. In the proposed approach, the attributes in an active-context are treated as boolean values, presence of an attribute refers to a value 1, otherwise to 0. Let ACi and ACj indicates attributes in ith and j th active-contexts. The similarity between two active-contexts ACi and ACj is computed based on the Jaccard coefcient as sim(ACi , ACj ) = |ACi ACj | |ACi ACj | (1)

Given the context C, the approach to compute activecontexts is a two-phase approach. In the rst phase, the day-wise active-contexts are generated and in the next phase the nal rened active-contexts are generated. During the second phase, the active-contexts are merged when the two active-contexts are similar. This process continues for all the active-contexts to form large active-contexts. 1) Create an array of < ai , ti > for context data, where 1 i n and initialize the value of n to cycle duration (number of days). 2) Finding active-context for each day Create an array of <ACi , Attribute(ACi )>, where 1 i n and Attribute(ACi ) is a set of attributes used in ACi for ith day. th If i day falls in tk , where 1 i n and 1 k n then insert ak into Attribute(ACi ). 3) Finding the nal active-contexts. Find similarity of Attribute(ACi ) and Attribute(ACi+1 ) where 1 i n. If Attribute(ACi ) and Attribute(ACi+1 ) are more similar then merge Attribute(ACi ) and Attribute(ACi+1 ) into Attribute(ACi ), and decrease n by 1. Otherwise increase i by 1. The pseudo code is shown in Algorithm 1. This pseudo code takes a context C, and threshold ST, as an input parameters and produces k active-contexts. The day-wise active-contexts are formed in the steps 2 to 9. These
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Algorithm 1 ClusterAttributes(ci ) Input: C and ST C = Context. ST = Similarity Threshold. C = < ai , ti > where 1 i n and ti consisting of staring day sti and ending day eti (ti = sti -eti ). /*ai is attribute names, ti is time duration consisting of starting day and ending day*/ Output: k active-contexts Variables: day, nc, na, nd, i, std are integers. ACi : denotes a active-context i where (i < n) as n denotes total number of active-contexts. max(), min(): denotes the functions to nd the maximum and minimum of the given set. A = Set of attributes. 1: nc = 0, na = |A|, nd = max(etj ), std=min(stj ) 2: for day = std to nd do 3: for i = 0 to na do 4: if sti >= day and day <= eti then 5: ACstd = ACstd ai 6: nc = nc + 1 7: end if 8: end for 9: end for 10: i = 0 11: while i < (nc-2) do 12: Compute sim = sim(ACi , ACi+1 ) 13: if sim > ST then 14: Merge ACi and ACi+1 i.e., ACi = ACi ACi+1 15: nc = nc - 1 16: else 17: i=i+1 18: end if 19: end while 20: After completion of all the initial active-contexts, return attributes in AC as active-contexts

active-contexts are then merged step-by-step according to the Jaccord coefcient similarity criterion in steps between 11 and 19. The cluster merging process repeats until all the objects are eventually merged into one big active-context. The attributes in the active-contexts are varied based on the time duration of attributes. The attributes of each active-context are used to create UIs.

IV. P ERFORMANCE E VALUATION ON A R EAL S YSTEM We dene the performance metric, explain the implementation results on the real system (eSaguT M ) and provide the discussion.

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A. Performance Metric We dene the performance metric called Improvement Factor (IF) to measure the performance improvement. The IF denotes the reduction in navigational burden to the end user. Let the |ACi | denote the number of attributes in each active-context. Let the ACA denote the number of attributes used in context-based approach (CA). The IF is dened as follows. IF = 1
1 n

|ACi | |ACA|

n i=1

(2)

Note that, all the attributes are exposed to the user for making data-entry in CA. User has to browse through the attributes for entering data, even though few attributes receive values. However, in CAAT, the relevant attributes are present in the UI for a given time duration. Therefore, user has to enter the data for all the attributes. For example, a UI with 10 attributes and required attributes for a given time duration are only 5. In CAAT, the attributes are divided into two active-contexts with 5 attribute each. In CA, at any given point of time, user has to surf all 10 attributes for entering values for 5 attributes. In CAAT, only 5 attributes are exposed to the user for data-entry. Hence, the value of IF is 0.5 in CAAT. 1) Overview of eSaguT M : By extending information and communication technologies, a personalized agricultural advisory system called eSaguT M has been developed in which the farmers receive agricultural expert advice for each of their farms at regular intervals. In eSaguT M [19], the agriculture scientist, rather than visiting the crop in person, delivers the expert advice by getting the crop status in the form of both digital photographs and the related information. An educated farmer is employed to act as a coordinator, since most of the Indian farmers are illiterates. Once in a week the coordinator lls-in the printed crop observation form for the respective crop and takes about ve photographs and sends the same to the agriculture scientist electronically. The agriculture scientists prepare the advice/corrective steps based on the crop observation information and photographs. 2) Designing UI with Context-based Approach: In eSaguT M system, we have implemented context-based approach and designed UIs by considering crop as a context. The number of attributes available to one crop is ranging from 70 to 150. Table I shows the attributes for the UI to enter information for Cotton crop (a context). The rst column is the serial number, second column is the name of the attribute, the third column is the attribute temporality, and the nal column is the description of the attribute. We have developed UI by employing CA approach. As a result, all these attributes are shown to the user for data-entry. The following problems are encountered while entering data through the UI designed using CA. The attributes spread over to multiple computer screens. As a result,
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the user has to browse through all the attributes for dataentry. The user consumed more time to enter the correct values for the required attributes. User has to search for the required attributes and enter the value. It increased both the navigational burden and data-entry errors. 3) Implementation of Context-based Approach with Attribute Temporality: We have redesigned UIs by employing CAAT. We have prepared durations of each attribute by interacting with domain (agriculture) experts. Third column of Table I shows the temporality values for each attribute. Several small UIs are designed for different durations.

Table I ATTRIBUTES IN A SAMPLE CONTEXT (C OTTON CROP ) IN E S AGUT M

SYSTEM

Sl. No. 1 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32

Name of the attribute 2 crop code1 original crop name center id coordinator id coordinator name obs date weather farm id PreviousWeeks AdviceFollowed Result Healthy Jassids Aphids Thrips WhiteFly Spodoptera Eggmass Spodoptera SmallLarvae Spodoptera BigLarvae Helicoverpa Eggs Helicoverpa SmallLarvae Helicoverpa BigLarvae SpottedBollworm PinkBollworm StemBorer Mites OtherInsects DampingOff LeafSpots Wilt Blackarm GreyMildew BollRot

Temporality in days 3 1-180 1-180 1-180 1-180 1-180 1-180 1-180 1-180 1-180 11-170 11-170 11-170 11-170 11-170 71-170 21-150 21-150 21-170 21-150 21-150 21-170 21-170 91-170 61-150 11-170 11-170 1-20 11-170 21-50 71-170 70-170 100-180

Description 4 A unique crop code Crop name Village center identier Coordinator identier Name of coordinator Date of crop observation Weather information Farm identication Previous weeks advice followed by former or not Result of the previous week advice Status of healthiness of crop Name of Pest Name of Pest Name of Pest Name of Pest Name of Pest Name of Pest Name of Pest Name of Pest Name of Pest Name of Pest Name of Pest Name of Pest Name of Pest Name of Pest Any other Pest Name of Decease Name of Decease Name of Decease Name of Decease Name of Decease Name of Decease

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1 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78

(Table I. Continued ...) 2 3 4 BoronDef 45-120 Name of Decease MagnesiumDef 80-120 Name of Decease Unknown Prob- 1-180 Any other Decease lem Fertilizers 1-180 Name of fertilizer fertilizer1 1-180 Fertilizer usage method dose fertilizer1 1-180 Fertilizer quantity spraydate 1-180 Fertilizer applied date fertilizer1 fertilizer2 11-20 Name of fertilizer dose fertilizer2 11-20 Fertilizer quantity spraydate 11-20 Fertilizer applied date fertilizer2 fertilizer3 21-50 Name of fertilizer dose fertilizer3 21-50 Fertilizer quantity spraydate 21-50 Fertilizer applied date fertilizer3 fertilizer4 61-170 Name of fertilizer dose fertilizer4 61-170 Fertilizer quantity spraydate 61-170 Fertilizer applied date fertilizer4 Nutrients 1-180 Micro nutrients Nutrient1 1-180 Name of micro nutrient dose Nutrient1 1-180 micro nutrient quantity spraydate Nu- 1-180 Date of application trient1 Nutrient2 11-20 Name of micro nutrient dose Nutrient2 11-20 Quantity spraydate Nu- 11-20 Date of application trient2 Nutrient3 31-40 Name of micro nutrient dose Nutrient3 31-40 Quantity spraydate Nu- 31-40 Date of application trient3 Insecticides 1-173 Chemicals applied insecticide1 1-173 Name of chemical dose 1-173 Quantity insecticide1 spraydate 1-173 Date of application insecticide1 insecticide2 21-50 Name of chemical dose 21-50 Quantity insecticide2 spraydate 21-50 Date of application insecticide2 insecticide3 21-50 Name of chemical dose 21-50 Quantity insecticide3 spraydate 21-50 Date of application insecticide3 insecticide4 61-140 Name of Chemical dose 61-140 Quantity insecticide4 spraydate 61-140 Date of application insecticide4 Fungicides 21-140 Fungicides applied fungicide1 21-140 Name of fungicide dose 21-140 Quantity fungicide1 spraydate 61-140 Date of application fungicide1 fungicide2 61-140 Name of fungicide dose 61-140 Quantity fungicide2 spraydate 61-140 Date of application fungicide2

1 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100

2 fungicide3 dose fungicide3 spraydate fungicide3 Weedicides weedicide1 dose weedicide1 spraydate weedicide1 weedicide2 dose weedicide2 spraydate weedicide2 IPMPractices

(Table I. Continued ...) 3 4 61-140 Name of fungicide 61-140 Quantity 61-140 1-20 1-20 1-20 1-20 21-50 21-50 21-50 1-173 1-173 1-173 1-173 61-173 61-173 61-173 61-173 61-173 61-173 1-173 1-173 Date of application Weedicides applied Name of weedicide Quantity Date of application Name of weedicide Quantity Date of application Integrated Pest Management (IPM) practices Name of IPM practices Quantity Date of application Name of IPM practice Quantity Date of application Name of IPM practice Quantity Date of application Other control measures Description of other control measure

101 102 103 104 105 106

IPMPractise1 dose IPMPractise1 spraydate IPMPractise1 IPMPractise2 dose IPMPractise2 spraydate IPMPractise2 IPMPractise3 dose IPMPractise3 spraydate IPMPractise3 Any other control measure Any other control measure text photo id1 photo id2 photo id3 photo id4 photo id5 photo id6

1-180 1-180 1-180 1-180 1-180 1-180

Crop observation Photograph 1 Crop observation Photograph 2 Crop observation Photograph 3 Crop observation Photograph 4 Crop observation Photograph 5 Crop observation Photograph 6

The evaluation results for ve crops are shown in Table II. In this table, the rst column indicates serial number, the second column shows the context (crop) name, third column describes number of attributes in a context, fourth column indicates identiers of the active-contexts, fth column shows the time duration of the active-context, and sixth column indicates the the number of attributes in active-contexts. The average number of attributes among the active-contexts is shown in column seventh and the nal column shows IF values. In this table, the context Cotton is having 106 attributes, these attributes are divided in six active-contexts and each active-context has number of attributes shown. Similarly, Chlilli, Maize, Rice and Sunower contexts are divided into 7, 6, 6 and 6 active-contexts respectively. The results indicate that creation of the UIs using CAAT is
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more appropriate than using CA. It can be observed that the reduction in the number of attributes with the proposed approach is signicant. The IF varies between 0.37 and 0.44 and the average value of IF comes to 0.40. After redesigning the UI with the proposed approach, it was observed that there is a signicant reduction in the navigational burden to the user as the size of the UI is reduced drastically. The end users felt more convenient. B. Discussion The CAAT gives number of small UIs instead of single large UI. The small UIs contains all the relevant attributes for a given time duration. The algorithm captures all the attributes required for a particular time duration. In the real system, we made an analysis of relevancy of attributes in active-contexts with the help of an agricultural expert. We have provided attributes in each active-context for the sample crops. The agricultural expert tested attributes in each activecontext with the agricultural information for the respective crops. The experts have satised with the attributes in each active-context. The proposed approach can be applied in different domains with similar situations. This approach can be used in different information systems such as medical information systems, e-Commerce systems, etc. The attributes of some UIs developed in these domains may receive the data on the time durations. For example, festival and celebrations are celebrated on xed time durations and these periods will repeat every year. Generally, discounts and free gifts are announced by the e-commerce systems during these periods. The attributes related to discounts and free gifts will be lled during these periods and the rest of the period there is no values for these attributes. So, there is a scope to improve the performance with the proposed approach. V. S UMMARY AND C ONCLUSIONS In information systems, the improper UI design causes reduction in the efciency of the user due to increase in navigational burden and data-entry errors. Traditionally, contextbased approach is employed to design user interfaces. In this paper, we have proposed an efcient approach for UI design by exploiting the notion of temporality of attributes. The input attributes are clustered into several active-contexts based on the temporality values of attributes. This approach is implemented in a real system and the results show that the proposed approach reduces the navigational burden as the size of the UI is reduced drastically. In addition to improving convenience to the user, the proposed approach has a potential to reduce both data-entry cost and data maintenance cost (due to reduction in data-entry errors). As a part of future work, we will investigate how the proposed approach improves the performance in mobile and hand-held environments.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This work has been carried out with the support from Nokia Global University Grant.

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Table II P ERFORMANCE OF CAAT OVER CA USING E S AGUT M SYSTEM S.No. 1 Crop (Context) Name Cotton Total Attributes 106 AC Identier 1 2 3 4 5 6 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 1 2 3 4 5 6 1 2 3 4 5 6 1 2 3 4 5 6 Time period 1-20 21-50 51-60 61-140 141-170 171-180 1-20 21-30 31-40 41-140 141-180 181-190 191-210 1-20 21-30 31-40 41-50 51-70 71-100 1-30 31-50 51-70 71-90 91-110 111-120 1-30 31-40 41-60 61-70 71-80 81-100 # of attributes in AC 53 69 53 79 63 41 59 65 85 82 64 49 32 50 63 71 74 67 54 72 93 80 62 60 50 61 77 79 71 59 50 Average # attributes IF

59.67

0.44

Chilli

108

62.29

0.42

Maize

111

63.17

0.40

Rice

105

69.50

0.37

Sun Flower

106

66.17

0.38

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