A language perspective on the development of plastic multimodal user interfaces

Designing complex interactive systems requires the collaboration of actors with very different background. As a result, several languages and tools are used in a single project with no hope for interoperability. In this article, we examine whether a universal language is a realistic approach to UI specification by looking for answers into the domain of Linguistics while finding analogies in software engineering. Then, we explore one particular avenue from main-stream software engineering: that of Model Driven Engineering where the notion of transformation is key to the definition of bridges between languages and tools. Building upon these two analyses, we then show how model-driven engineering can be successfully exploited in the development and execution of plastic multimodal UIs illustrated with a variety of complementary tools.