Master's thesis

My master's thesis Ontology-Based Cultural Personalization in Mobile Applications is ready to download as a PDF.
For your convenience the bibtex for citation is available at the website of the University of Zurich.

If you would like to get a short overview about the thesis, you can check out the slides of a talk I did about my thesis:

For the mobile phone menu of my master's thesis I needed some icons.

I found following good sources for free icons:

Silk icons
Very well designed and a lot of icons for different subjects
http://www.famfamfam.com/lab/icons/silk/
Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License

vbarchiv.net
A huge archive. Not smoothly designed though, most icons look like Windows icons in the 90s did.
http://www.vbarchiv.net/download/icons.php
for free use

Pinvoke.com
http://pinvoke.com/
Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license

Mini Pixel Icons
Icons available in different color sets.
http://www.ndesign-studio.com/resources/mini-pixel-icons/
Write a link back to http://www.ndesign-studio.com/ if over 10 used


Based on the Silk icons, i created some more icons:



I put the edited icons online licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.
Download as zip file.

For my master's thesis I needed a way to parse my ontology which was saved as an OWL file. There are a lot of XML parsers for J2ME but there was no parser available for RDF or OWL files.

So I used the the NanoXML parser for J2ME by Eric Giguere which is based on the parser of Marc De Scheemaecker and modified it. NanoXML is a model parser.

I added the class kRDFElement. It is based on the kXMLElement class and I added some useful fields and methods to parse and change RDF and OWL files comfortably. Note that if you use Protégé to create an OWL file, save it as "RDF/XML" and not "RDF/XML-ABBREV".

Head over to the Sourceforge-Page of NanoXML for J2ME for the library and the source files.


The most important changes are:

Some static constants were added, who are RDF/OWL specific:

-RDF_DESCRIPTION
-RDF_ABOUT
-RDF_ID
-RDF_RESOURCE
-RDF_TYPE

Some methods are used to get information from the current kRDFElement (see figure).

-getAboutValue
-getContenstOfSubtag(String tagName)
-getResourceValueOfSubtag(String tagName)
-getTypeName()




Some methods are used to change the kRDFElement

-setAboutValue(String aboutValue)
-setResourceValue(String resourceId)


And there are also two very handy methods who search in the kRDFElement for kRDFElements. They are most useful when applied to the root-kRDFElement of the whole OWL-file.

-searchForElement(String rdfAboutValue) - returns the kRDFElement with the given rdfAboutValue
-searchForAllElementsOfType(String rdfAboutValue,String elementTypeName) - returns all the kRDFElements of the given type



If you are not restricted to a J2ME environment it is easier to use a RDF/OWL framework or API like Jena Semantic Web Framework.

For my master's thesis I had to evaluate GUI Libraries for J2ME (CLDC + MIDP). Because putting that evaluation in my thesis would be an overkill, I post it here, to make the evaluation for others easier.

Another evaluation was made by Wendong Li.

Note: This evaluation does not claim to cover every criteria. I list some arguments that - I think - give a good impression of the different libraries. Of course, if a library had a property, which made it impossible for me to use (like if it was not free) I stopped investigating further properties. I hope this table will help some of you to see the differences, advantages and disadvantages between the different GUI libraries of J2ME, furthermore this list is a good starting point to start your own evaluation.

If you know some other libraries or have some additional information to the individual libraries, that you'd like to share, write a comment.

Name	Comments	License
Paxmodept	Special features: Expandable list items and tab-menus	Commercial
TWUIK	Very powerful and really an eye-candy. Looks very sophisticated and gives your application the IPhone-Look. Check the demo of this twitter-client, to see how powerful it is. Unfortunately it's not free.	Commercial
J2ME Polish	Very sophisticated. Is not only a library, but a whole development-framework. Allows to deploy different variants of applications for different mobile phones or different customers. Has built-in features like auto-completion of textfields. Possibility to seperate application logic and design through CSS-like layout. Plugins for Netbeans and Eclipse. Has ListLayout, TabLayout, GridLayout and TreeLayout.	GPL
Tinyline	Seems to be better for graphical drawing, than for GUIs with components like textfields and navigation.	Tinyline License
Synclast	Has containers like tablecontainer. Text in Textfields can only be entered all lower-case or all upper-case, there's no possibilty to switch the enter-mode during runtime.	GPL
APIME	Seems to work only by mouse pointer navigation. Plus the javadoc is only in spanish. Nevertheless there are some nice components like progress bars and tooltips.	GPL
fire j2me	Possibility of screen rotation and popup panels. As far as I can see, it has not layout managers, it assumes that all elements are aligned as lists.	LGPL
jMobileCore	Some very clean components like checkboxes etc. but seems to support only normal alignment. no fancy containers like table-containers. Furthermore, there is no native use of the cell-phone textentry, only upper-case textfields without numbers for textentry.	LGPL
MWT - Micro Window Toolkit	Demo-Applications were quite confusing in the emulator. Some weird behaviour (command-keys didn't work) and navigation via 2,4,6,8 instead of direction-keys. (Felix in the comments added, that the direction keys DO work.)	LGPL
Nextel's Open Windowing Toolkit for J2ME Handsets	also has a gridlayout and a flow-layout! demo is directly in the sourcecode disadvantage: very old (2001), doesn't seem to be continued not as many layout-possibilities as with j2me polish	Nextel license
Thinlet	Uses xml to add components. contains all the components in one class-file last midp-version was in 2002. respectively in 2005 (redesigned by Porsche Engineering (without documentation, only the java-file). the now developed version is mainly thought as a lightweight component library for J2SE and Pocket PCs (J9 VM).	LGPL
Light Weight Visual Component Library	Grid, Tree, list: A lot of possible components. Just a draft-version available at the moment	GPL
microEWT	Has BoxLayout, GridLayout and BorderLayout and FlowLayout, but doesn't have tab-layout.	GPL
J4ME	Professional looking UI, support themes, logging framework included, get GPS information from internal GPS and external GPS pucks	Apache 2.0 License
Kuix	User interface components can be arranged in an XML file. The style of the components is defined in a CSS file. Also has special components like tabbed forms. Very good looking interfaces.	GPL
TagsME	Provides the possiblity to create GUIs with XML that work across different devices.	not known yet
Swing ME	A J2ME implementation of Swing GUI	LGPL
kUI	a Canvas based replacement for the high level LCDUI classes	GPL
LWUIT	UI Library, supports theming, transitions, animation and more.	GPLv2
J2ME GUI		Special license
Flemil	Uses less memory and supports themes and layout switching.	Commercial license

In order to finish my studies and to get the degree of "Master of Science in Informatics" I have to work on a diploma thesis. There are a lot of interesting master thesis subjects at our Department of Informatics, so I had a lot of choices. But one subject catched my interest in particular:

Ontology-Based Cultural Personalization in Mobile Applications

In plain English: I will develop different menus for navigation on a mobile phone. First the application will ask the user some questions, and then show him a navigation that should suit his cultural background. For example a grid-navigation with deep navigation-hierarchy or a list-navigation with a flat navigation-hierarchy. To make the decision which menu to take, the application needs some information about cultures, this information is taken from an OWL-file (this is something like a XML-file).

This thesis gives me the chance to deepen my knowledge of the following subjects:

• cultural differences in user interface design
• developing applications for mobile devices
• ontologies (OWL) and semantic web

The next half year will be very interesting.