HMI generation for plug-in services from semantic descriptions

We describe our implemented approach to automatically generating user interfaces (UIs) for dynamic services in the automotive domain. Dynamic services are services that are not known at design/deploy time of the HMI (human machine interaction) software of the automobile. Such services will increasingly find their way into the modern car: via mobile consumer electronics, via online servers, or via software download. In order for the driver to safely and comfortably interact with these services, their user interfaces need to be seamlessly integrated into the overall HMI system of the car and resemble the look and feel of the statically deployed HMI system. In the approach described in this paper, each service is accompanied by a description of its semantics, based on which a generic UI generator then automatically designs an appropriate UI and integrates it into the existing HMI system. We use OWL to formulate the domain-specific ontology of automotive infotainment services and OWLS to describe the service interfaces. In order to be able to express listener/notification semantics, we extended OWLS by several new constructs. Our results are based on our implementation of a UI generator for an automotive infotainment system, using the typical BMW Group HMI concepts.