Work-centered Infomediary Layer (WIL): An architecture for adaptive interfaces

Active interfaces that act as infomediaries between underlying systems and their human users offer a rich and comprehensive solution to the pervasive problem of (lack of) usability in computer-based work environments. However, they also pose a substantial technological challenge. The paper describes a novel work-centered active interface architecture, called the Workcentered Infomediary Layer (WIL). This architecture allows interfaces to actively identify and offer highly customized work support to the system user without employing any intent inference mechanism. Instead, WIL relies on its ability to build and maintain an internal representation of the work context, and to offer support to the user based on their common relationship to the underlying work situation.