EXPERIMENTATION MANAGEMENT KNOWLEDGE SYSTEM

R. William Maule, Shelley P. Gallup and Gordon Schacher

A current focus in the DoD involves the integration of information across the different military branches for operations. Network-centric information methods will enable efficiencies through the integration of best-of- breed software and hardware from each branch of the military, together with the latest advances from government laboratories and the private sector. Information merging will promote synergy and expand effective use of the enterprise infrastructure to realize improved operational and organizational processes. Research to date has focused on core network and infrastructure capabilities but has not fully addressed strategic organizational objectives in the context of systems integration. A model is advanced that establishes variables for enterprise analysis to assess strategic technical objectives enabled or hindered through new network-centric capabilities. Examples are derived from operational experimentation in network-centric warfare but presented generically to apply to any organization seeking to assess the effectiveness of organizational strategy as enabled or hindered through network-based communications and enterprise-level systems integration.

WEB SERVICES AS AN INFORMATION ENABLER IN THE RETAIL INDUSTRY

Sudeep Mallick and Anuj Sharma

Retail organizations works on thin margins and hence it is very imperative that they utilize information technology to achieve optimization on time and space in the entire retail supply chain in order to remain competitive. However, as emerging technologies present new opportunities for lowering cost of operation, increasing efficiency, productivity and the overall customer satisfaction, it is also a big risk to experiment with these new technologies especially in a low margin scenario. Web services is an emerging technology holding tremendous promise as a platform neutral, easy to implement mechanism to achieve information and business process integration in the extended enterprise. In this paper, we review how Web services in consonance with other technologies can prove to be an effective business enabler and analyze the application of Web services in the retail vertical. The paper also proposes a road map approach towards adoption of Web services in this industry vertical which will help increase ROI and at the same time minimize the risk of adoption of this emerging technology.

INTEGRATED METHODOLOGY FOR INTERNET-BASED ENTERPRISE INFORMATION SYSTEMS DEVELOPMENT

Sergey V. Zykov

The paper considers software development issues for large-scale enterprise information systems (IS) with databases (DB) in global heterogeneous distributed computational environment. Due to high IT development rates, the present-day society has accumulated and rapidly increases an extremely huge data burden. Manipulating with such huge data arrays becomes an essential problem, particularly due to their global distribution, heterogeneous and weak-structured character. The conceptual approach to integrated Internet-based IS design, development and implementation is presented, including formal models, software development methodology and original software development tools for visual problem-oriented development and content management. IS implementation results proved shortening terms and reducing costs of implementation compared to commercial software available.

RESERVING IMMUTABLE SERVICES THROUGH WEB SERVICE IMPLEMENTATION VERSIONING

Robert Steele and Takahiro Tsubono

Widespread adoption of a Web services-based paradigm for software applications will imply that applications will typically have potentially many dependencies upon Web services that they invoke or consume. These invoked services might typically be available from a remote site and be under the administration of third parties. This scenario implies a significant vulnerability of a Web service-based application: one or more of the services which it consumes may become altered, hence potentially “breaking” the application. Such alterations might be such as those that alter the WSDL signature of the service or could be changes to the underlying service implementation that do not change the WSDL signature. In this paper, we will focus on the second of these two cases and will introduce a versioning system that can detect changes to service implementations and that can avoid the breaking of applications that call services in the face of changes to the implementations of those called services.

EMPOWERING DISABLED USERS THROUGH: THE CONCEPT CODING FRAMEWORK AN APPLICATION OF THE SEMANTIC WEB

Andy Judson, Nick Hine, Mats Lundälv and Bengt Farre

The World Wide Web offers many services from typical textual web content to shopping, banking and educational services, for example, virtual learning environments. These technologies are inherently complex to use, but in their very nature offer many benefits to the disabled person. The traversal of the web relies upon the cognitive skills of the user. You need to know what you want to do. You need to understand what the site is allowing you to do, and you need to be able to complete the task by interacting with the website. The emergence of the semantic web offers the potential to reduce the cognitive burden of understanding what the site can do and how to complete a task, whilst also offering new solutions to typical accessibility issues. In this paper, we aim to present how the semantic web can be used to enhance accessibility. Firstly we’ll give some examples of what is currently possible. Secondly we’ll motivate some research initiatives to enhance user independence for the disabled person, particularly those that use Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) systems and/or are Learning Impaired.

FORMAL VERIFICATION OF TRANSACTIONAL SYSTEMS

Mark Song, Adriano Pereira and Sergio Campos

Today, the trend in software is toward bigger, more complex systems. This is due in part to the fact that computers become more powerful every year leading users to expect more from them. People want software that is better adapted to their need which, in turn, merely makes software more complex. This trend has also been influenced by the expanding use of the internet for exchanging all kinds of information. As a new computational infra-structure has become available, new distributed applications which were previously too expensive or too complex have become common. In this context, web based systems has become a popular topic for business and academic research. However, web applications tend to generate complex systems. As new services are created, the frequency with which errors appear has increased significantly. This paper presents the UML-CAFE, an environment which can be used to help the designer in the development of transactional systems, such as web based ones. It is divided into the UML-CAFE Methodology, a set of transformation patterns, and the UML-CAFE translator to describe and map UML specifications into a formal model to be verified.

A META-MODEL FOR THE DIALOG FLOW NOTATION

Matthias Book, Volker Gruhn and Nils Mirbach

While the separation of presentation and application logic is widely practiced in web-based applications today, many do not cleanly separate application and dialog control logic, which leads to inflexible implementations especially when multiple presentation channels shall be served by the same application logic. We therefore present a notation for specifying the complete dialog flow of an application separately from the application logic and show how to construct a formal metamodel for it using the OMG's Meta-Object Facility (MOF). This allows the validation of dialog flow models, as well as the generation of machine-readable dialog flow specifications from graphical models.

LOGIC-BASED MOBILE AGENT FRAMEWORK USING WEB TECHNOLOGIES

Shinichi Motomura, Takao Kawamura and Kazunori Sugahara

We have proposed Maglog which is a framework for mobile multi-agent systems. Maglog is based on Prolog, and has the concept of field. A field is an object which can contain a knowledge base. With the concept of field, Maglog provides a simple and unified interface for 1)inter-agent communication, 2)agent migration between computers, and 3)utilization of data and programs on computers. An agent migrates using HTTP as the transport protocol and XML as the encoding format itself. In this paper, we present the implementation of Maglog on Java environment, in detail. Since we have implemented both command-line shell and GUI for Maglog, users can choose them for their needs. In addition, through XML-RPC interface for Maglog which we have also implemented, other systems can easily utilize Maglog. As examples, we outline several applications developed through XML-RPC interface.

P2P WEB-BASED TRAINING SYSTEM USING MOBILE AGENT TECHNOLOGIES

Shinichi Motomura, Takao Kawamura, Ryosuke Nakatani and Kazunori Sugahara

In this paper, we present a novel framework for asynchronous Web-based training. The proposed system has two distinguishing features. Firstly, it is based on P2P architecture for scalability and robustness. Secondly, all contents in the system are not only data but also agents so that they can mark user's answers, can tell the correct answers, and can show some extra information without human instruction. We also present a prototype implementation of the proposed system on Maglog. Maglog is a Prolog-based framework for building mobile multi-agent systems we have developed. The agent migrates using HTTP as transfer protocol and XML as encoding format itself. The user interface program of the proposed system is built on Squeak. Performance simulations demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed system.

AN ARCHITECTURE FOR CONTEXT-SENSITIVE TELECOMMUNICATION APPLICATIONS

Agnieszka Lewandowska, Maik Debes and Jochen Seitz

Nowadays, everybody utilizes information from different sources and services from various providers. However, one must know how to find the interesting information and how to access services. Wouldn’t it be better if information and service access could adapt to the user and his interests? This approach is the central point of the ubiquitous computing research. And the adaptation is done based on the current context describing the user and his equipment. Although there are many projects that claim to be context sensitive, a general architecture for context-sensitive applications has not yet been introduced. This paper closes this gap and describes an architecture that has been developed for assisting handicapped tourists during their holidays in the Thuringian Forest. However, this architecture can easily be generalized for any context-sensitive telecommunication application, because it gives a well-defined and flexible model for context information and defines several processes to gather, transfer, process and apply context information.

A DISTRIBUTED ALGORITHM FOR MINING FUZZY ASSOCIATION RULES

George Stephanides, Mihai Gabroveanu, Mirel Cosulschi and Nicolae Constantinescu

Data mining, also known as knowledge discovery in databases, is the process of discovery potentially useful, hidden knowledge or relations among data from large databases. An important topic in data mining research is concerned with the discovery of association rules. The majority of databases are distributed nowadays. In this paper is presented an algorithm for mining fuzzy association rules from these distributed databases. This algorithm is inspired from DMA (Distributed Mining of Association rules) algorithm for mining boolean association rules.

AN AUTOMATIC GENERATION METHOD OF DIFFERENTIAL XSLT STYLESHEET FROM TWO XML DOCUMENTS

Takeshi Kato, Norihiro Ishikawa and Norihiro Ishikawa

We propose a differential XSLT stylesheet generation method for arbitrary pairs of XML contents. It is possible to obtain the revised XML document by supplying the XSLT stylesheet with the differential data to the original XML document. Comparing with sending whole revised XML document, the original XML document can be updated by sending less information, the differential data. This paper introduces a difference detection algorithm based on the DOM tree and a difference representation method that permits the expression of difference information. We also discuss a new XSLT function for the proposed method. We also introduce prototype software implemented based on proposed method and evaluation result that shows the effectiveness of our method. An experiment shows that the proposed method is suitable for updating XML contents, especially for web service in the costly mobile network.

ON GEOSPATIAL AGENTS

Merik Meriste, Tõnis Kelder, Jüri Helekivi, Andres Marandi and Leo Motus

As access to spatial and real-time data improves, the need for appropriate software tools has become prevalent. To develop geospatial applications in this context requires an approach to software architecture that helps developers evolve their solutions in flexible ways. Two concepts are today considered reasonable here – web services and agents. This paper presents generic geospatial agents in a prototype of agent development environment KRATT. Pilot applications are described and experience discussed.

PIGGYBACK META-DATA PROPAGATION IN DISTRIBUTED HASH TABLES

Erik Buchmann, Sven Apel and Gunter Saake

Distributed Hashtables (DHT) are intended to provide Internet-scale data management. By following the peer-to-peer paradigm, DHT consist of independent peers and operate without central coordinators. Consequentially, global knowledge is not available and any information have to be exchanged by local interactions between the peers. Beneath data management operations, a lot of meta-data have to be exchanged between the nodes, e.g., status updates, feedback for reputation management or application-specific information. Because of the large scale of the DHT, it would be expensive to disseminate meta-data by peculiar messages. In this article we investigate in a lazy dissemination protocol that piggybacks attachments to messages the peers send out anyhow. We present a software engineering approach based on mixin layers and aspect-oriented programming to cope with the extremely differing application-specific requirements. The applicability of our protocol is confirmed by means of experiments with a CAN implementation.

A NEW VISION OF CONTROL FOR A SMART HOME

Pavlo Krasovsky and Jochen Seitz

Intelligent systems that provide integrated control for many functions, such as lighting, safeguard, air-conditioner, heating, housekeeping equipment and maintenance of electronics, are close at hand for the mass market. Main factors for the increase in needs of intelligent systems are: reduction of price, reputation of products, and technical improvements. There are many corresponding systems, control equipment and ser-vices at the market now. The main goal is the complete integration of all functions. It demands a high level of interoperability between equipment and subsystems. The most important and advanced stage of devel-opment is the remote control via internet or telephone. In the context of our project we developed a new concept of interaction between server-side hardware and end-user software. The main purpose is to develop a control system for the smart home in terms of communication and automation modules, first of all in a wireless range. A communication interface should allow changing properties of end-user software without recompilation. All necessary changes should happen in the server-side software with the help of configura-tion files. One can use any text editor to change these files. Client software has to have full control of the automation equipment at real time.

USING RELEVANT SETS FOR OPTIMIZING XML INDEXES

Paz Biber and Ehud Gudes

Local bisimilarity has been proposed as an approximate structural summary for XML and other semi-structured databases. Approximate structural summary, such as A(k)-Index and D(k)-Index, reduce the index's size (and therefore reduce query evaluation time) by compromising on the long path queries. We introduce the A(k)-Simplified and the A(k)-Relevant, approximate structural summaries for graph documents in general, and for XML in particular. Like A(k)-Index and D(k)-Index, our indexes are based on local bisimilarity, however, unlike the previous indexes, they support the removal of non-relevant nodes. We also describe a way to eliminate false drops that might occur due to nodes removal. Our experiments shows that A(k)-Simplified and A(k)-Relevant are much smaller then A(k)-Index, and give accurate results with better performance, for short relevant path queries

RESIDENTIAL GATEWAY FOR THE INTELLIGENT BUILDING: A DESIGN BASED ON INTEGRATION, SERVICE AND SECURITY PERSPECTIVE

Budi Erixson and Jochen Seitz

In this paper we present the architecture of a residential gateway, which is designed with the OSGi (Open Service Gateway Initiative) that coordinate with the LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) in order to integrate and connect the various home networks and appliances with the internet securely. The presented architecture is applied in the intelligent building project, LISTIG (LAN-integrated control system for intelligent building technique), the cooperation project between Technische Universität Ilmenau, Desotron (Sömmerda), with the University of Applied Science, Jena and the HFWK (Hörmann Funkwerk Kolleda GmbH) in Germany. This project is currently still on the progress to achieve the full integration of the several of home networking technologies, protocols and services.

SEAMLESS AND SECURE AUTHENTICATION FOR GRID PORTALS

Jean-Claude Côte, Mohamed Ahmed, Gabriel Mateescu, Roger Impey and Darcy Quesnel

Grid portals typically store user grid credentials in a credential repository. Credential repositories allow users to access Grid portals from any machine having a Web browser, but their usage requires several authentication steps. Current portals require users to explicitly go through these steps, thereby hindering their usability. In this paper we present intuitive and easy to use tools to manage certificates. We also describe the integration of Grid Security Infrastructure authentication into a Java-based SSH terminal tool. Based on these tools, we build an innovative portal authentication mechanism that enables transparent delegation of credentials between clients, grid portal and the credential repository.

DEVELOPING A WEB CACHING ARCHITECTURE WITH CONFIGURABLE CONSISTENCY: A PROPOSAL

Francisco J. Torres-Rojas, Esteban Meneses and Alexander Carballo

In recent years, Web Caching has been considered as one of the key areas to improve web usage efficiency. However, caching object from the web proposes many considerations about the validity of the cache. Ideally, it would be valuable to have a consistent cache, where no invalid relations between objects are held. Several alternatives have been offered to keep consistency in the web cache, each one being better in different situations and for diverse requirements. Usually, web cachers implement just one strategy for maintaining consistency, sometimes giving bad results if circumstances are not appropriate for such strategy. Given that, a web cacher where this policy can be adapted to different situations, can offer good results in a long execution.

DYNAMIC AND DECENTRALIZED SERVICE COMPOSITION: WITH CONTEXTUAL ASPECT-SENSITIVE SERVICES

Thomas Cottenier and Tzilla Elrad

This paper introduces a new technique to dynamically compose Web Services in a decentralized manner. Many of the shortcomings of current Web Service composition mechanisms stem from the difficulty of defining, modularizing and managing service behaviour that is dependent on the context of service invocation. Contextual Aspect-Sensitive Services (CASS) enables crosscutting and context-dependent behaviour to be factored out of the Service implementations and modularized into separate units of encapsulation that are exposed as Web Services. Service orchestrations can then be defined in a much more flexible way, as Services can be dynamically customized to address context-dependent requirements. Moreover, CASS does not require a centralized orchestration engine to coordinate the message exchanges. The coordination logic is woven directly into the composed services. The CASS specification language offers a powerful alternative to static and centralized business process specification languages such as BPEL4WS.

XML-BASED EVALUATION OF SYNTHESIZED QUERIES

Ron G. McFadyen, Yangjun Chen and Fung-Yee Chan

XML repositories are a common means for storing documents that are available through Web technologies. As the use of XML increases, there is a need to integrate XML repositories with other data sources to supply XML-oriented applications. In this paper, we examine documents that express business rules in XML format, and where the triggering and instantiation of rules requires execution of database queries. In this way, an inference process is governed by an XML document tree that controls the synthesis and evaluation of database queries.

UDDI ACCESS CONTROL FOR THE EXTENDED ENTERPRISE

Robert Steele and Juan Dai

Web Services are designed to provide easier B2B integration among enterprises. UDDI defines a standard way for businesses to list their services and discover each other on the Internet. Due to security concerns organizations prefer to build their own private UDDI registries in their corporate network, which are only accessible by invited business partners. Since an organization may only want the right business partners to see only the right service information they are entitled to, access control mechanisms inside the private registry are required. Hence we propose a role based access control model in private UDDI registries to help achieve information confidentiality inside corporate registries. Based on XACML, the model exploits XML’s own ability to build access control in the UDDI.

RAPID PROTOTYPING OF MULTIMEDIA ANALYSIS SYSTEMS: A NETWORKED HARDWARE/SOFTWARE SOLUTION

Fons de Lange and Jan Nesvadba

This paper describes a hardware/software framework and approach for fast integration and testing of complex real-time multimedia analysis algorithms. It enables the rapid assessment of combinations of multimedia analysis algorithms, in order to determine their usefulness in future consumer storage products. The framework described here consists of a set of networked personal computers, running a variety of multimedia analysis algorithms and a multi-media database. The database stores both multimedia content and metadata – as generated by multimedia content analysis algorithms – and maintains links between the two. The multimedia (meta)database is crucial in enabling applications to offer advanced content navigation and searching capabilities to the end-user. The full hardware/software solution functions as a test-bed for new, advanced content analysis algorithms; new algorithms are easily plugged-in into any of the networked PCs, while outdated algorithms are simply removed. Once a selected consumer system configuration has passed important user-tests, a more dedicated embedded consumer product implementation is derived in a straightforward way from the framework.

XPACK: A HIGH-PERFORMANCE WEB DOCUMENT ENCODING

Daniel Rocco, James Caverlee and Ling Liu

XML is an increasingly popular data storage and exchange format whose popularity can be attributed to its self-describing syntax, acceptance as a data transmission and archival standard, strong internationalization support, and a plethora of supporting tools and technologies. However, XML's verbose, repetitive, text-oriented document specification syntax is a liability for many emerging applications such as mobile computing and distributed document dissemination. This paper presents XPack, an efficient XML document compression system that exploits information inherent in the document structure to enhance compression quality. Additionally, the utilization of XML structure features in XPack's design should provide valuable support for structure-aware queries over compressed documents. Taken together, the techniques employed in the XPack compression scheme provide a foundation for efficiently storing, transmitting, and operating over Web documents. Initial experimental results demonstrate that XPack can reduce the storage requirements for Web documents by up to 20\% over previous XML compression techniques. More significantly, XPack can simultaneously support operations over the documents, providing up to two orders of magnitude performance improvement for certain document operations when compared to equivalent operations on unencoded XML documents.

SFS-KNOPPIX WHICH BOOTS FROM INTERNET

Kuniyasu Suzaki, Kengo Iijima, Toshiki Yagi, Hideyuki Tan and Kazuhiro Goto

KNOPPIX is a bootable CD with a collection of GNU/Linux software. KNOPPIX is very convenient but it requires downloading 700MB iso image and burning a CD-ROM when it is renewed. In order to solve this problem we make SFS-KNOPPIX which boots from Internet with SFS (Self-certifying File System). SFS-KNOPPIX requires 20MB boot-loader with Linux-kernel and miniroot. Root file system is obtained from Internet with SFS at boot time. It enables to change root file system and makes easy to try new version of KNOPPIX. SFS-KNOPPIX is also customized for Linux kernel emulators; “UserModeLinux” and “coLinux”. They enable us to use KNOPPIX as an application on Linux and Windows. In this paper we describe the detail of SFS-KNOPPIX and its performance.

A FRAMEWORK FOR IDENTIFYING ARCHITECTURAL PATTERNS FOR E-BUSINESS APPLICATIONS

Feras T. Dabous, Fethi A. Rabhi and Tariq Al-Naeem

The success of today's enterprises is critically dependant on their ability to automate the way they conduct business with customers and other enterprises by means of e-business applications. Legacy systems are valuable assets that must play an important role in this process. Selecting the most appropriate architectural design for an e-business application would have critical impact on participating enterprises. This paper discusses an initiative towards a systematic framework that would assist in identifying a range of possible alternative architectural designs for such applications and how some of these alternatives can evolve into formal architectural patterns or anti-patterns. This paper focuses on a category of e-business applications with special requirements and assumption that is often presented in a few specific domains. The concepts presented in this paper are demonstrated using a real life case study in the domain of e-finance and in particular capital markets trading.

A COSMIC-FFP APPROACH TO ESTIMATE WEB APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT EFFORT

Gennaro Costagliola, Sergio Di Martino, Filomena Ferrucci, Carmine Gravino, Genoveffa Tortora and Giuliana Vitiello

Web applications are constantly increasing both in complexity and number of offered features. In this paper we address the problem of estimating the effort required to develop dynamic web applications, which represents an emerging issue in the field of web engineering. In particular, we formalize a method which is based on the main ideas underlying COSMIC-FFP (Cosmic Full Function Point), which is an adaptation of the Function Point method, especially devised to tackle real-time and embedded applications. The method is focused on counting data movements and turns out to be suitable for capturing the specific aspects of dynamic web applications which are characterized by data movements to and from web servers. The method can be applied to analysis and design documentation in order to provide an early estimation. We also describe the empirical analysis carried out to verify the usefulness of the method for predicting web application development effort.

SERVICE ORIENTED GRID RESOURCE MODELING AND MANAGEMENT

Youcef Derbal

Computational grids (CGs) are large scale networks of geographically distributed aggregates of resource clusters that may be contributed by distinct providers. The exploitation of these resources is enabled by a collection of decision-making processes; including resource management and discovery, resource state dissemination, and job scheduling. Traditionally, these mechanisms rely on a physical view of the grid resource model. This entails the need for complex multi-dimensional search strategies and a considerable level of resource state information exchange between the grid management domains. Consequently, it has been difficult to achieve the desirable performance properties of speed, robustness and scalability required for the management of CGs. In this paper we argue that with the adoption of the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), a logical service-oriented view of the resource model provides the necessary level of abstraction to express the grid capacity to handle the load on hosted services. In this respect, we propose a Service Oriented Model (SOM) that relies on the quantification of the aggregated resource behaviour using a defined service capacity unit that we call servslot. The paper details the development of SOM and highlights the pertinent issues that arise from this new approach. A preliminary exploration of SOM integration as part of a nominal grid architectural framework is provided along with directions for future works.

THE DESIGN OF THE MIRAGE SPATIAL WIKI

Nels Anderson, Adam Bender, Carl Hartung, Gaurav Kulkarni, Anuradha Kumar, Isaac Sanders, Dirk Grunwald and Bruce Sanders

Location based services can simplify information access but despite the numerous efforts and prototypes that attempt to provide location based services, there are very few such systems in wide spread use. There are three common problems that face the designers of location based systems - the basic location technology, the complexity of establishing a service for a particular location and the complexity of maintaining and presenting information to users of the systems. This paper outlines the software architecture of and experience with the Mirage Spatial Wiki. We describe the design decisions that have led to a system that is easy to deploy and use.

QOS-AWARE MULTIMEDIA WEB SERVICES ARCHITECTURE

Ikbal Taleb, Abdelhakim Hafid and Mohamed Adel Serhani

Due to the increasing growth of Web Services, Quality of Service (QoS) is becoming a key issue in web services community. Providers and clients need to use QoS-aware architectures to get/ensure end-to-end QoS. The QoS delivery to clients is highly affected by the web service performance itself, by the hosting platform (e.g., Application Server) and by the underlying network (e.g., Internet). Thus, even if web services together with hosting platform provide acceptable QoS, they also require sufficient available network resources to deliver end-to-end QoS. In this paper, we propose a solution approach to the problem of end-to-end QoS support for web services. Our approach rely on the utilization of a web service, called Network resources manager NRM, to take care of the QoS support in the network connecting the client location and the matching web service location. NRM either relies on the network QoS capabilities (e.g., Integrated Services, Differentiated Services, Multiprotocol Label Switching), if any, to uses a measurement-based scheme to estimate the quality that can be delivered between the two locations. One of the key differentiator of our solution is that it does not require any changes to the currently used infrastructure by the users and web services providers.

DESIGN, IMPLEMENTATION AND TESTING OF MOBILE AGENT PROTECTION MECHANISM FOR MANETS

Khaled E. A. Negm

A caching proxy server acts as an invisible intermediary between browsing clients and the internet servers. In the case of a Web cache, cacheable objects are always separate and are always read in their entity with no pre-fetching. In the present study we present a novel design for a system to remote control an array of proxy system. The administrator can monitor and configure the caching array system from any normal client computational facility. The current system emphasizes on the fact that the administrator can change the configuration of the system with no need either to start the system or alter the clients’ statuses. This is achieved by implementing the concurrency control system under the system hierarchy. The primarily local testing of the system shows promising results to get implemented on large scale of enterprise systems

CHARACTERISTICS OF THE BOOLEAN WEB SEARCH QUERY: ESTIMATING SUCCESS FROM CHARACTERISTICS

Sunanda Patro and Vishv Malhotra

Popular web search engines use Boolean queries as their main interface for users to search their information needs. The paper presents results based on a user survey employing volunteer web searchers to determine the effectiveness of the Boolean queries in meeting the information needs. A metric for measuring the quality of a web search query is also presented. This enables us to relate attributes of the search session and the Boolean query with its success. Certain easily identified characteristics of a good web search query are identified.

WEB MINING FOR AN AMHARIC - ENGLISH BILINGUAL CORPUS

Atelach Alemu Argaw and Lars Asker

We present recent work aimed at constructing a bilingual corpus consisting of comparable Amharic and English news texts. The Amharic and English texts were collected from an Ethiopian news agency that publishes daily news in Amharic and English through their web page. The Amharic texts are represented using Ethiopic script and archived according to the Ethiopian calender. The overlap between the corresponding Amharic and English news texts in the archive is comparatively small, only approximately one article out of ten has a corresponding translated version. Thus a major part of the work has been to identify the subset of matching news texts in the archive, transliterating the Amharic texts into an ASCII representation, and aligning them with their respective corresponding English version. In doing so, we utilised a number of available software and data sources that were (mainly) found on the Internet. Amharic is a language for which very few computational linguistic tools or corpora (such as electronic lexica, part-of-speech taggers, parsers or tree-banks) exist. A challenge has therefor been to show that it is possible to create a comparable corpus even in the absence to these resources. We used fuzzy string matching between words in the English and Amharic titles as a way to determine how likely it is that two news items are referring to the same event. In order to restrict the matching algorithm further, we only compared titles of news items that were published on the corresponding same date and at the same place. We present an experimental evaluation of the algorithm, based on data from one year, and show that fuzzy string matching of news titles can be sufficient to align Amharic and English news text with relatively high precision despite the obvious difference between the two languages.

XML-BASED RDF QUERY LANGUAGE (XRQL) AND ITS IMPLEMENTATION

Norihiro Ishikawa, Takeshi Kato, Hiromitsu Sumino, Johan Hjelm and Kazuhiro Miyatsu

Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a language which represents information about resources. In order to search RDF resource descriptions, several RDF query languages such as RQL and SquishQL have been proposed. However, these RDF query languages do not use XML syntax and they have limited functionality. xRQL is proposed to solve these issues by defining an XML-based RDF query language with enhanced manipulations of the RDF metadata. xRQL is a logic language relying on a functional approach. It consists of an operator declaration, a RDF data description and a result description. Based on RDF graph data model, xRQL defines a graphical path expression with variables, which is similar to GOQL for describing RDF data. It also adopts the object-oriented model for creation, modification and deletion operations of RDF data. Users can define their favorite XML-compliant result descriptions by themselves, which is similar to XQuery. In addition, a set of RDF operations for RDF schema is defined to manipulate the class and property hierarchies in RDF schema. xRQL has been implemented as an RDF query language over a native RDF database management system. This paper also briefly describes the evaluation and implementation status.

SEMANTIC DISCOVERY OPTIMIZATION: MATCHING COMPOSED SEMANTIC WEB SERVICES AT PUBLISHING TIME

Andreas Friesen and Michael Altenhofen

This paper describes an algorithm optimizing the discovery process for composed semantic web services. The algorithm can be used to improve discovery of appropriate component services at invocation time. It performs semantic matchmaking of goals of a composed service to appropriate component services at publishing time. The semantic discovery problem at invocation time is therefore reduced to a selection problem from a list of available (already discovered) component services matching a goal of the composed service.

EFFICIENT RSS FEED GENERATION FROM HTML PAGES

Jun Wang and Kanji Uchino

Although RSS demonstrates a promising solution to track and personalize the flow of new Web information, many of the current Web sites are not yet enabled with RSS feeds. The availability of convenient approaches to “RSSify” existing suitable Web contents has become a stringent necessity. This paper presents EHTML2RSS, an efficient system that translates semi-structured HTML pages to structured RSS feeds, which proposes different approaches based on various features of HTML pages. For the information items with release time, the system provides an automatic approach based on time pattern discovery. Another automatic approach based on repeated tag pattern discovery is applied to convert the regular pages without the time pattern. A semi-automatic approach based on labelling is available to process the irregular pages or specific sections in Web pages according to the user’s requirements. Experimental results show that our system is efficient and effective in facilitating the RSS feed generation.

ERGOMANAGER: A UIMS FOR MONITORING AND REVISING USER INTERFACES FOR WEB SITES

Walter de Abreu Cybis, Dominique L. Scapin and Marcelo Morandini

This paper describes the results of studies dedicated to the specification of ErgoManager, a UIMS (User Interface Management System) specifically intended to support the user interface revision phase over changeable Web sites running B2B, ERP or Intranets transactions. This UIMS contains two basic components: ErgoMonitor and ErgoCoIn. ErgoMonitor applies task-oriented analysis and usability oriented processing on interaction traces stored in log files as a way to identify “average” usability levels that have been occurring during the accomplishment of transactional tasks on web sites. ErgoCoIn is a checklist based CSEE (Computer Supported Ergonomic Evaluation) tool that features automatic services to inquire context of use aspects and to recognize web page components as a way to conduct inspections of only the context pertinent aspects of a Web page. By integrating these tools, ErgoManager aims to support quality assurance strategies over the revision phase of web sites lifecycle by confronting, in an iterative way, usability quantitative metrics and qualitative aspects of user interfaces.

MODELING PREFERENCES ONLINE

Maria Cleci Martins and Rosina Weber

The search for an online product that matches e-shoppers’ needs and preferences can be frustrating and time-consuming. Browsing large lists arranged in tree-like structures demands focused attention from e-shoppers. Keyword search often results in either too many useless items (low precision) or few or none useful ones (low recall). This can cause potential buyers to seek another seller or choose to go in person to a store. This paper introduces the SPOT (Stated Preference Ontology Targeted) methodology to model e-shoppers’ decision-making process and use it to refine a search and show products and services that meet their preferences. SPOT combines probabilistic theory on discrete choices, the theory of stated preferences, with knowledge modeling (i.e. ontologies). The probabilistic theory on discrete choices coupled with e-shoppers’ stated preferences data allow us to unveil parameters e-shoppers would employ to reach a decision of choice related to a given product or service. Those parameters are used to rebuild the decision process and evaluate alternatives to select candidate products that are more likely to match e-shoppers’ choices. We use a synthetic example to demonstrate how our approach distinguishes from currently used methods for e-commerce.

BUILDING E-COMMERCE WEB APPLICATIONS: AGENT- AND ONTOLOGY-BASED INTERFACE ADAPTIVITY

Oscar Martinez, Federico Botella, Antonio Fernández-Caballero and Pascual González

E-Commerce Web based applications designed to facilitate data-exchange collaboration are enjoying growing popularity. In the next few years, business companies will want their web resources linked to ontological content –because of the many powerful tools that will be available for using it by potential customers. Thus, product information will be exchanged between applications, allowing computer programs to collect and process web content, and to exchange information freely with each other. In this paper, few pointers are used for this emerging area, and then go on to show how the ontology languages of the semantic web can lead directly to more powerful agent-based approaches to using services offered on the web. As a result, e-commerce architecture is outlined as an agent-based system to retrieve information products. In this framework, an ontology representing fashion clothing domain used by potential consumers is also introduced, where RDF-S (Resource Description Framework Schema) is used.

PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS OF WEB SERVERS: APACHE AND MICROSOFT IIS

Andrew J. Kornecki, Nick Brixius and Ozeas Vieira Santana Filho

The Internet has become the leading means for people to get information and interact between organizations. Each year there is an increase of the numbers of Internet users. Organizations must be aware of the performance of their web servers to be able to accommodate this growing demand. Networks, connections, hardware, web servers and operating systems each have a role to play in this market, but the web server could be a bottleneck for the entire system. The goal of this research paper is to discuss the issues related to the performance analysis of web servers. The focus is on measurement technique as a solution to performance analysis. Also, the paper describes a practical method to compare two web servers.

A DISTRIBUTED INFORMATION FILTERING : STAKES AND SOLUTION FOR SATELLITE BROADCASTING

Sylvain Castagnos, Anne Boyer and François Charpillet

This paper is a preliminary report which presents information filtering solutions designed within the scope of a collaboration between our laboratory and the company of broadcasting per satellite SES ASTRA. The latter have finalized a system sponsored by advertisement and supplying to users a high bandwidth access to hundreds of web sites for free. This project aims at highlighting the benefits of collaborative filtering by including such a module in the architecture of their product. The term of collaborative filtering (Goldberg et al., 2000) denotes techniques using the known preferences of a group of users to predict the unknown preference of a new user. Our problem has consisted in finding a way to provide scale for hundreds thousands of people, while preserving anonymity of users (personal data remain on client side). Thus, we use an existing clustering method, that we have improved so that it is distributed respectively on client and server side. Nevertheless, in the absence of numerical votes for marketing reasons, we have chosen to do an innovative combination of this decentralized collaborative filtering method with a user profiling technique. We have also been submitted to constraints such as a short answer time on client side, in order to be compliant with the ASTRA architecture.

WHAT HAPPENS IF WE SWITCH THE DEFAULT LANGUAGE OF A WEBSITE?

Te Taka Keegan and Sally Jo Cunningham

In this paper we investigate the effect of the default interface language setting on a bilingual website. Log file analysis is undertaken to determine usage patterns of the Niupepa digital library (a collection of historic Māori language newspapers) when the default interface language is switched between Māori and English in alternate weeks. Activity is grouped into active user sessions, which are further analysed to determine methods of access and searching patterns. The results clearly show that changing the default language of a website will affect the ways in which users access information.

SUPPORTING AWARENESS IN ASYNCHRONOUS COLLABORATIVE ENVIRONMENTS

Shang Gao, Dongbai Xue and Igor Hawryszkiewycz

One of the major challenges in asynchronous collaborative environment is to provide a sense of awareness of other users actions. The amount of awareness needed varies due to specific roles users undertaking during collaboration. While emphasizing the importance of roles, this paper discusses awareness-role relationship and proposes a role-based approach to specifying the awareness characteristics in asynchronous collaborative environment. An example of implementation of role-based awareness supporting system LiveNet4 is also illustrated at the end of this paper.

A TAXONOMY OF PROGRAMMABLE HTTP PROXIES FOR ADVANCED EDGE SERVICES

Delfina Malandrino and Vittorio Scarano

In this paper, we present the state of the art in the field of programmability in HTTP proxies. In particular, we first deal with programmability and show how it is a crucial requirement to easily realize and assemble edge services that can enhance the quality and the user perception of the navigation into a crowded and confusing World Wide Web. Then, we compare some of the most used HTTP proxies to provide an analysis of their programmability and, finally, show some evidence of successful edge services realized on top of existing programmable HTTP proxy frameworks.

EVALUATION OF TEXT CLASSIFICATION ALGORITHMS: FOR A WEB-BASED MARKET DATA WAREHOUSE

Carsten Felden and Peter Chamoni

Decision makers in enterprises cannot handle information flooding without serious problems. A market data information system (MAIS), which is the base of a decision support system for German energy trading, uses search and filter components to provide decision-relevant information from Web-documents for enterprises. The already implemented filter component in form of a Multilayer Perceptron has to be benchmarked against different existing algorithms to enhance the classification of search results. An evaluation environment with appropriate algorithms and a metric is developed for this purpose. Also a set of test data is provided and a tool selection as well as the implementation of different text mining algorithms for classification took place. The benchmark results will be shown in the paper.

BUILDING WEB APPLICATIONS WITH XQUERY - INTEGRATING TECHNOLOGIES IN WEB DEVELOPMENT

Javier J. Gutiérrez, María J. Escalona, Manuel Mejías and Jesús Torres

Today, it is needed to apply a set of heterogeneous technologies to implement every layer or element into a web application. These technologies must be combined and must work together. This implies the need for heterogeneous development teams with heterogeneous formation and high costs in tools and formation. This work shows how XML with XQuery could be a valid technology to unify the technologies used in web development. This works shows how a combination of XML and XQuery could be a valid selection to unify the used technologies in web development. Thus, it is possible decrease costs in tools and formation applying only one technology in web development. To justify why XML with XQuery is a valid technology to implement a whole system this work shows, at first time, the main characteristics of XQuery focuses in web development. At second time, this work shows how to apply those characteristics in a web development and how to implement every layer or component of a web application with XQuery. Finally, this work exposes a brief overview about the open-source tools available to implement a web application developed with XQuery.

EFFICIENTLY LOCATING COLLECTIONS OF WEB PAGES TO WRAP

Lorenzo Blanco, Valter Crescenzi and Paolo Merialdo

Many large web sites contain highly valuable information. Their pages are dynamically generated by scripts which retrieve data from a back-end database and embed them into HTML templates. Based on this observation several techniques have been developed to automatically extract data from a set of structurally homogeneous pages. These tools represent a step towards the automatic extraction of data from large web sites, but currently their input sample pages have to be manually collected. To scale the data extraction process this task should be automated, as well. We present techniques to automatically gathering structurally similar pages from large web sites. We have developed an algorithm that takes as input one sample page, and crawls the site to find pages similar in structure to the given page. The collected pages can feed an automatic wrapper generator to extract data. Experiments conducted over real life web sites gave us encouraging results.

AN ADAPTABLE MIDDLEWARE FOR PERSONALIZING WEB APPLICATIONS

Zahi Jarir and Mohammed Erradi

The personalization is an important topic for the Web industry. It consists in providing the capabilities to accommodate Web applications to user’s requirements such as defining preferences on the execution of the application, associating the provided application to a specific terminal, specifying or modifying QoS parameters, and so on. The contribution of this paper is to present a solution to ensure an advanced Web application personalization by focusing on the middleware level rather than the application level. We provide an enhanced architecture to personalize Web applications using the EJB technology. An implementation using JOnAS environment is presented. It has the advantage to adapt and/or reconfigure Web application’s behavior at runtime according to the user’s specific needs.

ON-THE FLY ANNOTATION OF DYNAMIC WEB PAGES

Mamdouh Farouk, Samhaa R. El-Beltagy and Mahmoud Rafea

The annotation of web pages is a critical task for the success of the semantic web. While many tools exist to facilitate the annotation of static web pages, annotation of dynamically generated ones has not been sufficiently addressed. This paper addresses the task of annotating web pages whose dynamic content is derived from a database. The approach adopted is based on annotating a database schema based on public ontologies and using this database annotation to generate annotations for dynamic web pages that access that database, on the fly. This paper both presents details about the adopted approach as well as a tool that supports this approach.

IDIOLECT-BASED IDENTITY DISCLOSURE AND AUTHORSHIP ATTRIBUTION IN WEB-BASED SOCIAL SPACES

Natalie Ardet

In this paper, we inspect new possible methods of Web surveillance combining web mining with sociolinguistic and semiotic related knowledge of human discourse. We first give an overview of telecommunication surveillance methods and systems, with focus on the Internet, and we describe the legal issues involved in Web or Internet communications investigations. We put the emphasis on identity disclosure and anonymity or pseudonymity undermining in open web spaces. Further, we give an overview of new trends in Internet mediated communication, and examine the virtual social networks they create. Finally, we present the results of a new method using the semiotic features of web documents for authorship attribution and identity disclosure.

AUTOMATIC IDENTIFICATION OF SPECIFIC WEB DOCUMENTS BY USING CENTROID TECHNIQUE

Udomsit Sukakanya and Kriengkrai Porkaew

In order to reduce time to find specific information from high volume of information on the Web, this paper proposes the implementation of an automatic identification of specific Web documents by using centroid technique. The Initial training sets in this experiment are 4113 Thai e-Commerce Web documents. After training process, the system gets a Centroid e-Commerce vector. In order to evaluate the system, six test sets were taken under consideration. In each test set has 100 Web pages both known e-Commerce and non e-Commerce Web pages. The average system performance is about 90 %.

IMPLICIT INDICATORS FOR INTERESTING WEB PAGES

Hyoung-rae Kim and Philip K. Chan

A user’s interest in a web page can be estimated by observing the user’s behavior unobtrusively (implicitly) without asking the user directly (explicitly). Implicit methods are naturally less accurate than explicit methods, but they do not waste a user’s time or effort. Implicit indicators can also be used to create models that change with a user’s interest over time. Research has shown that a user’s behaviour is related to his/her interest in a web page. We compare previous implicit indicators and examine the time spent on a page in more detail depending on whether a user is really looking at the monitor. Our results indicate that the duration is related to a user’s interest of a web page regardless a user’s attention to the web page.

EFFICIENT INFORMATION ACCESS FROM CONSTRAINT WIRELESS TERMINALS - EXPLOITING PERSONALIZATION AND LOCATION-BASED SERVICES

Hans Weghorn

Today, the success of data services used from small mobile devices, like digital phones or PDAs, appears very limited. Different reasons can be identified, which prevent the average customer from broadly using wireless data services: At first, the user has to deal with very uncomfortable devices in terms of UI ergonomy, and on the other hand, the costs for wireless data communication are extremely high. These restrictions can be overcome by employing a system concept, which is built up on two main components: A personalized display software allows simplifying the information access on the wireless terminal, while an intermediate agent residing on the Internet takes care of mining the desired contents from the open Web. In addition to the improved UI handling, this concept offers a reduction of costs and an increase in access speed. Real-world experiments with an information system on actual train departures are reported for measuring and demonstrating the benefit of the described system concept.

AN INNOVATIVE TOOL TO EASILY GET USABLE WEB SITES

Cosimo Antonio Prete, Pierfrancesco Foglia and Michele Zanda

This paper describes the actual methodologies to develop usable web sites. We consider significant tools to model web sites and pages, and then we propose an innovative approach to create usable web sites rapidly and easily. Our goal has been the inclusion of new methodologies in the web application development process

A NEW MECHANISM FOR OS SECURITY: SELECTIVE CHECKING OF SHARED LIBRARY CALLS FOR SECURITY

Dae-won Kim, Geun-tae Bae, Yang-woo Roh and Dae-yeon Park

This paper presents a systematic solution to the serious problem of GOT/PLT exploitation attacks. A large class of security mechanisms has been defeated by those attacks. While some security mechanisms are con-cerned with preventing GOT/PLT exploitation attacks, however they are not complete against GOT/PLT ex-ploitation attacks or the considerable performance decline occurs. We describe the selective checking of shared library calls, called SCC. The SCC dynamically relocates a program’s Global Offset Table (GOT) and checks whether the accesses via Procedure Linkage Table (PLT) are legal. The SCC is implemented by modi-fying only the Linux dynamic loader, hence it is transparent to applications and easily deployable. In experi-ment results, we show that the SCC is effective in defeating against GOT/PLT exploitation attacks and is the mechanism with the very low runtime overhead.

THE USE OF DATA MINING IN THE IMPLEMENTATION OF A NETWORK INTRUSION DETECTION SYSTEM

John Sheppard, Joe Carthy and John Dunnion

This paper focuses on the domain of Network Intrusion Detection Systems, an area where the goal is to detect security violations by passively monitoring network traffic and raising an alarm when an attack occurs. But the problem is that new attacks are being deployed all the time. This particular system has been developed using a range of data mining techniques so as to automatically be able to classify network tracffic as normal or intrusive. Here we evaluate decision trees and their performance based on a large data set used in the 1999 KDD cup contest.

DESIGN, IMPLEMENTATION AND TESTING OF MOBILE AGENT PROTECTION MECHANISM FOR MANETS

Khaled E. A. Negm

In the current research, we present an operation framework and protection mechanism to facilitate secure environment to protect mobile agents against tampering. The system depends on the presence of an authentication authority. The advantage of the proposed system is that security measures is an integral part of the design, thus common security retrofitting problems do not arise. This is due to the presence of AlGamal encryption mechanism to protect its confidential content and any collected data by the agent from the visited host . So that eavesdropping on information from the agent is no longer possible to reveal any confidential information. Also the inherent security constraints within the framework allow the system to operate as an intrusion detection system for any mobile agent environment. The mechanism is tested for most of the well known severe attacks against agents and networked systems. The scheme proved a promising performance that makes it very much recommended for the types of transactions that needs highly secure environments, e. g., business to business.

THE EFFECT OF ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE ON KNOWLEDGE SHARING INTENTIONS AMONG INFORMATION SYSTEM PROFESSIONALS

Jin-Shiang Huang

On knowledge management discipline, little empirical research has been carried out to verify the differences of knowledge sharing among individuals within different organizational settings. In the current study, theory of Competing Value Approach (CVA) and knowledge classification structures from existing literature are applied to conduct a conceptual framework to explore knowledge sharing intentions of different knowledge categories for information system professionals from firms that exhibit various strengths on distinct cultural dimensions. The hypothesized model is tested by Pearson correlation analysis and canonical analysis with data from 172 full time workers of various job titles engaged in system development and maintenance projects of different firms in Taiwan. Findings support the notion that knowledge sharing intentions of information system professionals under distinct cultural types are quite different. Evidences also show that, given the same organizational culture, the observed sharing intentions of various knowledge categories are of equal level.

A MEDIATOR FOR E-BUSINESS

Sven Apel, Gunter Saake, Sebastian Herden and André Zwanziger

Partner Relationship Management Systems are being implemented in many companies to improve the relations to important partners along the value-chain. The goal is to differentiate themselves from competitors and their products. That leads to different types of relationships between customers, suppliers and other market-participants. Some of these types require a mediator, that connects the partners, if a direct connection is impossible. This article will introduce the ideas of Partner Relationship Management within E-Business and will show a system called Mediator, which is able to tie together business partners in a distributed environment. The two parts of the mediator (communication system and information system) are presented and their key technologies peer-to-peer network and an agent-based system are discussed.

EFFICIENT MANAGEMENT OF MULTI-VERSION XML DOCUMENTS FOR E-GOVERNMENT APPLICATIONS

Federica Mandreoli, Riccardo Martoglia, Fabio Grandi and Maria Rita Scalas

This paper describes our research activities in developing efficient systems for the management of multi-version XML documents in an e-Government scenario. The application aim is to enable citizens to access personalized versions of resources, like norm texts and information made available on the Web by public administrations. In the first system developed, four temporal dimensions (publication, validity, efficacy and transaction times) were used to represent the evolution of norms in time and their resulting versioning and a stratum approach was used for its implementation on top of a relational DBMS. Recently, the multi-version management system has migrated to a different architecture (``native'' approach) based on a multi-version XML query processor developed on purpose. Moreover, a new semantic dimension has been added to the versioning mechanism, in order to represent applicability of norms to different classes of citizens according to their digital identity. Classification of citizens is based on the management of an ontology with the deployment of semantic Web techniques. Preliminary experiments showed an encouraging performance improvement with respect to the stratum approach and a good scalability behaviour. Current work includes a more accurate modeling of the citizen's ontology, which could also require a redesign of the document storage scheme, and the development of a complete infrastructure for the management of the citizen's digital identity.

INTERNET DIFFUSION AMONG ITALIAN FIRMS: THE DIGITAL DIVIDE EXISTS

Maurizio Martinelli, Irma Serrecchia and Michela Serrecchia

This paper reports about a study to analyse the Internet diffusion in Italy by Italian firms, using domain names under the .it ccTLD as metric. The penetration rate calculated according to the number of companies is computed for highly dissimilar geographical areas (regions). A concentration analysis was performed in order to discover whether the geographical distribution of the Internet is less concentrated with respect to both the number of companies present in Italy and income level, suggesting a diffusive effect. Regression analysis was carried out using social, economic and infrastructure indicators. Results show that a “digital divide” exists in terms of geographical distribution (i.e., in macro-areas – Northern, Central, and Southern Italy - and at the regional level). In future we are going to carry out a research in order to compare the number of domains registered to businesses with that of domains registered in the non-profit sector.

A FRAMEWORK FOR DEVELOPMENT AND MANAGEMENT OF E-LESSONS IN E-LEARNING

Azita A. Bahrami

The use and or re-use of the existing e-lessons for the creation of new ones make the e-learning both time and cost effective. To accomplish this, however, requires the removal of some obstacles first. This paper presents a framework for that purpose. The progression of the concepts leading to the framework includes the introduction of a multi-dimensional e-lesson model that leads to the construction of an e-lesson cube. This cuboid is the backbone of an e-lesson warehouse, which is the main component of the proposed framework.

IMPACTS OF E-LEARNING ON ORGANISATIONAL STRATEGY

Charles A. Shoniregun, Paul Smith, Alex Logvynovskiy and Vyacheslav Grebenyuk

E-learning is a relatively new concept. It has been developed to describe the convergence of a whole range of learning tools, which use technology as their basis for delivery. E-learning is using technology to assist in delivering learning experiences to learners. It is also a concept which is built around the philosophy of “anytime and anywhere” learning meaning that learners can access learning materials when and as required, no matter where they happen to be located in the world or, indeed, off world. E-learning gives both strategic and competitive advantage to organisations. Business organisations recognised knowledge and people are critical resources that should be treated as treasures. In the information ages the speed of introducing new products, and services, requires employees to learn and consolidate new information quickly and effectively. Organisations worldwide are now seeking more innovative and efficient ways to deliver training to their geographically dispersed workforce, and with traditional training methods, companies generally spend more money on transporting and housing trainees than on actual training programs. E-learning has the capacity to reduce these costs significantly and enabled organisations to secured their product or service knowledge. This paper focuses on how organisation can secure their internal E-learning development and advocate combination of technological approaches. It also provides a framework on how organisation /or academic institution should make a rational decision regarding the implementation of E-learning The question posed by this paper is that: can organisations improve their E-learning while also securing higher level of knowledge based?

TOWARDS A GRID-BASED COLLABORATIVE PLATFORM FOR E-LEARNING

Wang GuiLing, Li YuShun, Yang ShengWen, Miao ChunYu, Xu Jun and Shi MeiLin

Large-scale cooperation support for learners becomes even more important, when e-Learning is implemented in scalable, open, dynamic and heterogeneous environment. This paper presents how to realize collaborative learning support in distributed learning environments based on grid technology. Our approach fills the existing gap between current cooperative platform and complex, cross-organization infrastructure. We propose grid architecture for establishing collaborative platform for e-Learning, where grid middleware and CSCW services are provided. A Learning Assessment Grid, abbreviated as LAGrid, is built on top of these services and provides collaborative learning in large-scale cross-organization environment.

DEVELOPMENT AND DEPLOYMENT OF A WEB-BASED COURSE EVALUATION SYSTEM - TRYING TO SATISFY THE FACULTY, THE STUDENTS, THE ADMINISTRATION, AND THE UNION

Jesse M. Heines and David M. Martin Jr.

An attempt to move from a paper-based university course evaluation system to a Web-based one ran into numerous obstacles from various angles. While development of the system was relatively smooth, deploy¬ment was anything but. Faculty had trouble with some of the system's basic concepts, and students seemed insufficiently motivated to use the system. Both faculty and students demonstrated mistrust of the system’s security and anonymity. In addition, the union threatened grievances predicated on their perception that the system was in conflict with the union contract. This paper describes the system’s main technical and, per¬haps more important, political aspects, explains implementation decisions, relates how the system evolved over several semesters, and discusses steps that might be taken to improve the entire process.

ETHEMES: AN INTERNET INSTRUCTIONAL RESOURCE

Laura Diggs and John Wedman

This paper describes a major initiative to support teachers in integrating Internet resources into the instructional process while shifting their instruction to a more constructivist approach. This paper also presents the background of this initiative and results of a study to determine teacher perceptions of this initiative based on the Performance Pyramid.1 Referred to as eThemes, this service accepts requests from teachers, finds Web sites that meet the requirements specified in the requests, and creates an archive of quality Internet resources for easy access and searching. It minimizes teachers’ resource-seeking time and maximizes their resource-using time in their instruction to enhance teaching practice and student performance.

AN AFFECTIVE ROLE MODEL OF SOFTWARE AGENT FOR EFFECTIVE AGENT-BASED E-LEARNING BY INTERPLAYING BETWEEN EMOTIONS AND LEARNING

Shaikh Mostafa Al Masum and Mitsuru Ishizuka

E-learning could become the major form of training and development in organizations as technologies will improve to create a fully interactive and humanized learning environment (Tim L. Wentling, et al, 2000). Hence to recognize this objective this paper would like to explain about an affective role model of a software agent to facilitate interactive online learning by considering and incorporating emotional features associated to learning with a view to strengthening the expectation of Lister (Lister, et al, 1999) that the differences between F-to-F and purely web-based courses are rapidly disappearing. The paper first presents the relationships between emotion and learning from different literatures and surveys. Then an affective model for e-learning is explored. After the model the paper enlists the emotion dynamics underpinned by a software agent. The paper concludes with the notion of future and extension of further research.

SOFTWARE-AGENT ARCHITECTURE FOR INTERACTIVE E-LEARNING

Shaikh Mostafa Al Masum and Mitsuru Ishizuka

Many universities worldwide have developed a variety of web-based e-learning environments, hoping to benefit from this new and fast spreading IT (Harasim, 2000). The main intention of this paper is to describe an e-learning model that would act as a prudent teacher to teach and test the aptitude of e-learners based on available knowledgebase. Here, we provide an overall view of the proposed model and then describe in brief about the purposes of different components of the model. This paper provides a visualization model named Web Online Force-Directed Animated Visualization (WebOFDAV) (Huang, et al, 1998) and also points out the implementation issues. The proposed model is designed to be compatible with any e-learning module designed according to the guideline mentioned in this paper. Finally an animating cartoon like character agent will act to interact with the learner. Such an agent based software system under this model is in development phase with necessary linguistic and emotion support

BEYOND COLLABORATIVE LEARNING - COMMUNAL CONSTRUCTION OF KNOWLEDGE IN AN ONLINE ENVIRONMENT

John Cuthell

The drive for e-learning as a cost-effective and flexible channel for distance and life-long learning has focused on the benefits of a just-in-time delivery of content to the learner. The assumption is that knowledge is inseparable from, and follows, content. An obvious and important aspect of e-learning has been the need for online tutors to deploy a range of Soft Skills to support learners. E-learning relies on e-tutoring: the concept of e-tutoring embodies mentoring, coaching and facilitating techniques. In an online environment in which student discussion forums constitute one of the tools for knowledge construction the role of the facilitator assumes greater importance that that of mentor, moderator or coach. The ability to facilitate a discussion or a debate becomes central to the construction of new knowledge for the participants (Holmes et al, 2001) In spring and early summer 2004 a group of teachers from diverse backgrounds engaged in an intensive course in e-facilitation techniques. This paper describes how they learned and were taught, and evaluates the ways in which an online collaborative environment enabled the development of the basic skills required for e-facilitation. The paper then assesses the effectiveness of individuals as both contributors and e-facilitators in a range of online educational forums. It examines the contribution seach made, and details the e-facilitation techniques deployed in various forums. Outcomes are measured against the input that individuals made. The ways in which the participants were able to construct new knowledge in the online communal context are detailed. These are compared with some other models of learning in an online environment: Cuthell (2001); (Salmon (2002). Finally, the paper evaluates the ways in which e-facilitation enables individuals to construct new knowledge, both with and for others. An interesting consequence of participating in a course of this nature is that perceptions of teaching, learning and knowledge change. Do these perceptions follow through into the daily praxis of the teachers? The implications for teaching and learning in a range of educational environments are identified

IDENTIFYING FACTORS IMPACTING ONLINE LEARNING

Dennis Kira, Raafat Saade and Xin He

The study presented in this paper sought to explore several dimensions to online learning. Identifying the dimensions to online learning entails important basic issues which are of great relevance to educators today. The primary question is “what are the factors that contribute to the success/failure of online learning?” In order to answer this question we need to identify the important variables that (1) measure the learning outcome and (2) help us understand the learning experience of students using specific learning tools. In this study, the dimensions we explored are student’s attitude, affect, motivation and perception of an Online Learning Tool usage. A survey utilizing validated items from previous relevant research work was conducted to help us determine these variables. An exploratory factor analysis (EFA) was used for a basis of our analysis. Results of the EFA identified the items that are relevant to the study and that can be used to measure the dimension to online learning. Affect and perception were found to have strong measurement capabilities with the adopted items while motivation was measured the weakest.

A WEB-BASED ALGORITHM ANALYSIS TOOL - AN ONLINE LABORATORY FOR CONDUCTING SORTING EXPERIMENTS

James TenEyck

In this paper, an on-line laboratory is described in which students can test theoretical analyses of the run-time efficiency of common sorting algorithms. The laboratory contains an applet that allows students to select an algorithm with a type of data distribution and sample size and view the number of compares required to sort a particular instance of that selection. It provides worksheets for tabulating the results of a sequence of experiments and for entering qualitative and quantitative observations about the results. It also contains a second applet that directly measures the goodness of fit of recorded data with common functions such as cn2 and cn(lg(n)). The laboratory is intended to reinforce classroom learning activities and other homework assignments with a practical demonstration of the performance of a variety of sorting algorithms on different kinds of data sets. It is a singular on-line tool that complements other online learning tools such as animations of various sorting algorithms and visualizations of self-adjusting data structures. The laboratory has been used in algorithms courses taught by the author at (omitted) and (omitted), and is available on-line for use by a more general audience

THE AUTOTUTOR 3 ARCHITECTURE: A SOFTWARE ARCHITECTURE FOR AN EXPANDABLE, HIGH-AVAILABILITY ITS

Patrick Chipman, Andrew Olney and Arthur C. Graesser

Providing high quality of service over the Internet to a variety of clients while simultaneously providing good pedagogy and extensibility for content creators and developers are key issues in the design of the computational architecture of an intelligent tutoring system (ITS). In this paper, we describe an ITS architecture that attempts to address both issues using a distributed hub-and-spoke metaphor similar to that of the DARPA Galaxy Communicator. This architecture is described in the context of the natural language ITS that uses it, AutoTutor 3.

ACTIVE LEARNING BY PERSONALIZATION - LESSONS LEARNT FROM RESEARCH IN CONCEPTUAL CONTENT MANAGEMENT

Hans-Werner Sehring, Sebastian Bossung and Joachim W. Schmidt

Due to their increasing popularity, e-learning systems form a system class of growing importance. We believe, however, that contemporary e-learning systems can be further enhanced by improving the support for active participation of learners, which is believed to improve recall. In this paper we describe how personalization of both content and structure can be used to enable this active learning. Personalization is also a key feature of research-oriented content management systems. Therefore systems for learning and research can efficiently be integrated by linking and exchanging content between them. Synergies which stem from this include processes which transparently span system boundaries, and sharing of content between systems. We explain how personalization can be used for enabling autonomous learning activities and also for supporting research-oriented workflows. Personalization and content coupling technologies are at the heart of one of our operational web-based application systems, the Warburg Electronic Library. This system is successfully used in a number of research as well as learning projects, during which advantages of joint research and learning systems have been identified.

A METHODOLOGY TO BUILD E-LEARNING MULTIMEDIA RESOURCES

Giovanni Casella, Gennaro Costagliola and Filomena Ferrucci

In this paper, we present a methodology to develop e-learning resources. It focuses on the resources creation so it can be integrated in a general methodology for big e-learning projects or it can be used in small e-learning projects in which the main task is the content creation. The methodology has been conceived by taking into account several crucial issues, such as e-learning standards, accessibility, and easy of its application. A case study is also described to show the effectiveness of the proposal.

THE TEACHING OF AUDITING: FROM SCHOOL ATTENDANCE TO VIRTUAL SCHOOL

Agostinho Inácio Bucha, Francisco Alegria Carreira and Maria da Conceição Aleixo

The concept of education has evolved in time and is now seen not only as a natural phenomenon, but specially as a social phenomenon essential to the development of the society. School shouldn’t be an organization closed in itself apart from the surrounding environment, on the contrary it should be an open organization and it should take part in the constant changes. In the specific situation of the Higher Education Institutions they can not remain indifferent to the economical, social and specially technological change happening everywhere and that are urging a different behaviour from the teachers who need now new skills to face the competitive environment of the present. Therefore we believe that the scientific and technical training must be complemented with another training capable of stimulating other skills concerning attitude and emotion. Along with the development of management skills the teachers should also invest on new learning proceedings related to the New Information and Communication Technologies (NICT), namely the web pages, portals and enterprise simulation. Hence we have tried to identify the new environments reflecting about the actual and virtual teachings and sharing our experience concerning the teaching of auditory using the Internet. Thus we have created a web page for the discipline of auditing, a positive experience, if we consider the results which show a clear preference from the students who find it relevant, convenient and a precious aid to improve the process of teaching/learning.