Insider: Towards Breaking Down Mobile App Silos
Insider: Towards Breaking Down Mobile App Silos
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业内人士：打破移动应用孤岛
DOI：
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发表时间：
2015
期刊：
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通讯作者：
R. Ramjee
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作者：
V. Chandramouli;Abhijnan Chakraborty;Vishnu Navda;S. Guha;V. Padmanabhan;R. Ramjee
如今，用户数据被孤立在移动的应用程序中。其中一个应用程序可以保存用户的航班预订，另一个应用程序可以保存用户的出租车预订，两者之间几乎没有数据共享，导致用户体验碎片化。例如，如果刚刚使用一个应用程序预订了航班的用户希望从机场预订出租车，则他们将不得不通过手动重新输入来自航班应用程序的数据（例如，为了使用户能够重新控制其应用内数据，Insider平台从任意应用的表示层提取结构化用户数据，而无需对应用代码或二进制文件进行任何修改，并在用户需要时轻松跨应用共享此类数据。在其核心，普通用户为他们关心的应用创建和共享模型;应用模型将来自应用的表示层的数据与任务模板中的属性相关联，该任务模板对应于用户在应用中执行的特定任务（例如，预订航班）。在运行时，Insider将应用模型与来自表示层的原始流相结合，以生成结构化和语义上有意义的信息。然后，Insider通过一组API发布这些信息，从而创建以前无法构建的新颖应用程序。例如，我们在一个出租车应用程序中原型化了航班预订后的自动信息填充，以及其他三个依赖于跨应用程序数据共享的新颖应用程序。最后，我们报告了在11个类别的150个应用程序上运行Insider的详细评估。我们表明，我们能够成功地提取83%的关键属性（例如，对应于源机场的UI小部件）。此外，我们还跟踪了从2014年9月到2015年3月的6个月期间的应用程序版本变化，发现即使40%的应用程序进行了更新，只有6%的应用程序需要重建应用程序模型。
User data is siloed in mobile apps today. Where one app may hold the user’s flight booking, another app the user’s cab reservation, with little data sharing between the two, resulting in a fragmented user experience. For instance, if a user, who has just booked a flight using one app, wishes to pre-book a cab from the airport, they would have to do so by manually re-entering the data from the flight app (e.g., location, date, time) into the cab app. To enable the user to retake control of their in-app data, the Insider platform extracts structured user data from the presentation layer of arbitrary apps, without any modifications to the app code or binary, and makes it easy for such data to be shared across apps, when the user so desires. At its core, ordinary users create and share models for the apps they care about; the app model relates the data from the presentation layer of the app to attributes in a task template, which corresponds to the specific tasks users perform in the app (e.g., booking a flight). At runtime, Insider combines the app model with the raw stream from the presentation layer to produce structured and semantically-meaningful information. Insider then publishes this information through a set of APIs, enabling creation of novel apps that could not have been built previously. For example, we prototype the automatic population of information in a cab app after a flight booking as well as three other such novel apps that rely on cross-app data sharing. Finally, we report on a detailed evaluation of running Insider on 150 apps across 11 categories. We show that we are able to successfully extract 83% of the key attributes (e.g., UI widget corresponding to source airport) from these apps. Further, we also track app version changes during a 6 month period from Sep 2014 to Mar 2015 and find that even though 40% of apps were updated, only 6% of apps required rebuilding of the app model.