WEBIST 2007 Abstracts

Area 1 - e-learning

Full Papers

Paper Nr:	162
Title:	WEB-BASED COMMUNITIES IN E-LEARNING
Authors:	Gavin McArdle, Teresa Monahan and Michela Bertolotto
Abstract:	E-learning is a growing online service, its convenience appealing to many users. An abundance of e-learning applications have been developed which provide many features aiding both tutors and students. However, despite the growth and development of online communities in other areas, the effective establishment of these communities within e-learning is still lacking. Communication and social interaction among students forms an important part of any learning scenario. Therefore, it should also be provided for online learners. This paper presents guidelines for the development of e-learning systems which foster the establishment of communities and encourage interaction among users. The paper describes CLEV-R, our own development which employs these techniques to realise an effective online learning community.
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Paper Nr:	172
Title:	LEARNING AND RETENTION OF LEARNING IN AN ONLINE POSTGRADUATE MODULE ON COPYRIGHT LAW AND INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY
Authors:	Carmel McNaught, Paul Lam, Shirley Leung and Kin-fai Cheng
Abstract:	Various forms of knowledge can be distinguished. Low-level learning focuses on recognition and remembering facts. Higher level learning of conceptual knowledge requires the development of some form of mental structural map. Further, application of knowledge requires learners to put theories and concepts into use in authentic and novel situations. This study concerns learning at a number of levels. The context is a fully online module on copyright laws and intellectual property, designed as an introductory course for all postgraduates at a university in Hong Kong. The paper also explores whether the knowledge learnt through the web-based medium was retained after three to six months. Findings ascertained the effectiveness of the new medium, not only in delivering facts but also for assisting the learning of higher level knowledge. As expected, the performance of students declined in the delayed post-tests but not to any alarming degree. Retention of factual knowledge, however, was much lower than retention of other forms of knowledge. This perhaps suggests that the role of e-learning, just as in face-to-face classes, should focus on concepts and the applied knowledge, rather than on memorization of facts alone.
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Paper Nr:	394
Title:	LINKING CONVERSATIONS AND TASK OBJECTS IN COMPLEX SYNCHRONOUS CSCL ENVIRONMENTS
Authors:	Jacques Lonchamp
Abstract:	In CSCL systems, linking conversations and task objects is essential for establishing joint attention and constructing shared meaning. This paper proposes an application-independent linking mechanism, well adapted for expressing complex inter-tool links as required by the most recent synchronous CSCL environments. The sticky annotated snapshot concept and its more classical derivatives, sticky note and persistent graphical pointer, are described together with their implementation. Preliminary use experiences are discussed which show, in addition to normal linking usages, a somewhat unanticipated way of using sticky annotated snapshots as fully-fledged intermediary objects during creative processes.
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Paper Nr:	418
Title:	A MODEL FOR COMPETENCE GAP ANALYSIS
Authors:	Juri Luca de Coi, Eelco Herder, Arne Koesling, Christoph Lofi, Daniel Olmedilla, Odysseas Papapetrou and Wolf Siberski
Abstract:	Modeling competences is an integral part of many Human Resource (HR) and e-Learning related activities. HR departments use competence descriptions to define requirements needed for performing specific tasks or jobs. The same competences are acquired by employees and applicants by e.g. experience or certifications. Typically, HR departments need to match such required and acquired competences in order to find suitable candidates. In e-Learning a similar situation arises. Curricula or training programmes need to describe pre-requisites that must be fulfilled before joining and the competences that will be acquired after successful completion. This paper analyses the limitations and extends existing approaches for modeling competences in order to allow (semi-)automatic competence matching.
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Paper Nr:	419
Title:	APPLYING GAMES-BASED LEARNING TO TEACH SOFTWARE ENGINEERING CONCEPTS
Authors:	Thomas Connolly, Mark Stansfield and Tom Hainey
Abstract:	For some time now, computer games have played an important role in both children and adults’ leisure activities. While there has been much written on the negative aspects of computer games, it has also been recognised that they have potential advantages and benefits. There is no doubt that computer games can be highly engaging and incorporate features that are extremely compelling. It is these highly engaging features of computer games that have attracted the interests of educationalists. The use of games-based learning has been growing for some years now, however, within software engineering there is still a dearth of empirical evidence to support this approach. In this paper, we examine the literature on the use of computer games to teach software engineering concepts and describe a computer game we have been developing to teach these concepts.
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Paper Nr:	420
Title:	SERIOUS GAME DEVELOPMENT BY DISTRIBUTED TEAMS - A Case Study Based on the EU Project PRIME
Authors:	Manuel Oliveira and Heiko Duin
Abstract:	This paper describes as a case study the first 12 months of a 2 year project developing a serious game targeted at a number of industrial sectors: aeronautical, automotive, civil construction, software and electronics. The paper presents the devised methodology to address the problems that emerged, mostly associated to the inherent barriers of managing a distributed team with equal participatory roles and responsibilities in the creative process of developing a serious game. Some of the lessons learnt are shared with the reader.
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Paper Nr:	469
Title:	DESIGNING FOR FLEXIBLE LEARNING: DEVELOPING WIRED AND WIRELESS APPLICATIONS
Authors:	David M. Kennedy and Doug Vogel
Abstract:	Mobility is an intrinsic property of learning encompassing spatial, temporal and developmental components. Students’ expectations on how and when they learn are creating increasingly heavier demands upon all aspects of their learning and young people, more than any other group, are making mobile devices extensions of their personal space and fundamental to their daily lives. In response, the world is moving very rapidly to engage with the opportunities and flexibility offered by mobile technologies. Educators and developers are faced with the dilemma: do you develop applications for the mobile or the wired environment? In this paper we argue that learning environments will remain combinations of wired and wireless for the foreseeable future. However, not all affordances offered by wired environments are transferable to small mobile devices. In fact, some tasks involving student-generated content are better served by applications that are designed to be entirely mobile. The paper will present initial results and evaluations of five of learning tools with the properties mobility, flexibility and either instructor- or student- generated content.
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Paper Nr:	470
Title:	WEB-BASED ANNOTATION AND COLLABORATION - Electronic Document Annotation Using a Standards-compliant Web Browser
Authors:	Trev Harmon
Abstract:	The Internet provides a powerful medium for communication and collaboration through web-based applications. However, most web-based annotation and collaboration applications require additional software, such as applets, plug-ins, and extensions, in order to work correctly with the web browsers typically found on today’s computers. This in combination with the ever-growing number of file formats poses an obstacle to the wide-scale deployment of annotation and collaboration systems across the heterogeneous networks common in the academic and corporate worlds. In order to address these issues, a web-based system was developed that allows for freeform (handwritten) and typed annotation of over twenty common file formats via a standards-compliant web browser without the need of additional software. The system also provides a multi-tiered security architecture that allows authors control over who has access to read and annotate their documents. While initially designed for use in academia, flexibility within the system allows it to be used for many annotation and collaborative tasks such as distance-learning, collaborative projects, online discussion and bulletin boards, graphical wikis, and electronic grading. The open-source nature of the system provides the opportunity for its continued development and extension.
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Paper Nr:	472
Title:	DEVELOPMENT AND EVALUATION OF PERSONALISED REMOTE EXPERIMENTS IN AN ENGINEERING DEGREE
Authors:	Martin Levesley, P. Culmer, Kate Page, J. Gallagher, Andrew Weightman, B. B. Bhakta, A. Tennant and P. Cripton
Abstract:	A system to allow remote access to experimental equipment via the internet has been developed at the University of Leeds in the UK. This system, called ReLOAD (Real Labs Operated At a Distance), has been used to deliver laboratory sessions to over 200 undergraduate engineering students at the University of British Columbia, using laboratory equipment located at Leeds. The laboratory sessions were developed from well established face-to-face sessions used at the University of Leeds for many years. New equipment was built and a personalised experiment for each student was generated to ensure student’s learning objective remained the same but the data used to present the experimental problem varied. As part of the experiment, students were asked to determine the length of a vibrating beam from their experimental data. Using prizes for the closest answer to the measured length as an incentive, students were asked to record their calculated beam length, to assess their performance. A web-based student feedback system was developed to provide anonymous feedback. Initial results are very encouraging, with students able to undertake remote experimentation with high levels of measurement precision and feedback suggesting the system easy to use. Further experiments and international collaborations are underway using ReLOAD.
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Paper Nr:	502
Title:	E-MEDI: A WEB-BASED E-TRAINING PLATFORM FOR BREAST IMAGING
Authors:	Ioannis Pratikakis, V. Virvilis, Dimitrios Kosmopoulos, Stavros Perantonis, A. Damianakis and D. Tsatsos
Abstract:	This paper concerns a Web-based e-Training platform that is dedicated to multimodal breast imaging. The assets of this platform are summarised in the following : (i) the efficient representation of the curriculum flow that will permit efficient training; (ii) efficient tagging of multimodal content appropriate for the completion of realistic cases and (iii) ubiquitous accessibility and platform independence via a web-based approach.
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Paper Nr:	509
Title:	BUILDING VIRTUAL LEARNING COMMUNITY WITH AUTHENTIC PROBLEM-BASED LEARNING ACTIVITIES - For Exploring Emerging Science and Technology
Authors:	Satoru Fujitani, Tadayuki Kishimoto and Kumiko Iwazaki
Abstract:	The authors have worked with developing and evaluating educational programs dealing with emerging scientific and technological. The programs promote collaborative learning activities that research and examine emerging science and technology through interfacing between middle and high school students with volunteers via websites. Upon abstracting empirical knowledge from the actual experiences of high school club activities and evaluating the effectiveness of the information system, the learners took the initiative in uploading what they had learned from their club activities to the websites, received necessary information from the explanations and queries of the waiting online volunteers, and were ultimately able to translate that into such activities as presentations on that basis.
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Paper Nr:	548
Title:	AN ELEARNING EXPERIENCE USING THE SAKAI ENVIRONMENT - A Case-Study for Online Courses in Operating Systems
Authors:	Félix Buendía-García and Antonio Hervás Jorge
Abstract:	In the context of the Bologna process, e-learning experiences are being promoted in many European universities. Recently, the Universidad Politécnica of Valencia (UPV) has implemented the Poliformat platform that is based on the Sakai environment. Last year, a pilot experience was developed to test this environment for undergraduate courses in a Computer Engineering degree. The current work describes an e- learning application of the Poliformat platform in an Operating Systems online course. The experience has been evaluated using survey techniques that analyse online learning issues and also technical aspects related to the Poliformat platform. Globally, the experience was rather positive although some problems were detected in the evaluation process that revealed that e-learning methods and tools have to be improved.
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Short Papers

Paper Nr:	74
Title:	TRENDS IN TEACHING WEB-BASED DEVELOPMENT - A Survey of Pedagogy in Web Development Courses
Authors:	Ralph Grove
Abstract:	Many universities now offer a computer science course covering the development of information systems for the World Wide Web. Over the last ten years much has been written about experiences gained in developing and teaching such a course. This paper summarizes these experiences, including curriculum, common problems, and lessons learned. It also provides a suggested model curriculum and argues for more emphasis on fundamental concepts in addition to the standard core set of Web development technologies.
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Paper Nr:	90
Title:	AUTHORING REUSABLE SLIDE PRESENTATIONS
Authors:	Alberto González Téllez
Abstract:	Slide presentations have become a common method used by lecturers to prepare and deliver teaching content. The amount of effort invested in authoring this material is usually very high and then it is desirable to be able to reuse it. Unfortunately commonly used slide editors offer very little reuse capabilities. In this paper we present a method of authoring teaching slide presentations that has the advantage of being able to automatically port slide contents into other delivering formats (textbooks, synchronized multimedia presentations, e-learning platforms, etc). The technique is based on using an XML compliant language with available tools that are user friendly and free.
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Paper Nr:	188
Title:	IUMELA - The Inception of an Intelligent Modular Education Learning Assistant
Authors:	Elaine Mcgovern, Rem Collier and Eleni Mangina
Abstract:	University College Dublin has made an unprecedented transition from its once traditional educational metaphor to a modularised education framework, the first of its kind in Ireland. This paper questions whether students, who are unfamiliar with the concepts of modularisation, can successfully make informed decisions, ensuring success from specifically tailored module combinations. It presents IUMELA, an intelligent modularised-education learning assistant for use in a mobile context to aid in this career-making decision making process. Using multi-agent systems and their associated expert systems, it recommends appropriate modules based on the students own requirements. Proclaimed as a new departure, the ubiquitous multi agent systems technologies are capable of transcending the boundaries of the traditional into a world of innovative intelligent mobile learning, where software components embedded with intelligent learning assistants can enhance the third level students academic career.
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Paper Nr:	193
Title:	GUIDANCE AND MONITORING OF LEARNING VIA INTERNET - Analysis of a Practical Experiment
Authors:	Isabel Cuadrado-Gordillo and Inmaculada Fernández-Antelo
Abstract:	During the 2005/6 academic year, we experimented with adapting the subject of Psychology of Instruction in the undergraduate Psychopædagogy degree course to the European Higher Education Area (EHEA). This involved transforming presencial tutorials into virtual tutorials. We here describe our experience and analyze the strengths and weaknesses that we encountered in using different tools of synchronous and asynchronous virtual communication to monitor the students' learning. The results showed a greater willingness of the students to become involved in the study of the material, a significant increase in their grades and in particular in the number of passing grades, and a change of attitude from one of total passivity to an optimal degree of activity, responsibility, and commitment.
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Paper Nr:	385
Title:	INTERACTIVITY WITHIN IMS LEARNING DESIGN AND QUESTION AND TEST INTEROPERABILITY
Authors:	Onjira Sitthisak, Lester Gilbert, Mohd T Zalfan and Hugh C. Davis
Abstract:	We examine the integration of IMS Question and Test Interoperability (QTI) and IMS Learning Design (LD) in implementations of E-learning from both pedagogical and technological points of view. We propose the use of interactivity as a parameter to evaluate the quality of assessment and E-learning, and assess various cases of individual and group study for their interactivity, ease of coding, flexibility, and reusability. We conclude that presenting assessments using IMS QTI provides flexibility and reusability within an IMS LD Unit Of Learning (UOL) for individual study. For group study, however, the use of QTI items may involve coding difficulties if group members need to wait for their feedback until all students have attempted a question, and QTI items may not be able to be used at all if the QTI services are implemented within a service-oriented architecture.
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Paper Nr:	390
Title:	E-LEARNING IN CONTINUOUS PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT ACROSS THE GLOBE - An Experience in Water Engineering
Authors:	Joaquín Izquierdo, P. Amparo López, V. S. Fuertes and Francisco J. Izquierdo
Abstract:	Based on our wide experience in continuous professional development (CPD) through traditional activities and hands-on experience on several commonly used Learning Management Systems, we have integrated both concepts and developed a simple, yet effective e-learning approach to help professionals in the water field to fill the gap between their sometimes not updated background and the new features that characterize the water field in the present days. We argue that this task can make use of the same approach that is essential to the knowledge discovery process, to which the e-learning process boils down to. In this contribution we present the work performed at the Polytechnic University of Valencia, within the Multidisciplinary Team of Fluid Modelling, on web systems to support technology enhanced learning specifically addressed to professionals in the Water field. Our approach hinges on the joint use of the online as well as the offline characteristics of the e-learning process and puts to work together in a synergic way both traditional and technology-based learning know-how. As a result, a number of distance courses have been produced that are used for Engineering CPD across the globe, since many professionals worldwide, mainly from Spanish speaking countries, have followed our courses. We present the evolution of our system and the results obtained from testing and evaluating the prototype during the last three years. We have identified issues significant to users in order to better manage the system and changes required to adapt our system to organizational processes and context. Feedback received from trainees indicates both the validity of our approach and the feasibility of implementing e-learning materials to contribute to CPD in the water field in particular and in any field in general, since the methodology herein presented can be exported in a straightforward manner.
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Paper Nr:	391
Title:	CREATING STRUCTURE FROM DISORDER - Using Folksonomies to Create Semantic Metadata
Authors:	Hend Al-Khalifa, Hugh C. Davis and Lester Gilbert
Abstract:	This paper reports on an on-going research project to create educational semantic metadata out of folksonomies. The paper describes a simple scenario for the usage of the generated semantic metadata in teaching, and describes the ‘FolksAnnotation’ tool which applies an organization scheme to tags in a specific domain of interest. The contribution of this paper is to describe an evaluation framework which will allow us to validate our claim that folksonomies are potentially a rich source of metadata.
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Paper Nr:	393
Title:	FLOOR CONTROL IN COMPLEX SYNCHRONOUS CSCL ENVIRONMENTS
Authors:	Jacques Lonchamp
Abstract:	Complex synchronous CSCL environments are dual space environments providing a task space where users “do things” through a set of collaborative tools and a communication space where users “talk of what they do”. The most recent systems provide several tools in each space. In such complex dual space environments, the definition and role of floor-control (FC) has to be clarified. FC can be associated to different granularity levels: environment, space, artefact, component or attribute. If FC is associated to the tool or space level, the coexistence of different FC policies has to be considered. This paper discusses FC in complex synchronous CSCL environments and describes the particular approach implemented in Omega+ generic framework.
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Paper Nr:	414
Title:	ARCHITECTURE FOR A REMOTE ACCESS LABORATORY WITH APPLICATION TO ELECTRONICS ENGINEERING TEACHING
Authors:	Marco Chella and Elnatan Ferreira
Abstract:	This article presents an architecture for the development of Internet remotely controlled experiments with focus on educational applications. We use the Internet as the communication infrastructure; hardware and applications specific for computer based instrumentation; a system composed of an electronic board and applications for monitoring and controlling real experiments. The experiments created with the tools presented make it possible for a user with a computer connected to the Internet to control and get information about the experiment upon which he/she is acting.
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Paper Nr:	424
Title:	DEFINING ADAPTIVE ASSESSMENTS - Construction of Adaptive Assessments Based in the Learning Style of the Students
Authors:	Héctor Of, Francisco García Peñalvo and Maria Jose Rodriguez Conde
Abstract:	This article presents a proposal to define learning objects for adaptive assessments. Two adaptation processes are described here, the first one is the adaptation in the level of complexity of the questions, and the second one is our proposal to adapt the final presentation according to the user’s learning style. To define the items and exams, a model to construct adaptive assessment and a proposal of three levels of integration is detailed.
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Paper Nr:	449
Title:	LEARNING STYLE ESTIMATION USING BAYESIAN NETWORKS
Authors:	Sotiris Botsios, Dimitrios Georgiou and Niloaos Safouris
Abstract:	In order to improve the efficiency of Learning Style estimation, we propose an easily, applicable, Web based, expert system founded on Bayesian networks. The proposed system takes under consideration learners’ answers to a certain questionnaire, as well as classification of learners who have been examined before. As a result, factors such as cultural environment will add value to the learning style estimation. Moreover, the influence of wrong answers, caused by various reasons, is expected to be reduced.
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Paper Nr:	474
Title:	AN APPLICATION OF REMOTLEY CONTROLLED EXPERIMENTS TO PERFORM FEEDFORWARD AND FEEDBACK DAMPING CONTROL OF AN ELECTRO MECHANICAL SERVOMECHANISM
Authors:	Andrew Weightman, P. Culmer, Martin Levesley and Ben Hanson
Abstract:	This paper presents the findings of a pilot study to examine the possibility of delivering a control and dynamics laboratory session, using equipment located at the University of Leeds, to students at University College London (UCL), utilising the ReLOAD (remote access to real experimental equipment) system. The ReLOAD system has been developed to provide improved access to experimental equipment, used as part of undergraduate engineering degree programmes. Key to its operation is the availability of the system to serve video clips that record the experiment in progress, providing essential visualisation plus an improved sense of realism for the user. Students at UCL remotely performed an experiment to determine the effect of varying the feedforward and feedback gain on the dynamics of an electro mechanical servomechanism. Evaluation of the ReLOAD system, performed by the module leader at UCL, shows the system has huge potential to allow more efficient and collaborative use of laboratory equipment across the global engineering education community.
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Paper Nr:	499
Title:	METADATA CHALLENGES IN INTRODUCING THE GLOBAL IEEE LEARNING OBJECT METADATA (LOM) STANDARD IN A LOCAL ENVIRONMENT
Authors:	Lars Edvardsen and Ingeborg Sølvberg
Abstract:	The world of closed Learning Management Systems (LMS) is being replaced by open systems for sharing and reusing digital Learning Objects (LOs) between users, courses, institutions and countries. This poses new challenges in describing these LOs with detailed and correct metadata. This information background is needed for querying services to perform accurate queries for LO retrieval. In this paper we present metadata specific challenges when converting from a local LMS with proprietary metadata schema to a global metadata schema. We have uncovered extensive LO description possibilities based on the existing, local LMS, registered metadata, its LO types and the local context. Files can contain extensive metadata descriptions, though require special attention. We have confirmed that technologies developed as crosswalks are valid for usage in this projects for a one-time metadata transferral. However, transferring of all local metadata elements can result in incompatibility issues with other LMSs. This, even when keeping with the global metadata schema.
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Paper Nr:	512
Title:	DEVELOPMENT OF A WEB-BASED PLANT SCIENCE TEACHING RESOURCE FOR USE BY UNIVERSITY LECTURERS - The Gatsby Plants Teaching Resource
Authors:	Aurora Levesley, Juliet Jopson and Celia Knight
Abstract:	Undergraduate interest in plant science has reached a new critical low; with so few students taking plantbased options that some Universities no longer do a separate Plant Science degree. This raises the question “where is the next generation of British plant science researchers going to come from?”. The Gatsby Plants Teaching Resource http://www.gatsbyplants.leeds.ac.uk/tr aims to support research academics to provide stimulating and inspiring plant science teaching to reverse this downwards trend. The on-line resource will supply a mix of novel teaching ideas, images and practical protocols, as well as holding a database of plant science lecturer contacts so the lecturing community can work together to spread good teaching practice.
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Paper Nr:	532
Title:	MOBILE FEEDBACK SYSTEM FOR SUPPORTING INTERACTIVE LEARNING
Authors:	Harri Hämäläinen, Tomi Ruuska and Ari Happonen
Abstract:	Nowadays in some environments cases the lack of interaction between teacher and students is a huge challenge. Because of this the teachers may have difficulties to diagnose the level and preliminary knowledge of the students. In this paper we take a look at the wireless web-based education system supporting the traditional learning environment. We have earlier developed a pilot that can be used to develop the interaction between different parties. First virtual learning applications have had an approach where studying is independent from time and place. The goal for our application instead was to develop the current learning event and lecture. Our solution is founded on a WWW-based service. Students have access to the application for participating using their devices. Teachers as well as students have their own interfaces. Based on a questionnaire we completed, there is a need for these types of applications. This paper introduces a pilot application and its usage in a Wireless Service Platform. The platform gives completely new possibilities for taking advantage of the eLearning application. Lack of end-user devices is still a limiting factor but this solution at least reduces the need for existing network infrastructure.
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Paper Nr:	546
Title:	DEVELOPMENT OF AN ON-LINE ASSESSMENT SYSTEM TO TRACK THE PERFORMANCE OF STUDENTS
Authors:	Raquel Trillo-Lado, Sergio Ilarri, Juan R. López and Nieves R. Brisaboa
Abstract:	An important feature of an e-learning environment is the ability to continuously assess the progress of the students. With an adequate tracking of the students’ knowledge and performance, it is possible to re-orient the teaching strategies in time to ensure the success of the learning process. Suitable computer tools are required to help the teachers to achieve such difficult goal. In this paper, we present a tool for the definition, execution and evaluation of on-line tests, which can be easily integrated in an existing e-learning system. Prior to the development of the tool, we performed an extensive study of other existing alternatives, both commercial and free, that led our design. Thus, the developed tool presents the desirable features of those alternatives and others that we consider interesting.
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Paper Nr:	547
Title:	APPLYING QUALITY HYPERMEDIA DESIGN PRINCIPLES TO A WEB-BASED EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM
Authors:	Roberto F. Arroyo, Nuria Medina Medina, Miguel J. Hornos and Fernando Molina
Abstract:	We present a web-based educational system modeled using hypermedia design principles. The design establishes two interrelated and interacting layers: a data storage layer and an adaptation layer, linked by the user model. The data storage layer is structured in a data level and an object level. The first level is responsible for maintaining a relational representation of all data, and the second one converts data from the relational schemes into object oriented structures, used out of the storage layer. The adaptation layer performs an adaptive process in two levels: contents and presentation. The former decides what must be shown and depends on the user’s capabilities, while the latter determines how it must be shown and depends on the user’s preferences. Moreover, the system uses dynamic role assignments based on users’ capabilities.
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Paper Nr:	576
Title:	CAPTURING USER BEHAVIOR IN E-LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS
Authors:	Enric Mor, Julià Minguillón and Francesc Santanach
Abstract:	In this paper we describe a proposal for embedding hidden marks in the web pages of a complex web site with the aim of simplifying the process of collecting and analyzing users’ behavior. Usually, server log files are used for tracking user actions, but these files present typical drawbacks due to their huge size and the lack of discrimination between user actions and automated responses. We propose two different strategies for embedding usage marks into web server log files, action-oriented and content-oriented. Action marks are button-oriented and keep track of user behavior oriented to perform tasks thorough system buttons and menus. Content marks keep track of page loads and navigation thorough links pointing to contents that act as traps. Both strategies are complementary and can be used at once. A simple experiment designed to capture user behavior once the initial web site page has been loaded is described as a real example of such proposal usage, showing the advantages of reducing the number of relevant log entries and focusing on specific user actions.
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Paper Nr:	576
Title:	CAPTURING USER BEHAVIOR IN E-LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS
Authors:	Enric Mor, Julià Minguillón and Francesc Santanach
Abstract:	In this paper we describe a proposal for embedding hidden marks in the web pages of a complex web site with the aim of simplifying the process of collecting and analyzing users’ behavior. Usually, server log files are used for tracking user actions, but these files present typical drawbacks due to their huge size and the lack of discrimination between user actions and automated responses. We propose two different strategies for embedding usage marks into web server log files, action-oriented and content-oriented. Action marks are button-oriented and keep track of user behavior oriented to perform tasks thorough system buttons and menus. Content marks keep track of page loads and navigation thorough links pointing to contents that act as traps. Both strategies are complementary and can be used at once. A simple experiment designed to capture user behavior once the initial web site page has been loaded is described as a real example of such proposal usage, showing the advantages of reducing the number of relevant log entries and focusing on specific user actions.
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Paper Nr:	594
Title:	A COMPUTER GAMES APPROACH TO EXPLORATORY LEARNING - LAVA: A Case Study in System Design
Authors:	Kristoffer Getchell, J. Nicoll, C. Kerbey, A. Miller, A. Miller, R. Sweetman, J. Complin and R. Michaelson
Abstract:	This paper presents an approach to utilising computer game technologies and methodologies to support explorative learning. This approach has particular relevance to subjects such as archaeology and geography which contain a significant fieldwork component. A detailed case study, the LAVA project, is presented and the design decisions taken discussed. LAVA was motivated by the need to provide support for explorative learning and an understanding of fieldwork for classes of students in the face of the very few opportunities available for participating in real archaeological excavations. The aim of LAVA is not to replace real world fieldwork, but rather to provide realistic simulations that allow students to better prepare for any involvement with a real excavation. These objectives have initially been achieved through the combination of a 3D game engine, 2D maps and a group-based learning environment.
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Paper Nr:	182
Title:	NEW WEB SERVICES BASED ON-THE-FLY SMIL GENERATOR ARCHITECTURE FOR HIGHLY AVAILABLE ELEARNING PRESENTATION
Authors:	Abdallah Al-Zoubi and Akram Alkouz
Abstract:	Learning objects are usually targets to transfer from one repository to another or subject to modifications due to the unavailability of the server running the repository. Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL) has recently become increasingly important in eLearning environments to integrate learning objects into a synchronized complex multimedia web presentation. However, this standard specification lacks the ability to provide alternative links in the case of repository unavailability and may occasionally lead to broken links. An outline of various aspects of the design and implementation of web services based on-the-fly SMIL generator architecture (WSOSGA) is presented in this paper. WSOSGA consists of three tiers which cooperate together in a simple way to search for multimedia learning objects both locally and in the internet, rank them based on learning objects (LO) author considerations, generate and publish the corresponding SMIL document and its XML profile. The latter will be used by the web services tiers on the target web server to generate SMIL documents on-the-fly. The major advantage of WSOSGA is thus achieved to give SMIL presentations high availability in eLearning instructional content.
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Paper Nr:	189
Title:	A WEBLOG IN PRACTICE - Examination of a Global Telecollaborative Project Blog
Authors:	Cynthia Choi
Abstract:	Students in three elementary schools in the Northeastern area of the US and their partners in a primary school from a small coastal town of Papua New Guinea have used technology to initiate dialogue with one another through collaborative classroom activities-a web-based learning community that spans across the globe. Within an established model of teaching and learning online through online networking, application of the weblog component is examined. Preliminary findings suggest the use of weblog to be an effective component in regards to maintaining student motivation. And, the ease of implementation was manageable to participating teachers.
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Paper Nr:	196
Title:	INTEGRATION OF KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT AND E-LEARNING MANAGEMENT FOR CONSTRUCTION COMPANIES
Authors:	Nuria Forcada, Miquel Casals, Marta Gangolells and Xavier Roca
Abstract:	Knowledge and learning are the basis for the development of whatever business activity. There are plenty of knowledge management tools and also e-learning management tools. Basically, they are separated initiatives and their approach is specific to the targets of each particular area. The main problem is the inexistence of a common language which difficults the exchange of experiences and information. This paper describes the background and methodology to integrate a Knowledge Management Strategy (KMS) for a construction company and an e-learning management system. Two central objectives structure this Paper: 1. To identify categories of important information generated and shared between knowledge management and e-learning; 2. To integrate vast amounts of contents from diverse repositories created in several KM systems as well as e-learning platforms by implementing “Concept Indexes” for tagging contents.
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Paper Nr:	407
Title:	ABEL-GUI: AN AGENT-BASED GRAPHICAL USER INTERFACE FOR E-LEARNING
Authors:	Steffen Kernchen, Fritz Zbrog and Reiner Dumke
Abstract:	In this paper we present an agent-based graphical user interface (GUI) for the domain of e-Learning: the ABEL-GUI. It is developed following a structured approach for the analysis, specification and design of agentbased graphical user interfaces. Therefore a logical goal/task hierarchy is designed and depicted by a society of agents. By this an implicit partition of the GUI takes shape and gets connected with the particular agents. The result takes benefits from the cooperation idea behind agent technology and focuses on specialization, personalization and interaction support.
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Paper Nr:	428
Title:	VIRTUAL LEARNING ENVIRONMENT - Challenge to Increase Teaching and Learning
Authors:	Eva Milková and Antonín Slabý
Abstract:	The present paper summarizes the authors' experience of application of distance aspects in the education. In the article the main reasons why the authors use a virtual learning environment as an indivisible part of the part-time study program, and as a support of the full-time study program at their university, are explained there.
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Paper Nr:	432
Title:	ON-LINE DISTANCE LEARNING PLATFORM
Authors:	Sergio Ramírez, Hugo Rosales and Oswaldo Trelles
Abstract:	In this work we report a software platform for synchronous distance learning, which makes the presence of teachers in the student’s house possible, deploying the same class, in the same time, with the same mates, through the internet. Thus the working scenery is a normal student room, in which some students are present and some others are virtual students with interactive presence that allows to participate, be interrogated by the professor, and maintaining a fluid communication with partners. Several important technical aspects has been solved using public domain components: web-browsers, blackboards, on-line messaging –chats, forums-, and real time sound delivery. All these components have been integrated in a user friendly environment with record of use, and interface customisation for different age-levels. The participation of learners, psychologist, computer-science technicians and teachers has allowed a very simple but powerful way to integrate our children in the educational circuit.
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Paper Nr:	448
Title:	A LOCATION BASED E-LEARNING SYSTEM
Authors:	Georg Schneider, Patrick Arnoldy and Tobias Mangerich
Abstract:	Much information is inherently coupled with a certain place. Accessing this information at the given place is often the key to understand it or at least it helps understanding the information much better than accessing it elsewhere. e-Learning systems free the learners from the chains of time and place. However they are normally used with PCs or laptop computers either at home or at certain premises. Especially in a city like Trier, which is full of history, it is easy to verify that learning about the Romans and seeing a picture of a historic site is different to the real world experience of this site. This reflection leads us to the idea to extend the capabilities of a conventional E-learning system in a way that information can be accessed where it can be understood more easily, i.e. on its place. Therefore we have extended the system MOVII (Moving Images and Interfaces), which is a flexible and visually appealing E-learning Platform with a possibility to geocode information entities and to access them appropriately.
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Paper Nr:	456
Title:	HUMAN-TECHNOLOGY INTERACTION - Accessible Interfaces Design in Spanish University e-Learning Platforms
Authors:	Nuria Lloret Romero and Lilia Fernandez Aquino
Abstract:	At the moment e-learning platforms are being applied in the University studies of ascending form. The objective of this work is to analyse the e-learning platforms of different European Universities, to analyse their user interaction capacities and the degree of accessibility developed in these platforms. Interaction in e-learning platforms is vital for potential users; in many cases the bad development of these platforms encourages the abandonment of these studies. Starting off with this hypothesis, we develop an evaluation study of the interaction of e-learning platforms in European Universities and we study the degree of interaction with the user, we also consider the level of accessibility developed according to W3C standards.
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Paper Nr:	473
Title:	WebELS E-LEARNING PLATFORM AND PROPOSAL FOR AUTOMATIC VIDEO SUPPORT
Authors:	Mahfuzur Rahman, Sato Hidoyuki, Vuthichai Ampornaramveth and Haruki Ueno
Abstract:	This paper discusses video contents in WebELS e-learning platform for post-graduate education and proposes ideas for automatic video support. WebELS provides a web-based, multi-platform tool, by which traditional instructors can archive their learning materials on the web and students can do their personal learning over the Internet. Uploaded contents can be used either in standalone or group learning in real-time with discussion. WebELS supports contents with text, images, audio and video. However, VIDEO, because of its nature and high volume of involved data causes series of problems regarding its capturing, uploading, transmission, downloading, viewing, code conversion, compression and so on. The vision of this paper is to discuss the WebELS editor and propose ideas to support PowerPoint presentation material with video created by standard PowerPoint presentation editor, for example Microsoft PowerPoint with an explanation of video pre-processing and video handling.
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Paper Nr:	479
Title:	USING HYPERMEDIA AS A SUPPORT FOR COMPUTER SCIENCE COURSES IN PRIMARY SCHOOL - Design and Evaluation of a Web Based Multimedia Framework for Primary School
Authors:	Alessandro De Gloria, Massimiliano Margarone and Fabrizio Bracco
Abstract:	Teaching children is a very critical task due to several factors. Attention in children is limited in time, very often the kind of information they face at school is conveyed in abstract and formal way and, most of all, it is not playful. Moreover, they have to deal with devices normally designed for adults (i.e. mouse and keyboard among all) and could have psychomotor difficulties to their firs use. For these reasons, the learning-by-doing approach, together with the edutainment philosophy, are ideal learning methods in courses designed for children. In this work we present a teaching framework based on the learning-by-doing approach to support several subjects in primary school curricula, especially computer science courses preparation, but also used successfully in foreign language courses preparation.
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Paper Nr:	496
Title:	A UML DEFINITION OF A MANAGEMENT FRAMEWORK FOR E-LEARNING SESSION-CENTRIC SERVICES
Authors:	Theodore Apostolopoulos and Anna Kefala
Abstract:	During the last decade, systems offering various e-learning services are implemented en masse. Proposed management framework aims at acting as a facilitator among e-learning systems, learners, underlying communication infrastructure and access devices, content and delivery methods, forming an integration management middleware, while at the same time acts as a broker for e-learning and content providing systems. Our framework is session profile centric, since a key characteristic is the dynamic creation of user session by detecting and managing information and parameters that are either derived by stored profiles or change dynamically at each user session. In this paper, we present content and e-learning provision services’ context, along with the proposed architecture overview. We also present session profile and a UML definition of its creation process.
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Paper Nr:	518
Title:	PEDAGOGICAL RESOURCES REPRESENTATION IN RESPECT IN ONTOLOGY AND COURSE SECTION
Authors:	Patitta Suksomboon, Danièle Hérin and Michel Sala
Abstract:	E-Learning or online learning refers to the use of computer technologies to design, create, deliver, manage and support learning for students and help teachers to provide their resources on the internet. And each web site contains sets of pages and associated indexes. To organize learning resources to facilitate the access to these resources by teachers or students, many useful queries and computations over such repositories involve traversal and navigation of the Web graph. In this paper we purposed learning resources cauterization by applying S-Node graph with respect in ontology or concept structure.
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Paper Nr:	533
Title:	SUPPORTING EFFECTIVE AND USEFUL WEB-BASED DISTANCE LEARNING
Authors:	Santi Caballé, Thanasis Daradoumis, Fatos Xhafa and Joan Esteve
Abstract:	Learners interacting in a Web-based distance learning environment produce a variety of information elements during their participation; these information elements usually have a complex structure and semantics, which makes it rather difficult to find out the behavioural attitudes and profiles of the users involved. User modelling in on-line distance learning is an important research field focusing on two important aspects: describing and predicting students’ actions and intentions as well as adapting the learning process to students’ features, habits, interests, preferences, and so on. This work provides an approach that can be used to greatly stimulate and improve the learning experience by tracking the students’ intentions and helping them reconduct their actions that could evolve accordingly as the learning process moves forward. In this context, user modelling implies a constant processing and analysis of user interaction data during long-term learning activities, which produces large and considerably complex information. In this paper we show how a Grid approach can considerably decrease the time of processing log data. Our prototype is based on the master-worker paradigm and is implemented using a peer-to-peer platform called Juxtacat running on the Planetlab nodes. The results of our study show the feasibility of using Grid middleware to speed and scale up the processing of log data and thus achieve an efficient and dynamic user modelling in on-line distance learning.
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Paper Nr:	540
Title:	DIGITAL RIGHTS AND E-PAYMENT IN E-LEARNING - Completing the Learning Object Lifecycle
Authors:	Luis De Marcos, Carmen Pages, Jose-Javier Martinez, Jose A. Gutierrez-De-mesa, Juan Manuel De Blas and José-María Gutiérrez-Martínez
Abstract:	The learning objects paradigm actually drives the majority of researches and commercial developments in elearning field. Nevertheless, this paradigm has been harshly criticized due to the fact that it has not achieved the objectives proposed in its initial definition. This, together with some false assumptions surrounding the e-learning concept, have led costumers and organizations to the belief that e-learning have not met its initial expectations, and have borne e-learning marketplace to a expansion lower than was expected. This paper describes how two emerging areas within e-learning field, digital right aggregation to learning objects and payment systems integration, can help the learning object paradigm to meet its initial expectations and can help the e-learning marketplace to go beyond its current barriers. Digital rights and e-payment will enable to complete the learning object lifecycle in an automated way, thus permitting on-demand, high-quality, lowcost learning.
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Paper Nr:	562
Title:	THE ROLE OF USABILITY TESTING IN AN INTEGRATED APPROACH TO CAT DEPLOYMENT - Experience from the WELKOM Project
Authors:	Maurice Grinberg and Evgenia Hristova
Abstract:	The main features of an integrated Computer Assisted Training (CAT) system design and deployment methodology, developed in the WELKOM project, are summarized and discussed. The two main dimensions of the methodology – educational efficiency and usability – are presented with a focus on the latter. Selected results from usability and learning style testing during the application of the methodology in the development of three different CAT systems in three different educational contexts (a factory, a SAP training company and an university) are presented and the results are discussed with regard to their impact on the implementation process and to the applicability of the integrated methodology as a whole.
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Paper Nr:	562
Title:	THE ROLE OF USABILITY TESTING IN AN INTEGRATED APPROACH TO CAT DEPLOYMENT - Experience from the WELKOM Project
Authors:	Maurice Grinberg and Evgenia Hristova
Abstract:	The main features of an integrated Computer Assisted Training (CAT) system design and deployment methodology, developed in the WELKOM project, are summarized and discussed. The two main dimensions of the methodology – educational efficiency and usability – are presented with a focus on the latter. Selected results from usability and learning style testing during the application of the methodology in the development of three different CAT systems in three different educational contexts (a factory, a SAP training company and an university) are presented and the results are discussed with regard to their impact on the implementation process and to the applicability of the integrated methodology as a whole.
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Paper Nr:	566
Title:	POIESIS AND TECHNOLOGIES - e-Learning Material Development in Literature
Authors:	Laura Borràs and Joan Elies Adell
Abstract:	We wanted our students to act as literary critics of works of digital literature so we designed a work of digital literature with different surfing possibilities so that students could undertake an authentic and complete exercise of literary criticism. This piece of Digital Literature (the Diary of an Absence) is an elearning tool to show them what a piece of digital narrative could be and to provide them the real and complex experience of reading the new literature in its own medium and with its own rules. With different technologies such as Director, Flash, Quick-time, HTML, etc. the Diary is an eminently textual product, situated in a determinate visual and musical dimension, which also offers the reader a journey to be undertaken. It presents six possible approaches to the text and therefore six different possible readings: 1- An exploratory immersion in the house-scenario that offers words acting as passwords and points of access to the text. 2- A nominal reading that comes from the universe of words that have been selected from the text. 3- A numerical reading by looking at the ‘treasure map’ of the numbers allowing a chronological reading of the diary pages. 4- A topological reading allows consulting the plan of the house and its surroundings to see which objects or locations give us an access to the text and where it is situated. 5- A reading through objects permits to reach the text from the different objects in which the words have been assigned and 6- A musical reading since the map situates the different lyrics that constitute this particular melody in space. In a word: an immersive experience to approach e-literature from e-learning.
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Paper Nr:	597
Title:	THE USE OF INTERACTIVE INSTRUCTORS OF RECREATIONAL MATHEMATICS IN SECONDARY SCHOOLS
Authors:	Gabriel López-Morteo, Marcos Galaviz-férman, Gilberto López and María Andrade-Aréchiga
Abstract:	A methodology for secondary math teachers, designed to introduce information technology through Interactive Instructors of Recreational Mathematics (IIRM) and an electronic ludic learning environment in its practice, is studied. First, an instrument designed to find the level of knowledge of the teachers in information technologies was applied. We show the preliminary results of applying this device in 20 secondary schools of the region, which allowed us to choose three different representative scenarios, to make the case of study. As a result of the observations and interviews that were made, we show the form in which the teachers obtained a greater degree of interaction and participation from the students in the particular subjects that were taught. It allowed them to identify different levels of abilities and different learning progress among the students. Another important result of the investigation is the stable and reliable answer of the learning environment in realistic scenarios.
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Paper Nr:	603
Title:	ADAPTIVE ONLINE TEACHING MATERIALS FOR INTERNET, INTRANET AND MOBILE DEVICES FOR MCUC STUDENTS
Authors:	D. Balaji, J. Akbar Ali and B. Malathi
Abstract:	Academicians in this Information age are trying different teaching methods for the effective learning by different background students. Online teaching method is not only effective for distance learning but also for teaching in a traditional method through intranet. Since MCUC has WLAN, allowing the students to access online materials through mobile devices with in college premises and also through internet it can be accessed anywhere and anytime. Since different program students are using laptops, PDA's and mobile phones to access these information's it is necessary to provide personalised experience for their convenience while learning through showing the frequently accessed links or arranging the links based on the accessibility or listing the links as per the students preference using Adaptive Navigation Support technique. We also tried to use different methods to improve the performance of the website and reduce the development cost.
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Paper Nr:	604
Title:	A LEARNER-CENTERED SEMANTIC WEB-BASED ARCHITECTURE
Authors:	Tania Kerkiri, Athanasios Manitsaris and Ioannis Mavridis
Abstract:	In this paper the architecture of a learner-centered e-Learning system, which aims to qualify and recommend learning material using semantic web technologies, is presented. In the proposed approach, the learner has a central role in the decision-making process of the distribution of learning material. The main idea relies on gathering appropriate reputation metadata from the learning material consumers. As a result of a proper material ranking, a better matching to future searches of learners having similar profile is anticipated. An experimental implementation of the presented architecture provided interesting results that better depict the applicability and usefulness of the proposals.
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Rejecteds

Paper Nr:	194
Title:	DESIGN OF DIGITAL EDUCATIONAL MATERIALS FOR PRIMARY EDUCATION
Authors:	Isabel Cuadrado-Gordillo and Inmaculada Fernández-Antelo
Abstract:	The design of multimedia materials adopted in our proposal is based on a constructivist centred approach in providing the children with mediated learning experiences that foster the acquisition of strategies and the self-regulation of their learning process. To this end, we use the figure of a mascot who acts as their guide in resolving tasks set them in language, mathematics, and environmental knowledge. The guidance is not limited to telling them that their answer is right or wrong, but attempts to get them to reflect on the procedures they applied, the mistakes they might have made, the relationships that have to be established between the different concepts involved in the problem, the cognitive strategies they have to put into effect to complete the task, etc. This design is wrapped in a series of adventure games matching the centres of interest shown by children according to their age.

Area 2 - Internet Technology

Full Papers

Paper Nr:	34
Title:	STACK ENCODING REVISITED
Authors:	Yangjun Chen
Abstract:	The twig join, which is used to find all occurrences of a twig pattern in an XML database, is a core operation for XML query processing. A great many strategies for handling this problem have been proposed and can be roughly classified into two groups. The first group decomposes a twig pattern (a small tree) into a set of binary relationships between pairs of nodes, such as parent-child and ancestor-descendant relations; and transforms a tree matching problem into a series of simple relation look-ups. The second group decomposes a twig pattern into a set of paths. Among all this kind of methods, the approach based on the so-called stack encoding [N. Bruno, N. Koudas, and D. Srivastava, Holistic Twig Hoins: Optimal XML Pattern Matching, in Proc. SIGMOD Int. Conf. on Management of Data, Madison, Wisconsin, June 2002, pp. 310-321] is very interesting, which can represent in linear space a potentially exponential (in the number of query nodes) number of matching paths. However, the available processes for generating such compressed paths suffer some redundancy and can be significantly improved. In this paper, we analyze this method and show that the time complexities of path generation in its two main procedures: TwigStack and TwigStackXB can be reduced from O(m2n) to O(mn), where m and n are the sizes of the query tree and document tree, respectively. Experiments have been done to compare TwigStackXB and ours, which shows that using our method much less time is needed to generate matching paths.
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Paper Nr:	39
Title:	MODELING AND MANAGING FEDERATED WEB-BASED SYSTEMS
Authors:	Johannes Meinecke, Martin Gaedke, Frederic Majer and Alexander Brändle
Abstract:	Among the various aspects of Web applications that are subject to modeling, like navigation, interaction or business processes, the architectural aspect is receiving growing attention. This is related to the fact that the Web is increasingly used as a platform for distributed services which transcend organizational boundaries to form so-called federated applications. In this context, we use the term “architecture” to denote the composition of the overall solution into individual Web applications and Web services that belong to different parties and invoke each other. The design and evolution of such systems calls for models that give an overview of the federation structure and reflect the technical details of the various accesses. We introduce the WebComposition Architecture Model (WAM) as an overall modeling approach tailored to aspects of highly distributed systems with federation as an integral factor.
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Paper Nr:	87
Title:	COZO - CONTENT ZONING FOR SPAM EMAILS
Authors:	Claudine Brucks, Cynthia Wagner, Michael Hilker and Ralph Weires
Abstract:	Spam is an increasing problem when using email as communication medium. Spam is detected and removed using spam filters. Furthermore, the spammers use more and more intelligent and complex techniques so that novel approaches are required to enhance existing spam filters. One promising technique is the Argumentative Zoning that classifies a text in different parts where each part has a meaning. In this paper, we want to use this technique in order to divide an email into different zones and evaluate whether the email is spam or not. We introduce the technique Content Zoning, the way we use it, the implementation, and our results.
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Paper Nr:	87
Title:	COZO - CONTENT ZONING FOR SPAM EMAILS
Authors:	Claudine Brucks, Cynthia Wagner, Michael Hilker and Ralph Weires
Abstract:	Spam is an increasing problem when using email as communication medium. Spam is detected and removed using spam filters. Furthermore, the spammers use more and more intelligent and complex techniques so that novel approaches are required to enhance existing spam filters. One promising technique is the Argumentative Zoning that classifies a text in different parts where each part has a meaning. In this paper, we want to use this technique in order to divide an email into different zones and evaluate whether the email is spam or not. We introduce the technique Content Zoning, the way we use it, the implementation, and our results.
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Paper Nr:	181
Title:	SECURITY RISK ANALYSIS IN WEB APPLICATION DESIGN
Authors:	Rattikorn Hewett, Phongphun Kijsanayothin and Meinhard Peters
Abstract:	Web-based information systems play increasingly important roles in providing functions and business services for many organizations. Because of their ubiquitous natures dealing with a huge and diverse population of users, web applications must be tolerant to errors, adverse interactions and malicious attacks. The ability to quickly estimate security risks early in the system development life cycle can be beneficial in making various decisions. This is particularly crucial for large and complex web applications that are asset-critical and evolve rapidly through long life cycles. This paper presents a systematic approach for the automated assessment of security risks, at the design stage, of web-based information systems. The approach combines risk concepts in reliability engineering with heuristics using characteristics of software and hardware deployment design to estimate security risks of the system to be developed. It provides a simple early estimate of security risks that can help locate high-risk software components. We discuss limitations of the approach and give an illustration in an industrial engineering and business-to-business domain using a case study of a web-based material requirements planning system for a manufacturing enterprise.
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Paper Nr:	422
Title:	DYNAMIC DECENTRALIZED SERVICE ORCHESTRATIONS
Authors:	Ustun Yildiz and Claude Godart
Abstract:	This paper reports a new approach to decentralized orchestration of service compositions. Our contribution is motivated by the recent advances of service orchestration standardizations that enable the exchange of modeled processes among different tools and organizations. Precisely, we provide an efficient process transformation technique that converts a process conceived for centralized orchestration to a set of nested peer processes. Each peer process is conceived to be executed by a dynamically orchestrated service. Assuming that services are invokable with peer processes, we provide a decentralized orchestration setting where services can establish direct interconnections via the peer processes that they execute. Our proposition considers conversation-based services and dynamic service binding.
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Paper Nr:	423
Title:	GRID INFRASTRUCTURE ARCHITECTURE - A Modular Approach from CoreGRID
Authors:	Augusto Ciuffoletti, Antonio Congiusta, Gracjan Jankowski, Michal Jankowski, Norbert Meyer and Ondrej Krajicek
Abstract:	The European Union CoreGRID project aims at encouraging collaboration among european research institutes. One target of such project is the design of an innovative Grid Infrastructure architecture, specifically addressing two challenging aspects of such entity: scalability and security. This paper outlines the results of such activity, ideally extending the content of the official deliverable document (CoreGRID, 2006).
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Paper Nr:	447
Title:	WEWORM: AN ETHICAL WORM GENERATION TOOLKIT
Authors:	Mark Wallis and Frans Henskens
Abstract:	One of the largest threats to network security in Internet-connected corporate networks is attack via worms. Worms infiltrate the network and compromise security, consuming processor cycles and network bandwidth that would otherwise be available for corporate use. This research analyses a particular strain of network worm called the “Ethical worm”, which is targeted towards beneficial means rather than malicious. Also presented is a design for an Ethical worm generation toolkit (named WEWorm) that will aid System administrators in the cleanup of an infected network.
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Paper Nr:	468
Title:	A PERFORMANCE MODELLING OF WEB SERVICES SECURITY
Authors:	Kezhe Tang, David Levy, Shiping Chen, John Zic and Bo Yan
Abstract:	While Web Services Security (WSS) enhances the security of web services, it may also introduce additional performance overheads to standard web services due to additional CPU processing and larger message sizes. In this paper, we present a simple performance model for WSS. Based on the observations of WSS performance in our previous work, we extend a web service performance model by modelling WSS extra security operations and increased messages sizes into the existing model. As fitting the parameters on one testing environment, we validate our performance model on another different environment with different messages sizes and WSS security policies. Our testing results show that our performance model is valid and can be used to predicate the performance of web services with a variety of WSS configurations.
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Paper Nr:	490
Title:	A FRAMEWORK FOR THE MANAGEMENT OF CONTEXT-AWARE WORKFLOW SYSTEMS
Authors:	Liliana Ardissono, Roberto Furnari, Annamaria Goy, Giovanna Petrone and Marino Segnan
Abstract:	This paper presents the CAWE framework for the context-aware management of applications based on the composition of Web Services in complex workflows. We introduce a representation of context-dependent activities based on an abstraction hierarchy which supports the specification of synthetic and clear workflows. Moreover, we propose a framework architecture which enriches the capabilities of a workflow engine in order to support the execution of possibly complex adaptation rules. We have exploited the CAWE framework to develop a prototype application handling a medical guideline which specifies the activities to be performed in order to monitor patients treated with blood thinners from their home. The application coordinates actors playing different roles (e.g., patient, doctor, etc.) and can be accessed by using diverse client devices.
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Paper Nr:	507
Title:	POLICY-BASED MANAGEMENT OF DIFFSERV USING XML TECHNOLOGIES
Authors:	Ntanzi Carrilho and Neco Ventura
Abstract:	A design, implementation, and evaluation of a Policy-based Management framework for DiffServ networks using XML technologies is presented. XML is used for policy representation throughout the entire policy life cycle, as well as in the communication protocol, reducing development costs, while promoting clarity, simplicity, and interoperability. Furthermore, performance evaluation results show that the proposed scheme generates less network traffic than its COPS-PR counterpart when protocol messages are compressed. Moreover, XML messages generate higher processing delays. The added processing overhead caused by compression to XML messages is very small, thus the gains in reduced network traffic generated outweigh the losses in terms of processing delays.
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Paper Nr:	513
Title:	THE PRIVACY ADVOCATE (PRIVAD) - A Framework for Negotiating Individual Privacy Contracts
Authors:	Michael Maaser, Steffen Ortmann and Peter Langendörfer
Abstract:	Privacy has been a hot topic in research for several years. A lot of different approaches to protect privacy have been proposed recently. Among these are several tools for negotiation of privacy contracts. In this paper we present our privacy negotiation framework called “Privacy Advocat (PrivAd)”. It consists of three main parts: the policy evaluation unit, the signature unit and the preferences. In addition our frame supports an interface for negotiation strategies, so that they are independent of the framework. The preferences can be expressed with a combination of P3P and APPEL. The test we executed using a state of the art PDA clearly indicate that our framework can be used by mobile devices. The completion of a negotiation takes about 2 sec. including message transfer via an 802.11b wireless link. The processing itself is done in less than 250 msec.
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Paper Nr:	530
Title:	ACCELERATING XPATH AXES THROUGH STRUCTURAL PARTITIONING
Authors:	Olli Luoma
Abstract:	The query evaluation algorithms of practically all XML management systems are based on structural joins, i.e., operations which determine all occurrences of parent/child, ancestor/descendant, preceding/following etc. relationships between node sets. In this paper, we present a simple method for accelerating structural joins which is very easy to implement on different platforms. Our idea is to split the nodes into disjoint partitions and use this information to avoid unnecessary structural joins. Despite its simplicity, our proposal can considerably accelerate XPath evaluation on different XML management systems. To exemplify this, we describe two implementation options of our method - one built from the scratch and one based on a relational database - and present the results of our experiments.
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Paper Nr:	582
Title:	A FLEXIBLE MODEL FOR PROVIDING TRANSACTIONAL BEHAVIOR TO SERVICE COORDINATION IN AN ORTHOGONAL WAY
Authors:	Alberto Portilla, Genoveva Vargas-Solar, Christine Collet, José-Luis Zechinelli-Martini and Luciano García-bañuelos
Abstract:	A key step towards consistent services coordination is providing non functional properties. In that sense, transactional properties are particularly relevant because of the business nature of current applications. While services composition has been successfully addressed, transactional properties of services composition have been mainly provided by ad-hoc and limited solutions at systems’ back end. This paper proposes a transactional behavior model for services coordination. We assume that given a flow describing the application logic of a service based application, it is possible to associate to it a personalized transactional behavior in an orthogonal way. This behavior is defined by specifying contracts and associating a well defined behavior to the activities participating in the coordination. Such contracts ensure transactional properties at execution time in the presence of exceptions.
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Paper Nr:	602
Title:	TRANSPARENT SCHEDULING OF WEB SERVICES
Authors:	Dmytro Dyachuk and Ralph Deters
Abstract:	Web Services are applications that expose functionality to consumers via public interfaces. Since these interfaces are defined, described and consumed using XML-based standards, Web Services outperform other middleware approaches (e.g. CORBA, RPC) in terms of platform interoperability and ease of use. Web Services support the concept of loosely coupled components, which in turn enables the development of more agile and open systems. However, this flexibility comes at the price of reduced control over the usage of the services that are exposed via the interfaces. This paper focuses on the transparent scheduling of inbound requests by introducing a proxy that prevents clients from directly accessing the provider. By manipulating the order and volume of requests sent to the provider it becomes possible to improve throughput and mean response time and to ensure consistent performance in overload situation.
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Short Papers

Paper Nr:	72
Title:	ADJUSTMENT NEEDS IN SOA BASED E-LEARNING APPLICATIONS
Authors:	Antonio Ortiz, Juan Manuel De Blas and José-María Gutiérrez-Martínez
Abstract:	SOA is a promising emerging technology and as such, it still has to solve certain issues. This paper describes the solutions made to solve some interoperability issues found while carrying out an interconnection project of two SOA based systems. It is supposed that the solutions can help to avoid the problems in the future or solve incompatibilities. Not only in these projects, but also in similar ones, as the proposed solutions are not tied to a specific implementation. Both systems were developed using the same programming language, although they were based on different software platforms. These solutions are based on the analysis and the tests accomplished, where simple data structures were sent and received, using the Java language. This document also demonstrates the current state of interoperability in today’s frameworks, which are not fully compliant yet, and are still rather weak using complex data structures.
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Paper Nr:	91
Title:	MATCHING OF ENHANCED XML SCHEMAS WITH A MEASURE OF STRUCTURAL-CONTEXT SIMILARITY
Authors:	Amar Zerdazi and Myriam Lamolle
Abstract:	Schema matching is a critical step in integration of heterogeneous data sources. Recent integration work has mainly focused on developing matching techniques to find equivalent elements among the different XML sources. In this paper we propose a new approach to structural similarity measure based on the notion of context, between entities of the Enhanced XML Schemas, called EXS. In our approach, the set of the EXS schemas, are considered like a federation of XML schemas descended of different heterogeneous sources schemas (relational, object, XML, etc.) and enriched by the semantic metaknowledge. We present here the major problems bound to this crucial task, notably with regard to the semantic of schemas. So, we propose a structural matching algorithm. The algorithm takes two schema graphs as input, and produces as output a mapping between corresponding nodes of the schema graphs. After our algorithm runs, we expect a human to check and adjust the results.
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Paper Nr:	157
Title:	AN ONTOLOGY MAPPING ARCHITECTURE TO FACILITATE SEMANTIC INTEGRATION
Authors:	Yingzi Wang, Deren Chen and Yanyun Wang
Abstract:	Mapping between ontologies is the major bottleneck in semantic integration. In this paper, we present MCMA, a mediator-centric mapping architecture that facilitates the integration between ontologies of interrelated companies. In MCMA, different ontologies are mapped through some middle concepts and the Mapping Service acts as a bridge to connect them. As a mediator, the provider of Mapping Service is interested in a specific area and offers some common ontologies for participators to reuse. On the assumption that each individual ontology may reuse or make reference to common definitions, some mapping relations can be defined conveniently. Based on these basic mapping relations, the Mapping Service infers more middle-concept oriented mapping relations and organizes them in a layered manner. We present the idea of combining heuristics or machine-learning techniques with common ontology approach in the mapping discovery.
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Paper Nr:	166
Title:	DISPATCHING REQUESTS IN PARTIALLY REPLICATED WEB CLUSTERS - An Adaptation of the LARD Algorithm
Authors:	Jose Daniel Garcia, Laura Prada, Jesus Carretero, Felix Garcia, Javier Fernandez and Luis Miguel Sanchez
Abstract:	Traditional alternatives for Web content allocation have been full replication and full distribution. An hybrid alternative is partial replication where each content element is replicated to a subset of server nodes. Partial replication gives advantages in terms of balancing reliability and storage capacity. However, partial replication has architectural implications. In this paper we present a Web cluster architecture which may be used in single switched Web clusters and multiple switched Web clusters. We present an algorithm for Web content allocation which determines the number of replicas for each content based on its relative importance and that performs the allocation keeping in mind resource constraints in clusters with heterogeneous storage capacity. We also provide an adaptation of the LARD algorithm for request dispatching that copes with the fact that contents are partially replicated. Our evaluations show that performance of partial replication solutions is comparable to performance of traditional fully replicated solutions.
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Paper Nr:	170
Title:	SEMANTICS-BASED ACCESS CONTROL - Ontologies and Feasibility Study of Policy Enforcement Function
Authors:	Anton Naumenko
Abstract:	The current Web evolves to the Web 2.0 that is an intermediate step towards Semantic Web. Conventional security measures fall short to serve both, emerging technologies and innovative web-based information systems. The paper presents our research and development results towards adoption Semantic Web standards for the creation of unified view on the access control area that enables flexible, collaborative and distributed management of access control based on semantic relations amongst relating concepts. The integration of Semantic Web and access control disciplines leads to the elaboration of new more intelligent, flexible and reusable access control mechanisms and tools. The paper has practical orientation, evaluating research results and ideas with the development and testing of the prototype for the enforcement of access control policies based on the ontologies.
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Paper Nr:	203
Title:	A DECENTRALIZED WIKI ENGINE FOR COLLABORATIVE WIKIPEDIA HOSTING
Authors:	Guido Urdaneta, Guillaume Pierre and Maarten Van Steen
Abstract:	This paper presents the design of a decentralized system for hosting large-scale wiki web sites like Wikipedia, using a collaborative approach. Our design focuses on distributing the pages that compose the wiki across a network of nodes provided by individuals and organizations willing to collaborate in hosting the wiki. We present algorithms for placing the pages so that the capacity of the nodes is not exceeded and the load is balanced, and algorithms for routing client requests to the appropriate nodes. We also address fault tolerance and security issues.
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Paper Nr:	389
Title:	ROBUSTNESS ANALYSIS USING FMEA AND BBN - Case Study for a Web-based Application
Authors:	Ilaria C. Calori, Tor Stålhane and Sven Ziemer
Abstract:	Time pressure and quality issues represent important challenges for those who develop web-based systems. The ability to analyze a system’s quality and implement improvements early in the development life cycle is of great practical important. For our study we have considered robustness as a critical quality issue. Our objective is to propose a general framework for conducting robustness analysis of web-based systems at an early stage of software development, providing a tool for evaluating failure impact severity and supporting trade-off decisions during the development process. The framework makes use of Jacobson’s analysis method to decompose a system in its functional components, Failure Modes and Effects Analysis to identify all failure modes that characterize each component, and Bayesian Belief networks to deal with failure cause-effect relationships and evaluate the uncertainty of their impact.
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Paper Nr:	399
Title:	WEB SERVICE-BASED TRACEABILITY IN FOOD SUPPLY CHAINS
Authors:	Claudia Medeiros, Claudia B. Medeiros, Edmundo Madeira and Evandro Baccarin
Abstract:	Supply Chains present many research challenges in Computing, such as the modeling of their processes, communication problems between their components, logistics and processes management. This paper presents a supply chain traceability model that relies on a Web service-based architecture to ensure interoperability. Geared towards assisting quality control in the agricultural domain, the model allows to trace products, processes and services inside a chain. It has been validated for real life case studies and the Web service implementation is under way.
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Paper Nr:	400
Title:	PROVIDING SCALABLE ACCESS TO LARGE XML DOCUMENTS
Authors:	Arno Puder
Abstract:	XML documents often tend to be voluminous and accessing them through a DOM (Document Object Model) interface poses particular challenges. All the existing DOM implementations require an XML document to be completely collocated before it can be parsed. This solution does not scale for huge XML documents. In this paper we introduce an architecture, called VDOM (Virtual DOM) that allows scalable access to large XML documents through a DOM interface. In the VDOM architecture, the actively used portions of an XML document are transferred to the application. The application can begin to traverse this portion without requiring that the complete DOM tree is collocated. As the application traverses the DOM tree, portions of the XML document are loaded on-demand. Using the VDOM architecture is transparent to the application which uses a standard DOM interface to access the DOM tree.
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Paper Nr:	408
Title:	PROCESSING REMOTE MEASUREMENT DATABASES BY THE MEANS OF MOBILE AGENTS
Authors:	Steffen Kernchen, Dmytro Rud, Fritz Zbrog and Reiner Dumke
Abstract:	This paper discusses possible approaches for using mobile agents for accessing and processing of big remote databases containing measurement data. There are several reasons that make it inappropriate to dispatch raw data over the network. (a) Those data may be confidential and therefore need to be anonymized. (b) The amount of the data can be too big. In this case it could be advisable to generalize the data on the database provider node and to transfer only these generalization results to the customer. (c) Furthermore, this special information processing can be not in line with qualifications of both the database holder and its clients. The usage of agents gives the possibility to outsource the development and installation of additional software to an external agent provider, which is then responsible for regular updates of the software considering aspects like new algorithms. Application scenarios are outlined and certain kinds of service will be described and motivated with examples.
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Paper Nr:	416
Title:	HARNESSING THE WEB TECHNOLOGY TO ENRICH VISUALLY CHALLENGED USERS NAVIGATION
Authors:	Hulya Francis, Madjid Merabti and Azzelarabe Taleb-Bendiab
Abstract:	Navigating urban streets without sight is fraught with difficulty and is often dangerous. Visually challenged people rely on ancillary equipment such as a white cane to probe the immediate area in front of them as well as developing other pre-existing personal physiological senses such as tactile, auditory, and olfactory senses, to train themselves to walk along pavements. Conventional navigation systems based on geo-maps alone are of little use to a visually challenged pedestrian. Hence, there is a need to develop a navigation client-server system capable of providing information appropriate for a visually challenged pedestrian to use to navigate urban pavements. This paper describes a navigation system that includes an enriched information model and a technology to deliver such information in an easy-to-use, accessible fashion. The paper introduces the technical challenge to the creation of a digital database for the navigation server that stores appropriate data. A prototyped digital navigation model of Hoylake Town Centre, UK has been used to test and validate the proposed model. This paper describes the role and function, and outlines the architecture for the Web-based mobile computing location-based services navigation support systems.
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Paper Nr:	427
Title:	THE APPLICABILITY OF BALANCED ESI FOR WEB CACHING - A Proposed Algorithm and a Case of Study
Authors:	Carlos Guerrero, Carlos Juiz and Ramon Puigjaner
Abstract:	In this paper, we present an algorithm to improve the cases in which the caching of fragments pages (ESI standard) has a worse performance than expected. A layer between the web cache and the clients has been developed and has tested over a web application using a fragment and non fragment version of web pages. Through the results of this case study we demonstrate that the proposed algorithm improve the general performance of the web application.
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Paper Nr:	439
Title:	DEVELOPING NEW SERVICES FOR THE AUTOMOTIVE INDUSTRY USING MATRIX
Authors:	Silvia Alén, Daniel Glez-peña and Florentino Fdez-riverola
Abstract:	This progress report explores how multi-agent systems can be applied to the automotive industry in order to create an intercommunication platform. Our proposal called MATRIX (Multiagent Architecture for TRaffic Information eXchange) provides the basis for information exchange between cars (Car2Car) and between cars and infrastructural elements (Car2Infrastructure). In this work we also discuss how the most prominent technologies in both areas (JADE and OSGi) can be integrated in order to achieve new functionalities and security improvements in present cars.
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Paper Nr:	453
Title:	ENSURING HIGH PERFORMANCE IN VALIDATING XML PARSER
Authors:	Donglei Cao, Shuang Yu, Beijie Dai and Beihong Jin
Abstract:	An XML parser is the fundamental software for analyzing and processing XML documents. This paper presents the optimized validation algorithms in OnceXMLParser, a full-validating XML Parser. OnceXMLParser adopts a lightweight architecture and implements several efficient algorithms for validating. Since the element validating is a great challenge to the performance of a validating XML parser, this paper focused on two key algorithms to resolve it. The first one involves in an optimized automaton used to build these element validating rules efficiently. The second one is a statistical predictive algorithm to reduce the name string recognizing process. For a valid document, this algorithm could make precise prediction when the child elements are sequentially defined, and could fulfil the least cost prediction according to the cost function when the child elements are optionally defined. Performance testing shows OnceXMLParser after performance tuning has outstanding parsing efficiency.
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Paper Nr:	462
Title:	TRAP/BPEL - A Framework for Dynamic Adaptation of Composite Services
Authors:	Onyeka Ezenwoye and S. M. Sadjadi
Abstract:	TRAP/BPEL is a framework that adds autonomic behavior into existing BPEL processes automatically and transparently. We define an autonomic BPEL process as a composite Web service that is capable of responding to changes in its execution environment (e.g., a failure in a partner Web service). Unlike other approaches, TRAP/BPEL does not require any manual modifications to the original code of the BPEL processes and there is no need to extend the BPEL language nor its BPEL engine. In this paper, we describe the details of the TRAP/BPEL framework and use a case study to demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of our approach.
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Paper Nr:	467
Title:	A COLLABORATIVE FILTERING APPROACH TO PERSONALIZED INTERACTIVE ENTERTAINMENT USING MPEG-21
Authors:	Giorgos Andreou, Phivos Mylonas and Kostas Karpouzis
Abstract:	In this paper we present an integrated framework for personalized access to interactive entertainment content, using characteristics from the emerging MPEG-21 standard. Our research efforts focus on multimedia content presented within the framework set by today’s movie content broadcasting over a variety of networks and terminals. This work contributes to the bridging of the gap between the content and the user, providing end-users with a wide range of real-time interactive services, ranging from plain personalized statistics and optional enhanced in-play visual enhancements to a fully user- and content-adaptive platform. The proposed approach implements and extends a well-known collaborative filtering approach; it applies a hierarchical clustering algorithm on the data towards the scope of group modelling implementation. It illustrates also the benefits from the MPEG-21 components utilization in the process and analyzes the importance of the Digital Item concept. Finally, a use case scenario is presented to illustrate the entire procedure. The core of this work is the novel group modelling approach, on top of the hybrid collaborative filtering algorithm, employing principles of taxonomic knowledge representation and hierarchical clustering theory. The outcome of this framework design is that end-users enhance their personalized viewing experience.
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Paper Nr:	480
Title:	TUNING SEARCH ENGINE TO FIT XML RETRIEVAL SCENARIO
Authors:	Gilles Hubert, Josiane Mothe and Kurt Englmeier
Abstract:	XML usage is growing to describe documents and consequently systems to search in XML collections are necessary. Various proposals of systems intend to handle XML documents. This paper describes an XML approach based on direct contribution of the components constituting an information need. The search engine is largely configurable in order to be adapted to different context of search. Beyond being globally adapted to a collection of documents an important objective is to define a search engine that can be adapted to different retrieval scenarios and to identify how to adapt it. This paper presents first experiments on INEX testbeds that show how the engine can be adapted to better respond to different retrieval scenarios.
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Paper Nr:	491
Title:	A NOVEL APPROACH OF ALARM CLASSIFICATION FOR INTRUSION DETECTION BASED UPON DEMPSTER-SHAFER THEORY
Authors:	Guangsheng Feng, Huiqiang Wang and Qian Zhao
Abstract:	As the number of the alarms is increasingly growing, which are generated by intrusion detection systems (IDS), automatic tools for classification have been proposed to fulfil the requirements of the huge volume of alarms. In addition, it has been shown that an accurate classification requires the evidences from different sources, such as different IDS. Further more, Dempster-Shafer theory is a powerful tool in dealing with the uncertainty information. This paper proposes multiple-level classification model, which aims to classify the large sizes of alarms exactly. Experimental results show that this approach has an outstanding capability of classification. Especially it is quite effective in avoiding alarms grouped into the wrong classes in the case of short of evidences.
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Paper Nr:	492
Title:	MODELING ARCHITECTURAL LEVEL REPAIR IN WEB SERVICES
Authors:	Francisco Moo-mena and Khalil Drira
Abstract:	Failures during Web service execution may depend on a wide variety of causes, such as network faults, server crashes, or application-related errors, such as unavailability of a requested Web service, errors in the orchestration or choreography of applications, missing data or parameters in an execution flow, or low Quality of Service (QoS). Providing efficient solutions requires handling adaptability not only at the behavioral level, but also at the architectural level. Most of existing standard solutions focus on the behavioral level using reconfiguration mechanisms. In this paper, we propose a model-based approach providing adaptability actions at the architectural level. Typical architectural reconfiguration actions, such as duplication of services or substitution of a non conforming service are introduced. An example is illustrated and discussed with respect to a running example involving coordinated Web services.
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Paper Nr:	505
Title:	AN OPTIMAL EVALUATION OF GROUPBY-JOIN QUERIES IN DISTRIBUTED ARCHITECTURES
Authors:	Mohamad Al Hajj Hassan and Mostafa Bamha
Abstract:	SQL queries involving join and group-by operations are fairly common in many decision support applications where the size of the input relations is usually very large, so the parallelization of these queries is highly recommended in order to obtain a desirable response time. The most significant drawbacks of the algorithms presented in the literature for treating such queries are that they are very sensitive to data skew and involve expansive communication and Input/Output costs in the evaluation of the join operation. In this paper, we present an algorithm that overcomes these drawbacks because it evaluates the ”GroupBy-Join” query without the need of the direct evaluation of the costly join operation, thus reducing its Input/Output and communication costs. Furthermore, the performance of this algorithm is analyzed using the scalable and portable BSP (Bulk Synchronous Parallel) cost model which predicts a linear speedup even for highly skewed data.
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Paper Nr:	544
Title:	THE EFFECT OF PACKET LOSS ON THE RESPONSE TIMES OF WEB SERVICES
Authors:	Johan Garcia, Per Hurtig and Anna Brunstrom
Abstract:	Web services have today become an important technology for information exchange over the Internet. Although web services are designed to support interoperable machine-to-machine interaction, humans are often the final recipients of the produced information. This makes the performance of web services important from a user perspective. In this paper we present a comprehensive experimental evaluation on the response times of web services. The limited amount of data transfered in a typical web service message makes its performance sensitive to packet loss in the network and we focus our investigation on this issue. Using a web service response time model, we evaluate the performance of two typical web services over a wide range of network delays and packet loss patterns. The experiments are based on network emulation and two real protocol implementations are examined. The experimental results indicate that a single packet loss may more than double the response times of the evaluated services and lead to noticeable delays for the end user. We briefly review previous solutions that can be applied to improve performance and outline an improved approach that is based on packet loss detection at the receiver.
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Paper Nr:	549
Title:	ANALYSIS OF WEB-PROXY CACHE REPLACEMENT ALGORITHMS UNDER STEADY-STATE CONDITIONS
Authors:	Luis Guillermo Cardenas, Ana Pont, Julio Sahuquillo and José Antonio Gil Salinas
Abstract:	Web-Proxy servers are used to reduce the bandwidth consumption and users’ perceived latency while navigating the WWW, by caching the most frequent objects accessed by users. Since they were introduced, most of the evaluations studies related to Web-Proxy caches have focused on the replacement algorithms performance using simulation techniques. But few of them have been done assuring the representativeness of the studies and considering real traces and cache sizes. This paper describes a methodology that permits fair performance comparison studies of replacement algorithms, that is, the system reaches the steady-state and the results are provided showing narrow confidence intervals. An experimental evaluation study applying this methodology is also presented. The study uses a trace-driven simulation framework, real traces containing more than one hundred million of user’s requests, and compares three replacement algorithms implemented in actual Web-Proxy caches.
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Paper Nr:	552
Title:	DISTRIBUTED BLOOM FILTER FOR LOCATING XML TEXTUAL RESOURCES IN A P2P NETWORK
Authors:	Clément Jamard, Laurent Yeh and Georges Gardarin
Abstract:	Nowadays P2P information systems are considered as large scale distributed databases where all peers can provide and query data in the network. The main challenge remains locating relevant resources. In the case of XML documents, keywords and structures must be indexed. However, the major problem for maintaining indexes of huge textual XML documents is the cost for connecting/disconnecting: indexing a quantity of keys requires the transit of many messages in the network. To reduce this cost we adapt the Bloom Filter principle to summarize peer content. Our Bloom Filter summarizes both structure and value of XML document and is used to locate resources in a P2P network. Our originality is to propose techniques to distribute the Bloom Filter by splitting it into segments using a DHT network. The system is scalable and reduce drastically the number of network messages for indexing data, maintaining the index and locating resources.
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Paper Nr:	559
Title:	TRADE-OFF’S IN WEB APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT - How to Assess a Trade-off Opportunity
Authors:	Sven Ziemer and Tor Stålhane
Abstract:	This paper discusses a trade-off strategy for small projects and presents a preliminary guidelines for assessing the appropriateness of a trade-off. The motivation of this work is to make the development team aware of the performed trade-offs and to see both the associated opportunities and risks, to assess the appropriateness of a trade-off and to gather information for the future development of the system. The development environment of a web application is changing over time and it is important to know what the success criteria are at any time.
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Paper Nr:	573
Title:	WSRS: A WEB SERVICE RECOMMENDER SYSTEM
Authors:	Esma Aïmeur, David Daboue, Flavien Serge Mani Onana, Djamal Benslimane and Zakaria Maamar
Abstract:	Despite Web services widespread adoption, users still struggle with the problem of locating the Web services that best satisfy their needs and meet their requirements. Unfortunately, current Web services repositories suffer from various limitations, such as providing Web services to users regardless of these users’ past experiences and these Web services’ intrinsic characteristics like popularity and credibility. In this paper, we introduce a Web Service Recommender System that uses collaborative filtering, demographic filtering, and content-based filtering techniques to help facilitate the search of Web services. The WSRS system uses both users’ and Web services’ profile for the sake or recommending Web services.
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Paper Nr:	583
Title:	A GRAPH-BASED APPROACH FOR WEB SERVICES COMPOSITION
Authors:	Salima Benbernou, Djamal Benslimane, Mohand Said Hacid, Hamamache Kheddouci and Kamel Tari
Abstract:	The automatic web services composition plays an important role in the area of semantic web services. In fact, in a real life it is not usual to discover atomic web services matching with the user’s query. So composing services fulfilling the query is needed. This paper discusses the web services composition model based on an oriented graph. It is based on Bcov algorithm (Benatallah.B et al., 2005a), initially defined for web services discovery and considered as the best cover problem, which it was mapped as the problem of computing the minimal transversals with minimum cost of a weighted hypergraph. We propose two algorithms handling the oriented graph reasoning for web service composition. At first glance, a basic composition version for Bcov algorithm is given. The algorithm composes services over the induced subgraphs of each transversal provided by Becov algorithm, and gives a covering ratio satisfying the query. The second algorithm used a composed services graph maintained by a web services provider. The composition in that case is based on Dijkstra algorithm, where for each two consecutive services in the best minimal transversal provided by Bcov algorithm, a shortest path is computed regarding the composed services graph.
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Paper Nr:	601
Title:	MODELING BPEL WEB SERVICES FOR DIAGNOSIS: TOWARDS SELF-HEALING WEB SERVICES
Authors:	Yingmin Li, Tarek Melliti and Philippe Dague
Abstract:	An approach generating automatically the data dependency diagrams of the orchestrated complex Web services is presented. The method is derived from the Model-Based Reasoning paradigm, whose origin comes from Artificial Intelligence applied to engineered systems. It is achieved by modeling BPEL activities by Petri nets, enriched to represent data dependencies, and by proposing aggregation rules of these dependency relations. The algorithm to aggregate the basic enriched Petri nets, producing the data dependency diagram of the orchestrated Web service, is given. The model obtained can be directly exploited by a diagnosis algorithm.
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Paper Nr:	606
Title:	2SAP: A FLEXIBLE ARCHITECTURE FOR WEB SERVICE ENABLEMENT OF COMMUNICATION SERVICES
Authors:	Li Li, Wu Chou, Dan Zhuo and Feng Liu
Abstract:	In this paper, we present a flexible Web service middleware framework based on the approach of 2SAP, two-way Web service application proxy. 2SAP is to address some critical issues in Web service enablement of communication services that require session based stateful transactions, two-way full duplex Web service interaction, asynchronous operations and event notification. We introduce the concept of meta-services and base-services in Web service middleware architecture design, and we investigate three options that can be applied to synthesize the service interface descriptions of these services in current WSDL frameworks. Based on the dependency and interaction pattern analyses, we describe the architecture of 2SAP that modularizes the service implementation and components along two dimensions, i.e. stateful vs. stateless and core vs. extension. We show that the architecture of 2SAP can support a variety of collocated and distributed service integration configurations. Our experimental studies indicated that the service platform of the proposed 2SAP architecture can support the needs of Web service and SOA enablement of real-time communication services.
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Paper Nr:	606
Title:	2SAP: A FLEXIBLE ARCHITECTURE FOR WEB SERVICE ENABLEMENT OF COMMUNICATION SERVICES
Authors:	Li Li, Wu Chou, Dan Zhuo and Feng Liu
Abstract:	In this paper, we present a flexible Web service middleware framework based on the approach of 2SAP, two-way Web service application proxy. 2SAP is to address some critical issues in Web service enablement of communication services that require session based stateful transactions, two-way full duplex Web service interaction, asynchronous operations and event notification. We introduce the concept of meta-services and base-services in Web service middleware architecture design, and we investigate three options that can be applied to synthesize the service interface descriptions of these services in current WSDL frameworks. Based on the dependency and interaction pattern analyses, we describe the architecture of 2SAP that modularizes the service implementation and components along two dimensions, i.e. stateful vs. stateless and core vs. extension. We show that the architecture of 2SAP can support a variety of collocated and distributed service integration configurations. Our experimental studies indicated that the service platform of the proposed 2SAP architecture can support the needs of Web service and SOA enablement of real-time communication services.
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Paper Nr:	611
Title:	SET: A QUESTIONABLE SECURITY PROTOCOL
Authors:	Charles A. Shoniregun and Songhe Zhao
Abstract:	The Secure Electronic Transaction (SET) was developed by Visa and MasterCard in 1997. The SET is a protocol that is theoretically perfect with very high expectation to provide secured electronic financial transactions. It also provides a ‘dual signature’ as it hides credit card numbers from the merchants, and purchase details from the bank. This paper exploits the weaknesses that led to SET’s failure and proposed SET’s encryption process with elliptic curve cryptography (ECC).
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Paper Nr:	20
Title:	WEB SERVICES COMMUNITIES - Concepts & Operations
Authors:	Zakaria Maamar, Mohammed Lahkim, Djamal Benslimane, Philippe Thiran and Subramanian Sattanathan
Abstract:	This paper discusses the concepts and operations related to the specification and management of a community of Web services, respectively. Web services offering the same functionality are gathered into one community, independently of their origins. The community is led by a master component, which is responsible among others for attracting new Web services to the community, retaining existing Web services in the community, and identifying the Web services in the community that will participate in composite Web services. The identification of these Web services is based on the contract-net protocol.
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Paper Nr:	73
Title:	USING DATA TOGETHER WITH METADATA TO IMPROVE XML INFORMATION ACCESS
Authors:	Alda Lopes Gançarski and Pedro Rangel Henriques
Abstract:	In this paper, we address the use of data together with metadata to improve information access to XML document collections. We first emphasize the possibility to associate meta-information to parts of XML documents, and not only entire documents. This is accordingly to the fact that XML elements are considered as retrieval units. We, then, propose to explicitly search the desired information using a query language that is composed of XML search and metadata search. We focus our ideas in two types of metadata: Dublin Core and ontologies.
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Paper Nr:	158
Title:	DISCOVERY CHALLENGES AND AUTOMATION FOR SERVICE-BASED APPLICATIONS IN GRID
Authors:	Serena Pastore
Abstract:	Discovery is a necessary task; any modern distributed system must provide this for searching and finding resources in the network according some criteria. There are many solutions for providing such tool for grid and web service environments that are essentially based on a directory service as a specialized optimized database. One great challenge in such complex distributed networks is that the effective automation of process usually fails. This paper describes the discovery issue for WSDL-based applications exported in a specific grid system by analyzing different software solutions typical to grid and web service areas. The need for automation can be partially solved with the
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Paper Nr:	163
Title:	WEB SECURITY ENHANCEMENT BASED ON KEYSTROKE DYNAMICS
Authors:	Michal Choras and Piotr Mroczkowski
Abstract:	Many online access systems (e.g. e-banking) require stronger protection than the login-id password pair can provide. Other, more sophisticated techniques of identity verification are in demand: one-time passwords, smart cards or biometric technologies. Among several biometric approaches the web-based solution that incorporates keystroke dynamics is the most relevant due to the low cost of the implementation, satisfactory results as well as the degree of transparency it offers.
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Paper Nr:	171
Title:	A DESIGN PATTERN FOR AUTOMATIC GENERATION OF WEB SERVICES FROM DOMAIN ONTOLOGIES
Authors:	Bob Dourandish, Nina Zumel and Michael Manno
Abstract:	Web Services and Service-Oriented Architecture have become ubiquitous and are increasingly embedded in every aspect of systems architecture. At the same time, advances in workflow tools now enable us to compose complex new applications by dynamically orchestrating existing web services in new and previously unanticipated execution sequences. The combination of the two is slowly transforming software engineering to a service-centric discipline, with the focus shifting from creating expansive systems to building small, specialized services that can be sequenced, on demand, to support previously unanticipated missions. Implementing and deploying specialized services in this way presents significant challenges in design and programming, as well as long-term maintenance. A fundamental challenge is to maintain the underlying program code long after it has been released and, potentially, incorporated in numerous other processes. This paper presents a methodology and a design pattern to automatically generate web services based on domain ontology. Our approach promises to significantly reduce the programming and maintenance burden of creating and deploying web services, particularly in mission-critical, collaborative, and distributed operations such as emergency response, supply-chain, or healthcare.
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Paper Nr:	388
Title:	DYNAMIC SERVICE COMPOSITION FOR VIRTUAL UPNP DEVICE CREATION IN HOME NETWORK ENVIRONMENT
Authors:	Sheng-Tzong Cheng, Chun-Yen Wang, Mingzoo Wu, Wan-Ting Ho and Chia-mei Chen
Abstract:	Exploiting UPnP techniques, home users can easily control intelligent devices through control points. However, UPnP devices lack a composition mechanism to complete a novel application or value-added service. This paper proposes a dynamic service composition system which coordinates the primitive UPnP services at home to create a virtual device. We define data type ontology for UPnP devices to describe their service interfaces. The interface matching mechanism is employed to construct a service graph that describes which services can be composed together. Finally, the proposed system travels on the service graph, and probes a suitable execution path to generate a new device.
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Paper Nr:	402
Title:	FUTURE TRUST FORECAST IN OPEN MOBILE AGENT ENVIRONMENT
Authors:	Mieczyslaw Klopotek and Wolski Michał
Abstract:	Open Mobile Agent Environments, where entities can join and leave the system at any time, are particularly susceptible to the attacks of malicious entities. Hence intense studies of potential solutions of related problems are needed, including proper and speedy estimation of node’s trustworthiness. We propose an optimisation method for trust estimation (reputation forecasting) and apply it to two known reputation metrics (eBay and BetaSystem). We show results of simulations comparing the effectiveness of reputation discovery using the original algorithm and the optimized (forecasting reputation) one.
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Paper Nr:	425
Title:	USER AND APPLICATION INTERFACE FOR A DISTRIBUTED E-LEARNING SYSTEM
Authors:	Takao Kawamura, Kazuo Kuramochi, Junya Kishida, Shinichi Motomura and Kazunori Sugahara
Abstract:	In this paper, the user and application interface of our previously proposed e-Learning system is presented to demonstrate how user interfaces for distributed systems should be composed. The proposed e-Learning system has two distinguishing features. Firstly, it is based on P2P architecture for scalability and robustness. Secondly, all exercises in the system are not only data but also agents so that they have functions, such as scoring user’s answers, telling the correct answers, and showing some related information without human instruction. The interface provides three kinds of communication: communication between a user and an exercise agent, communication between an exercise agent and support applications, and communication between a user and other users. The interface consists of two parts: an interface agent and a plugin for Firefox web browser. An interface agent hides the existence of the P2P network and other agents from the Firefox plugin and users. The developed e-Learning system including the interface is examined by experiments in classroom.
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Paper Nr:	433
Title:	NEW IMPLEMENTATION OF RMI TO PROTECT INTEGRITY AND CONFIDENTIALITY FOR MOBILE AGENTS
Authors:	Shinichi Motomura, Takao Kawamura and Kazunori Sugahara
Abstract:	A new implementation of RMI named OnePort RMI is proposed in this paper. OnePort RMI consists of new RMI runtime, classes which are implemented interfaces by RMI specification, and MultiChannelSocketFactory. Using OnePort RMI, when an object on a client invokes methods of remote objects on a server, the client can use sockets of different types to connect one destination port at the same time, and the server can accept incoming call from the sockets on only the port. In order to protect integrity and confidentiality of our mobile agent framework named Maglog, OnePort RMI is introduced into Maglog. In consequence, each agent can select a socket depending on importance of data and programs which are contained in their agents. We emphasize that the proposed OnePort RMI is not only for mobile agent frameworks such as our Maglog but also for any RMI applications.
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Paper Nr:	440
Title:	SERVICE ORIENTED ATMOSPHERIC RADIANCES (SOAR) - A Web Service Research Tool for the Gridding and Synthesis of Multi-Sensor Satellite Radiance Data for Weather and Climate Studies
Authors:	Milton Halem, Curt Tilmes, Yelena Yesha, Sharon Shen, Mitch Goldberg and L. H. Zhou
Abstract:	Three decades of Earth remote sensing from NASA, NOAA and DOD satellites carrying successive generations of atmospheric instruments have resulted in petabytes of radiance data with successive increases in spatial and spectral resolutions stored at different data archives in various data formats. We describe here a web based Service Oriented Atmospheric Radiance (SOAR) prototype system built on the SOA architecture that will enable the science community to process these valuable climate data records according to their own gridding criteria. SOAR employs the standard XML based protocol suite of SOAP, WSDL and UDDI service descriptions for aggregating atmospheric instrument radiance data into user specified spatial grids. SOAR consists of three subsystems, a Client Server, a Directory Server, and a Process Server, connected to a high performance compute cluster and storage grid by a Service Bus. The process server employs optical communications to access data and invoke algorithms on the compute/storage cluster for on-demand spatial, temporal, and spectral subsetting Scientists can choose a variety of statistical averaging techniques for combining the footprints of satellite observed radiances from multiple instruments to form spatial-temporal grids for their respective studies. Animation services are also provided for viewing the results of the user specified service requests. Results are presented for subsetting and animating a multi-year high-resolution multi-instrument pre-gridded radiance field employing this initial version of SOAR.
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Paper Nr:	444
Title:	XLIVE: INTEGRATING SOURCES WITH XQUERY - An Efficient XQuery Evaluation Prototype with TGV
Authors:	Nicolas Travers, Tuyêt-Trâm Dang-Ngoc and Tianxiao Liu
Abstract:	This paper presents an efficient evaluation of XQuery in a heterogeneous distributed system. XQuery(W3C, 2005) is a rich and so a complex language. Its syntax allows us to express a large scale of queries over XML documents. We have extended (Chen et al., 2003) proposal to rewrite XQuery expressions in ”canonical XQuery” in order to support the full XQuery specification. The XQuery expressiveness makes difficulties to obtain an exclusive internal representation within a system. Models based on Tree Patterns have been proposed, and we have extended the tree pattern model to a model called TGV that (a) integrates the whole functionalities of XQuery (b) uses an intuitive representation that provides a global visualization of the request in a mediation context and (c) provides a support for optimization and for cost information. Our paper is based on the XLive mediation system. XLive integrates sources in a uniform view. It is a running research vehicle designed at PRiSM Laboratory for assessing the integration system at every stage of the process starting from sources extraction to the user interface and is already used in several projects.
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Paper Nr:	446
Title:	WEB SERVICE RETRIEVAL BASED ON ENVIRONMENT ONTOLOGY
Authors:	Budan Wu and Zhi Jin
Abstract:	Existed descriptions of Web Service are in syntax level, and still relies on people to understand and decide what a Web Service can do, which encumbers automatic and dynamic Web Service retrieval. In this paper, we propose environment ontology as the base of describing semantic of Web Services, whose resource and state transitions reflect Web Service’s behavior. We construct the description format based on environment ontology and put forward a road map approach towards automatic and dynamic Web Service retrieval.
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Paper Nr:	458
Title:	A PERFORMANCE EVALUATION OF MOBILE WEB SERVICES SECURITY
Authors:	Satish N. Srirama, Matthias Jarke and Wolfgang Prinz
Abstract:	It is now feasible to host basic web services on a smart phone due to the advances in wireless devices and mobile communication technologies. The market capture of mobile web services also has increased significantly, in the past years. While the applications are quite welcoming, the ability to provide secure and reliable communication in the vulnerable and volatile mobile ad-hoc topologies is vastly becoming necessary. Even though a lot of standardized security specifications like WS-Security, SAML exist for web services in the wired networks, not much has been analyzed and standardized in the wireless environments. In this paper we give our analysis of adapting some of the security standards, especially WS-Security to the cellular domain, with performance statistics. The performance latencies are obtained and analyzed while observing the performance and quality of service of our Mobile Host.
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Paper Nr:	464
Title:	POSITION INFORMATION FOR VOIP EMERGENCY CALLS - Originating from a Wireless Metropolitan Access Network
Authors:	Jaume Barcelo, B. Bellalta, C. Macián, M. Oliver and A. Sfairopoulou
Abstract:	This article describes a mechanism to provide location information about users of a wireless metropolitan access network to trusted and authorized third parties. A case of particular interest is that of providing emergency centers with the location of the VoIP caller. The location information is obtained from the wireless access points using SNMP polling, and stored in a location server. The outbound SIP proxy server requests the user’s location and includes it in the SIP invite message when the callee is an emergency center.
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Paper Nr:	465
Title:	WEB SERVICES-BASED QUERY REWRITING AND RESOLUTION IN LOOSELY COUPLED INFORMATION SYSTEMS
Authors:	Mahmoud Barhamgi, Pierre-antoine Champin and Djamal Benslimane
Abstract:	Recently a great deal of information resources has been exposed in the form of Data-Providing Web services in Peer-to-peer based e-collaboration environments. In this paper we model these services as RDF views over the peer local ontology, then we use these views in establishing a composition of Web services that satisfies a received query. Our composition is Data-Driven, therefore we apply extra data treatments on data flow between composed services before getting the desired result.
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Paper Nr:	475
Title:	IMPLEMENTATION OF INDEX SCHEMA FOR XML DOCUMENTS BASED ON STRUCTURE OF DATABASE
Authors:	Youngrok Song, Kyonam Choo, Yoseop Woo and Hongki Min
Abstract:	In this paper, structural information between tree nodes is presented without any structural changes in tree by converting number information added to tree into bit streams. It is also shown that other structural information can be retrieved and added to index schema, and that in query schema it is possible to restore host nodes by exploiting the given node information in case relative route query expressions as well as absolute query expressions are given. It has an advantage of making derived query expressions through a query. In addition, in the query-processing process, response time can be minimized by conducting bit operation between bit streams with index schema and query schema in use, and accurate results can be reached by searching only with information of record set by node in index files.
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Paper Nr:	478
Title:	END USER AUTHENTICATION (EUA)
Authors:	George S. Oreku, Li Jianzhong and Fredrick J. Mtenzi
Abstract:	Authentication is one among a set of services that constitute a security sub-system in a modern computing or communications infrastructure. End User Authentication flexibility model would proposed in this paper allow the user to have multiple authentication mechanisms with varying levels of guarantee, and for suppliers to request and rely on mechanisms appropriate to the service requested. Authentications to end-user in a simple three level ticket request model algorithms solution on open distributed environment. This paper describes the ticket used by clients, servers, and Kerberos to achieve authentication toward prevention of unauthorized access to in sourced data on applications level. However we explore an approach to end user authentication that generalizes the notion of a textual password that, in many cases, improves the security. Our approach is based on the use of Kerberos authentication technique and Diffie-Hellman Key exchange.
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Paper Nr:	485
Title:	A NETWORK-BASED ANOMALY DETECTION SYSTEM USING MULTIPLE NETWORK FEATURES
Authors:	Yuji Waizumi, Yohei Sato and Yoshiaki Nemoto
Abstract:	Accuracy of anomaly-based intrusion detection greatly depends on features, the numerical values representing characteristics of network traffic. In order to increase accuracy, it is necessary to choose appropriate features that can correctly detect anomalous events. In this paper, we stress the fact that a specific kind of anomaly changes specific features. We propose a highly accurate and robust intrusion detection system using multiple features. Each feature is used for evaluating anomalous events independently by a statistical detection method. Through experiments, we investigate the accuracy of the proposed scheme.
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Paper Nr:	489
Title:	A LOW COST WORM DETECTION TECHNIQUE BASED ON FLOW PAYLOAD SIMILARITY
Authors:	Youhei Suzuki, Yuji Waizumi, Hiroshi Tsunoda and Yoshiaki Nemoto
Abstract:	Recently, damages of information systems by worms have been reported at global level. Signature based Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs) are widley used to prevent these damages. To handle newly created worms, automatic signature generation techniques based on common strings in the payloads of multiple worm flows of the same kind have been proposed. Because these techniques need to use multiple strings as a signature for each kind of worm to acheive high detection accuracy, the calculation cost to detect worms is a serious issue. In this paper, we propose a novel scheme that does not use common character strings. The proposed scheme uses a 256-dimensional vector based on the appearance frequencies of 256 character codes. This vector is generated automatically and used as a mean to detect worms with low cost. In addition, we construct a cheap worm detection system by using the proposed method as the first stage analysis of conventional IDS. We evaluate the proposed scheme through experiments and present its performance.
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Paper Nr:	500
Title:	DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION PRINCIPLES FOR INTEGRATED NETWORK AND SYSTEM MANAGEMENT
Authors:	Martin Knahl
Abstract:	Rising costs for the maintenance of increasingly heterogeneous IT infrastructures has been one of the main reasons why anticipated cost reductions with the evolving structures have not materialised. This paper provides an analysis of the requirements for Management Services. The paper presents an approach for the design and realisation of Integrated Management Services. Management Systems are divided into different functional areas and can be derived from a set of Building Blocks in order to accommodate the range of requirements and environments applicable to Integrated Service Management. The paper further presents ways to utilize SW implementations for the provision of integrated Management Services based on the proposed principles. The construction and maintenance of Management Systems is facilitated by the use of existing solutions.
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Paper Nr:	511
Title:	ERLANG/OTP FRAMEWORK FOR COMPLEX MANAGEMENT APPLICATIONS DEVELOPMENT
Authors:	Carlos Abalde, Víctor M. Gulías, Laura M. Castro, Carlos Varela and J. Santiago Jorge
Abstract:	This paper presents our ideas about how to evolve a first and early architecture, which has been used in the development of a large scale management client/server application, to a more sophisticated one, which could be reused in other developments, significantly reducing the development life cycles of future versions. We also expose some problems that arised in the process and suggest some solutions.
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Paper Nr:	524
Title:	SPECIFICATION-BASED INTRUSION DETECTION SYSTEM FOR CARRIER ETHERNET
Authors:	Pan Jieke, João Redol and Miguel Correia
Abstract:	Layered network architectures (OSI, TCP/IP) separate functionality in layers, allowing them to be designed and implemented independently. However, from the security point of view, once a lower layer is compromised, the reliability of the higher layers can be impaired. This paper is about the security of the Data Link Layer, which can affect the reliability of higher layers, like TCP, HTTP and other World-Wide Web protocols. The paper analyzes security-wise a layer 2 protocol – the Spanning Tree Protocol (STP), part of the Ethernet suite – and presents a solution to detect attacks against this protocol using Specification-based Intrusion Detection.
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Paper Nr:	524
Title:	SPECIFICATION-BASED INTRUSION DETECTION SYSTEM FOR CARRIER ETHERNET
Authors:	Pan Jieke, João Redol and Miguel Correia
Abstract:	Layered network architectures (OSI, TCP/IP) separate functionality in layers, allowing them to be designed and implemented independently. However, from the security point of view, once a lower layer is compromised, the reliability of the higher layers can be impaired. This paper is about the security of the Data Link Layer, which can affect the reliability of higher layers, like TCP, HTTP and other World-Wide Web protocols. The paper analyzes security-wise a layer 2 protocol – the Spanning Tree Protocol (STP), part of the Ethernet suite – and presents a solution to detect attacks against this protocol using Specification-based Intrusion Detection.
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Paper Nr:	555
Title:	ON THE INTEGRATION OF QOS MANAGEMENT IN WEB SERVICE ARCHITECTURE
Authors:	Abdallah Missaoui and Kamel Barkaoui
Abstract:	The web service consumer requires sometimes a service provider which gives functional and non-functional requirement especially in e-business domain. In this paper, an overview on web services and their qualities are described. We propose a new architecture which permits the management of QoS, by integrating a new layer in the web service architecture.
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Paper Nr:	561
Title:	DYNAMIC PROVISIONING AND MONITORING OF STATEFUL SERVICES
Authors:	Peter Tröger, Harald Meyer, Ingo Melzer and Marcus Flehmig
Abstract:	While tools for service-oriented architectures promise a seamless combination of stateless basic services to new applications, reality looks different. Real-world services are wrapping stateful behavior using application-specific concepts, the monitoring is only available through vendor-specific interfaces, and service installations are bound to particular execution hosts. We present the ASG Services Infrastructure (SI) architecture as our practical solution to these real-world service integration issues. Our framework is based on established Web service standards and supports the dynamic hosting and monitoring of heterogeneous and stateful service implementations.
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Paper Nr:	563
Title:	3D MONITORING OF DISTRIBUTED MULTIAGENT SYSTEMS
Authors:	Sergio Ilarri, Juan L. Serrano, Eduardo Mena and Raquel Trillo-Lado
Abstract:	In the last years, multiagent systems have been proposed to solve a wide range of applications in distributed contexts, as they provide many advantages, such as parallelism, robustness, and scalability. A key element for the performance and reliability of the multiagent system is to design carefully the interaction and synchronization among the agents. Particularly, debugging and monitoring multiagent systems is a challenging task due to the number of agents involved and the complex communication patterns that they may exhibit. In this paper, we present a 3D interactive monitoring framework that we have developed to observe how the agents in a multiagent system communicate among themselves and other interesting events. It offers desirable features, such as the possibility of analyzing communications and events in real-time and also off-line, or filtering relevant events using queries. Besides, the framework can be easily customized and extended in order to debug a variety of multiagent systems.
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Paper Nr:	575
Title:	XML BASED FRAMEWORK FOR CONTACT CENTER APPLICATIONS
Authors:	Nikolay Anisimov, Brian Galvin and Herbert Ristock
Abstract:	W3C languages, VoiceXML and CCXML all play an important role in contact centers (CC) by simplifying the creation of CC applications. However, they cover only a subset of contact center functions, such as simple call control and interactive voice response (IVR) with automatic speech recognition. We discuss ways to complement VoiceXML and CCXML in order to cover all necessary contact center functions required to script end-to-end interactions in a consistent and seamless way. For this purpose we introduce an XML forms-based framework called XContact comprising the CC platform and applications, multi-script and multi-browsing, and interaction data processing. We also discuss how routing as a key CC capability can be scripted/captured within such framework in order to demonstrate the overall approach.
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Paper Nr:	598
Title:	THE DATA COLLECTION MODULE OF THE AGENT BASED SEARCH SYSTEM (ABSS)
Authors:	R. Baran, A. Dziech, T. Orzechowski, A. Dziech and Michał Lutwin
Abstract:	The main purpose of this paper is analysis and description of the Data Collection Module (DCM) that is the main unit of the ABSS system. The aim of the DCM module is to process the metadata for the learning resources and preparing them for the search algorithms. The components of the DCM module are analysed with respect to technologies and standards used to their implementation. Advantages of proposed solutions are also discussed. The subject of the paper is related to the Calibrate (Calibrating eLearning in Schools) project.
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Area 3 - Web Interfaces and Applications

Full Papers

Paper Nr:	36
Title:	LIFE CASES - An Approach to Address Pragmatics in the Design of Web Information Systems
Authors:	Klaus Dieter-Schewe and Bernhard Thalheim
Abstract:	On a high level of abstraction a Web Information System (WIS) can be described by a storyboard, which in an abstract way specifies who will be using the system, in which way and for which goals. While syntax and semantics of storyboarding has been well explored, its pragmatics has not. This paper contributes the first step towards closing this gap. For this we present life cases, which capture observations of user behaviour in reality. We discuss the facets of life cases and present a semi-formal way for their documentation. Life cases can be used in a pragmatic way to specify a story space, which is an important component of a storyboard.
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Paper Nr:	68
Title:	SOME ASPECTS OF DESIGNING ACCESSIBLE ONLINE FORMS FOR THE YOUNG ELDERLY
Authors:	Sergio Sayago and Josep Blat
Abstract:	This short paper reports on two key aspects for designing accessible online forms for the young elderly: (i) distinguishing between required and optional fields and (ii) usability of checkboxes, radio-buttons and list-boxes. Two hypotheses are tested with seven young elderly people in the course of designing a website for an old-age pensioner association. Separating required and optional fields into two sections is easier for the young elderly to understand and use than the current “asterisk” strategy which is invisible to them. Checkboxes and radio-buttons are easier for the young elderly to use than list-boxes because the latter requires a larger number of clicks in selection tasks. The results initially confirm both hypotheses, which should become requirements for designing accessible online forms for the older population.
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Paper Nr:	155
Title:	AUTOMATIC PLAYBACK OF 3D BLOG ENTRIES BASED ON 3D VIEWPOINT SIMILARITY
Authors:	Rieko Kadobayashi
Abstract:	The 3D Blog system allows a user to interact with a 3D model, annotate any spot on the model, and publish the annotations in a blog so that the user can easily communicate with other people and share interests, idea, and questions about 3D models of interest to the user. The main features of the system is that each annotation is saved as a blog entry with 3D viewpoint information, i.e., the user’s viewpoint and view direction as well as 3D information on annotated points. With this 3D viewpoint information, readers of a 3D Blog can reconstruct the exact same 3D scene the blogger saw when reading the blog entry, and, therefore, the readers may understand it better. The system also uses the 3D viewpoint information to detect similar entries and sends trackback links automatically to enable users to easily find people who may have similar interests. Users can easily and intuitively compare the similar entries using the “playback” function which renders the 3D scene in the similar entries. The 3D Blog system is expected to promote emergence of communities of people who share interests and support their communication.
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Paper Nr:	160
Title:	KNOWLEDGE DISCOVERY AND EXCHANGE - Towards a Web-based Application for Discovery and Exchange of Revealed Knowledge
Authors:	Sietse Overbeek, P. van Bommel, H. E. Proper and Daan Rijsenbrij
Abstract:	Web technologies enable the discovery and exchange of knowledge from many different locations using many different channels. This implies that one is able to discover and exchange knowledge while using a PDA when traveling by train for instance. A provisional Web-based application referred to as ‘DEXAR: Discovery and eXchange of Revealed knowledge’ is therefore introduced to illustrate the possibilities of the Web in the process of knowledge discovery and exchange. This is illustrated by an example from the medical domain. Before focussing on this Web application however a better understanding of knowledge discovery and exchange is needed to be able to determine what kind of Web-based support is desired and feasible. Thus, a knowledge market paradigm and a knowledge discovery paradigm are discussed in detail.
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Paper Nr:	173
Title:	MODEL DRIVEN DEVELOPMENT OF DIGITAL LIBRARIES - Validation, Analysis and Code Generation
Authors:	Esther Guerra, Juan De Lara and Alessio Malizia
Abstract:	This paper shows our model-driven approach for the formal construction and validation of Digital Libraries (DLs). We have defined a Domain Specific Visual Language (DSVL) called VisMODLE, which allows the description of a DL using five different viewpoints: services, behaviour, collections, structure and society. From a meta-model based description of the different viewpoints, we have generated a modelling environment for VisMODLE. We have provided the environment with a code generator that produces XUL code for the DL’s user interface and composes the application using predefined components that implement the different services. Moreover, we have also added validation and simulation capabilities to the environment. Using the behavioural models (state-machine based), we can visually animate the system. In addition, the combined behaviour of actors and services can be transformed into a Petri net for further analysis.
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Paper Nr:	187
Title:	ONTOLOGY-BASED ADAPTIVE QUERY REFINEMENT
Authors:	Lefteris Kozanidis, Paraskevi Tzekou, Nikos Zotos, Sofia Stamou and Dimitris Christodoulakis
Abstract:	Query refinement is the process of providing Web information seekers with alternative wordings for expressing their information needs. Although alternative query formulations may contribute to the improvement of retrieval results, nevertheless their realization by Web users is intrinsically limited in that alternative query wordings convey explicit information about neither their degree nor their type of correlation to the user-issued queries. Moreover, alternative query formulations are determined based on the semantics of the issued query alone and they do not consider anything about the search intentions of the user issuing that query. In this paper, we introduce a novel query refinement technique which uses a lexical ontology for identifying alternative query formulations that are both informative of the user’s interests and related to the user selected queries. The most innovative feature of our technique is the visualization of the alternative query wordings in a graphical representation form, which conveys explicit information about the refined queries correlation to the user issued requests and which allows the user select which terms to participate in the refinement process. Experimental results demonstrate that our method has a significant potential in improving the user search experience.
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Paper Nr:	435
Title:	ADAPTIVE PREDICTIONS IN A USER-CENTERED RECOMMENDER SYSTEM
Authors:	Anne Boyer and Sylvain Castagnos
Abstract:	The size of available data on Internet is growing faster than human ability to treat it. Therefore, it becomes more and more difficult to identify the most relevant information, even for skilled people using efficient search engines. A way to cope with this problem is to automatically recommend data in accordance with users’ preferences. Among others, collaborative filtering processes help users to find interesting items by comparing them with users having the same tastes. This paper describes a new user-centered recommender system relying on collaborative filtering and grid computing. Our model has been implemented in a Peer-to-Peer architecture. It has been especially designed to deal with problems of scalability and privacy. Moreover, it adapts its prediction computations to the density of the user neighborhood.
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Paper Nr:	438
Title:	A BROWSER EXTENSION FOR PROVIDING VISUALLY IMPAIRED USERS ACCESS TO THE CONTENT OF BAR CHARTS ON THE WEB
Authors:	Stephanie Elzer, Edward Schwartz, Sandra Carberry, Daniel Chester, Seniz Demir and Peng Wu
Abstract:	This paper presents the SIGHT (Summarizing Information GrapHics Textually) system that enables visually impaired users to gain access to information graphics that appear on a web page. The user interface is implemented as a browser extension that is launched by a keystroke combination. The output of SIGHT is a textual summary of the graphic, the core content of which is the hypothesized intended message of the graphic designer. The textual summary of the graphic is then conveyed to the user by screen reading software (such as JAWS). This approach has the benefits of 1) not requiring any action on the part of the web page developer, and 2) providing the user with the message and knowledge that one would gain from viewing the graphic rather than requiring the user to form a mental map of the graphic.
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Paper Nr:	438
Title:	A BROWSER EXTENSION FOR PROVIDING VISUALLY IMPAIRED USERS ACCESS TO THE CONTENT OF BAR CHARTS ON THE WEB
Authors:	Stephanie Elzer, Edward Schwartz, Sandra Carberry, Daniel Chester, Seniz Demir and Peng Wu
Abstract:	This paper presents the SIGHT (Summarizing Information GrapHics Textually) system that enables visually impaired users to gain access to information graphics that appear on a web page. The user interface is implemented as a browser extension that is launched by a keystroke combination. The output of SIGHT is a textual summary of the graphic, the core content of which is the hypothesized intended message of the graphic designer. The textual summary of the graphic is then conveyed to the user by screen reading software (such as JAWS). This approach has the benefits of 1) not requiring any action on the part of the web page developer, and 2) providing the user with the message and knowledge that one would gain from viewing the graphic rather than requiring the user to form a mental map of the graphic.
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Paper Nr:	487
Title:	MODELING BROWSING BEHAVIOR AND SAMPLING WEB EVOLUTION FEATURES THROUGH XML INSTANCES
Authors:	Ioannis Anagnostopoulos, Christos-Nikolaos Anagnostopoulos and Dimitrios Vergados
Abstract:	Nowadays, many web services have the essential role of accessing and processing the disseminated information on the web, while in parallel, distribute and exchange metadata among them in order to deliver relevant information to the end user. However, their competence is hindered, due to the vast amount of information added, the poor organization, as well as the lack of effective crawling techniques that fail to follow the exponential growth of the web. In this paper we propose an algorithm, which uses five third party web search services and it is capable of self-adapting over the incessant changes that occur on the indexed web. The algorithm works in conjunction with a user browsing behavior model that monitors and records the users’ interactions with the third-party services, using XML search session instances. From the assessment made, it was concluded that the proposed algorithm not only adapts to the users’ web search profiles but also adapts to the evolutionary nature of the web.
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Paper Nr:	498
Title:	ACCEPTANCE BY THE USERS OF SERVICES INTEGRATED IN THE HOME ENVIRONMENT
Authors:	Michele Cornacchia, Vittorio Baroncini and Stefano Livi
Abstract:	Whether or not ICT represents the most important vehicle to transform the society seems to be out of discussion. The point of interest diverts from how people do really feel with these services and from the way they perceive the advantages as acceptable to improve the quality of life and work. It is matter of fact that the technical innovation is characterized by a certain risk, the problem of how to implement the technology for sure and, ahead of this phase, the problem of predicting its influence on the social, working and private life in view of the high costs effort to produce. This study applies a predictive model for the acceptance to a services integrated home environment properly set-up in a special laboratory. A class of users was selected from the employees of the company which hosted the trial in order to participate at the evaluation sessions. The tasks were designed to point out the main innovative features of the services presented. The questionnaires were suitably designed and submitted to collect the end-users opinions. The analysis was carried out to assess the performance by the side of the real users and to predict their intentions of use.
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Paper Nr:	503
Title:	A MULTIMEDIA-BASED GUIDANCE SYSTEM FOR VARIOUS CONSUMER DEVICES
Authors:	M. Kropfberger, R. Tusch, M. Jakab, J. Köpke, M. Ofner, Hermann Hellwagner and L. Böszörmenyi
Abstract:	This paper introduces a Web-based guidance system which offers optimized presentations of sights or exhibited objects on different types of available stationary and mobile consumer devices, possibly running different operating systems. This is accomplished by adapting both the objects’ content and their presentation to the current usage context. Content thereby may be encoded in different presentation formats like video, audio, image, and marked-up text. The usage context embraces a set of properties describing the current usage environment of the guide. This includes, for example, the consumer device’s capabilities, its current location, and the user’s preferences. Both, the content adaptation and presentation services are based on standard Web technologies for increased interoperability. Finally, the guidance system is augmented with a Web-based content management and a statistics module, which enable for remote content administration and usage evaluations, respectively.
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Paper Nr:	557
Title:	RDF COLLECTIONS
Authors:	Saket Kaushik and Duminda Wijesekera
Abstract:	We add collection types such as sets, bags and lists to the resource description framework (RDF).
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Paper Nr:	585
Title:	LOG4P: AN INNOVATIVE LOGGER FRAMEWORK FOR WEB PORTALS - Towards New Metrics For Web Portals
Authors:	Gennaro Costagliola, Filomena Ferrucci, Vittorio Fuccella and Luigi Zurolo
Abstract:	Content Management Systems and Web Portal Frameworks are more and more widely adopted in Web development. Those kinds of software often produce web pages whose layout is divided in sections called, in the case of Web Portals, “portlets”. Portlets can be produced by different sources and then aggregated in the same page by the portal. For Web portals, traditional web metrics based on page visits can be inadequate for fully understanding user’s interest, due to the heterogeneity of content and the variety of sources. This paper proposes a system for evaluating the web traffic at a deeper level than the page visit one: the level of the sections, or of the portlets. The interest of the user in the sections of the page is gauged through implicit interest indicators, such as, section visibility, mouse movements and other client-side interactions. Our system is composed of two different products: a framework that, opportunely instantiated in a web portal, allows the production of a log, and a log analyzer. The possible uses and benefits gained by research in the fields of web traffic analysis, portal design and usability are investigated in depth.
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Paper Nr:	610
Title:	THE DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF A SEMANTICS-BASED WEB CONTENT ADAPTATION FRAMEWORK FOR MOBILE DEVICES
Authors:	Chichang Jou and Cheng-ze Ho
Abstract:	With the rapid development of wireless communication technology, many users are accessing the internet from mobile appliances, such as notebooks, PDAs, and cellular phones. These devices are miscellaneously limited in computing resources, like CPU speed, memory, temporary storage, power supply, installed software, and communication bandwidth. The web accesses in these mobile devices thus encounter distorted user interface, broken images, slow responses, etc. To overcome this problem, we design and implement a semantics-based web content adaptation framework to provide automatically adapted contents to miscellaneous mobile devices. RDF Semantics of client device CC/PP configurations and web page tag structures are extracted to determine the proper parameters for the format and layout of web contents. Heuristic transcoding rules in the Jena Inference System are then applied to transform the web contents for each particular device. The functionality of this framework is illustrated by its capability of adjusting the layout of the main page of a shopping portal and of adjusting the parameters of images in the page.
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Short Papers

Paper Nr:	11
Title:	PATTERN-ORIENTED ARCHITECTURE FOR WEB APPLICATIONS
Authors:	Mohamed Taleb, Ahmed Seffah and Alain Abran
Abstract:	A number of Web design problems continue to arise, such as: (1) decoupling the various aspects of Web applications (for example, business logic, the user interface, navigation and information architecture; and (2) isolating platform specifics from the concerns common to all Web applications. In the context of a proposal for a pattern-oriented architecture for Web applications, this paper identifies an extensive list of patterns aimed at providing a pool of proven solutions to these problems. The patterns span several levels of abstraction, from information architecture and interoperability patterns to navigation, interaction, visualization and presentation patterns. The proposed architecture will show how several individual patterns can be combined at different levels of abstraction into heterogeneous structures, which can be used as building blocks in the development of Web applications.
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Paper Nr:	27
Title:	ANALYSING TERMS, PAIRS, TRIPLETS AND FULL QUERIES USED IN INTRANET SEARCHING
Authors:	Dick Stenmark
Abstract:	Web search engines have become often-used tools for many ordinary people today and a growing number of researcher are therefore studying how these lay-persons interact with such tools. Studies of public web search engine usage have often produced term frequency lists to illustrate the information needs the users. This study differs on several aspects from previous work. Firstly, we have analysed the logs of an intranet search engine, since studies of corporate internal search behaviour are in short supply. Secondly, we have not just used search terms but also full queries and show that single terms give a skewed understanding. Thirdly, we have analysed data from three different years - 2000, 2002 and 2004 - to be able to detect shifts and trends in information seeking behaviour.
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Paper Nr:	29
Title:	SIMILARITY OF DOCUMENTS AND DOCUMENT COLLECTIONS USING ATTRIBUTES WITH LOW NOISE
Authors:	Chris Biemann and Uwe Quasthoff
Abstract:	In this paper, a unified framework for clustering documents based on vocabulary overlap and in-link similarity is presented. A small number of non-zero attributes per document, taken from a very large set of possible attributes, ensure efficient comparisons procedures. We show that A) low frequent words are excellent attributes for textual documents as well as B) sources of in-links as attributes for web documents. In the cases of web documents, co-occurrence analysis is used to identify similarity. The documents are represented as nodes in a graph with edges weighted by similarity. A graph clustering algorithm is applied to group similar documents together. Evaluation for textual documents against a gold standard is provided.
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Paper Nr:	86
Title:	A FRAMEWORK FOR BUILDING A WEB-BASED DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEM FOR JOB ASSIGNMENT
Authors:	Patravadee Vongsumedh
Abstract:	In order to achieve the concept of “Putting the right man on the right job”, the job director has to clearly understand job’s requirements, related job’s skills, and, especially, employee who is possible to be assigned to do the given jobs. The fulfillment of these concerned issues could be done by one of the information systems called “Decision Support System” (DSS), which provides capabilities of identifying possible alternatives (that is, the appropriate employees), supporting the alternative-comparison process, and making-choice process. The DSS’s capabilities in supporting job assignment process increase not only the job director’s satisfaction in assigning job, but also the employee’s satisfaction in doing the assigned job. Moreover, the “Flexibility” is another factor required by the job directors in performing job assignment, and communicating with their employees. Therefore, this research proposes a framework for building a Webbased DSS for job assignment.
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Paper Nr:	154
Title:	CONTEXT-AWARE INFORMATION RETRIEVAL BASED ON USER PROFILES
Authors:	Santtu Toivonen and Heikki Helin
Abstract:	In mobile Web usage scenarios, taking advantage of user context in information retrieval (IR) and filtering becomes evident. There are multiple ways to approach this, of which we present some alternatives and discuss their performance independently and in combination. The investigation is restricted to Semantic Web like structured content consisting of statements. The discussed approaches address relative importances of statements constituting the content, dependencies between statements, and close matches. Simulated results of the various approaches are provided.
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Paper Nr:	185
Title:	AISLES THROUGH THE CATEGORY FOREST - Utilising the Wikipedia Category System for Corpus Building in Machine Learning
Authors:	Rüdiger Gleim, Alexander Mehler, Matthias Dehmer and Olga Pustylnikov
Abstract:	The Word Wide Web is a continuous challenge to machine learning. Established approaches have to be enhanced and new methods be developed in order to tackle the problem of finding and organising relevant information. It has often been motivated that semantic classifications of input documents help solving this task. But while approaches of supervised text categorisation perform quite well on genres found in written text, newly evolved genres on the web are much more demanding. In order to successfully develop approaches to web mining, respective corpora are needed. However, the composition of genre- or domain-specific web corpora is still an unsolved problem. It is time consuming to build large corpora of good quality because web pages typically lack reliable meta information. Wikipedia along with similar approaches of collaborative text production offers a way out of this dilemma. We examine how social tagging, as supported by the MediaWiki software, can be utilised as a source of corpus building. Further, we describe a representation format for social ontologies and present the Wikipedia Category Explorer, a tool which supports categorical views to browse through the Wikipedia and to construct domain specific corpora for machine learning.
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Paper Nr:	186
Title:	TASK MODELS FOR PROACTIVE WEB APPLICATIONS
Authors:	Melanie Hartmann, Daniel Schreiber and Matthias Kaiser
Abstract:	In this paper, we propose a task modeling language for augmenting web applications with a proactive user interface (PUI). PUIs cooperate with the user to accomplish his tasks and facilitate the usage of web applications. They provide user-sensitive support mechanisms and adapt the interface to the user’s needs and preferences. Further, they can suggest which data to enter by inferring it from the context or previous interactions. For these purposes, the required knowledge about the application is stored in a task model. We propose a task modeling language that allows to easily enriching the automatically created initial task model with additional semantics. We define requirements for such a language and show that none of the existing languages fulfils all of them. As UML statecharts meet the most requirements, we use them as basis for our task modeling language. We show the applicability of this language and the capabilities of PUIs by enhancing an existing web application with a PUI.
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Paper Nr:	198
Title:	AN ADAPTATION MANAGER FOR PERSONALIZED MOBILE WEB SEARCHES
Authors:	Wolfgang Wörndl and Huda Yousef
Abstract:	Context-aware and personalized information access becomes more and more important, especially in a mobile scenario. In this paper, we present an Adaptation Manager which customizes Web searches to a user’s context and profile attributes. The approach allows for reuse of personal information for different services such as the Google Web Service API. We identify personalization components as parts of our Adaptation Manager and explain the design of the system. We have also implemented the most important parts of the system and thereby show the usability of the approach. Our solution is extensible, for example to incorporate a rule system to (semi-)automatically switch between services.
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Paper Nr:	386
Title:	RICH DIGITAL BOOKS FOR THE WEB
Authors:	Rui Lopes, Hugo Simões, Carlos Duarte and Luís Carriço
Abstract:	This article presents an architecture for the production and delivery of Rich Digital Books on the Web. These books are transformed and enriched with supporting media, like images and sound, pursuing the goal of reaching broader audiences and enlarging usage possibilities. The architecture affords for the production process’ automation, and thus has the potential to increase digital books’ availability. The architecture also enjoys a high flexibility degree, allowing the production of books that can be read with Web-based technologies, such as Web browsers.
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Paper Nr:	409
Title:	WEB PAGE CLASSIFICATION CONSIDERING PAGE GROUP STRUCTURE FOR BUILDING A HIGH-QUALITY HOMEPAGE COLLECTION
Authors:	Yuxin Wang and Keizo Oyama
Abstract:	We propose a web page classification method for creating a high quality homepage collection considering page group structure. We use support vector machine (SVM) with textual features obtained from each page and its surrounding pages. The surrounding pages are grouped according to connection type (in-link, outlink, and directory entry) and relative URL hierarchy (same, upper, or lower); then an independent feature subset is generated from each group. Feature subsets are further concatenated to compose the feature set of a classifier. The experiment results using ResJ-01 data set manually created by the authors and WebKB data set show the effectiveness of the proposed features compared with a baseline and some prior works. By tuning the classifiers, we then build a three-way classifier using a recall-assured and a precision-assured classifier in combination to accurately select the pages that need manual assessment to assure the required quality. It is also shown to be effective for reducing the amount of manual assessment.
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Paper Nr:	411
Title:	COINCIDENCE BASED MAPPING EXTRACTION WITH GENETIC ALGORITHMS
Authors:	Vahed Qazvinian, Hassan Abolhassani and S Hossein Haeri
Abstract:	Ontology Aligning is an answer to the problem of handling heterogenous information on different domains. After application of some measures, one reaches a set of similarity values. The final goal is to extract mappings. Our contribution is to introduce a new genetic algorithm (GA) based extraction method. The GA, employs a structured based weighting model, named “coincidence based model”, as its fitness function. In the first part of the paper, some preliminaries and notations are given and then we introduce the coincidence based weighting. In the second part the paper discusses the details of the devised GA with the evaluation results for a sample dataset.
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Paper Nr:	412
Title:	A MULTILINGUAL DIALOGUE SYSTEM FOR ACCESSING THE WEB
Authors:	Marta Gatius, Meritxell Gonzalez and Elisabet Comelles
Abstract:	In this paper we propose the use of multilingual multichannel dialogue systems to improve the usability of web contents. In order to improve both the communication and the portability of those dialogue systems we propose the separation of the general components from the application-specific, language-specific and channel-specific aspects. This paper describes the multilingual dialogue system for accessing web contents we develop following this proposal. It is particularly focused two main components of the system: the dialogue manager and the natural language generator.
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Paper Nr:	426
Title:	FROM THE BWW CONCEPTUAL MODEL TO THE DESIGN OF FAMILY OF WEB APPLICATION
Authors:	Roberto Paiano, Andrea Pandurino and Enrico Pulimeno
Abstract:	The phase of analysis and design of a modern web application with its multi-user and multi-device features is surely a real complex task. Moreover during the design, the aspects of ergonomics, usability and human computer interaction have to take into consideration in leading way. To answer to these requirements, many methodologies were born. Such approaches are yet valid for the design of a single WA but became in crisis when the main goal is to develop a framework for family of applications in a specific domain. In this paper, starting from a knowledge base obtained using an ontological approach to BWW, we propose the guidelines of changeover from the domain conceptual model to the Interactive Dialogue Model (IDM) for families of applications. From the IDM model, it will be possible to derive a single application through the specialization. In order to check the validity of the proposed considerations, we create a case study in the environmental domain. Starting from the conceptual model, first we design the IDM model of the family of applications and then we derive from it the IDM model of a specific web application.
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Paper Nr:	434
Title:	VECTOR BASED MAPPING OF POLYGONS ON IRREGULAR TERRAIN MESHES FOR WEB 3D MAP SERVICES
Authors:	Arne Schilling, Jens Basanow and Alexander Zipf
Abstract:	In this paper we show how to efficiently integrate traditional GIS data into terrain models in order to generate complete 3D maps with little overhead for textures. The results meet the requirements for the Web 3D Service (W3DS), a proposal for the standardization for delivering 3D web maps. Our approach is designed to create fully vectorized 3D scenes that deliver the best possible quality and do not require dynamic texture generation and handling. We describe the mesh operations for integrating polygonal GIS data like forests, parks, buildings blocks, or streets into the terrain mesh and compare the results with a texture based approach.
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Paper Nr:	455
Title:	AN ONTOLOGY FOR A WEB DICTIONARY OF ITALIAN SIGN LANGUAGE
Authors:	Rosella Gennari and Tania Di Mascio
Abstract:	Sign languages are visual languages used in deaf communities. They are essentially tempo-spatial languages: signs are made of manual components, e.g., the hand movements, and non-manual components, e.g., facial expressions. The e-LIS project aims at the creation of the first web bidirectional dictionary for Italian sign language–verbal Italian. Whereas the lexicographic order is a standard and ‘natural’ way of ordering hence retrieving words in Italian dictionaries, there is nothing similar for Italian sign language dictionaries. Stokoe-based notations have been successfully employed for decomposing and ordering signs in paper dictionaries for Italian sign language; but consulting the dictionaries requires knowing the adopted Stokoe-based notation, which is not as easy-to-remember and well-known as Italian alphabet is. Users of a web dictionary cannot be expected to be expert of this. There the role of ontologies comes into play. The ontology presented in this paper analyses and relates the formational components of a sign; in some sense, the ontology allows us to ‘enrich’ the e-LIS dictionary with expert information concerning classes of sign components and, above all, their mutual relations. We conclude this paper with several open questions at the intersection of knowledge representation and reasoning, semantic web, sign and computational linguistics.
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Paper Nr:	460
Title:	DESIGNING TEMPLATES FOR MINING ASSOCIATION RULES FROM XML DOCUMENTS
Authors:	F. H. Ismail, H. K. Mohammed, M. A. Ismail and I. El-Maddah
Abstract:	Nowadays, some information is semi-structured. The main characteristic of semi-structured data (XML) is that they have irregular structure. There is no distinction between data and structure. Even though, it is quite common that semi-structured objects representing the same sort of information have similar, though not identical, structure (pattern). Previous work has introduced templates for mining association rules from XML based on prior knowledge about the structure of the XML document. If the users do not have any knowledge about the structure in advance, what would be their clue in writing templates? In this paper, we introduce a new approach for designing association rule templates based on the automatic discovery of frequent structure in the XML document. Frequent structure serves as a schema built over the semi-structured data. This layer guides the user to the useful structure that might yield useful associations rather than choosing any piece of structure at random. The structured layer is displayed from which the user can select templates of interest. Association rules that comply with the specified templates are generated.
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Paper Nr:	481
Title:	USAGE BASED INDEXING OF WEB RESOURCES WITH NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING
Authors:	Armelle Brun and Anne Boyer
Abstract:	Due to the huge amount of available information via Internet, the identification of reliable and interesting items becomes more and more difficult and time consuming. This paper is a position paper describing our intended work in the framework of multimedia information retrieval by browsing techniques within web navigation. It relies on a usage-based indexing of resources: we ignore the nature, the content and the structure of resources. We describe a new approach taking advantage of the similarity between statistical modeling of language and document retrieval systems. A syntax of usage is computed that designs a Statistical Grammar of Usage (SGU). A SGU enables resources classification to perform a personalized navigation assistant tool. It relies both on collaborative filtering to compute virtual communities of users and a new distance dependent trigger model. The resulting SGU is a community dependent SGU.
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Paper Nr:	482
Title:	WAINE - Automatic Generator of Web Based Applications
Authors:	Antonio Delgado, Antonio Estepa and Rafael Estepa
Abstract:	This paper presents WAINE (Web Application & INterface Engine), a system for quick web application development based on a novel architecture which provide multiple benefits like: zero programming, integrated security, high re-usability and many degrees of independence. The architecture is well suited for development of multi-user applications and is based on an abstract model which captures all the elements of a typical application. The sample applications developed validate the advantages of the proposed architecture.
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Paper Nr:	488
Title:	AN ONTOLOGY MANAGEMENT TOOL FOR QOS-BASED WEB SERVICES DESIGN
Authors:	Marco Comerio, Flavio De Paoli and Gianluigi Viscusi
Abstract:	Web Services are the current most promising technology based on the concept of Service Oriented Computing that provides the basis for the development and execution of business processes that are distributed over the network and available via standard interfaces and protocols. Quality of Services (QoS) represents a major issue that covers the challenges in the service composition area and in the service oriented engineering. In this paper, we present the Web Services Design Tool (WSDTool). This tool allows the different actors involved in Web services design to define and address QoS requirements.
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Paper Nr:	501
Title:	MELIS - An Incremental Method for the Lexical Annotation of Domain Ontologies
Authors:	Sonia Bergamaschi, Laura Po, Maurizio Vincini, Paolo Bouquet, Daniel Giacomuzzi and Francesco Guerra
Abstract:	In this paper, we present MELIS (Meaning Elicitation and Lexical Integration System), a method and a software tool for enabling an incremental process of automatic annotation of local schemas (e.g. relational database schemas, directory trees) with lexical information. The distinguishing and original feature of MELIS is its incrementality: the higher the number of schemas which are processed, the more background/domain knowledge is cumulated in the system (a portion of domain ontology is learned at every step), the better the performance of the systems on annotating new schemas. MELIS has been tested as component of MOMIS-Ontology Builder, a framework able to create a domain ontology representing a set of selected data sources, described with a standard W3C language wherein concepts and attributes are annotated according to the lexical reference database. We describe the MELIS component within the MOMIS-Ontology Builder framework and provide some experimental results of MELIS as a standalone tool and as a component integrated in MOMIS.
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Paper Nr:	515
Title:	EXPLOITATION OF ONTOLOGY LANGUAGES FOR BOTH PERSISTENCE AND REASONING PURPOSES - Mapping PLIB, OWL and Flight Ontology Models
Authors:	Chimène Fankam, Yamine Ait-ameur and Guy Pierra
Abstract:	Ontologies are seen like the more relevant way to solve data understanding problem and to allow programs to perform meaningful operations on data in various domains. However, it appears that none of the proposed models is complete enough by itself to cover all aspects of knowledge applications. In this paper, we analyse existing modeling approaches and classify them according to some revelant characteristics of knowledge modeling we have identified. Finally, this paper present transformation rules between ontology models in order to get benefits of their strengths and to allow a powerful usage of ontologies in data management and knowledge application.
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Paper Nr:	525
Title:	PLATFORM FOR ELABORATION OF SEARCH RESULTS
Authors:	Ari Korhonen, Juha Litola and Jorma Tarhio
Abstract:	We introduce a systemcalled VisElabor that is a platformfor elaborating search results. It is a local meta search engine utilizing general search engines. The system downloads a number of documents from the search results and is dynamically able to cluster them and show them on multiple views. VisElabor visualizes relations of documents based on clustering, and it coordinates the information among the views based on user actions in order to better maintain the user context. In addition, VisElabor has been designed so that it is fairly easy to integrate new visualizations and other elaborations into the system.
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Paper Nr:	526
Title:	WEB CONTENTS AND STRUCTURAL ADAPTIVITY BY KNOWLEDGE TREE - The Herculaneum Excavation Hypermedia
Authors:	Silvia Rossi, Vincenzo Scognamiglio and Ernesto Burattini
Abstract:	The aim of this work is the design and the implementation of a prototype for supporting a user through the navigation in a web-site. We exploit the potentiality of having a representation of an hypermedia based on the concept of an abstract semantic description of the knowledge tree, in order to use some adaptivity processes, typical of many hypermedia systems, without the limitation of having a fixed set of resources. Our prototype was implemented for the archaeological Herculaneum Excavations, but the novelty of this work is an attempt to combine methodologies coming from Adaptive Hypermedia, Recommendation Systems and SemanticWeb in order to have a context-independent approach for Hypermedia on theWeb. What we propose is an architecture with modules that can be reused and adapted in many different contexts. In order to have a context independent behavior the system was implemented with a structural adaptivity itself. This means that changing the tree the system adapts itself to the modifications and dynamically regenerates the code of its components.
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Paper Nr:	526
Title:	WEB CONTENTS AND STRUCTURAL ADAPTIVITY BY KNOWLEDGE TREE - The Herculaneum Excavation Hypermedia
Authors:	Silvia Rossi, Vincenzo Scognamiglio and Ernesto Burattini
Abstract:	The aim of this work is the design and the implementation of a prototype for supporting a user through the navigation in a web-site. We exploit the potentiality of having a representation of an hypermedia based on the concept of an abstract semantic description of the knowledge tree, in order to use some adaptivity processes, typical of many hypermedia systems, without the limitation of having a fixed set of resources. Our prototype was implemented for the archaeological Herculaneum Excavations, but the novelty of this work is an attempt to combine methodologies coming from Adaptive Hypermedia, Recommendation Systems and SemanticWeb in order to have a context-independent approach for Hypermedia on theWeb. What we propose is an architecture with modules that can be reused and adapted in many different contexts. In order to have a context independent behavior the system was implemented with a structural adaptivity itself. This means that changing the tree the system adapts itself to the modifications and dynamically regenerates the code of its components.
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Paper Nr:	527
Title:	EXPRESSIVE REASONING ABOUT CULTURAL HERITAGE KNOWLEDGE USING WEB ONTOLOGIES
Authors:	Dimitrios Koutsomitropoulos and Theodore Papatheodorou
Abstract:	The cultural heritage knowledge domain is often characterized by complex semantic structures and a great lot of legacy information, possibly scattered on the Web that is not always properly structured. Thus, to achieve proper reasoning about this kind of knowledge one needs first a rather expressive model of representation that would also accommodate for its web distributed nature; and secondly a set of techniques that would allow for its intelligent and productive manipulation. The former can be served by the CIDOC-CRM which we first transform to the Semantic Web standard language, OWL and then augment with more expressive structures, possible only after this transformation. To show the latter we conduct a series of experimental inferences based on this CRM augmented form, using our Knowledge Discovery Interface. Our results clearly demonstrate the potential as well as the limitations of such an approach.
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Paper Nr:	534
Title:	XMODEL-BASED TESTING OF XSLT APPLICATIONS
Authors:	Antonia Bertolino, Jinghua Gao, Eda Marchetti and Andrea Polini
Abstract:	Model-based testing is nowadays the emerging paradigm for software testing in many domains. In the Web arena XML Schema is becoming the technology of reference to describe data structure and applications input domains. The proposed tool (TAXI - Testing by Automatically generated XML Instances) exploits such a model to automatically derive correct XML instances applying the well-known Category-partition methodology. In this paper we introduce an improvement of TAXI to test XSLT Stylesheets. Indeed, with XSLT Stylesheets increasingly getting larger and more complex, their correctness becomes a crucial factor for software quality and hence we believe that they need careful validation. Two different case studies illustrate the approach to the validation of XML to XML and XML to XHTML transformations.
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Paper Nr:	553
Title:	THE EFFECTS OF THE AJAX TECHNOLOGY ON WEB APPLICATION USABILITY
Authors:	Jonas Kluge, Frank Kargl and Michael Weber
Abstract:	The Ajax technology is said to make the Internet faster, more interactive and user-friendly. It is spreading rapidly throughout the web. By allowing scripts being executed inside the user’s browser to communicate with a remote server, it enables new forms of interaction for web-pages and -applications. In this paper we analyze Ajax usability, taking into account both advantages and imposed problems. Subsequently we present a user study with two typical scenarios in web-applications and compare Ajax-enabled and non-Ajax-enabled versions. This allows us to verify and quantify the assumed effects. As a result, we show that Ajax significantly enhances both user satisfaction and efficiency of use, at least in some scenarios.
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Paper Nr:	558
Title:	TOOLS TO FOSTER SEMANTIC-BASED COLLABORATION - A Knowledge Management Approach Based on a Semantic Wiki and Personal Ontologies
Authors:	Flavio De Paoli and Marco Loregian
Abstract:	Increased mobility and team distribution may hinder collaboration in organization by hampering spontaneous communication in workplaces. Tools are required to be integrated and not intrusive with respect to users’ activities, in order to provide effective support to workers for the development of joint projects. In this paper we present the enhancement of a knowledge-based collaborative system by means of a Semantic Wiki, which is a wiki exploiting ontologies to create machine-processable annotation of documents. Moreover, we present a simple tool to edit personal ontologies, that can be shared with other team or organization members.
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Paper Nr:	560
Title:	TOWARDS A SELF-ADAPTIVE MULTI-AGENT APPROACH FOR ENHANCING THE QUALITY OF SERVICE PROVIDED BY OPEN INFORMATION SYSTEMS
Authors:	Valérie Camps and Pierre Glize
Abstract:	Current information systems are plunged into highly dynamical environments which produce occurrences of unpredictable situations. This dynamics combined with the inherent geographical and functional distribution of such systems, make usual adaptation techniques which are global or dependent of the intended global function realised by the system, unsuitable. Our contribution concerns a partial instantiation of a local adaptation method, based on adaptive multi-agent systems, to manage the QoS of information systems. This management is done according to two points of view addressed in an integrate way: a quantitative one and a qualitative one. First obtained results, showing the benefits of cooperation to the adaptation of such systems, are then discussed.
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Paper Nr:	564
Title:	A GEOGRAPHICAL QUESTION ANSWERING SYSTEM
Authors:	Ehsan Behrangi, Hamed Ghasemzadeh, Kyumars Sheykh Esmaili and Behrouz Minaei Bidgoli
Abstract:	Question Answering systems are one of the hot topics in context of information retrieval. In this paper, we develop an open-domain Question Answering system for spatial queries. We use Google for gathering raw data from the Web and then in a few iterations density of potential answers will be increased, finally based on a couple of evaluators the best answers are selected to be returned to user. Our proposed algorithm uses fuzzy methods to be more precise. Some experiments have been designed in order to evaluate the performance of our algorithm and results are totally promising. We will describe that how this algorithm can be applied to other type of questions as well.
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Paper Nr:	568
Title:	USING XSD INHERITANCE FOR XML-DRIVEN PRESENTATION LAYOUT IN WWW, ITV AND MULTI-CHANNEL PUBLISHING - Facilitating Large-Scale Publishing
Authors:	Daniel Giribet
Abstract:	The usage of abstract XML layout languages has proven an effective technique of agile, adaptable and multi-channel multimedia publishing. This general strategy employs an XML definition file specifying graphical widget layout and relative disposition regardless of specific presentation medium. This strategy has been successfully applied for WWW, MHP, WAP, PDA and in many media platforms and there exist several existing proposals and implementations. However, not many general formal strategies have been developed to address some XML-based layout language design challenges such as general structure, validation and schema development. Additionally, there are some implementation issues that many such techniques fail to address properly. In this paper, a simple yet powerful general strategy of solving these issues is described: the XSD standard is leveraged to help in designing and validating XML layout languages as well as aiding in the development of GUI layout applications. This strategy is proposed as a practical approach valid in large-scale publishing environments.
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Paper Nr:	569
Title:	EFFICIENT NAVIGATION ON THE WORLDWIDEWEB FOR THE PHYSICALLY DISABLED
Authors:	Leo Spalteholz, Kin Fun Li and Nigel Livingston
Abstract:	One of the major obstacles with current web access solutions for those with physical disabilities is the efficient selection of links and other web page elements. This is especially so for users of single switches. Current solutions simply build a list of the selectable web page elements and use a linear scan to iterate through them, selecting the highlighted link when the user activates an input device. We propose a new method based on incremental searching of the link text to select elements. This approach, paired with well-established switch typing solutions, allows a single switch user to select any element on a web page by typing very few (most often only one) letters.
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Paper Nr:	572
Title:	DESIGN OF A WEB-BASED INTERFACE FOR IMAGE RETRIEVAL SYSTEMS
Authors:	Liam Mayron and Oge Marques
Abstract:	In this work we present a new interface for image retrieval system that highlights the potential of a real-time, Web-based application. This system, the Perceptually-Relevant Image Search Machine (PRISM), combines the capabilities of content-based, content-free, and semantic annotation-based image retrieval. Each of the aforementioned image retrieval methods has its own strengths, weaknesses, and impracticalities. It is our hope that the PRISM interface, by enabling the simultaneous expression of all three methods, will lead to more robust image retrieval systems.
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Paper Nr:	577
Title:	SCUBA DIVER: SUBSPACE CLUSTERING OF WEB SEARCH RESULTS
Authors:	Fatih Gelgi, Srinivas Vadrevu and Hasan Davulcu
Abstract:	Current search engines present their search results as a ranked list of Web pages. However, as the number of pages on theWeb increases exponentially, so does the number of search results for any given query. We present a novel subspace clustering based algorithm to organize keyword search results by simultaneously clustering and identifying distinguishing terms for each cluster. Our system, named Scuba Diver, enables users to better interpret the coverage of millions of search results and to refine their search queries through a keyword guided interface. We present experimental results illustrating the effectiveness of our algorithm by measuring purity, entropy and F-measure of generated clusters based on Open Directory Project (ODP).
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Paper Nr:	580
Title:	SIMPLE EVOLUTION OF COMPLEX WEB SYSTEMS
Authors:	Lech Krzanik
Abstract:	Usability implies effective, efficient and satisfactory interaction with a system when using it. Similar properties are not usually considered when an end user is faced with evolutionary developing or improving a system – an activity increasingly more often, particularly when the context of using a system undergoes frequent and significant changes. Project Nomadic Media investigated possibilities for user-participative, effective, efficient and satisfactory evolution of nomadic systems. We considered geographically distributed, context-sensitive, personalized systems, exploiting various web services and allowing for a general function referred to as nomadic blogging. In this paper we demonstrate general policies of evolution and the specific ways of end-user interaction with the evolving system. The overall strategy may be generally described as simplicity – effective with clear and straightforward goals, efficient in terms of resources spent at each small evolutionary delivery step and satisfactory in terms of end-user participation and reaching the explicit planned user targets. Results of experiments with such systems are demonstrated.
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Paper Nr:	586
Title:	PERSONAL ARCHIVING AND RETRIEVING IMAGE SYSTEM (PARIS)
Authors:	Pei-Jeng Kuo, Terumasa Aoki and Hiroshi Yasuda
Abstract:	In previous publications, we have proposed the DDDC architecture which annotates multimedia data with twelve main attributes regarding its semantic representation. In addition, we also proposed machine-understandable “Spatial and Temporal Based Ontologies” representation for the above DDDC semantics description to enable semi-automatic annotation process. PARIS (Personal Archiving and Retrieving Image System) is an experiment personal photograph library, which includes more than 80,000 of consumer photographs accumulated within a duration of approximately five years, metadata based on our proposed MPEG-7 annotation architecture, Dozen Dimensional Digital Content (DDDC), and a relational database structure. In this paper, we explain our proposed spatial and temporal coordinated Ontologies constructed based on personal related photograph preferences. As personal digital photograph libraries have specific characteristics and are particularly Spatial and Temporal associated, we envision various novel retrieval possibilities at semantic level can be developed based on the proposal described in this paper.
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Paper Nr:	608
Title:	EVALUATING THE USERS’ EXPERIENCE OF A PDA-BASED SOFTWARE APPLIED IN ART MUSEUMS
Authors:	R. Tesoriero, María D. Lozano, J. A. Gallud and V. M. R. Penichet
Abstract:	Mobile devices as smartphones or PDAs are common in our daily life. Museums and art galleries provide electronic guides in order to do more pleasant a visit or exhibition. The problem tackled in this paper is to prove the suitableness of using a PDA, instead of the traditional guides. In this case an application was specially developed to provide users that are visiting the museum additional information and help. It is interesting to know how to adapt these devices to guide and improve visitors’ experience. Moreover, we have to take into account that technology should not be the centre of attention in art museums or exhibitions, but it should be unperceivable. Thus, in this paper, we describe an evaluation of a real system deployed in an emblematic museum in Spain, called Cutlery Museum of Albacete. Our approach offers visitors a PDA that employs a wireless network to show additional information about old knives, jack-knives and scissors which are exhibited in the museum. In this way, art and technology are combined with success. The system supports four languages and incorporates special functions for disabled people. This article shows the users’ satisfaction results collected during the last 18 months. These results lead to a detailed analysis suggesting some improvements for future versions of the software.
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Paper Nr:	612
Title:	X3D IN RADIATION THERAPY PROCEDURE PLANNING
Authors:	Felix Hamza-lup, Ivan Sopin, Dan Lipsa and Omar Zeidan
Abstract:	Radiation therapy, an increasingly available and effective cancer treatment solution, involves sophisticated machinery as well as careful planning. Interactive 3D simulations combined with accurate 3D patient specific data can improve the planning process saving time and resources in generating the optimal treatment plan. We illustrate the potential of X3D in radiation therapy, specifically radiation treatment planning. Embedding patient specific data (2D CT scans) in the interactive virtual setup improves the radiation therapy planning by early detection of collision cases. The X3D system may be used to support the decision making process as well as innovations in medical planning and training.
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Paper Nr:	10
Title:	AUGMENTING SEARCH WITH CORPUS-DERIVED SEMANTIC RELEVANCE
Authors:	Zachary Mason
Abstract:	This paper describes a system for doing contextually-steered web search. The system is based on a method for estimating the semantic relevance of a web page to a query. Consider doing a web search for conferences about web search. The query “search conferences” is not effective, as it produces results relevant for the most part to searching over conferences, rather than conferences on the topic of search. The system described in this paper enables queries of the form “search conference context:pagerank”. The context field in this example specifies a preference for results semantically relevant to the term “pagerank”, although there is no requirement that said results contain the word “pagerank” itself. This a more semantic, less lexical way of refining the query than adding literal conjuncts. Contextual search, as implemented in this paper, is based on the Google (Google) search engine. For each query, the top one hundred search results are fetched from Google and sorted according to their relevance to the context query. Relevance is computed as a distance function between the vocabulary vectors associated with a web-page and a query. For queries, the vocabulary vector is formed by aggregating the web-pages in the search results for that query. For web-pages, the vocabulary vector is aggregated from that web-page and other web-pages nearby in link-space.
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Paper Nr:	88
Title:	RANKING ALGORITHMS FOR WEB SITES - Finding Authoritative Academic Web Sites and Researchers
Authors:	Dalibor Fiala, François Rousselot and Karel Jezek
Abstract:	In this paper, we discuss several common ranking algorithms for Web pages and we present a methodology based on them for finding authoritative researchers by analyzing academic Web sites. We show a case study in which we concentrate on a set of French computer science departments’ Web sites. We analyze the relations between them via hyperlinks and find the most important ones. We then examine the contents of the research papers present on these sites and determine the most authoritative French authors. We also propose some future improvements.
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Paper Nr:	176
Title:	CREATING A META-MODEL FOR SEMANTIC WEB SERVICE STANDARDS
Authors:	Florian Lautenbacher and Bernhard Bauer
Abstract:	Annotating web services with semantic information is a tremendous piece of work for persons who are not familiar with the languages and underlying logic. However, a graphical model can assist users to achieve this goal easily. Therefore, we reviewed existing standards and developed a meta-model and UML profile for semantic web services based on the current W3C submissions to enable an automatic generation of code and reduce this normally time-consuming task.
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Paper Nr:	395
Title:	SEARCH ON THE WEB WITH SPATIAL CRITERIONS - Improving a Search Engine with Spatial Queries
Authors:	Jose Eduardo Corcoles, Pascual Gonzalez and Marcos Rodriguez
Abstract:	In tackling the Semantic Web, a rich domain that requires special attention is the Semantic Geospatial Web. In order to achieve the Semantic Geospatial Web, an approach to query non-spatial resources using spatial criterions is presented in this paper. The non-spatial resources are well-known web resources represented by HTML, GIF, PDF, etc. However, to use spatial criterions a set of spatial resources with spatial information represented with GML (geographic Markup Language) is necessary. In this way, queries with spatial operators (touch, within, near, etc.) can be carried out over resources. In this approach, the relations between spatial and non-spatial resources are carried out “on the fly” in each query, i.e., they are not manually pre-stored. So, the main aim of this approach is to boost the capacity of Search Engines (such as Google, Yahoo!, etc) in order to include spatial criterions in the queries and not only string matches.
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Paper Nr:	396
Title:	DOMINANT PATTERN OF VISUAL DESIGN IN ONLINE CLOTHING WEBSITES
Authors:	Anitawati Mohd Lokman, Nor M. Noor and M. Nagamachi
Abstract:	Visual web design covers website content and layout. In the context of content, the use of trendy technologies is suggested as a method to deliver a better look and feel of clothing products in the online environment. However, it has been recognized by the study and in the literature that the use of these technologies is less popular and there seems to be a paradigm shift towards instilling positive consumer experience in online shopping via emotional usability engineering. This shift is seen in previous studies that linked consumer’s decision making with emotion. Correspondingly, the research investigates the detail design elements and presents the result in the form of dominant pattern of visual design in online clothing websites. 163 online clothing websites were selected based on their visible differences in both content and layout context. Analysis was conducted based on predefined rules and controls. A descriptive model of the dimension of a visual web design is derived and a model of visual technology on online clothing website is presented. This study of detail website design elements is the know-how technique in investigating associations with consumer’s emotional responses, towards incorporating emotional appeal into web design, as an alternative for online shopping experience.
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Paper Nr:	405
Title:	TOWARDS POLYGON-BASED SIMILARITY AGGREGATION IN ONTOLOGY MATCHING
Authors:	Feiyu Lin and Kurt Sandkuhl
Abstract:	Due to an increased awareness of potential ontology applications in industry, public administration and academia, a growing number of ontologies are created by different organizations and individuals. Although these ontologies are developed for various application purposes and areas, they often contain overlapping information. In this context, it is necessary to find ways to integrate various ontologies and enable use of multiple ontologies. A number of concepts and approaches for ontology alignment and matching have been developed in this field. In this paper, we introduce our preliminary work on ontology matching using polygon-based similarity aggregation. The main ideas we contribute to the research field are (1) to aggregate the results of distance calculations between concepts in different ontologies by creating polygons for each ontology and (2) to compare the area of these polygons for deciding on similarity.
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Paper Nr:	406
Title:	FORMAL DESIGN OF SMIL DOCUMENTS
Authors:	Abdelkader Belkhir and Samia Bouyakoub
Abstract:	This article introduces a new formal technique based on extended timed Petri nets, called SMIL-Net for the modelling and the verification of SMIL presentations. We also propose a technique for the temporal and hyper-temporal consistency checking of the document based on the SMIL-Net model.
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Paper Nr:	454
Title:	SEMANTIC WEB BROWSING
Authors:	Ioannis Papadakis and Michalis Stefanidakis
Abstract:	The employment of semantic web technologies like ontologies, give the opportunity to web engineers to model the information space of web sites according to the conceptualization of the broader domain they refer to. In this paper, an innovative highly interactive semantic web browsing methodology is presented, that is applicable to a wide range of current web sites of rich and at the same time diverse content. The proposed approach is demonstrated through a prototype semantic web application based on current web technologies such as OWL and Ajax.
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Paper Nr:	463
Title:	HOW DO GREEK SEARCHERS FORM THEIR WEB QUERIES?
Authors:	Fotis Lazarinis
Abstract:	This paper presents an initial analysis of a large log of Greek Web queries. The main aim of the study is to understand how users form their queries. The analysis showed that users include terms of low discriminatory value and form their queries in various non lemmatised forms. Lower case queries are the most common case, although several query instances are in upper case. Accent marks are usually left out by query terms. These conclusions could be utilized by local and worldwide search engines so as to improve the services offered to the Greek Web community and to users of other morphologically complex natural languages.
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Paper Nr:	471
Title:	ECA RULE ONTOLOGY - Modelling Prescriptive Rules as Descriptive Ontology
Authors:	Vandana Kabilan and Pernilla Svan
Abstract:	Ontology is said to be descriptive in contrast to the prescriptive nature of typical behaviour, process or rules. However, rules and behaviour models are in themselves a domain of re usable shared knowledge. Whether in the domain of enterprise systems or in military modelling and simulations, we find instances of such ’prescriptive’ body of knowledge. While capturing such ’rules’ as programmatic axioms using rule languages may be viable, it does not help us is establishing the reusable domain knowledge. In this paper, we combine software engineering technique based on the Event Condition Action logic to propose the ECA Rule Ontology as a mechanism for capturing such prescriptive rules as ontological conceptualisations. We exemplify our approach by applying it to the domain of military operations modelling and simulations.
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Paper Nr:	477
Title:	DYNAMIC DEPLOYMENT OF SEMANTIC-BASED SERVICES IN A HIGHLY DISTRIBUTED ENVIRONMENT
Authors:	Christos Chrysoulas and Odysseas Koufopavlou
Abstract:	Today’s Networking Systems tend to increase in both heterogeneity and complexity. So there arises the need for an architecture for network-based services that provides flexibility and efficiency in the definition, deployment and execution of the services In this paper we present an approach that applies a Semantic-based Service deployment framework, which enables the provision of parallel applications as QoS-aware, whose performance characteristics may be dynamically negotiated between a client application and service providers. Our component model allows context dependencies to be explicitly expressed and dynamically managed with respect to the hosting environment, computational resources, and dependencies on other components.
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Paper Nr:	495
Title:	A SYSTEM OF LEARNING LINKS BETWEEN UTTERANCES WITH META-INFORMATION IN CHARACTER BASED MULTI-PARTY CONVERSATION BY DECISION TREE
Authors:	Junpei Nakamura, Yasuhiro Tajima and Yoshiyuki Kotani
Abstract:	It is important to find out interactive links between pairs of utterances in multi-party conversation like an online chat. Though the usage of linguistic information is necessary to do this, we showed the better performance to this criterion by using physical meta-information that consists of the number of conversation members, the distance between utterances, and the frequency of individual utterance. The result of the examination of Decision Tree learning showed the accuracy is 84.1%, the precision is 87.1% and the recall is 66.9% for link between same speaker’s utterances, and the accuracy is 77.5%, the precision is 68.5% and the recall is 56.8% for link between others’ utterances. The result of the examination without meta-information showed the accuracy is 62.7%, the precision is 86.7%, the recall is 64.5% for same speaker’s utterances, and the accuracy is 77.9%, the precision is 73.8% and the recall is 49.9% for others’. These results showed we could find new links by using meta-information.
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Paper Nr:	510
Title:	FORMAL DESCRIPTION OF WEB USER INTERFACES FOR AUTOMATIC GENERATION
Authors:	Vincenzo Cannella, Daniele Peri, Roberto Pirrone and Edoardo Ardizzone
Abstract:	In this work we present an extension of a paradigm for abstract description of user interfaces using data structures described in the Set Description Language (SDL). An experimental software system for the automatic design and generation of web client interfaces has been developed too, which makes use of the Extended SDL (ESDL). At first, an interface is described at the highest level of abstraction through the data it operates on, and it is generated in a way that enforces data correctness. Generation of interfaces is executed by an expert system on the basis of a set of rules expressed in first order logic. The development of the system relies on AJAX technology, which makes the developing process adaptive and allows the feasibility of dynamic web interfaces.
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Paper Nr:	516
Title:	BROWSING A STRUCTURED MULTIMEDIA REPOSITORY
Authors:	Rui Lopes and Luís Carriço
Abstract:	Browsing large amounts of assorted multimedia poses several challenges on creating a supporting user interface. Even further, if metadata, structures and relations are defined on top of multimedia fragments, the complexity of a multimedia repository increases. However, this is also a path for exploiting new browsing mechanisms. This paper presents insights on which aspects should be available on a task-oriented user interface for browsing a structured multimedia repository, centred on speeding up interaction through media independent navigation schemes and user advisory.
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Paper Nr:	531
Title:	SEMANTIC SERVICE DESCRIPTION TO SUPPORT EDUCATION AND TRAINING - An Easy-to-Apply Service Description Model and Service Registry
Authors:	Karsten Krutz, Tilmann Kuhn, Christophe Gnad and Sebastian Abeck
Abstract:	This work describes a semantic service description model based on and inspired by existing service description approaches like WSDL-S and OWL-S and a service registry to support the creation of service oriented applications in the area of education and training. Our service description is based on an OWL ontology and combines a simple message- and state-oriented approach in order to reduce the effort for the creation of the descriptions which is a major drawback of a lot of existing, powerful semantic service description approaches. Furthermore, the proposed service description enables the matchmaking algorithm of the service registry to use not only the data-oriented input and output parameters to identify suitable services but also considers the preconditions and effects of a service. The usage of the service description model and the search capabilities are discussed against the background of the education and training area.
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Paper Nr:	535
Title:	RECOMMENDATION OF WEB RESOURCES FOR ACADEMICS - Architecture and Components
Authors:	Pavel Cech and Vladimír Bureš
Abstract:	Vast amount of resources in digital libraries and on the Internet makes the selection of relevant and appropriate resources rather difficult especially for novices and less experienced academics such as students. The article presents an architectural solution for personal recommendation system of web pages targeted to the academic sphere. The solution aims to meet the objective of minimizing the overheads and provide support for PDF documents. The solution is based on a set of heterogeneous components connected via web services.
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Paper Nr:	539
Title:	HARVESTING AND AGGREGATION OF DIGITAL LIBRARIES USING THE OAI FRAMEWORK
Authors:	Alon Kadury and Ariel Frank
Abstract:	Digital Libraries (DLs) are an important tool for quality information retrieval over the Internet. However, with the information explosion on the Internet and the increase in the number of DLs, users might need to search several DLs before finding the relevant information looked for. Federated DLs (FDLs) and Harvested DLs (HDLs) can solve this problem. To overcome the lack of uniformity and interoperability problems between DLs and to develop standards that can ease the distribution of information between them, an initiative called OAI established the OAI-PMH (Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting) protocol. While this protocol enables the construction of FDLs, HDLs are hardly found. This paper presents the RIDDLE model for construction and aggregation of HDLs using the OAI-PMH protocol with some modifications. The use of RIDDLE can provide for high quality information retrieval from digital libraries on the Internet.
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Paper Nr:	542
Title:	WEB PAGE RECOMMENDATION BY URL-BASED COLLABORATIVE FILTERING
Authors:	Kiyotaka Takasuka, Minoru Terada and Kazutaka Maruyama
Abstract:	Because the number of Web pages is very huge, and still increasing, many people have difficulty to reach pages they want. Although social bookmarking and search engines are helpful, users still have to find pages themselves. Our goal is to recommend Web pages which are supposed to be interesting for a user, without active effort by the user. We first analyzed the http traffic data in our university collected by a sniffer, and developed a recommendation system that works on URLs and their viewers (IP address). Our system has four features: (1) collaborative filtering, (2) implicit build of user profiles, (3) exclusion of popular Web pages (4) and use of the real activity in our university. We evaluated the effectiveness of our system by applying it to the real http transaction data and found that there were 18 successful recommended users out of 50 users.
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Paper Nr:	545
Title:	A PROTOTYPE FOR KNOWLEDGE EXTRACTION FROM SEMANTIC WEB BASED ON ONTOLOGICAL COMPONENTS CONSTRUCTION
Authors:	Nesrine Ben Mustapha, Baazaoui Hajer and Marie-aude Aufaure
Abstract:	Adding a semantic dimension to web pages is a response to some problems of the present web and is known as the semantic web. Many methods and methodologies can be found in the literature. Generally, they are dedicated to particular data types like text, semi-structured data, relational data, etc. This paper presents a prototype for knowledge extraction from web pages based on ontological components construction. Our work deals with web pages. We will first study the state of the art of methodologies defined to learn ontologies from texts. Then, we will define architecture of ontological components for the Semantic web. An implementation and experimentation of the proposed architecture are presented.
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Paper Nr:	550
Title:	SOFTWARE TOOLS FOR NAVIGATION IN DOCUMENT DATABASES - Development of Information Navigation Service Based on Classification Schemes
Authors:	Pavel Shapkin and Alexander Shapkin
Abstract:	Internet allows accessing large document databases contained in different information centres across the world. Each database has its own search engine which is based on an index or classification scheme. Problems occur when a user tries to search different databases at once: different databases use different classification schemes. This article describes a classification scheme mapping service which is useful in integration of different databases in one search engine.
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Paper Nr:	567
Title:	AUTOMATIC CONVERSION TOOL FOR ACCESSIBLE WEB
Authors:	Juan M. Fernández-Ramírez, Vicenç Soler and Jordi Roig
Abstract:	A tool for automatic conversion for making accessible Web pages is presented. It is set in the Help to the Integration of Disabled Persons to the New Technologies field. The project tries to bring the Web to as much people as possible. To get it, we analyze HTML documents and style sheets to adequate them to the regulation of the accessibility dictated by World Wide Web Consortium. The application of this project means a substantial improvement to the access of the information contained in the Web, even though a disability is suffered or not. It improves navigation with all kinds of devices and the view of the Web contents.
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Paper Nr:	570
Title:	HEI - A HIGH EDUCATION INSTITUTIONS ORIENTED CONTENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM - Making Easy the Web Content Publishing for High Education Institutions
Authors:	Roger Wagner and Francisco A. Moreira Do Nascimento
Abstract:	This work presents a content management system (CMS) oriented to high education institutions, allowing the optimization of the internal web publishing processes in a way that encourages the uniformity of the information exhibition on the Web. Our CMS tool also enforces that the portal of the institution must be the starting point for any resource offered by the many faculties of the Institution. We applied our CMS tool to develop the portal of a high education institution and this case study has shown the efficiency and practicability of our approach.
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Paper Nr:	579
Title:	ACCESSIBILITY OF MULTIMEDIA RESOURCES IN WEB
Authors:	Lourdes Moreno, Ana Iglesias and Paloma Martínez
Abstract:	This paper emphasises the importance of providing accessibility of Web-based information resources for everybody, not only for people with disabilities. Due to the continuous technical and social changes of the Web, it is necessary to have in mind that new scenarios and user behaviour are appearing. Nowadays, most of Web sites use multimedia resources and it is indispensable to provide accessibility not only to the resource content, but the access to the resource in the Web site. This work summarises some items to take into account in order to make accessible a multimedia resource and present some best practices including on-line multimedia resources in a Web site.
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Paper Nr:	584
Title:	FINDING SUITABLE KEYWORDS FOR A WEB PAGE FROM CACHES BASED ON SIMILARITY AND FREQUENCY
Authors:	Yasuhiro Tajima and Yoshiyuki Kotani
Abstract:	Meta data are most important entry in a web page for summarization, indexing, and so on. Unfortunately, there are many kind of matadata item but there are few guidelines for construct the metadata for a web page. We propose an metadata finding method for a web page by searching the internet caches and selecting suitable items for the target page. Our method is based on a bayesian method which is used in the area of text retrieval. We evaluate this method by an experiment to find a set of suitable keywords for a source web page. Compareing the original metatagged keywords and the system output, we obtain 74% precision and 76% recall. We can conclude that this method finds the tendency of metadata which is annotated to the pages similar to the target page.
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Paper Nr:	600
Title:	CONTEXT-AWARE MODEL DRIVEN DEVELOPMENT: APPLICATIONS TO WEB SERVICES PLATFORM
Authors:	Slimane Hammoudi, Samyr Vale and Stephane Loiseau
Abstract:	Context-aware applications have been developed since the last decade but until today there has not yet been a common definition about what context means. One thing everybody agrees on is that applications must be more adaptable for each user. Context-aware applications aggregate different types of context to be more personalized and to respond more effectively the user needs. Nevertheless inserting personal context information into application code inhibits software development productivity and reuse. We propose in this work the separation of business logic from context properties in different models, as context depends essentially on a particular environment and user situation. We suggest the use of the Model Driven Development (MDD) approach to design context-aware applications. Context information as models can improve reusability and interoperability in contextual applications. We use a context metamodel and suggest a merging model technique to build CPIM (Contextual Platform Independent Model). By traditional transformation techniques a CPSM (Contextual Platform Specific Model) can be built from a CPIM. Web Service is the target platform used on account of its distributed and interoperable characteristics.
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Area 4 - Society, e-Business and e-Government

Full Papers

Paper Nr:	178
Title:	AUTOMATIC SUMMARIZATION OF ONLINE CUSTOMER REVIEWS
Authors:	Jiaming Zhan, Han T. Loh and Ying Liu
Abstract:	Online customer reviews offer valuable information for merchants and potential shoppers in e-Commerce and e-Business. However, even for a single product, the number of reviews often amounts to hundreds or thousands. Thus, summarization of multiple reviews is helpful to extract the important issues that merchants and customers are concerned about. Existing methods of multi-document summarization divide documents into non-overlapping clusters first and then summarize each cluster of documents individually with the assumption that each cluster discusses a single topic. When applied to summarize customer reviews, it is however difficult to determine the number of clusters without the prior domain knowledge, and moreover, topics often overlap with each other in a collection of customer reviews. In this paper, we propose a summarization approach based on the topical structure of multiple customer reviews. Instead of clustering and summarization, our approach extracts topics from a collection of reviews and further ranks the topics based on their frequency. The summary is then generated according to the ranked topics. The evaluation results showed that our approach outperformed the baseline summarization systems, i.e. Copernic summarizer and clustering-summarization, in terms of users’ responsiveness.
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Paper Nr:	180
Title:	APPLICABILITY OF WEB-BASED INFORMATION SYSTEMS FOR SMALL KNOWLEDGE-ORIENTED SERVICE COMPANIES - Case Study from Finland
Authors:	Erno Salmela, Ari Happonen and Jukka Hemilä
Abstract:	The aim of this study was to explore the applicability of web-based information systems to the business processes of small knowledge-oriented service companies from Finland. The study explains the current status of web applications in the corporate sector researched, and discusses the future possibilities for applying web-based information systems, taking into consideration the special features of the sector. The applications have mainly been focused on contacts with authorities, paying invoices, marketing on public web sites and extranet services for customers. In two of the cases, web systems were used rather extensively in service processes. These two cases were far ahead of the others in applying web-based systems. However, also they applied web-based solutions mainly in the company's internal processes. In the studied companies, the application of web systems should in the future focus more on knowledge management support than on the automation of individual transactions. In many of the studied cases, the automation of transactions is not even sensible due to their small number. The application of web technologies to knowledge-oriented work based on creativity and innovation seems, however, to be challenging since the related processes normally produce unique solutions tailored to customers’ needs, which cannot easily be replicated and thus automated. Therefore, the automation of the entire creative process is impossible, but web technologies may produce added value to individual stages of the creative process, such as collecting and distributing data.
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Paper Nr:	180
Title:	APPLICABILITY OF WEB-BASED INFORMATION SYSTEMS FOR SMALL KNOWLEDGE-ORIENTED SERVICE COMPANIES - Case Study from Finland
Authors:	Erno Salmela, Ari Happonen and Jukka Hemilä
Abstract:	The aim of this study was to explore the applicability of web-based information systems to the business processes of small knowledge-oriented service companies from Finland. The study explains the current status of web applications in the corporate sector researched, and discusses the future possibilities for applying web-based information systems, taking into consideration the special features of the sector. The applications have mainly been focused on contacts with authorities, paying invoices, marketing on public web sites and extranet services for customers. In two of the cases, web systems were used rather extensively in service processes. These two cases were far ahead of the others in applying web-based systems. However, also they applied web-based solutions mainly in the company's internal processes. In the studied companies, the application of web systems should in the future focus more on knowledge management support than on the automation of individual transactions. In many of the studied cases, the automation of transactions is not even sensible due to their small number. The application of web technologies to knowledge-oriented work based on creativity and innovation seems, however, to be challenging since the related processes normally produce unique solutions tailored to customers’ needs, which cannot easily be replicated and thus automated. Therefore, the automation of the entire creative process is impossible, but web technologies may produce added value to individual stages of the creative process, such as collecting and distributing data.
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Paper Nr:	197
Title:	INSTANT COLLABORATION - Developing a Framework to Support New Patterns of Team-Cooperation
Authors:	Alexander Schatten, David Pölz and Matthias Epheser
Abstract:	Communication and collaboration is supported by a multitude of different (client) applications and backend systems. At the same time, new patterns of collaboration between knowledge workers arise: people want to communicate in-time, share resources, keep track of their issues and yet do not want to be unnecessarily disturbed in their concentration. We analyse several systems and approaches to support team-collaboration and finally introduce our understanding of “instant collaboration”. In our research we support first patterns with a middleware and client-side prototype. The system is built upon proven systems for (instant) messaging, communication and repositories, and suggest a system that allows support for new work-patterns, yet integrates seamlessly into existing IT and workgroup infrastructure and company policies.
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Paper Nr:	387
Title:	EXPERTS’ PERSPECTIVES ON BARRIERS TO THE DEPLOYMENT OF MOBILE GOVERNMENT SERVICES
Authors:	Tarek El-kiki, Elaine Lawrence and Gordana Culjak
Abstract:	Effective management is considered the crucial factor that decides the success or failure of any mService project. This paper is a further step into a research project that aims to measure the effectiveness of mGovernment services. As a preparatory step to developing a users’ opinion survey, this paper analyses and defines barriers to the success of mGovernment service projects from the perspective of mobile government and mobile technology experts from nineteen countries around the world. The outcome is compared to the findings from an extensive literature review. The results show a very close correspondence between the literature review and the opinions of the experts.
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Paper Nr:	430
Title:	MULTI-INTEREST COMMUNITIES AND COMMUNITY-BASED RECOMMENDATION
Authors:	Fang Wang
Abstract:	This paper introduces an approach to organising multi-interest communities in which a user may belong to more than one community. The interests of a user are first identified from the resources he handled and then refined through interest association analysis in order to remove false or redundant interests. To each identified interest topic, users who have this topic are clustered together, so a series of multi-interest communities are formed. Because members of a community may have interest in the topics of other communities, the formed communities are also connected with each other, resulting in a kind of community network indicating interest associations of groups of users. Based on formed multi-interest communities, users will receive useful recommendations within their own communities and from other related communities. This provides users opportunities to obtain information beyond their current interests so new interests of the users may be discovered. The multi-interest communities approach has been examined on the EachMovie data. The experimental results showed that the formed multi-interest communities were more cohesive and condensed when users were clustered according to their refined interest topics. The users also received much more recommendations based on multi-interest communities.
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Paper Nr:	450
Title:	WEB-BASED INFORMATION SYSTEMS SATISFACTION - Theoretical Development and Testing of Competing Models
Authors:	Christy M. Cheung and Matthew K. O. Lee
Abstract:	User satisfaction has been widely used in evaluating the performance of web-based information systems (WIS) since the growth of the World Wide Web. This study aims at investigating the structure and dimensionality of the WIS satisfaction construct. We tested the competing models built upon the web satisfaction model and assessed the psychometric properties of the factors and measuring items using confirmatory factor analysis. Our findings suggested that WIS satisfaction can be explained by a higher-order factor model with six first-order factors (i.e., understandability, reliability, usefulness, access, usability, and navigation) and two correlated second-order factors (i.e., web information satisfaction and web system satisfaction). The model provides a good-fit to the data and is theoretically valid, reflecting the logical or formal consistency. Implications of the current investigation for practice and research are provided.
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Short Papers

Paper Nr:	75
Title:	CITIZEN TRUST IN E-GOVERNMENT IN IRELAND - The Role of Webite Service Quality
Authors:	Regina Connolly
Abstract:	The emergence of the concept of e-government in the 1990s, the use of information and communications technology in the public sector turned from being inward looking and administration-focused to outward looking and service-focused. One aspect of this has been on-line tax filing which in Ireland takes the form of the Revenue Online Service (ROS). The purpose of this paper is to outline a research project that is currently being undertaken with the Irish Revenue Commissioners to evaluate the quality of ROS and the relationship between these e-service quality dimensions and citizen trust in the Revenue Commissioners. It describes the application of a newly developed website service quality measurement instrument in the unique context of electronic government. It is anticipated that the findings from this study will provide insight regarding the dimensions of website service quality that are most valued by users of ROS and also identify the dimensions of e-service quality that engender, or in their absence inhibit, citizen trust in this service. The application of this recently operationalised website service quality instrument will also provide evidence regarding the degree to which it is culture independent.
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Paper Nr:	79
Title:	CITIZEN TRUST IN E-GOVERNMENT IN IRELAND - The Role of Webite Service Quality
Authors:	Regina Connolly
Abstract:	The emergence of the concept of e-government in the 1990s, the use of information and communications technology in the public sector turned from being inward looking and administration-focused to outward looking and service-focused. One aspect of this has been on-line tax filing which in Ireland takes the form of the Revenue Online Service (ROS). The purpose of this paper is to outline a research project that is currently being undertaken with the Irish Revenue Commissioners to evaluate the quality of ROS and the relationship between these e-service quality dimensions and citizen trust in the Revenue Commissioners. It describes the application of a newly developed website service quality measurement instrument in the unique context of electronic government. It is anticipated that the findings from this study will provide insight regarding the dimensions of website service quality that are most valued by users of ROS and also identify the dimensions of e-service quality that engender, or in their absence inhibit, citizen trust in this service. The application of this recently operationalised website service quality instrument will also provide evidence regarding the degree to which it is culture independent.
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Paper Nr:	80
Title:	USING UDDI REGISTRY AND WORKFLOW ENGINE FOR MANAGING E-PROCUREMENT PROCESSES
Authors:	Juha Puustjärvi
Abstract:	In electronic business buyers and sellers should be able to interact with each others inside an architecture that is easy to use and maintain. Electronic auctions are an interesting approach to achieve this goal by bringing together business in the Web. Further the greatest benefits lie in cost reduction for buyers and sellers. Technically, an electronic marketplace is a virtual place that resides somewhere in the Internet. They can provide several types of business processes depending upon their target audience. A form of such processes is e-procurement. E-procurement technology is any technology designed to facilitate the acquisition of goods by a commercial or a government organization over the Internet. A form of eprocurement is reverse e-auctioning. In such auctions the supplier that made the lowest offer wins the auction. In this paper we describe the e-procurement system that we are developing. In particular we present how taxonomies and user profiles can be utilized in improving the effectiveness of the e-procurement process. From technological point of view we present how suppliers’ Web services support e-procurement specific operations, and how BPEL4WS (Business Process Execution Language for Web Services) can be used in orchestrating these Web services. In addition, we present how UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration) registry can be utilized in storing the used taxonomies and the profiles of the suppliers. In this way we can achieve high recall and precision fractions in searching relevant suppliers.
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Paper Nr:	156
Title:	A TWO-STAGED APPROACH FOR ASSESSING FOR THE QUALITY OF INTERNET SURVEY DATA
Authors:	Chun-Hung Cheng, Chon-huat Goh and Anita Lee-post
Abstract:	In this work, we propose to develop a procedure to detect errors in data collected through Internet surveys. Although several approaches have been developed, they suffer many limitations. For instance, many approaches require prior knowledge of data and hence they need different procedures for different applications. Others have to test a large number of parameter values and hence they are not very efficient. To develop a procedure to overcome the limitations of existing approaches, we try to understand the nature of this quality problem and establish its linkage to travelling salesman problem (TSP). Based on the TSP problem structure, we propose to develop a two-staged approach based on a genetic algorithm to help ensure the quality of Internet survey data.
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Paper Nr:	184
Title:	ANALYZING EBAY NEGOTIATION PATTERNS
Authors:	Adriano Pereira, Leonardo Rocha, Fernando Mourao, Thiago Torres, Wagner Meira Jr. and Paulo Goes
Abstract:	Online auctions have several aspects that violate the common assumptions made by the traditional economic auction theory. An online auction can be seen as an interactive economic information system, where usersystem interactions are usually very complex. It is important to note that the interactions are not isolated, but successive interactions become a loop-feedback mechanism, that we call reactivity, where the user behavior affects the auction negotiation and vice-versa. In this paper we describe a new hierarchical characterization model for online auctions and apply this model to a real case study, showing its advantages in discovering some online auction negotiation patterns. The results demonstrate that our characterization model provides an efficient way to open the auction dynamics’s “black box”. We also propose an abstraction named Auction Model Graph (AMG) which enables the temporal analysis of the negotiation. This work is part of a research to analyze reactivity in e-business, that may contribute to understand the business dynamics and has wide applicability to activities such as designing recommendation agents, service personalization, and site interaction enhancement.
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Paper Nr:	191
Title:	FROM CYBORG TO CYBERPUNK - The Art of Living in the Cyberage
Authors:	Anh T. Nuyen
Abstract:	The World Wide Web, the Internet and other cyber technologies have changed the way we live and work. In addition to such technologies, and interwoven with them, are biological technologies, such as those in the areas of cloning and genetic engineering. Some of us welcome the technological age, some are hostile to it, most are ambivalent, and hardly anyone approaches it with the Socratic question “How should one live?” The context in which Socrates asks this question, in The Republic, is different, but in the context of modern technology, electronic as well as biological, the significance of the question remains the same: Not a trifling matter as Socrates puts it. Indeed, the new technologies have changed the way we conduct ourselves so drastically, and the way we think about ourselves so fundamentally, that Socrates’ question must now be asked with urgency. In what follows I offer some reflections on how one should live with the new technologies, drawing on the works of Foucault, Heidegger, Leary and Haraway.
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Paper Nr:	195
Title:	A RULE-BASED DSS FOR THE QUALITATIVE PREDICTION OF THE EVOLUTION OF E-SALES
Authors:	Luca Canetta, Naoufel Cheikhrouhou and Rémy Glardon
Abstract:	Many parameters have a significant influence on e-commerce evolution. This complicates the assessment of the requirements for and the consequences of e-sales adoption. In order to support the decisions of companies thinking about a possible e-sales channels introduction a Decision Support System (DSS) is proposed. The relevant e-commerce success factors, which constitute the DSS input, have been identified and their influence described relying upon a literature review. The DSS output aims at describing typical ecommerce evolution patterns taking into account the speed of adoption and the steady state potential diffusion (saturation level). These variables point out the considerable discrepancies between the ecommerce evolution charactering different industrial sectors. The DSS, which is based on a system of rules, allows to qualitatively predict the expected e-sales evolution for companies introducing a specific e-sales channels strategy in a given environment and to explain it in terms of different e-commerce success factor configurations.
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Paper Nr:	398
Title:	A COMPUTING MODEL TO BRIDGE A GAP BETWEEN REAL SPACE ANDWEB SPACE
Authors:	Kenji Sugawara, Shigeru Fujita, Norio Shiratori, Takuo Suganuma and Tetsuo Kinoshita
Abstract:	In this paper, we propose a computing model named ”symbiotic computing” to bridge an e-Gap between the real space (RS) and the web space (WS). The symbiotic computing is a post ubiquitous computing model based on an agent-based model to bring in social heuristics and awareness of the RS into the WS. The symbiotic computing is defined as a space of computing model spanned by three axes of the Ubiquitous computing, the Web computing and P/S computing, which consists of Perceptualware and Socialware. The last section of this paper describes a prototypical system of a symbiotic computing-based application of uEyes, which is a gentle watch over system for elderly people in an ubiquitous computing environment.
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Paper Nr:	398
Title:	A COMPUTING MODEL TO BRIDGE A GAP BETWEEN REAL SPACE ANDWEB SPACE
Authors:	Kenji Sugawara, Shigeru Fujita, Norio Shiratori, Takuo Suganuma and Tetsuo Kinoshita
Abstract:	In this paper, we propose a computing model named ”symbiotic computing” to bridge an e-Gap between the real space (RS) and the web space (WS). The symbiotic computing is a post ubiquitous computing model based on an agent-based model to bring in social heuristics and awareness of the RS into the WS. The symbiotic computing is defined as a space of computing model spanned by three axes of the Ubiquitous computing, the Web computing and P/S computing, which consists of Perceptualware and Socialware. The last section of this paper describes a prototypical system of a symbiotic computing-based application of uEyes, which is a gentle watch over system for elderly people in an ubiquitous computing environment.
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Paper Nr:	410
Title:	TASK MODEL REPRESENTATION OF A COLLABORATIVE SYSTEM USING HYPERMEDIA NETWORKS
Authors:	Beatriz Jiménez, Miguel Sánchez Román, Francisco L. Gutiérrez Vela and Nuria Medina Medina
Abstract:	This paper presents a method for representing the task models of collaborative systems using hypermedia networks. The aim is to represent these models flexibly and extensibly so that they may be managed in web environments. This approach considers three relevant aspects of collaborative systems: the organization’s structure (roles), the tasks to be performed by organization members, and the resources necessary for carrying out these tasks. The AMENITIES methodology will be used to represent the initial models which describe these three aspects in collaborative systems. These initial models will be the basis for representing the transformation process for achieving our hypermedia network.
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Paper Nr:	413
Title:	INTERNET AND IT IN THE TMAD REGION - A Methodology to Promote their Use by General Communities
Authors:	Gina C. Santos, Maria Gentil Alves Domingos Reis, Nuno Manuel Vaz Vieira and M. C. J. C. S. Reis
Abstract:	This paper summarises our experience in furthering the use of the Internet and IT by general communities of northeast Portugal. We discuss the problems and constraints that we faced and the approach taken. Some of the resources made available and the most relevant results achieved are described and discussed.
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Paper Nr:	443
Title:	MINING CONSUMER OPINIONS ON THE WEB - Organizational Learning from Online Consumer-to-Consumer Interactions
Authors:	Irene Pollach
Abstract:	Consumer-opinion websites are becoming important sources of marketing intelligence for companies, enabling them to turn consumer opinions into opportunities for enhancing customer satisfaction. Grounded in media richness theory, this paper examines a sample of consumer-opinion websites to identify mechanisms that render the information disseminated on these websites more suitable for data mining activities. The results indicate that feedback mechanisms, member profiles, active hyperlinks, and spellcheckers are means of raising data quality. However, a key challenge for mining consumer opinions remains the identification and elimination of emotional content such as humor.
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Paper Nr:	457
Title:	E-RELATIONSHIP MARKETING BY CLOSED MEMBER AREAS IN THE GERMAN HEALTH INSURANCE INDUSTRY
Authors:	Said Salmi, Dirk Frosch-Wilke and Hilke Spoerel
Abstract:	German compulsory health insurance companies are in intense rivalry and for most of these companies customer loyalty is a critical success factor. E-Relationship marketing as a basic concept in business field is constantly on improving new means of managing customer relationship. The marketing departments in the health insurance industry have developed different tools of attracting their customers. One of the new strategies that are used today by industries in general and compulsory as well as private health insurances in particular is the implementation of an online closed member area that offers exclusively some benefits for their customers in order to create a long term customer relationship. For this reason we have benchmarked different national and international closed member areas of some health insurances. Using these results, we have developed a concept of an effective closed member area for a German health insurance as a part of the customer loyalty policy of this company. In fact, implementing this closed member area by a health insurance company will be very helpful in enhancing a long-term customer relationship and maintaining the competitive policy of that company.
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Paper Nr:	457
Title:	E-RELATIONSHIP MARKETING BY CLOSED MEMBER AREAS IN THE GERMAN HEALTH INSURANCE INDUSTRY
Authors:	Said Salmi, Dirk Frosch-Wilke and Hilke Spoerel
Abstract:	German compulsory health insurance companies are in intense rivalry and for most of these companies customer loyalty is a critical success factor. E-Relationship marketing as a basic concept in business field is constantly on improving new means of managing customer relationship. The marketing departments in the health insurance industry have developed different tools of attracting their customers. One of the new strategies that are used today by industries in general and compulsory as well as private health insurances in particular is the implementation of an online closed member area that offers exclusively some benefits for their customers in order to create a long term customer relationship. For this reason we have benchmarked different national and international closed member areas of some health insurances. Using these results, we have developed a concept of an effective closed member area for a German health insurance as a part of the customer loyalty policy of this company. In fact, implementing this closed member area by a health insurance company will be very helpful in enhancing a long-term customer relationship and maintaining the competitive policy of that company.
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Paper Nr:	497
Title:	SUPPORT FOR KNOWLEDGE AND INNOVATIONS IN SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT - Community within Company: Inner Source Environment
Authors:	Mirja Pulkkinen, Oleksiy Mazhelis, Pentti Marttiin and Jouni Meriluoto
Abstract:	This case study considers a software development support portal adapted from open source developer communities into a company internal, so called inner-source development environment. With theoretical insights into knowledge management (KM) models, recent advancements in KM theory building, and observations of the inner source platform we make observations as regarding the KM approach and suggestions for its further development. Both technological and human components of KM are considered. The results of this study, can be generally applicable to the knowledge creation and innovation support in software development. We believe that many software companies are following the example and building virtual environments to support the knowledge processes and innovation in their activities. The case company, Nokia, is a pioneer in KM efforts for the software organization.
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Paper Nr:	517
Title:	MOBILE FINANCIAL SERVICES: A SCENARIO-DRIVEN REQUIREMENTS ANALYSIS
Authors:	Apostolos Kousaridas, George Parissis and Theodore Apostolopoulos
Abstract:	Mobile devices are expected to extend financial information systems, providing additional communication interfaces and new dimensions in computing. Several architectures and commercial systems have been proposed and implemented during the last years for m-payment and m-banking services. However, few of them have met wide acceptance. In this paper, a real case scenario is described; where payment and banking services are taking place using a mobile phone. Through this scenario, we identify the main characteristics and the fundamental functional and technological requirements that should be satisfied by advanced mobile financial systems.
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Paper Nr:	520
Title:	AUTOMATIC & UNMANNED STOCK REPLENISHMENT PROCESS USING SCALES FOR MONITORING
Authors:	Ari Happonen and Erno Salmela
Abstract:	This paper presents a process description for a fully integrated, unmanned warehouse inventory replenishment system. This description serves as a springboard for discussion on the TEMO project (TEMO-Project, 2006), where the Vendor Managed Inventory (VMI) model’s current situation and future possibilities in the Finnish engineering industry are being studied. In this paper we concentrate exclusively on C-class product management challenges. Because of the exceptional characteristics of these products, Cclass product monitoring cannot be directly adapted to the VMI models used by the food industry, which are usually based on Point of Sale (POS) information. By presenting the “ideal” model, as well as an adapted version which can be carried out using currently available technology, the researchers would like to open scientific discussion on the subject, especially considering challenges in stock monitoring. The main idea is to offer a higher level of service to customers as well as new business opportunities to service providers. This kind of technology implementation would bring new challenges to supply chain management but also new areas for research, such as information management, communications engineering, as well as ecommerce and added value services, to the forefront.
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Paper Nr:	529
Title:	SEMANTIC LIFE EVENT ENVIRONMENT FOR EGOVERNMENT SERVICES - Towards a Holistic Support to Host eGovernment Services in a Scalar Manner
Authors:	Luis Álvarez Sabucedo and Luis Anido Rifón
Abstract:	The huge amount of resources that are being devoted to eGovernment projects makes possible the soaring of new solutions. This onrush of contributions leads us to some shortcomings such as lack of interoperability or poor scalability. To overcome this situation, the use of Life Events is proposed. Introduced in the paper, Life Events are the cornerstone for a semantic proposal to provide eGovernmentservices in an organized manner. A methodology for the use of Life Events and, also, the modelling of the entire system are presented.
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Paper Nr:	565
Title:	SPINNING A CORPORATE SEMANTIC WEB FOR PRODUCT ENGINEERING
Authors:	Uwe Keller, Stijn Heymans, Alois Reitbauer and Michael Neswal
Abstract:	We propose a novel approach towards a generic engineering support environment that combines Semantic Web technologies, Semantic Desktops, Group Memory Systems and Multi-Agent Systems to overcome the problems of current systems for supporting individuals in collaborative engineering processes. In particular, we aim at transferring the principles underlying the Semantic Web into an enterprise. This paper provides a motivation for our research, identifies requirements and outlines the proposed solution.
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Paper Nr:	592
Title:	INTERACTIVE HOMEPAGE OF NON-PROFIT ORGANIZATION
Authors:	Kim Fagerudd and Eija Koskivaara
Abstract:	This paper presents how local orienteering club with the interactive homepage attract new members, and communicate with people interested in or involve with the club. Especially, the children and youth sector is presented. This communication way is important in the city, where orienteering places are around the city and surroundings. Orienteering really is a hobby for the whole family – a real sport for all who wants to promote physical activity with metal and social well-being. It can be practised almost anywhere in the world, in all kinds of terrain from parks to woods. A map and a compass, and suitable outdoor clothes are all you need to get started. Orienteers navigate their way round a with the map and compass. To reach orienteering places is challenging, especially for newcomers, as the physical activity place changes almost every time, otherwise orienteer’s learns the terrain too well and the mental feedback is not so rewarding anymore. The interactive homepage of youth sector have eight items.
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Paper Nr:	595
Title:	HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT VIA THE WEB: OPPORTUNITIES AND THREATS
Authors:	Tanya Bondarouk and Huub Ruel
Abstract:	Web-based Human Resource Management (HRM) is coming to a more full-grown stage within organisational life. Much is assumed and expressed about its advantages, however scientific proof of these advantages is scarce. No clarity exists about the answer to the question whether Web-based HRM contributes to the effectiveness of HRM processes. This paper contributes to the Web Information Systems sciences in two ways. Firstly, findings-wise, we present results from the quantitative study on the contribution of Web-based HRM to HRM effectiveness. The data is collected in a Dutch ministry of Internal Affairs. Results show that actual use of the Web-based HRM application correlates with HR effectiveness, especially its content and design. Regression analysis confirms that the experienced quality of the Webbased HRM application is the only significant explanatory factor of technical and strategic HRM effectiveness. Secondly, in this paper we integrate two approaches, namely Web technology-oriented approach, and organizational processes-oriented approach. An intersection of Web- and HRM- studies reveals new possibilities both for scientific and practical implications.
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Paper Nr:	69
Title:	THE ORGANIZATIONAL EFFECTS OF E-COMMERCE - A Cross-sectional Study
Authors:	Efthymios Constantinides
Abstract:	Electronic Commerce (EC) is increasingly perceived as a mainstream element of the marketing strategy. With more firms trying to extract value from the virtualized and global marketplace of the 21st century it is essential that managers effectively address the problems related to the organizational adoption and internal implementation of EC. The paper evaluates the aptitude of the stages model, one of the well-known approaches describing the adoption of EC, in accurately mapping and explaining this complex process. Based on a study of ten commercial firms the study concludes that in the majority of cases the stages model does not adequately describe the EC adoption process. The model suffers from a fundamental flaw, namely overlooks the irregular pattern of the EC assimilation in the internal organizational processes who are shaped by EC with different intensity, in different ways and at different times rather than in a linear way the stages model suggests. The paper proposes a more flexible approach recognizing the complexity of this process and providing a more accurate and representative picture of the EC adoption by commercial firms.
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Paper Nr:	85
Title:	BUSINESS-TO-BUSINESS E-COMMERCE ADOPTION: A CASE STUDY APPROACH
Authors:	Moses Niwe
Abstract:	This case study research presents the preliminary findings from an explorative study concerning challenges, benefits and problems in adoption of business-to-business e-commerce. In this case study research two United States (U.S.) organizations are analyzed. Case one is a sporting goods company that has been doing Business to Business (B2B) based transactions since 1970s. Case two is a shipping and transportation company doing B2B transactions for over 3 decades. Both cases have gone through B2B transaction stages of growth; however management is still faced with tasks of understanding the drivers of B2B adoption.
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Paper Nr:	159
Title:	OPTIMIZATION CONTROL OF E-BUSINESS INCOME BASING ON INTERVAL GENETIC ALGORITHM OF MULTI-OBJECTIVE
Authors:	Qin Liao and Zhonghua Tang
Abstract:	In order to control the E-Business income, the relationship between 9 influencing factors and 3 controlling objectives is built by neural network. Then an interval genetic algorithm of multi-objective (IGAMO) is proposed to obtain the satisfactory interval solution instead of a single point solution provided by traditional algorithm. The IGAMO is constructed with 2-step genetic algorithm to find expending intervals satisfying the multiple income objectives, thus we gain the control conditions for influencing factors to make the income indexes fall in the anticipant intervals. The optimal control of E-Business income is proved to be feasible according to the analysis of the data collected from example e-Business enterprises of Guangzhou.
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Paper Nr:	161
Title:	RECIPIENT SPECIFIC ELECTRONIC CASH - A Scheme for Recipient Specific Yet Anonymous and Tranferable Electronic Cash
Authors:	Chittaranjan Mandal and Chris Reade
Abstract:	A new scheme for electronic money is described where e-cash is created for a specific recipient in any transaction. This has benefits for the efficiency of implementing measures against double spending. Details of the scheme are provided to show that anonymity and transferability are still possible with recipient specific e-cash. The scheme ensures both authentication and integrity of the electronic instrument. A method for giro payments based on the scheme is also discussed.
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Paper Nr:	174
Title:	KNOWLEDGE INTENSITY OF ORGANIZATIONS IN KNOWLEDGE ECONOMY
Authors:	Vladimír Bureš and Pavel Cech
Abstract:	Attention paid to knowledge can be seen at different levels. At the supranational and national levels, potential of single knowledge economies can be measured. To do this, we can use, for example, the Knowledge Assessment Methodology. It would also be useful to develop a similar methodology at the organizational level. The aim of this paper is to present the basics of our project, in which principles of this idea and an outline of a possible way how to sort out this problem based on the four pillars of knowledge management in organizations are currently elaborated.
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Paper Nr:	177
Title:	A STUDY OF THE INFLUENCE IN E-SHOPPING BY CUSTOMER SATISFACTION
Authors:	Cheng F. Hsu, Andreas and Y.a. Hsu
Abstract:	Online customer satisfaction is an influential key to reach the purpose. The development of E-commerce brings the new economic type; it is unable to increase more company value and higher customer satisfaction by the tradition customer relationship management. Hence, understanding what customers consider the most importance help establish a suitable e-business model, new to be systematic, the new method or the new mechanism which can intense also in the fast changing market subdues in e-competition. E-commerce management depends on the different strategy adopted by environments and enterprises overall transport business goal. This research aims at understanding how customer satisfaction influences B2C, interactions between customers and the medium; through customer data analysis to know the consumer behaviour pattern. By advantages of this draws up the role of customer satisfaction, it help B2C implementation, and promotes the customer cognition value, and then increase the enterprise profit.
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Paper Nr:	199
Title:	EMPOWERING PRIMARY HEALTH CARE SERVICES THROUGH E-GOVERNANCE - A Case Study from Delhi Government
Authors:	Rajan Vohra
Abstract:	In the field of health care services the responsibility for their delivery is shared by many agencies in the public sector. In addition there are central government ministries each with their own institutions. Each of these agencies provides health care services in Delhi through a variety of outlets like dispensaries and hospitals. These institutions function independently and there is neither proper coordination between the government agencies managing them nor between the institutes themselves at the operational level. This coordination is essential from the point of view of having a structured patient referral system and sharing of resources between institutes in addition to providing feedback to shape government health policies. In this research paper the study focuses on primary health service centres of Delhi Government. The research objectives of this paper are: • Study the working of Primary health centres including services provided. • Study the level of IT usage in these dispensaries • Analyze key problems faced by these dispensaries • Propose an e Governance model to manage these dispensaries • Determine obstacles & challenges in implementation of this model. This research paper uses some technologies that are being used by National health services (NHS) of UK. These technologies include use of call centers for service delivery and Decision support systems (DSS) that are being used in patient interaction.
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Paper Nr:	431
Title:	COMPARISON BETWEEN COMMUNITY NETWORKS IN U.S.A. AND IN SOUTH KOREA
Authors:	Jin Im and Jin-Wan Seo
Abstract:	In this paper, we will discuss (1) past, present, and future of the community network in the United States with an analytic framework of the community network lifecycle (2) planning and implementation of the INVIL project, a South Korean version of the community network; (3) similarities and dissimilarities between those two for comparison in terms of expected benefits, and (4) recommendations based on our analysis. Contributions of this paper are two folds: helping the South Korean government to improve the INVIL project and other governments to learn lessons on similar projects as part of their e-government programs.
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Paper Nr:	486
Title:	UNIVERSITY INFORMATION SYSTEM RUSSIA: MULTIFUNCTIONAL RESOURCE FOR RESEARCH, EDUCATION AND PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION
Authors:	Tatyana Yudina and Anna Bogomolova
Abstract:	Described in the paper is the Moscow State University-based Information System RUSSIA (uisrussia.msu.ru) – a multifunctional resource that have been started in 2000 as an electronic library for economic and social investigations and innovative education programs. NLP-technologies implemented under the project provide for content-based cross-collections search and query refinement. Researchassisting services are complimented. Accomplished under the project is a statistical information system that integrates main RF state agencies data collections and makes data analysis available at federal, regional and local levels. Work underway is on an ontology to integrate data and knowledge products. Currently the system is in growing demand for public administration.
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Paper Nr:	486
Title:	UNIVERSITY INFORMATION SYSTEM RUSSIA: MULTIFUNCTIONAL RESOURCE FOR RESEARCH, EDUCATION AND PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION
Authors:	Tatyana Yudina and Anna Bogomolova
Abstract:	Described in the paper is the Moscow State University-based Information System RUSSIA (uisrussia.msu.ru) – a multifunctional resource that have been started in 2000 as an electronic library for economic and social investigations and innovative education programs. NLP-technologies implemented under the project provide for content-based cross-collections search and query refinement. Researchassisting services are complimented. Accomplished under the project is a statistical information system that integrates main RF state agencies data collections and makes data analysis available at federal, regional and local levels. Work underway is on an ontology to integrate data and knowledge products. Currently the system is in growing demand for public administration.
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Paper Nr:	493
Title:	EZK: A ZERO KNOWLEDGE TOOL FOR GENERATING, HANDLING, AND SECURING ELECTRONIC BILLS OF LADING
Authors:	Andrea Visconti
Abstract:	EZK is a tool for generating, handling, and securing electronic bills of lading. EZK implements the cryptographic protocol suggested by Pagnoni and Visconti in (Pagnoni and Visconti, 2006), cryptographic protocol that is based on a shipper-carrier-holder model. This protocol makes use of (a) blind merchandise counts, or zero-knowledge counts, − that is, counts that do not reveal any information about the quantities actually counted, − (b) secure timestamps, and (c) digital signatures. We show how EZK generates and handles order e-BOLs and how the cryptographic techniques implemented in EZK make a number of common fraud schemes impossible.
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Paper Nr:	522
Title:	VCS: AN OPEN SOURCE WEB-BASED VACCINATION MANAGEMENT INFORMATION SYSTEM
Authors:	Carlos T. Renck, Leandro Sorgetz and Francisco A. Moreira Do Nascimento
Abstract:	This work presents VCS (Vaccination Control System), a Web based application implemented using the PHP script language, the PostgresSQL DBMS and the Apache web server under a GNU/Linux platform. VCS is a management information system tool for the vaccination process control, which was modelled and designed towards the necessities of the Brazilian public health system. The current version of VCS includes the management of vaccines, patients, mass immunization campaigns, access control to the recorded information, record of immunizations and history of immunizations per individual, and many statistical reports. An important social benefit provided by VCS is the improvement in the strategic planning for the public vaccination system, which results in a better assistance to the population in general and resources savings by governments with the reduction of vaccine lost.
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Paper Nr:	536
Title:	AN ANALYSIS OF INTERNET DEPLOYMENT AND GOVERNANCE
Authors:	Martin Knahl
Abstract:	Internet governance is concerned with the global management and operation of key internet resources. Given the global nature and reach of internet based services, technological as well as political aspects and considerations are interwoven and cannot be separated. This paper analyses current trends and developments regarding internet deployment and governance and is considering future developments. The paper suggests that governments as well as market governance will remain present for the network access and content. Is is further argued that internet governance is having more diversity with respect to governance and more prominent network governance than other communication channels. The paper further considers future developments and proposes alternative perspectives.
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Paper Nr:	543
Title:	QUERYING WORKFLOWS OVER DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS
Authors:	Hanna Kozankiewicz, Krzysztof Stencel and Kazimierz Subieta
Abstract:	We describe a new paradigm of declarative workflow, where an activity is modelled as an object which can have other activities as subobjects. All activities act in parallel and have pre- and post-conditions determining when they are to be started and when they are to be terminated. The proposal is based on the Stack-Based Approach (SBA) to object-oriented query languages, query language SBQL and updatable SBQL views. The idea is currently implemented within the European project eGov Bus.
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Paper Nr:	578
Title:	PERSPECTIVES OF E-GOVERNEMENTDEVELOPMENT IN POLAND
Authors:	Anna Dziech
Abstract:	This paper attempts to describe the phenomenon of e-Governement, which has recently appeared in the modern governance as the derivative of the global information society. First part of the article explains the definition and the essence of e-Governement. It also presents some main programmes that are being implemented in Poland in order to popularise e-Governance. The results of surveys held in year 2005, which show the actual condition of e-Governement in Poland conclude the article.
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