FORMAL SPECIFICATION AND REFINEMENT FOR AN INTERACTIVE WEB EXAMPLE

Ingrid van Coppenhagen and Barry Dwolatzky

This paper provides a small interactive Web example (the Car1 example) that illustrates parts of the software life cycle processes of specification, refinement and implementation in an object-oriented environment. Part of the software system is specified in Z, data- and operation refined and then implemented into HTML, XML, XSD and JavaScript. Short descriptions of the refinement processes comprising data refinement, operation refinement and operation decomposition are given. The main focuses of the study are to firstly investigate how effective (or not) a formal specification is for an interactive Web system, and secondly to illustrate a control structure in the refinement process. Following the specification, refinement and implementation, conclusions are drawn and some suggestions for future research given.

RULE-BASED QUERY TREE EVALUATION OVER FRAGMENTED XML DOCUMENTS

Ron G. McFadyen and Yangjun Chen

XML documents are used to hold information and to make exchanges between systems. In this paper, we consider documents that embed knowledge and rules which may contain considerable redundancy. To control redundancy and to provide for efficient execution of queries, documents are decomposed into fragments that are stored separately. Then, to materialize documents for end-users, they need to be dynamically con-structed from their sources (separately stored fragments) by evaluating rules, which requires database queries to be executed according to the document structure.

KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT FOR ADAPTED INFORMATION RETRIEVAL IN UBIQUITOUS ENVIRONMENTS

Angela Carrillo-Ramos, Marlène Villanova-Oliver, Jérome Gensel and Hervé Martin

PUMAS is a framework based on agents which provides nomadic users with relevant and adapted information. Using PUMAS, information delivered to nomadic users is adapted according to, on the one hand, their preferences and history in the system and, on the other hand, the limited capacities of their Mobile Devices (MDs). This framework is composed of four Multi-Agent Systems (MAS, Connection MAS, Communication MAS, Information MAS and Adaptation MAS) for handling adaptation. In this paper, we illustrate how the PUMAS agents augment user queries with information about her/his characteristics and those of her/his MD and, how the Router Agent (which belongs to the Information MAS) redirects the user queries towards the different Web based Information System (WIS) which contain all or part of the information for answering them and which execute on servers or MDs.

A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF 802.11 AND 802.11E WIRELESS LAN STANDARDS

Fedoua Didi, Houda Labiod and Guy Pujolle

Quality of service is a key problem of today’s IP networks. At the same time, the Internet is becoming more and more heterogeneous due to recent explosion of wireless networks. In wireless environments, bandwidth is scarce and channel conditions are time varying and sometimes highly lossy. Although IEEE 802.11 wireless LAN (WLAN) is the most widely used WLAN standard today, and the upcoming IEEE 802.11e QoS enhancement standard will introduce the QoS for supporting multimedia applications. This paper compare the propositions of standard IEEE 802.11e with the standard IEEE 802.11 without QoS, a simulation of these standards is done, by use NS a simulator of networks widely used by the university researchers. A discussion is presented in detail using simulation-based evaluations and a conclusion is done.

CWS-TRANSACTIONS: AN APPROACH FOR COMPOSING WEB SERVICES

Juha Puustjärvi

Many transaction models have been developed for modelling composed web services. In these models subtransactions (single web services) can commit and release their resources before the whole composed transaction commits. If the whole transaction aborts, then the (semantic) atomicity is ensured by executing compensating transactions which semantically undo the effects of the committed subtransactions. However, using compensating transactions in ensuring semantic atomicity is turned out to be problematic in many cases. In order to avoid these problems we have developed a new transaction model, called CWS-transaction model, for composed web services. It deviates from other advanced transaction models in that it is not based on compensating transactions, but rather it divides the traditional business transaction into two successive transactions, called request transaction and decision transaction. The commitment of the request transaction ensures that the decision transaction will not fail, and so the atomicity of the CWS-transaction is ensured. In this paper we specify the complements of the CWS-transaction model, their execution dependencies, the correctness criteria of the CWS-transactions and give an example of the implementation of the CWS-transaction model.

BENCHMARKING OF WEB SERVICES PLATTFORMS - AN EVALUATION WITH THE TPC-APP BENCHMARK

Daniel F. García, Javier García, Manuel García, Ivan Peteira, Rodrigo García and Pablo Valledor

Web services are becoming an essential technology for the development of current distributed applications. Therefore, the organizations must be aware of the possibilities and limitations of the web services and their enabling technologies related to interoperability, performance, security, etc. Benchmarking techniques can provide very useful insights about which technologies are viable and what are the current limitations of the available implementations of those technologies. Furthermore, well established benchmarks provide a way to carry out useful comparisons between two or more implementations. In this paper we present several issues of how web service implementations could be benchmarked. We describe the TPC-App benchmark and explain the most interesting issues of our implementations. Finally we present benchmarking results for the two predominant development platforms, .NET and J2EE.

A TRANSACTION MODEL AND IMPLEMENTATION BASED ON MESSAGE EXCHANGE FOR GRID COMPUTING

Zou Yali, Ling Hong and Wu Yonghua

Transaction process is the key technology to the success of applying grid computing to enterprise distributed computing. While grid computing is extending to apply to the commercial area, the need for transaction process that ensures the dependency of grid computing is more and more urgent. This paper proposes a grid transaction process model (GridTP) which is based on Web Service resource framework (WSRF) and suitable for the grid computing. GridTP can manage and monitor the state of transaction participants via the message exchange among those participants, and it can use atomic or cohesion transaction coordination algorithms to coordinate the transaction participants to achieve a mutually agreed outcome.

THE GLOBALLY SCALABLE ARCHITECTURE FOR HETEROGENEOUS VIDEO SERVERS WITHOUT ANY MODIFICATION

SeongKi Kim and SangYong Han

As a single video server reveals its limitations in the aspects of scalability, capability, fault-tolerance, and cost-efficiency, a part of solutions for these limitations emerge. However, these solutions have their own problems. To overcome these problems and exploit already existing video servers, we designed the globally scalable architecture that supports both heterogeneous and commodity-off-the-shelf personal computer (PC), operating system (OS), video server applications with both a HTTP-level redirection and the least bandwidth scheduling as well as developed its prototype.

ANNOTATED LOGIC REASONING BASED ON XML

Fuxi Zhu, Duanzhi Chen and Jia Rao

Paraconsistent logic is able to handle the inconsistent knowledge reasonably. In this paper we propose using XML as a tool to implement the presentation and reasoning of Annotation Logic--one of the paraconsitent logic systems and investigate the problems about the automatic inference rules and inference strategies under XML representation. Demonstrations are presented to show that XML can represent the Annotation Logic conveniently and XML and its auxiliary tools can implement the inference mechanism efficiently.

TOWARDS A RAD FRAMEWORK FOR E-COMMERCE SYSTEMS

Ernest Cachia and Mark Micallef

Given the ever-increasing revenues being generated from e-commerce systems, the quality of such systems is becoming ever more important. Industry studies carried out by the authors of this paper show that customers want higher quality systems built in ever-shorter timespans. This paper establishes the need for the creation of a Rapid Application Development (RAD) based framework specifically tailored towards e-commerce systems. A skeletal version of such a framework is also proposed.

OPTIMIZED CSS ENGINE

Alessandro Cogliati and Petri Vuorimaa

Future Web applications will be based on XML platform. CSS is a tool used to create different XML presentations’ layouts in the heterogeneous set of client devices, which often have limited resources. In this paper, design and implementation of an optimized CSS engine are described. At first, the optimization algorithm is explained, and then the implementation of the CSS engine and its integration within an XML browser are described. Measurements taken with real Web XML documents styled with CSS style sheets show performance improvements of the optimization.

INTEGRATING E-LEARNING OBJECTS IN A P2P SYSTEM

Gabriel André D. Dubois Brito and Ana Maria de C. Moura

ROSA is an e-learning system, which enables the creation, storage, reuse and management of Learning Objects (LOs). LO is a collection of reusable material used to support learning, education, or training. However, since ROSA is still a centralized system, it does not provide yet a complete integration of LOs created in local ROSAs of other institutions. This paper presents the evolution of ROSA into a peer-to-peer (P2P) system - the ROSA - P2P - and describes the integration process of LOs in this environment. It provides the required interoperability to execute queries throughout all ROSA - P2P peers, taking into account a strategic data integration system that includes queries rewriting based on their semantic meanings. Controlled vocabularies are also used to support the query rewriting process and the identification of relevant peers that are able to answer queries on a specific knowledge domain.

AN EVENT-BASED MODEL FOR WEB SERVICES COORDINATION

Mohsen Rouached and Claude Godart

The promise of Web services is centered around standard and interoperable means for integrating loosely coupled Web based components that expose well-defined interfaces, while abstracting the implementation and platform specific details. The current and more mature core Web services standards SOAP, WSDL and UDDI provide a solid foundation to accomplish this. However, these specifications primarily enable development of simple Web services whereas the ultimate goal of Web services is to facilitate and automate business process collaborations both inside and outside enterprise boundaries. Useful business applications of Web services in B2B, B2C, and enterprise application integration environments will require the ability to compose complex and distributed Web services and the ability to formally describe the relationships between the constituent low-level services. This paper advocates an event-based approach for Web services coordination. We focused on reasoning about events to capture the semantics of complex Web service combinations. Then we present a formal language to specifying and detecting composite events for managing complex interactions amongst services.

ONTOLOGY-BASED INTEGRATION OF XML DATA - SCHEMATIC MARKS AS A BRIDGE BETWEEN SYNTAX AND SEMANTIC LEVEL

Christophe Cruz and Christophe Nicolle

This paper presents an ontology integration approach of XML data. The approach is composed of two pillars the first of which is based on formal language and XML grammars analysis. The second pillar is based on ontology and domain ontology analysis. The keystone of this architecture which creates a bridge between the two pillars is based on the concept of schematic marks introduced in this paper. These schematic marks make it possible to establish the link between the syntactic level and the semantic level for our integration framework.

EXTENDING AN XML MEDIATOR WITH TEXT QUERY

Clément Jamard and Georges Gardarin

Supporting full-text query in an XML mediator is a difficult problem. This is because most data-sources do not provide keyword search and ranking. In this paper, we report on the integration of the main functionalities of the emerging XQuery Text standard in XLive, a full XML/XQuery mediator. Our approach is to index on keywords virtual documents in views. Selected virtual documents are on demand mapped to data source objects. Thus, the mediator selection operator is efficiently extended to support full-text search on views. Keyword search and result ranking are integrated. We rank results using a relevance formula adapted to XPath, based on number of keywords in elements and distance from the searched nodes.

SOME POINTS AFFECTING WEB PERFORMANCE

Christophe Deleuze

Despite continuously growing network and server capacity, web performance is still often bad. Changes in version 1.1 of the hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) have brought solutions to some of the performance problems, but daily experience shows that problems remain. In this work, we examine some characteristics of a number of popular web pages and try to get insights about what could be made to enhance overall web performance. We find that most web pages have very large numbers of small objects, something HTTP doesn't handle very well, and that style-sheets were expected to avoid. Moreover, half of the sites we examined do not support HTTP enhancements such as persistent connections and request pipelining. Finally, most sites embed objects from multiple (and often at lot of) different hosts.

INSTANCES NAVIGATION FOR QUERYING INTEGRATED DATA FROM WEB-SITES

Domenico Beneventano, Sonia Bergamaschi, Stefania Bruschi, Francesco Guerra, Mirko Orsini and Maurizio Vincini

Research on data integration has provided a set of rich and well understood schema mediation languages and systems that provide a meta-data representation of the modeled real world, while, in general, they do not deal with data instances. Such meta-data are necessary for querying classes result of an integration process: the end user typically does not know the contents of such classes, he simply defines his queries on the basis of the names of classes and attributes. In this paper we introduce an approach enriching the description of selected attributes specifying as meta-data a list of the ``relevant values" for such attributes. Furthermore relevant values may be hierarchically collected in a taxonomy. In this way, the user may exploit new meta-data in the interactive process of creating/refining a query. The same meta-data are also exploited by the system in the query rewriting/unfolding process in order to filter the results showed to the user. We conducted an evaluation of the strategy in an e-business context within the EU-IST SEWASIE project. The evaluation proved the practicability of the approach for large value instances.

WEBTESTE: A STRESS TEST TOOL

Hugo Saba, Eduardo Manuel de Freitas Jorge, Victor Franco Costa and Hernane Borges de Barros Pereira,

The use of web applications becomes a very common activity in the organizations' scope. From the software engineering perspective, the incessant search for the production of more robust softwares, with better quality, is a continuous requirement. The goal of this paper is to present the {\it WebTeste}, which consists of a test tool used to verify the robustness of a web application. Within this context, it is observed an improvement of the reliability of the web application architecture. Using the {\it WebTeste} tool, stress tests have been performed taking into account two types of tests. The first one consists of one computer stressing the selected architecture, and the second one consists of ordered computers stressing the selected architecture. After comparison of simulation results, the importance of the use of distributed and ordered computers to obtain a more reliable test has been confirmed. In addition, the analysis of the obtained results can suggest a new (re)design towards the desired architecture in a web system. {\it WebTeste} could be used to test in a stressed way the robustness of a web application more precisely.

RSA-PADDING SIGNATURES WITH ATTACK STUDIES

George Stephanides, Nicolae Constantinescu, Mirel Cosulschi and Mihai Gabroveanu

A fixed-pattern padding consists in concatenating to the message m a fixed pattern P. An RSA signature for the padding P and message m is obtained by raising the message m and the padding P to the private decryption exponent d. In this paper we prove that the security of RSA fixed-pattern padding is insecure for messages at least two-thirds of the size of n, the RSA public modulus.

USING SIMPLE PUSHLOGIC

David Greaves and Daniel Gordon

Pushlogic is a scripting language for a dynamic population of devices (sensors/processors/actuators) and dynamic number of concurrent applications in a reliable or safety-critical system. System stability is assured by idempotency constraints and intrinsic error recovery capabilities arise from the reversible nature of Pushlogic. It is a constrained language amenable to automated reasoning. It defines `re-hydration' for dynamic binding of rules to new device instances and a load-time model checker that runs before a new bundle of rules may join a domain of participation. In a typical application, complex embedded devices are partitioned into passive components known as `pebbles'. API reflection is then used to expose the interfaces offered by the pebbles. All proactive and interactive behaviour between pebbles or over the network must then be implemented with Pushlogic and `code reflection', as we call it, exposes this behaviour for automated reasoning.

MEETING ARRANGEMENT SYSTEM BASED ON MOBILE AGENT TECHNOLOGY

Takao Kawamura, Shinichi Motomura, Kengo Kagemoto and Kazunori Sugahara

In this paper, a meeting arrangement system based on mobile agent technology is proposed. The users of the system do not need to input all of their schedules unlike the existing groupwares. When a user intends to call a meeting, he only inputs information about the meeting. On behalf of the inviter, mobile agents move around each invited user's computer to ask whether he can join the meeting and negotiate with him if necessary. Therefore, the inviter's work becomes less compared with using the existing groupwares. We have developed the system with our mobile agent framework on Java platform and confirmed its effectiveness through experiments.

A LOGIC-BASED MOBILE AGENT FRAMEWORK FOR WEB APPLICATIONS

Shinichi Motomura, Takao Kawamura and Kazunori Sugahara

A new logic-based mobile agent framework named Maglog is proposed in this paper. In Maglog, a concept called ``field'' is introduced. By using this concept, the following functions are realized: 1) the agent migration which is the function that enables agents to migrate between computers, 2) the inter-agent communication which is the indirect communication with other agents through the field, 3) the adaptation which is the function that enables agents to execute programs stored in the field. We have implemented Maglog on Java environment. The program of an agent which is a set of Prolog clauses is translated into Java source code with our Maglog translator, and then it is compiled into Java classes with a Java compiler. The effectiveness of Maglog is confirmed through the demonstrations of an application: the meeting arrangement system.

DISTRIBUTED E-LEARNING SYSTEM USING P2P TECHNOLOGY

Shinichi Motomura, Ryosuke Nakatani, Takao Kawamura 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 user interface program of the proposed system is built on Squeak. Performance simulations demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed system.

UNIFIED MODEL BASED THREE DIMENSIONAL TOOL FOR MANAGING COMPUTER NETWORKS

Meva Dodo, Patrice Torguet, Michelle Sibilla and Jean Pierre Jessel

Computer network management is a field where several researches have been done and many tools created. The last decades have seen the appearance of a new generation of management tools introducing a new approach based on graphical visualization enabling the users to explore visually a complete system. The main objective of the graphical visualization is to facilitate the different tasks of the administrators. This is particularly important when the system is becoming complex due to the growth of information flow, the heterogeneity of devices and environments or applications that handle this information. In this perspective this research is led with as a goal to study the benefit of the use of 3D graphical representation combined with an object-oriented information model (CIM - Common Information Model - proposed by the industrial consortium DMTF - Distributed Management Task Force). Through this research we have particularly focused on the necessary requirements to offer a high quality of visualization and the ways or languages allowing the modelling of all resources present in a complex computer network

MEDIATION WITHOUT A GLOBAL SCHEMA - MATCHING QUERIES AND LOCAL SCHEMAS THROUGH AN ONTOLOGY

Michel Schneider and Damien Thevenet

Approaches by mediation to make multiple sources interoperable were essentially investigated when one are able to resolve a priori the heterogeneity problems. This requires that a global schema must be elaborated or that mappings between local schemas must be established before any request can be posed. The object of this paper is to study to what extend a mediation approach can be envisaged when none of these features are a priori available. Our solution consists in matching a query with each of the local schema by using an ontology of the domain. Such a solution is particularly suitable when sources are liable to evolve all the time. We are investigating this solution by considering the mediation of heterogeneous XML sources. Local schemas are represented in the OWL language. Queries are formulated using an XQUERY-like language. Matching of names is solved by using the an ontology of the domain. We have developed a prototype and conducted a number of experiments to evaluate the capacity of the approach.

A FORMAL DEFINITION OF SELECTION OPERATIONS THAT EXTEND XQUERY WITH INTERACTIVE QUERY CONSTRUCTION

Alda Lopes Gançarski and Pedro Rangel Henriques

XQuery is the standard language for querying XML documents using structural and content restrictions. XQuery is being complemented with a Full-Text language to perform operations on text treating it as a sequence of words, units of punctuation, and spaces. Due to the complex nature of XQuery structured queries, an extension to XQuery was informally proposed to allow for the selection of the interesting subset of elements from each intermediate result of a query. Intermediate results are, thus, available during the construction of the query, which helps the user in building a query to retrieve the desired result. In this paper, we formally define selection operations by extending XQuery grammar and defining new functions. These definitions will be used to build a processing system. The system should be incremental such that, after changing a query, only the operations depending on the changes are computed.

RESEARCH AND IMPLEMENTATION OF MPLS VPN PROTOCOL BASED ON NETWORK PROCESSOR

Wang YongJun and Huang QingYuan

MPLS VPN is one of popular protocols in next generation internet. In general, it would be implemented in modern routers. In this paper, the implementation technology of MPLS VPN was studied in high performance router based on network processor. The programming view of NPs is studied and a flexible protocol development software framework is proposed, which considers function partition of protocol into two parts for specific NP and general-purpose processor. Making use of properties of flexible programming and high processing capability of network processor, software architecture of MPLS VPN was proposed, the key technology was designed and implemented, which shows the efficiency of protocol extension and exploits the method to software upgrade of network processor.

AUTHORIZATION AND ACCESS CONTROL TO SECURE WEB SERVICES IN A GRID INFRASTRUCTURE

Serena Pastore

Security in a grid infrastructure is implemented by adopting standard protocols in order to realize authentication, authorization and access to distributed network nodes and services. Every different grid middleware implementing a grid environment makes use of several components to allow digital certification, delegation and single sign-on features while every virtual organization joining the grid should allow to set own authorization and access control rules. This paper reports about the mechanisms required to secure web services deployed in a grid environment based on the middleware used in several grid projects (LCG): the case study refers to a web application composed by java web services that allows for querying astronomical data sources, according to international standards currently under development within the international astrophysical community. The procedure requires the use of middleware packages that secure both web container and the application: security chain is basically implemented by means of java libraries, allowing for course-grained authentication and authorization, simplified by customizing configuration files such as those for the web application engine hosted in a grid node and for authorization and access control to be included in Web Archive (WAR) file implementing the application to be deployed.

A SECURE, OPEN AND INTEROPERABLE E-ORDERING SERVICE

Despina Polemi and Spyridon Papastergiou

Electronic Ordering (e-Ordering) services are fundamental in the provision of electronic trade. The contemporary e-Ordering implementations vary in terms of the underlined technologies, creating important interoperability and security problems. In this paper we capture the security requirements of the e-Ordering service and we present an e-ordering system based on the eXtensible Markup Language (XML), XML Cryptography, Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) and Web Services. Our proposed e-Ordering service is an open, secure and interoperability solution, respecting the EU legislation.

TRANSFORM: A TRANSACTION SAFE WEB APPLICATION MODEL

Matthias Ihle and Georg Lausen

Classical models of database-driven web applications follow thin-client architectures, i.e., all data processing and business logic resides on the server while the client's role is to arrange and display the user interface. When transactions come into play, which may naturally span several consecutive interactions between client pages and server actions, problems arise since transaction cannot exceed the boundaries of server actions. We address this issue by proposing a novel architecture for web applications, where a webservice-based data access component is integrated directly in the markup of a client page. Our approach guarantees ACID transaction properties and generates serializable histories in the sense of conflict serializability. In contrast to past efforts to transaction management in web applications, our architecture does not necessitate the existance of an additional, external transaction server.

WEB FEDERATES - TOWARDS A MIDDLEWARE FOR HIGHLY SCALABLE PEER-TO-PEER SERVICES

Ingo Scholtes and Peter Sturm

Starting from the classical Client/Server paradigm, in the last couple of years Peer-To-Peer approaches have evolved and proven their power. Currently we see an evolution from the distributed object access paradigm represented e.g. by middleware architectures like CORBA, DCOM or RMI towards Service Oriented Architectures (SOA), entailing a retrogression to the Client/Server paradigm. In this paper we want to present how Peer-To-Peer Applications can to a large extend benefit from intrinsic Web Service properties like loose coupling, declarative interface definition and interoperability, thus incorporating advantages from SOA and the Peer-To-Peer approach, opening new fields of application to both of them. For this purpose, WebFederate, a prototype middleware based on Microsoft's .NET Framework has been implemented and will be presented in this paper.

SECURITY SENSOR PROVIDING ANALYSIS OF ENCRYPTED NETWORK DATA

Daniel Hamburg and York Tüchelmann

A common drawback of Intrusion Detection Systems is that they are susceptible to encrypted attacks, i.e. attacks that employ security protocols, such as SSL, to conceal malign data. In this work, we introduce the Transport Layer Security Sensor (TLSS) providing detection engines access to network data encrypted at Transport Layer. TLSS consists of a local proxy and an integrated software sensor. The proxy outsources cryptographic functions from a local application, and the latter captures data exchanged between the proxy and the application and subsequently forwards it to a detection engine. We present an implementation of TLSS designed for Web servers providing SSL-secured HTTP access and evaluate its performance.

XML EVERY-FLAVOR TESTING

Antonia Bertolino, Jinghua Gao and Eda Marchetti

With XML and XML Schema widely acknowledged as the de facto standard for data exchange and interoperability between remote applications, the need for checking integrity and adequacy of XML documents, also by means of automated tools, increases. In this perspective, this paper addresses two objectives: we provide a classification and a short overview of the diverse existing approaches for the testing of XML-based documents; then, pushing further the potential of XML for testing purposes, we pursuit the application of traditional testing methods to programs using XML input data. We discuss the use of XML and XML schema as a basis for formalizing and automatizing the testing of applications using such kind of data, with particular reference to recent proposals for specification-based and perturbation-based testing approaches.

INVOKING ADAPTED WEB SERVICES USING A MULTI-AGENTS SYSTEM - THE FRAMEWORK PUMAS-AWS

Céline Lopez-Velasco, Angela Carrillo-Ramos, Jérôme Gensel, Marlène Villanova-Oliver and Hervé Martin

Nowadays, users access Web-based Information Systems (WIS) through various devices (desktops, laptops, Mobile Devices (MD) such as cell phones or PDA). Ideally, when a user queries WIS, she/he expects information to be adapted according to her/his context of use. In our work, this context is represented by the personal characteristics of the user, the features of her/his access device and her/his location. In order to provide WIS designers with mechanisms for adapting information we propose PUMAS-AWS, a framework which integrates the concept of Adapted Web Services –AWS into PUMAS framework. PUMAS is able to adapt (according to the personal characteristics of a nomadic user and the features of her/his mobile access device) the results of the queries of a nomadic user. This paper describes PUMAS-AWS which provides a nomadic user with adapted information retrieved from one or several WIS queried in nomadic environments.

A STRATEGYPROOF AUCTION MECHANISM FOR GRID SCHEDULING WITH SELFISH ENTITIES

V. Hastagiri Prakash and Y. Narahari

With major advances in computing technology and network performance, grid computing is strategically placed to become the future of enterprise and even personal computing. One of the most important issues concerned with grid computing is that of application scheduling. The type of scheduling algorithm used will depend on the type of the application. In a global grid setting, the individual users must be provided with an incentive to offer their resources. The situation becomes non-trivial because of the fact that these entities are intelligent, rational and selfish resource providers who, for strategic reasons, may not provide truthful information about their processing power and cost structure. In this scenario, apart from optimality of the algorithm used, strategy-proofness of the underlying mechanism becomes important. This paper presents a strategyproof mechanism based scheduling algorithm for parallel flow type applications in the form of a reverse auction.

OPEN AND DYNAMIC SCHEMA EVOLUTION IN CONTENT-INTENSIVE WEB APPLICATIONS

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

Modern information systems development is a complex task for it must fulfill a large variety of application- and architecture-oriented requirements. Furthermore, such requirements often are a moving target for the developer, not only because the system has to stay open to a constantly changing application domain, but also because new requirements are added during the extremely long lifetime of such information systems. To make things worse, modern information systems are operated in a 24x7-modus which generates the pressure of highly dynamic, almost online system evolution. A main source of problems such development projects struggle with originates from the lack of a systematic subdivision of large software systems into manageable modules. As a consequence developers are traditionally involved in a complex patchwork of manual efforts to keep the various parts of the system in sync with each other and with the system's requirements. In this paper we outline our approach to information system development which is based on a model for Conceptual Content Management (CCM). Our CCM approach profits from the dynamic, model-driven generation of smaller modules, which can be combined automatically into the full system. The generation process uses a CCM model of the application domain(s) from which our compiler framework can dynamically generate the schema-dependent parts of the system. Due to the dynamic nature of this generation process, we are able to provide adequate support for both schema evolution and personalization of such a system. We have successfully employed the CCM approach to the development of complex web information systems. We give a brief account of CCM development and present an application example.

OPTIMAL INFORMATION GATHERING SCHEME OVER A SCALABLE GRID INFORMATION SERVICES ARCHITECTURE

Nianjun Zhou, Dikran Meliksetian, Jean-Pierre Prost and Irwin Boutboul

A proactive model for gathering resource attribute values in large scale distributed systems is proposed and is analyzed within the context of resource discovery. This model, based on a tree topology, relies on information reduction to limit the amount of information collected at each node of the tree structure and to minimize information update and query cost. A Markov chain is used to model resource attribute value changes. This model is solved using dynamic programming to determine the optimal reduction scheme that minimizes the overall cost of updating and querying resource attributes.

CONTEXT-AWARENESS SIMULATION TOOLKIT - A STUDY ON SECURE CONTEXT-BASED LEARNING IN UBIQUITOUS COMPUTING

InSu Kim, HeeMan Park, BongNam Noh, YoungLok Lee, SeungYong Lee and HyungHyo Lee

The study deals with the most important elements of ubiquitous computing, that is, the toolkit to acquire, express and safely use the context information. To do so, we introduce CAST(Context-Awareness Simulation Toolkit) and show how it works. CAST generates users and devices in a virtual home domain, designates their relation and creates virtual context information. The created context information is reused by the request of application and put into use for learning. Particularly, we have given a consideration to security in the process of context creation and its consumption. That is, we applied SPKI/SDSI to test if the created context information was valid information and if the application that called for the context had legitimate authority to do so. CAST not only captures virtual context information, but it also guarantees the safe sharing of the context information requested by the application.

HIDING INFORMATION IN WAV-FILE - IMPLEMENTATION, ANALYSIS AND EVALUATION

Habes Alkhaisat

This paper focuses on the problem of Steganography: how can two communicating entities send secret messages over a public channel so that a third party cannot detect the presence of the secret messages. Notice that the goal of steganography is different from classical encryption, which seeks to conceal the content of secret messages. The goal of steganography is to hide messages inside other harmless messages in a way that does not allow any enemy to even detect that there is a second secret message present. This paper explains how to hide secret message (WAV and image file) inside WAV file called a BASE or HOST. This paper also explores several methods in detail, and attempts to test them out in code, and in practice, through several examples.

A MULTILINGUAL MARKUP TRANSLATION WEB-SERVICE - AN ENTRY LEVEL SOLUTION TO INTERNATIONALIZE XML MARKUP VOCABULARIES

Alejandro Bia, Juan Malonda and Federico Botella

Markup is based on mnemonics (i.e. element names, attribute names and attribute values). These mnemonics have meaning, being this one of the most interesting features of markup. Human understanding of this meaning is lost when the encoder doesn't understand the language the mnemonics are based on. By “multilingual markup” we refer to the use of parallel sets of tags in various languages, and the ability to automatically switch from one to another. We started working with multilingual markup in 2001, within the {name suppressed} Digital Library. By 2003, we have built a set of tools to automate the use of multilingual vocabularies. This set of tools translates both XML document instances, and XML document validators (we first implemented DTD translation, and then Schemas). First we translated the TEI tagset, and most recently the Dublin Core tagset to Spanish, and Catalan. Other languages were added later. Now we present a Multilingual Markup Website that provides this type of translation services for public use.

3D ANIMATION STREAMING

Martin Hash, Robert Hiromoto and Scott Harrison

In applications where it is imperative that an event occur at a specified time but the data loading requirements cannot be met before the event trigger, like animation distributed over the Internet, it seems appropriate to send the most important data first so that the user at least receives the gist of the information before the application moves on. We offer a framework of graceful degradation of 3D character animation, such that the story narrative is maintained even if data transmission rates are erratic.

AN ALGORITHM TO USE FEEDBACK ON VIEWED DOCUMENTS TO IMPROVE WEB QUERY - ENABLING NAÏVE SEARCHERS TO SEARCH THE WEB SMARTLY

Sunanda Patro, Vishv Malhotra and David Johnson

This paper presents an algorithm to improve a web search query based on the feedback on the viewed documents. A user who is searching for information on the Web marks the retrieved (viewed) documents as relevant or irrelevant to further expose the information needs expressed in the original query. A new web search query matching this improved understanding of the user’s information needs is synthesized from these text documents. The methodology provides a way for creating web search query that matches the user’s information need even when the user may have difficulty in doing so directly due to lack of experience in the query design or lack of familiarity of the search domain. A user survey has shown that the algorithmically formed query has recall coverage and precision characteristics better than those achieved by the experienced human web searchers.

WEB USER INTERACTION - COMPARISON OF DECLARATIVE APPROACHES

Mikko Pohja, Mikko Honkala, Miemo Penttinen, Petri Vuorimaa and Panu Ervamaa

The World Wide Web is evolving from a platform for information access into a platform for interactive services. Several applications are already used through Internet and Web browsers. User interface of such an application is defined by HTML. However, HTML has its deficiencies when used as a UI description language for all kinds of applications. Several parties have addressed this problem by defining specific UI description languages. Thus, for instance, a web browser could be used as a user interface for any application. We have revised the requirements for a UI description language from literature and evaluated two XML-based UI description formats against the requirements through use cases.

ENABLING VOCAL INTERACTION IN A WEB PORTAL ENVIRONMENT

Federico Bergenti, Lorenzo Lazzari, Marco Mari and Agostino Poggi

The growing request of innovative, multimodal interfaces for mobile users and the need of different navigation paradigms for impaired Internet users are promoting and driving nowadays research on multimodal interactions. In this paper we present our experiences in the integration of vocal components in a portal engine, namely Apache Jetspeed. First, we discuss the reasons why the integration of a full-featured portal brings significant advantages to the development of a vocal platform. Then, we describe two complementary approaches for enhancing portals with vocal capabilities, and we compare them under various standpoints. The first approach that we investigate is based on a server-side speech synthesizer, while the second relies on client-side technologies, X+V and the SALT markup languages. For each of these approaches we present some examples and we discuss advantages and drawbacks.

AN ONTOLOGY-BASED SERVICES COMPOSITION ALGORITHM

Jean-Charles Verdié, Danièle Hérin and Michel Sala

In the Semantic Web Services area, completing a complex request means calling many Web Services. They are characterized by their heterogeneity since they are build independently from the context in which they will be used. To compose them, we need to consider annotation and meta-data which will allow their characterization. The goal of this paper is to propose the execution of a formal model, allowing the automated processing of the composition of many Semantic Web Services. We define a request as a sequence of different Web Services with the help of a formal logic. We define the paths allowing its concrete resolution. Thanks to an abstraction of the Services whether they are viewed as physical, local or global, we propose an automation of the building of the request resolution map.

SCALABILITY OF TEXT CLASSIFICATION

Ioannis Antonellis, Christos Bouras, Vassilis Poulopoulos and Anastasios Zouzias

In this paper, we explore scalability issues of the text classification problem where using (multi)labeled training documents we try to build classifiers that assign documents into classes permitting classification in multiple classes. A new class of classification problems, called ‘scalable’ is introduced that models many problems from the area of Web mining. The property of scalability is defined as the ability of a classifier to adjust classification results on a ‘per-user’ basis. Furthermore, we investigate on different ways to interpret personalization of classification results by analyzing well known text datasets and exploring existent classifiers. We present solutions for the scalable classification problem based on standard classification techniques and present an algorithm that relies on the semantic analysis using document decomposition into its sentences. Experimental results concerning the scalability property and the performance of these algorithms are provided using the 20newsgroup dataset and a dataset consisting of web news

M-FIRE: A METAPHOR-BASED FRAMEWORK FOR INFORMATION REPRESENTATION AND EXPLORATION

Matteo Golfarelli, Andrea Proli and Stefano Rizzi

An open problem in the construction of an environment for visualizing and navigating information in the context of the Semantic Web is to guarantee a satisfactory compromise between expressivity and domain-independence. In this paper we first introduce M-FIRE, a configurable framework for instantiating visualization and navigation systems based on the adoption of custom metaphors: metaphors drive the process for obtaining a visual representation of a given piece of information and define how queries are generated upon user actions. Then, the paper describes in detail how presentation is achieved. The possible applications for our framework range from semantic browsing to ontology-enabled Web site design.

TOWARDS A DATA QUALITY MODEL FOR WEB PORTALS - RESEARCH IN PROGRESS

Angélica Caro, Coral Calero, Ismael Caballero and Mario Piattini

The technological advances and the use of the internet have favoured the appearance of a great diversity of web applications, among them Web Portals. Through them, organizations develop their businesses in a really competitive environment. A decisive factor for this competitiveness is the assurance of data quality. In the last years, several research works on Web Data Quality have been developed. However, there is a lack of specific proposals for web portals data quality. Our aim is to develop a data quality model for web portals focused on three aspects: data quality expectations of data consumer, the software functionality of web portals and the web data quality attributes recompiled from a literature review. In this paper, we will present the first version of our model.

ENTERPRISE PORTAL CONTENT MANAGEMENT - FROM MODEL TO APPLICATION

Sergey V. Zykov

The paper considers content management in web portals, which are built on heterogeneous enterprise information systems. Quite a heavy data burden has been accumulated by the enterprises, and it tends to increase further. Global distribution of the heterogeneous data and its weak-structuredness make difficult its uniform management. A problem-oriented approach for enterprise content management is presented, which includes a formal model and a software development toolkit. Implementation results demonstrate significant terms and cost reduction.

XML QUERY OBJECT MODEL: A GENERAL VIEW

Fábio Ribeiro Silvestre and Hernane Borges de Barros Pereira

We have observed an increase in document search needs in organizations. This increase in document search demand has required better efficiency on search software languages. The current technologies are using specific patterns to search documents. The most usual pattern, called XML, has been proposed by W3C and some languages (e.g. XQL, XML-QL etc.) were created to recover XML documents. The implementation of a XML query server, which abstracts the language used, has been an emerging necessity. This paper surveys technology used to develop a XML query server, called XQOM Schema, from the modelling to the implementation. In an organization setting, we have adopted new abstraction forms of searching for XML documents without the usage limitation established by a specific language. XQOM Schema may contribute to the creation of an universal document searching pattern in XML format.

GENERATING TEST CASES FROM SEQUENCES OF USE CASES

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

An important task in a development process is to test that functionality of the system under development satisfied its requirements. Test cases have to be realistic. They have to verify real behaviour of the system when it will in production. This paper shows a systematic approach to generate test cases that exercises several sequences of use cases.

DOMAIN ONTOLOGIES: A DATABASE-ORIENTED ANALYSIS

Stéphane Jean, Guy Pierra and Yamine Ait-Ameur

If many surveys on the ontology domain have clarified the concept of ontology, the capabilities and benefits of Information Systems based on this technology are still unclear. Therefore, the usage of these Information Systems in industry and services is not widespread. To propose a solution to this problem, this paper analyses ontology technologies from a database perspective. As a result, a taxonomy of ontologies is provided. This taxonomy highlights the need for different ontologies according to the business problems they intend to solve. It proposes an articulation of the different categories of this taxonomy on two scenarios. Finally, this paper presents several Information Systems based on ontology technologies and shows how they can be used to implement one of the proposed scenario.

MCCV BASED IMAGE RETRIEVAL FOR ASTRONOMICAL IMAGES

S.Santhosh Baboo, P.Subashini and K.S.Easwarakumar

Content based image retrieval in astronomy, a technique that uses visual contents to search astronomical images from a large scale image databases according to the users interests, has been an active and fast advancing research area. Early techniques were not generally based on visual features but the textual annotation of images. In other words, images were first annotated with text and then searched using a text-based approach from traditional database management systems. Comprehensive surveys of early text-based image retrieval methods can be found . Text-based image retrieval uses traditional database techniques to manage images. Through text descriptions, images can be organized by topical or semantic hierarchies to facilitate easy navigation and browsing based on standard Boolean queries. The aim of this paper is to review the current state of the art in content-based image retrieval in astronomical images , a technique for retrieving astronomical images on the basis of color distributions. The paper highlights the various retrieval methods like color histogram, color coherence vector and multi scale color coherence vector. The findings are based on both review of the relevant literature and discussions with researchers and practitioners in this field.

FRAC+: A DISTRIBUTED COLLABORATIVE FILTERING MODEL FOR CLIENT/SERVER ARCHITECTURES

Sylvain Castagnos and Anne Boyer

This paper describes a new way of implementing an intelligent web caching service, based on an analysis of usage. Since the cache sizes in software are limited, and the search for new information is time-consuming, it becomes interesting to automate the process of selecting the most relevant items for each user. We propose a new model (FRAC+), based on a decentralized collaborative filtering algorithm (FRAC) and a behavior modeling process. Our solution is particularly designed to address the issues of data sparsity, privacy and scalability. We consider the situation where the set of users is relatively stable, whereas the set of items may vary considerably from an execution to another. We furthermore assume that the number of users is much more important than the number of items. We argue that a user-based approach seems to be more suitable to address the aforementioned issues. We present a performance assessment of our technique called FRAC in terms of computation time and prediction relevancy, the two most reliable performance criteria in the industrial context we are involved in. This work has been implemented within the ASTRA satellite website broadcasting service.

COMBINING TWO STRATEGIES FOR ONTOLOGY MAPPING

Ying Wang, Jianbin Gong, Zhe Wang, Yanchun Liang and Nan Lu

Ontologies are the key to the Semantic Web because they are the carriers of the meanings contained in the Semantic Web (Brickly, 1999)(McGuinness, 2002)(Horrocks, 2002). At the same time, ontology mappings can provide a channel from which several ontologies could be accessed and hence could exchange information. Establishing such mappings has been the focus of a variety of research originating from diverse communities. In this paper, we propose an approach ACAOM (A Composite Approach for Ontology Mapping) for automatic ontology mapping based on the combination of name and instance based strategies. ACAOM uses WordNet to calculate similarities between concepts in two ontologies and also uses instances that include text information to build vectors, and then computes similarities. The two similarity measures are then combined to create the results of mapping. The experimental results and comparisons with related work indicate that ACAOM can find mappings effectively.

MINING THE COSTA RICAN WEB

Esteban Meneses

There is a mountain of gold behind the structure and composition of a local web. Identification of authorities, topics and web communities can be used to improve a search engine or to develop marketing strategies. This paper shows the usage of some powerful tools for generating results focused on a local web. The Costa Rican web was chosen as a test case. This analysis discovered the answer to typical questions like what is the site with more references or what is the most common type of files in dynamic pages. However, many more interesting data can also be obtained using web mining tools.

REAL-TIME DISCOVERY OF CURRENTLY AND HEAVILY VIEWED WEB PAGES

Kazutaka Maruyama, Kiyotaka Takasuka, Yuta Yagihara, Satoshi Machida, Yuichiro Shirai and Minoru Terada

The information on web increase explosively, so it is difficult for web users to find their necessary one. There are some approaches to resolve this problem, such as semantic web which deals with web information systematically, the improvement of search engines, and so on. Dealing with web as a huge database, these technologies works well, however, they cannot provide any useful solutions to get hot news which expands quickly to the world because of their time lag. In this paper, we propose a system whose users can know currently and heavily viewed web pages. The key features of this system are as follows: (1) to find hot news in web, (2) to provide recommendations to users without any content analysis, and (3) to apply the system to other communication tools like IM as their infrastructure to find appropriate contact targets. We describe our policy of the system implementation and show the result of a pilot experiment with a pilot implementation.

AUGMENTED REALITY ENVIRONMENT USING A WEB BROWSER - CONTENT PRESENTATION WITH A TWO-LAYER DISPLAY

Kikuo Asai and Hideaki Kobayashi

We developed a prototype system to make an augmented reality (AR) environment using a Web browser. Although AR technology has the potential to be used in various applications, authoring/editing AR contents is a problem. Graphics expertise and knowledge of computer programming are necessary for creating contents for AR applications. We used a Web browser as a presentation tool so that users who had experience in creating Web contents could reuse the multimedia data as AR contents and modify the AR contents by themselves. A two-layer display was used in the system in order to superimpose virtual objects onto a real scene for creating an AR environment. Another problem is about identifying objects in the real scene. An open-source library, ARToolkit, is often used as an image-processing tool for detecting the position and orientation of markers as well as identifying them. However, the markers must be registered in the system in advance, and the registration becomes tedious work when many markers are used such as Japanese kanji characters. The optical character reader (OCR) middleware was implemented as a character-recognition function for Japanese character markers. This paper describes the system design and software architecture for constructing an AR environment using a Web browser display and the demonstration of the prototype system.

TOWARD A SEARCH ENGINE OF MULTIMEDIA PRESENTATIONS

Belkhir Abdelkader, Bouyakoub Fayçal M’hamed and Bouyakoub Samia

Facing the explosion of the multimedia, it is necessary to develop new access methods to information that permit a fast access and natural to information. The handling of this aspect for presentations multimedia requires the implementation of a graphic interface facilitating the run-around, research and the visualization of the medias. Besides, this interface must answer the aspirations of the readers in terms of conviviality and simplicity of usage. This article presents an interface for presentations multimedia and proposes an indexing of these presentations for exploitation on the WEB.

JSR 168 AND WSRP 1.0 – HOW MATURE ARE PORTAL STANDARDS?

Xiaobo Yang, Xiao Dong Wang and Rob Allan

The benefits of adopting web portals in different scenarios like e-Learning and e-Research are well understood now. With built-in single sign-on (SSO), role-based authorisation management and personalisation, portals provide a uniform interface for seamless access by users to existing or emerging distributed resources such as the Grid. In this paper, two portal standards - Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP) and Java Specification Request (JSR) 168 will be discussed to reveal how practical they are in developing real world portals. The discussion is based on our work in portal development for several UK e-Science projects including the UK NGS (National Grid Services) Portal and the Sakai VRE Portal Demonstrator project.

SEMANTIC WEB TECHNOLOGIES FOR CONTENT REUTILIZATION STRATEGIES IN PUBLISHING COMPANIES

Andreas Andreakis, Adrian Paschke, Alexander Benlian, Martin Bichler and Thomas Hess

In recent times content reutilization in different media channels (such as in Cross Media Publishing or Windowing) is a much discussed concept in the media industry. It promises decreasing production and coordination costs by exploiting and leveraging synergy effects. First theoretical investigations emphasized the importance of efficient metadata-enriched linking and modularity techniques for a successful implementation of this multi-usage concept. However, nearly all recent approaches stop at the level of theoretical suggestions and do not include novel technological potentials provided by Semantic Web languages and tools. On the basis of previous works, this paper attempts to fill these research gaps by presenting a “proof of concept” implementation and by highlighting the possibilities and the potential of Semantic Web technologies in the context of media content reutilization.

FINDING EXPERTS ON THE WEB

Fabian Kaiser, Holger Schwarz and Mihály Jakob

In this paper, we present an integrated approach on finding experts for arbitrary user defined topics on the World Wide Web. We discuss the special challenges that come along with this issue and why solely applying standard techniques and standard tools like Web search engines is not suitable. We point out the necessity for a dedicated expert search engine, based on a Focused Crawler. The main contribution of our work is an approach to integrate standard Web search engines into the process of searching for experts to utilize the search engines' knowledge about content and structure of the Web.

A MODEL FOR AUTOMATIC MATCHING OF SECURITY REQUIREMENTS DURING SEMANTIC WEB SERVICE DISCOVERY

Andreas Friesen and Danna Feng

This paper describes a semantic approach for modelling security requirements of requesters and providers of Semantic Web Services. These semantic descriptions can be used either during semantic service discovery or service selection phase for automatic compatibility verification of the security requirements of a service requester and provider. The security requirements model, ontology classifying existing security services and mechanisms, and a semantic matchmaking method relying on description logics are described in detail. This work is related to several semantic and non-semantic Web Services standards. The relationship to the most relevant of them has been worked out.

INTEGRATING ONTOLOGIES AND USER INTERFACES - THE XGC APPROACH

Vicente R. Tomás López, J. Javier Samper, Juan José Martínez

In domains where several and different systems are working jointly, the integration of them via graphic interfaces is necessary to improve their employ and the user acceptance degree. In the transportation domain the interfaces are basically based on object control that allows to the road operator to manage the different traffic elements. The most usual interfaces are proprietary and they use different vocabularies to work with the same concepts. In this paper traffic ontology is presented. It is used to develop a Generic interface: the eXtensible Graphic Container-XGC. This user interface allows to create a standard interface able to integrate different systems. The system presents several good features: 1) traffic ontology is used to develop the object systems and to provide semantic knowledge; 2) the container is developed in Java which allows to use it in different platforms; 3) open source approach

A SERVICE BROKERING PLATFORM FOR PROVIDING PERSONALIZED AND SECURE CONTENTS

Alessandro Andreadis and Giovanni Luca Daino

During the last years, 3G standardization activities led to new directions both in the network and the service provision architecture. As a result, new concepts of service portability have been defined, as well as new topics related to security issues. Taking into account such an input, we moved to promote the development of a new generation of user-friendly and personalized information services for citizens as well as students and bank customers, accessible any-time, any-where, with any technology. In order to realize a personalized and trusted secure access to information services, we propose here a service brokering architecture. Based on Java and XML, the system implements user profiling techniques to tailor contents in a way that is independent of the specific device (fixed or mobile) used to get access. Such a new approach should carry to a fruitful user-friendliness and security in service managing, enabling the user to access services in an intuitive, trusted and personalized way, both in terms of service portfolio and user interface.

CONTEXT-AWARE WEBLOG TO ENHANCE COMMUNICATION AMONG PARTICIPANTS IN A CONFERENCE

Kosuke Numa, Hideaki Takeda, Takuichi Nishimura, Yutaka Matsuo, Masahiro Hamasaki, Noriyuki Fujimura, Keisuke Ishida, Tom Hope, Yoshiyuki Nakamura, Satoshi Fujiyoshi, Kazuya Sakamoto, Hiroshi Nagata, Osamu Nakagawa and Eiji Shinbori

In this paper, we propose a Weblog system called ActionLog, which can associate Weblog entries to real world contexts. The real world context is not only useful for Weblog authors themselves, but also beneficial to communication among people, because people with the same or a similar context can easily find each other. ActionLog collects user actions from both Web-based and other real-world systems. Weblog contents are generated automatically from these user actions with related information. Users can browse and edit these entries as their personal action records and in addition can publish them for experience sharing. We built a practical system as an ActionLog application for conference support. Its main objective is to help people to learn about presentations and to effectively meet other people in a limited amount of time and the least amount of user commitment. There are three main features, i.e., integration of information in the real world and the cyber world, personalization in both information capturing from users and in information providing to users, and persistent assistance throughout the conference.

WEB SERVICES FOR THE MANAGEMENT OF PERSISTENT ONLINE GAME FACTIONS

François Deliège and Esteban Zimányi

Star Wars Combine is a game involving thousands of players in a virtual world. Each player impersonates a character that continues evolving even when the player is not connected. Players have formed groups, called factions, that are self-organized. The more members a faction has, the more complicated to manage it becomes. The goal of this work is to create an infrastructure to allow faction management tools to automatically update their data with the information maintained on the game server. The web services technology is chosen for the various advantages it offers. While this technology is already widely accepted in the business world, its use in a game context is totally new. It seems that web services have gained their place in the game world and will continue to be developed. Hopefully, this experiment will convince other game designers to adapt their platforms in a similar manner.

WEB APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT AND QUALITY - OBSERVATIONS FROM INTERVIEWS WITH COMPANIES IN NORWAY

Sven Ziemer and Tor Stalhane

In this paper we present our findings from a series of interviews with companies developing web applications, investigating how quality issues are managed when developing web applications in a rush-to-market and competitive environment. Our findings suggest that requirement practises are communication intensive, that companies perceive quality attributes related to a good user experience important, and that companies don't have a clear trade-off situation.

SPECIFICATION AND IMPLEMENTATION OF MULTI-AGENT ORGANIZATIONS

Fatemeh Ghassemi, Naser Nemat Bakhsh, Behrouz Tork Ladani and Marjan Sirjani

Multi-agent systems are rapidly used by developers as a solution for complex and distributed systems. Applying organizational concepts in analysis and design of such systems helps developers to reduce the complexity and simplifies the system development procedure. In this paper, we propose a formal model for the specification of multi-agent organization. This formal model helps designing a coherent and consistent system using organizational structure. The formal model is applied to make the implementation of organization by Reo systematic. Reo is a coordination language that coordinates agents exogenously. Reo has a formal semantics which let us to validate the behavior of Reo circuits. This paper also defines how to convert the formal specification to a Reo circuit by providing Reo circuits for the different patterns of interaction protocols and organizational rules and how to compose simpler circuits to support more complex patterns.

TRANSFORMATION RULES FROM CONCEPTUAL MODEL TO NAVIGATIONAL MODEL IN HYPERMEDIA APPLICATIONS

Didier Assossou and Maxime Wack

During the hypermedia applications modeling and design process, the passage from conceptual model to cooperative navigational model is a critical transition which need consistency and precise rules to structure the navigation from the application domain information. In this paper, we propose some transformation rules from conceptual model to cooperative navigational model. We have elaborated a set of transformation rules to transform classes into nodes and relationships into links. These rules allow generating a first level navigational diagram from the hypermedia applications conceptual model.

METAMODELING THE REQUIREMENTS OF WEB SYSTEMS

María José Escalona and Nora Koch

A detailed requirements analysis is best practice in the development of traditional software. Conversely, the importance of requirements engineering for Web systems is still underestimated. Only few Web methodologies provide an approach for the elicitation of requirements and techniques for their specification. This paper focuses on specification through requirements models of Web systems. We present a metamodel, which contains the key concepts needed for the requirements specification of Web systems. The benefit of such a metamodel is twofold: (1) The key concepts are used for the definition of a common modeling language: a UML profile for Web requirements. (2) The elements of the metamodel are mapped to the modeling constructs of the different Web methodologies. In this way the prerequisite for model to model transformations is given, which allows to build different views of the requirements of a Web system using different Web methodologies.

EFFICIENT POLICY-BASED ACCESS CONTROL IN WEB-BASED PERSONALIZATION MANAGEMENT - FOR USE IN CONVERGENT APPLICATIONS

Heinz-Josef Eikerling

Personalisation of web-centric user environments and applications to contextual information, as well as to the needs and preferences of the user is a contemporary topic. The personalisation data which is usually managed through profiles is quite sensitive with respect to security concerns. Therefore means need to be devised to maintain the privacy status and to ensure proper access control and data integrity. Within this paper we describe a system which handles the aspect of access control through the use policies. The access control engine is a key component within the set of interacting services making up the profile access manager. Through this approach the according profiles can be potentially dispersed over different types of physical storage devices and access control can be featured quite independently of the actual storage type. Particularly, the integration of the different storage devices is facilitated which permits to bind locally stored profile data to data stored elsewhere (due to space or constraints with respect to accounting of profile information). We thus believe that the system is particularly applicable for convergent personalisation scenarios in which web-based personalisation data has to be combined with local information stored on a mobile device for nomadic use.

BPM: OVERALL ARCHITECTURE AND BUSINESS PROCESS DESIGN TOOL

Anna Lisa Guido and Roberto Paiano

Business processes are playing in the last years a very important role in the companies and the explicit introduction of them in the Information System architecture is a must. This requires the introduction of tools and methodologies able to support both business and IT experts in process modelling, analysis and design and to support cooperation between them. Our research work is focused not only on the overall Information System architecture that allows to work directly on the business processes and to manage them, but also on the tools that support the whole software development cycle from design to development and maintenance. We start our research work from the business process design: we select a notation able to cover the traditional semantic gap between business and IT experts and we give a powerful tool to support their job.

E-NAMOSUPPORT: A WEB-BASED HELPDESK SUPPORT ENVIRONMENT FOR SENIOR CITIZENS

Wei Zhou, Takami Yasuda and Shigeki Yokoi

This study aims to track the development of a helpdesk support environment -- E-namoSupport -- to solve digital divide between seniors and other generations. This is one part of the E-namokun project, an information promotion project started in Nagoya city, Japan. E-namoSupport is a helpdesk system that has the following characteristics: (1) unlike general helpdesk systems, which generally only cover one organization, E-namoSupport has been developed through joint government, university, and NPO cooperation; (2) users are senior citizens with little or no PC experience; (3) its aim is not only to solve problems or answer questions, but also helping senior citizens learn more computer knowledge and further their computer skills. In the E-namoSupport environment we have developed four subsystems: a case tracking system (CTS); a consultation management system (CMS); an FAQ System (FAQS); and an FAQ analysis system (FAQAS). We propose an information cycle model that efficiently manages information flow in the four subsystems as well as in organizations. We take senior citizens’ attributes into account using a set of quizzes that help operators describe enquiry cases and make conversation flow more smoothly. We also design an easy-to-use interface and functions that help users access FAQS. Moreover, we develop E-namoSupport as a learning environment, providing suitable learning contents by analysing users’ interests and needs, which helps users to improve their IT abilities of and enjoy life in the information age.

KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT AND ITS IMPLEMENTATION

Vladimír Bureš

Recently, knowledge management (KM) has become a very popular business concept. Unfortunately, there are still problems connected with the incorporation of KM into an organisation in the Czech Republic. Examples of these problems are a lack of utilisable methodologies of KM implementation in the Czech Republic that are described in sufficient details, strong technological orientation of KM implementation, different perception of KM by different people, where KM is mostly substituted by information technologies, absence of methodologies that would take into consideration of a specific business and culture environment in the Czech Republic, etc. That is why, a new methodology was developed at the Faculty of Informatics and Management at the University of Hradec Kralove. This paper briefly describes the situation of KM in the Czech Republic and basic features of the methodology KM-Beat-It.

BUSINESS MODEL ANALYSIS OF SEAMLESS ACCESS IN SOUTH EAST ASIA

Chin Chin Wong, Andy L. Y. Low and Pang Leang Hiew

Fixed mobile convergence (FMC) will be one of the strongest trends in telecommunications in the near future. Given the choice, most consumers would want to use a single handset yet do not want to pay the premium when at home or in the office. Even though seamless network integration will still take some time to become reality, there are many convergence opportunities that are currently being exploited. Only by truly reflecting customer needs with a broad and flexible portfolio of products and services that shield customers from underlying network technologies can players in the industry meet the challenge and promise of convergence. This paper aims to discuss business models to aid in addressing one of the most common issues facing executives: aligning IT with the business. This study analyses business models to examine FMC from multiple perspectives to understand how carrier differentiates its product offerings, acquires and keeps customers, positions itself in the competitive market as well as captures profit. The paper reports the findings on the evolutionary processes towards FMC development that could be used to derive architecture to serve as a guide for players in the industry and to outline suitable approaches to encourage mass market adoption of FMC services in South East Asia.

A CONCEPTUAL MODEL FOR SUSTAINING COMPETITATIVE ADVANTAGE IN DIGITAL ECONOMY

Swapan Kumar Majumdar

As high speed Internet is connecting citizens and businesses around the world, social and economic mode of interactions among citizens, governments, customers and businesses are changing rapidly. Governments and businesses are using web information systems to provide highest quality services at affordable cost to their citizens and customers. Citizens and customers are becoming more demanding. Businesses are experiencing intense pressure of global competitors, and are in constant search for strategies and models for better governance and sustaining growth. This paper examines the impacts of Internet and web-technology on the functions, processes, structure and behaviour of connected-business organizations, and their effects on the competitive landscape and sustainability of eBusiness organizations. As a final point, it provides a conceptual model for sustaining competitive advantage in digital economy

BAHASA SEMBANG IN WEB FORUMS - KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT FOR PILES OF ATOPIAN DISCOURSE

Mohd Zaidi Abd Rozan and Yoshiki Mikami

As most communication channels are expanding fast on the web, so does the usage of language that is parallel to it. In this paper, we are trying to explain that the national language of Malaysia, bahasa Melayu (BM) is currently being evolutionised in the web medium. This evolution process has transformed a vast number of BM words into new language known as bahasa sembang. As this transformation frequently happened in most Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), especially web forums, this has been an attention grabber for many sociolinguists and language researchers. However, this is predominantly inclined to its negative and controversial side. The popularity and uncomplicatedness of web forums has lead to the creation of sembang language irrepressibly; greatly accepted as common and sensible vocabularies for its communities. The process is becoming dominant and sembang language has emerged to provide evidence that supports knowledge-sharing-procreation process in a communal manner. A special character with sembang language is that it emulates spoken phrase via explicit spelling and typing, plus its feature that incorporates the blend of tacit knowledge and explicit knowledge. Such distinctive character is significantly contributing to the Socialization and Externalization process in knowledge management as proposed by Nonaka’s knowledge creation model.

THE INCREASING ROLE OF SERVICE LEVEL AGREEMENTS IN B2B SYSTEMS

Philipp Masche, Paul Mckee and Bryce Mitchell

As software development moves towards adopting service orientated architectures (SOA) applications will be increasingly composed of a number of services. This architecture enables business to drive down costs and respond faster and flexibly to changing markets. Virtualisation delivers similar benefits for the management of resources. If viable business models for a combination of those two technologies can be found, a true commodity grid can become reality. An essential principle of any viable business model will be to secure the flexibility for service providers to manage and provision services. This naturally restricts the customer’s access to the management interface of the service which inevitably leads to the customer and service provider having different views of the same service. The shared part of the view is encapsulated within a service level agreement (SLA). We propose that this SLA contains terms only related to business level objectives (BLO). Deployment and management detail of a service is hidden by virtualisation in the provider’s domain and therefore should not be expressed in the SLA. The SLA will become key to build confidence in the business relationship between provider and consumer and a differentiating factor between providers in a market place.

OFFER RETRIEVING STRATEGIES ON A COMMERCIAL WEB SITE - AN EXPLORATORY RESEARCH

Richard Ladwein and Mohamed Slim Ben Mimoun

After presenting the concept of offer retrieving on the Internet, the present paper explore via a qualitative study the different strategies used by the consumer to retrieve a product on a commercial web site and the role of familiarity in the determination of such strategy. Our results show that individual ability to retrieve the offer on a commercial Web site would depend on the adopted strategy and on the Internet familiarity level. Confirming the idea according to which there is a narrow link between the usability and offer accessibility on an e-commerce site.

OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE IN THE DESKTOP: THE PERSPECTIVE OF THE PUBLIC ADMINISTRATIONS IN UK

Andres Baravalle, Sarah Chambers, Siobhan North and Mike Holcombe

Open Source has the potential to play an important role in the drive towards e-Government. However, UK public administrations appear to have a markedly different attitude towards the use of Open Source in the desktop to similar organizations in other parts of Europe. The scope of this paper is to investigate some of the possible causes for the distinction, based on experience gathered in the COSPA project. Technical, economical, socio-cultural and political causes are considered and discussed.

OFFERING ERP SOLUTIONS AS ONLINE SERVICES

Aki Lassila

The differences between product and service business are considerable and the change of focus in a firm’s business model from one to the other is not easy to accomplish. The objective of this paper is to study how a software product company specialised in Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solutions can expand its business with the Software as a Service (SaaS) business model. SaaS services e.g. enable customers to focus on their core competencies, provide easier access to technical expertise, and offer economical access to valuable software applications at anytime and from anyplace. To providers, SaaS offers e.g. lowered production and distribution costs, more predictable cash flows, and shortened sales cycle. However, in order to be able to successfully offer SaaS services the provider has to overcome the potential risks associated with e.g. scalability, reliability, and partner management. In this case study we study SAP and examine how the SaaS model can be implemented by an ERP software company. SAP has leveraged its market leader position with its SaaS offering and expanded its customer base in the SME markets with the help of its partner network by successfully solving the problems associated with SaaS and by taking advantage of the SaaS model’s benefits.

ANALYSIS OF WEBLOG LINK STRUCTURE– A COMMUNITY PERSPECTIVE

Ying Zhou and Joseph Davis

In this paper, we report a two level study on weblog link structures. At the micro level, we carried out an in-depth investigation ofindividual weblogs. Our goal was to obtain some preliminary understanding of the different types of links that might indicate underlying communities of bloggers. Complete and detailed link data was collected from eight weblogs followed by a variety of analyses. The result shows that both incoming and outgoings follow Zipf like distribution in terms of the sources of those links. These suggest clustering patterns (communities) within the whole blogspace. We also examine the temporal aspects of weblogs. The average life span of a weblog entry is fairly long in most of our sample cases. In addition, analysis on individual comment authors shows that in average, active comment authors maintain a rather long relationship with a certain weblog. It provides evidence that historical data may be useful in understanding weblog communities. On a larger scale, we developed a program to collect complete link data from large number of interconnected weblogs and performed cluster analysis on it. Communities with common topics are successfully extracted using those link data.

SUPPORTING NETWORKED PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT WITH BUSINESS-TO-BUSINESS INTEGRATION - RECOGNIZING A NEW PHASE IN THE INTEGRATION IMPLEMENTATION

Hannu Laesvuori, Paavo Kotinurmi and Katrine Jokinen

Networked product development is becoming an important topic for many industrial companies due to the need to improve the performance of product development processes. In product development, product data management (PDM) systems are typically used to store and manage the information related to the developed products and thus business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce in this context requires integration of heterogeneous PDM systems located in different companies. In this paper, we describe the characteristics of B2B integrations (B2Bi) that enable e-commerce in the context of networked product development. The basis for this paper is a set of semi-structured interviews conducted among the representatives of PDM and B2Bi personnel in three companies, and the experiences gained on constructing a laboratory prototype of PDM systems integration using the RosettaNet standard. We argue that there is a unique phase in the B2Bi implementation process in the context of networked product development that we call project-level integration. This phase arises from the project-oriented nature of product development, and recognizing it seems important for the successful implementation of B2Bi in the context of networked product development.

MULTIFUNCTION SYSTEM BASED ON A STATE-OF-THE-ART MICROCONTROLLER

José Manuel Rodríguez Ascariz and Luciano Boquete

This paper presents the hardware and software design of a new point of sale terminal. It is a multifunction system with a wide range of functionalities: state-of-the-art user interface, a host of communication possibilities (RS232, Ethernet, GSM, RTB MODEM) etc. The core of the whole development is the IMX21 microcontroller which allows the system design to be simplified. The Linux operating system is used due to the complexity of the hardware systems and the fact that it has to be reconfigured for different functionalities. The peripheral drivers have therefore been programmed. The result is a totally portable, low-consumption system capable of performing many functions.

THE CONCEPTUALISATION AND ANALYSIS OF A VALUE NETWORK - HOW TO CREATE VALUE WITH INTER ORGANIZATIONAL COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE?

Cláudia Fernandes and Luís Rocha

This paper will discuss how an ongoing learning experience on collaborative learning in the industry field aligns with the principles of a community of practice and how technology is used to support the learning and development processes. It is a conceptual analysis that is grounded in theory and will provide the audience with opportunities to further reflect on learning communities. The authors present the main results and experiences from the use of knowledge networks. They start by comparing the community with pre-existing models, e.g. “Communities of Practice (CoP)” (Wenger & Snyder, 2000) and “Knowledge networks” (Büchel & Raub, 2002). This is one on-going experience in the industry/services field, directly with Portuguese Technical Commissions (PTC), and it has several outputs such as new norms and directives elaboration, norm projects voting, working papers, norms translation (quality system), etc. There are over 204 persons involved in the 8 PTC managed by XXXXX from several different organizations, technological centres, institutes, and universities. The final result is the value creation between the participants that sometimes enables practice rethinking and innovative processes. With the discussion of the experience we aim to contribute to further reflection and analysis of this emerging reality.

BUILDING UML MODELS COLLABORATIVELY

Weiqin Chen, Roger Pedersen and Øystein Pettersen

This paper presents the design, implementation and evaluation of a distributed collaborative UML modelling tool. The tool is designed primarily for students who study UML modelling. It can also be used as a platform for collaborative design of software. We conducted formative evaluations and summative evaluation to improve the environment and discover how users collaborate through the environment. From the evaluations we received positive feedback. The findings indicate that this environment is both user-friendly and informative. We also found that less experienced users can learn from their more experienced collaborators.

ANALYSIS OF POSITIVE INCENTIVES FOR PROTECTING SECRETS IN DIGITAL RIGHTS MANAGEMENT

Jianwen Xiang, Weiqiang Kong, Kokichi Futatsugi and Kazuhiro Ogata

A common problem to current DRM-based services that usually offer streaming digital content and support period pricing (monthly or yearly subscription) systems is how to prevent secret (e.g., account and password) sharing beyond authorized consumers. Traditional technical solutions such as binding the secrets with specific devices can only solve this problem to some extent at the cost of user's portability. Current legal measures also encounter some difficulties such as detecting the difference in the physical identity of the user. We propose a protocol, IBSPS (Incentives-based Secrets Protection System), to encourage the consumers to keep the secrets private rather than to share them among friends. With IBSPS, a content provider can also get more revenue by attracting more honest and authorized consumers in return, even the provider has to pay an amount of money as a positive incentive for the consumers to protect the secrets. An escrow service is used in IBSPS to receive registrations and allocate the incentive. We analyze this system and show that multiple registration and collusion between users can not get a higher payment than honest one-time registration and not sharing.

BUZZ NETWORK ON THE WEBLOG COMMUNITY

Shinya Takami and Katsumi Tanaka

Various information has come to overflow in the world and it became easy for us to discuss and share many topics on the Internet. As we don't give priority to the mass media as trustful information, effective expansion of buzz(word-of-mouth) will be expected as an important marketing approach. That is called 'Buzz Marketing'. It seems that buzz on the Internet spreads by information on weblogs because weblogs are communication media. Thus some weblog groups can be regarded as buzz networks. It is important in our research to analyze the network structure of buzz and find the hubs on the network. We propose the technique for finding the weblog groups that have suitable network structure for buzz marketing. Now we are developing the analyzer of buzz network for weblogs called 'WeBz Analyzer'. Our system can find the buzz hub in weblog communities by analyzing the network structure of weblogs.

PROVIDING FREE MUSIC OVER THE INTERNET - MAKING PROFITS OUT OF AN AD-BASED BUSINESS MODEL

Dimitrios Margounakis, Dionysios Politis and Christina Boutsouki

The digital revolution and the new way of thinking in the 21st century (as a result of the rapid evolution of technology) inevitably affect the music industry. Innovative kinds of e-business, which are virtual and evolve dynamically in a digital environment, tend to prevail the traditional retail stores. The traditional models should be revised, and new business models should be created, in order the electronic business to succeed. Information technologies (IT) would have the main role in the new business models, while new features will reconstruct the processes and the relations that constitute the music industry value chain. The new face of music e-commerce requires new strategies and new B2C and B2B models. Such a model is the advertisement model (ad-based model). Advertisements could be used as an alternative way of making profits, instead of selling music, since Internet users are yet quite familiar with free music downloading. The core idea of the proposed model of the paper is the distribution of free music with embedded sound advertisement spots of sponsors over the Internet. Certain improvements on the model design can lead to an integrated combination of the two most promising models: the ad-based and the subscription model.

PROTOTYPE OF CHINESE MACROECONOMIC MANAGEMENT INFORMATION SYSTEM

Junpeng Wei and Xinyou Li

This paper studies the design of the prototype system of Chinese Macroeconomic Management Information System. We construct the portal website of the prototype system to implement information services. And we create the database and the data warehouse, implement the function of data query, analysis and presentation, and achieve the management of unstructured information in the remote literature warehouse.

THE WEB BASED SYSTEM FOR RECORDING AND ANALYSING DIFFERENT KINDS OF NEGOTIATIONS

Michal Piotrowski and Beata Krawczyk-Brylka

The paper describes a web based system for recording, analysing and supporting some of the steps of negotiations. It also discusses several, fundamental problems of implementation of the system. To show its usability, some experiments and outcomes of negotiation processes are demonstrated.

PITFALLS AND POTENTIALS OF SOCIAL SOFTWARE IN HIGHER EDUCATION

Ines Puntschart, Klaus Tochtermann and Gisela Dösinger

The overwhelming success of all different types of social software, such as WIKIs, Blogs etc. is about to change the way how society interacts. Most of the systems are being used on a voluntary basis run and maintained by individuals who have a deep wish to transfer and share their knowledge with others. Often, mainly young people who meet won’t ask for their telephone numbers but instead for the weblog address. This transfer and sharing, however, often takes place outside any educational setting even though the main purpose of educational settings such as universities is to educate students through sharing and transferring knowledge. Still, until today only very rarely social software tools are used in universities to support teaching and training, and this is the case even though students are keen on using exactly these tools in their spare time. This observation leads to the guiding research question for our work: How can social software be used most effectively and efficiently in higher education? In order to find answers we conducted four case studies at TU Graz with more than 350 students involved.

DESIGN AND MAINTENANCE OF TRUSTWORTHY E-SERVICES: INTRODUCING A TRUST MANAGEMENT CYCLE

Christer Rindebäck and Rune Gustavsson

Designing trustworthy e-services is a challenge currently undertaken by many actors concerned with the development of e-services. This is a challenging task. Many problems have been identified but a unified approach towards the process of engineering trustworthy e-services doesn’t yet exist. This paper introduces a principled approach to deal with trust solutions in e-services based on a concern oriented approach where end users’ concerns serves as the starting point for the process to engineer appropriate solutions to trust related issues for an e-service. The trust management cycle is introduced and described in detail. We use an online application for reporting gas prices as validation of the proposed cycle

EVALUATION OF IT SERVICE MANAGEMENT FROM AN ORGANISATIONAL PERSPECTIVE

Blake E. McNaughton and Pradeep K. Ray

Applying IT Service Management (ITSM) is now a key issue in the management of the Information Technology function. The Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is perhaps the most popular and influential framework consisting of a set of ‘best practice’ processes for performing ITSM. With adoption growing globally it is important to understand the benefits that ITIL processes can bring an organisation. To date the benefits of implementing and using the ITIL processes have merely been inferred or assumed with very little academic research and only minimal anecdotal evidence available. Many organisations are planning to, or have already started implementing ITIL processes into their IT function with what would seem to be a lack of clear understanding into the tangible and more importantly intangible benefits that these processes can bring. Since organisations are investing millions of dollars over several years implementing ITIL it is important to evaluate the effectiveness of ITIL from the perspective of the businesses needs. This paper presents an overview of various approaches and evaluation methodologies with a view to develop an evaluation methodology for IT service management from an organisational perspective.

REDESIGNING INTRODUCTORY ECONOMICS - TECHNO-COLLABORATIVE LEARNING

Maha Bali, Aziza El-Lozy and Herb Thompson

Does computer-mediation enhance student performance or student interest in the learning process? In this paper we present the somewhat tentative results of an experiment carried out in teaching/learning methodology and pedagogy. The goal of the experiment was to examine, compare and elicit results to identify the differences, if any, in learning outcomes between two classes. One class was taught using computer-mediated technologies in conjunction with “active” learning pedagogical principles; and the other class was taught by the same instructor with identical course syllabi and textbook, but using a more conventional approach of lectures and tests to achieve learning.

COMPLETENESS, SECURITY AND PRIVACY IN USER MODELLING FOR WEB-BASED LEARNING

Maria Virvou, Nineta Polemi and Katerina Kabassi

This paper describes a user modelling agent for a web-based learning system that provides personalised and secure interaction with its users (learners). The system involves user modelling in order to provide tutoring that is dynamically tailored to the individual learner’s needs. It constantly observes the user silently and processes the observations so that it may generate hypotheses about the user’s level of domain knowledge, current goals and possible problems. Personalised Web-based learning requires the gathering of a lot of personal data concerning the user and thus security and privacy issues are raised. Information about the user is maintained centrally on a User modelling Server and concerns each individual learner. Each user model is available to any client application of the system that requests it through Web Services. PKI and WS-security technologies have been used in order to embed security in the F-SMILE system and offer basic security services.

TEACHING DOCUMENT PRODUCTION AND MANAGEMENT WITH DOCBOOK

Alberto González Téllez

Document production is an important aspect of academic activity. Nowadays the most common tools used to create teaching documents are office suites. These applications are user friendly but mainly oriented to business environments. Some desirable features like content repository management, content filtering and presentation format selection are partially or completely missing in office suites. Docbook is a book production oriented XML compliant language, so it has the capability of using the standard XML processing tools like XSLT, XPath, XInclude and XQuery. The main parts of Docbook (DTD and stylesheets) are open source and freely available. These basic components can be customized and complemented in order to get adapted to application requirements and final users. After some years of experience using Docbook to produce our teaching material we found productive tools and we developed some Docbook customizations

THE ROLE OF LEARNING OBJECT ONTOLOGIES

Juha Puustjärvi

Educational information systems should provide easy access to learning material. In addition learning material should be linked in a way that the learner can easily access all required material. Unfortunately current metadata standards and learning object content models do not support such features as they do not capture enough semantics of learning objects. In this article we present the ontologies that give the semantics for metadata descriptions, and thus support semantic querying and conceptual navigation of learning objects. Semantic querying differs from traditional keyword based searching in that searching expressions are based on ontologies, which describe the concepts of the domain in which learning takes place. Semantic querying can also be used for content based integration of learning objects. Conceptual navigation in turn means that named links can be used in navigating between learning objects. Named links are analogous with the relationships in conceptual models.

EDUWEB 2.0 - ICAMP & N-GEN EDUCATIONAL WEB

Antonio Fumero

This article presents iCamp – innovative, inclusive, interactive & intercultural learning Campus – as the first implementation of an actual Next Generation Educational Web, supported by the emergent Web 2.0 paradigm and the technologies surrounding it. It is intended to show you how the key elements under this blurry umbrella-like concept of Web 2.0 permeate the educational domain, allowing us to develop a brand-new learning environment upon a series of innovative pedagogical models, designed to be the basis of Higher Education in an enlarged Europe.

TEACHING DATABASE ANALYSIS AND DESIGN IN A WEB-BASED CONSTRUCTIVIST LEARNING ENVIRONMENT

Thomas M. Connolly and Carolyn E. Begg

The study of database systems is typically core in undergraduate and postgraduate courses related to computer science and information systems. However, there are parts of this curriculum that learners find difficult, in particular, the abstract and complex domain of database analysis and design, an area that is critical to the development of modern information systems. This paper reflects on these difficulties and describes an approach for teaching database analysis and design online motivated by principles found in the constructivist epistemology, which helps to overcome these difficulties and provides the learner with the knowledge and higher-order skills necessary to understand and perform database analysis and design effectively as a professional practitioner. The paper presents some preliminary results of this work and reflects on the findings.

INTEREST BASED GROUP MANAGEMENT MECHANISMS FOR E-LEARNING DESIGN USING THE PEER-TO-PEER TECHNOLOGIES

Surya Bahadur Kathayat and Nandana Rajatheva

Traditional client-server based e-Learning architecture has many limitations. There is the overhead in a single learning server and inefficient use of resources. There is a lack of real-time interactive ness among learning group members therefore learning is not effective. There is also difficulty in the collaborative work because learners may have different interest, may feel lonely and may leave the system as well. Synchronous, any time and any where, and interactive e-Learning architecture where every learner in the learning group can contribute their resources like in traditional class-room based system, is the requirement of next generation e-Learning architecture. In this paper we purpose novel mechanisms for next generation e-Learning architecture using alternative technologies, peer-to-peer technologies. The proposed framework is based on P2P architecture for scalability, robustness, efficient sharing of resources and interactivity. Purposed system also incorporate efficient and reliable interest based e-Learning grouping and management mechanisms in the top of application layer. Such Interest based interactive P2P based group management mechanisms for e-Learning will combine the tools that are already available, independent of the installed infrastructure and offer a great deal of potential for workgroup collaboration, communities of practice, and self-directed learning.

IMPROVING DESIGN OF E-LEARNING COURSES TO MEET SPECIAL NEEDS

Ileana Hamburg and Thorsten Busse

Web-based learning could provide additional educational opportunities for disabled people to improve their qualification supporting their social integration and integration into the knowledge-based economy. But the requirements and wishes of disabled people are frequently not understood or taken into account by the de-velopers of learning environments based on new media. Often the users can not articulate their wishes about the learning environments and what they would like to learn for their (future). In this paper the scenario planning is presented as one method to help on one hand disabled people to express their wishes and plan their careers and on the other hand designers to make decisions which address special needs of disabled people at e-learning courses so that they could be usable and accessible. Examples of on-going projects are also shortly presented.

SUPPORTING RE-LEARNING OF BASIC SKILLS OF PEOPLE WITH DISABILITIES BY WEB-BASED TRAINING

Thorsten Busse and Ileana Hamburg

Learners with disabilities need to (re) learn basic skills at all levels to enable them to lead more independent lives, to improve their literacy or numeracy, to gain employment or enter further education. Web-based Training- WbT has the potential to offer many advantages over traditional instructor-led training. In this pa-per after a listing of some barriers of (re-)learning of basic skills. two ongoing European projects are pre-sented having as one of the objectives the use of WbT for (re)learning of basic skills at people with learning and/or physical disabilities.

E-LEARNING TOOLS FOR E.F.L. TUITION AT UNIVERSITY - A FOCUS ON WRITING, READING, LISTENING AND SPEAKING SKILLS

Eduardo de Gregorio-Godeo

This paper reports an ongoing experience integrating the use of e-learning in English-as-a-Foreign-Language (EFL) university tuition. Focusing on such fundamental skills for the language-learning process as speaking, listening, reading and writing, we discuss the teaching-and-learning strategies activated throughout the undergraduates’ use of the virtual laboratory set up to allow EFL learners access the online lexical and grammatical resources designed to implement the programme. Attention is paid to the didactic and pedagogical premises followed for the incorporation of ICTs within the overall teaching-and-learning framework characteristic of traditional college education. In addition to describing the e-learning collaborative tools selected for the virtual laboratory, and the organization of the laboratory as such, practical consideration is given to curricular design and teachers’ tutoring action within the programme. Finally, the paper takes into account the implications of the project for further educational contexts as in continuing/adult education.

ISSUES INVOLVED WITH IMPLEMENTING A STUDENT-CENTRED TECHNOLOGY-BASED TOOL - THE CASE OF A MULTIMEDIA GLOSSARY

David M Kennedy

There is evidence that glossaries are perceived by students as highly desirable assets to improve learning. This paper describes the development of a glossary tool, the Multimedia Enhanced Glossary to Assist Understanding (MEGA-U), which can leverage the resources available on the internet, support communities of practice and support student-annotation of glossary terms. Customized glossaries should enhance student-centred online learning environments. However, there are significant barriers to successful deployment of the glossary system in pre-service teacher education Hong Kong. The paper describes the tool, and then examines the reasons why the tool is not being used as expected, highlighting some of the pedagogical, logistical and cultural factors that inhibit the use of the software.

AN AUTHORING TOOL TO DEVELOP ADAPTIVE ASSESSMENTS - PROPOSAL MODEL TO CONSTRUCT ADAPTIVE ASSESSMENT ITEMS

Héctor Barbosa and Francisco García

This paper presents the proposal for the development of an Authoring Tool for the definition of Assessment items for E-learning platform that follows accepted and open standards like IMS an XML. The main goal of this model is the definition and packaging of semantic learning objects that could be integrated and deliberated to open e-learning platforms.

SCORM-COMPLIANT LEARNING SYSTEM WITH ANNOTATION CAPABILITY - POWER RTE

Dowming Yeh, Han-yung Yang and Wen-Shen Liu

SCORM (Sharable Content Object Reference Model) standard simply records learner’s evaluation grade and traces their learning path. However, learning portfolios contain not only learner’s evaluation grade and the browsing sequence of their learning contents, but also annotations which the learner add onto learning objects, for example: comments, highlighting marks, digests, and so on. Therefore, a popular open source SCORM-compliant browser － ADL Sample RTE only records grades for pre-test/post-test and learning path, lacking the capability of storing annotation information. This research applies software reengineering techniques to enhance ADL Sample RTE so that learner can store annotation information with the enhanced version. The software Reengineering process is divided into three phases. Static analysis is performed first to dissect the system architecture, followed by dynamic analysis, which is proceeded interactively through web fronts to understand how various dynamic pages startup. Finally, annotation functionality is added in system reconstruction phase. The outcome of the reengineering process is called Power RTE. Besides its annotation power, Power RTE also enables sharing annotations among its users; therefore, learning objects with annotation information could be reused on this e-Learning platform.

WEB E-LEARNING SYSTEM BASED ON CONCEPT OF ONLINE WHITEBOARD

Ana Hadiana, Tao Zhang, Vuthichai Ampornaramveth and Haruki Ueno

The growing of information technology has impact on implementation of distance learning, so that the learning activity becomes easier with higher quality as well as better performance of network to enhance the education quality. In this paper we introduce a concept of Online Whiteboard to support collaborative activity in Web Based e-Learning System. The Online Whiteboard is a shared workplace for sharing notes, images, drawings and chat over the internet/intranet, to support an effective learning based on collaboration between teacher and students in distance learning. Teacher/presenter could use this tool in order to describe a learning material more detail collaborating with students who are enrolled in a course. Using this tool the teacher remotely and synchronously not only could explain a learning material similar as condition in the conventional classroom, but also asynchronously make collaboration with students in two ways direction between them. In other word, the proposed tool has many advantages for developing knowledge based on collaboration learning.

METADATA FOR DESCRIBING EDUCATIONAL COMPETENCIES: THE UOC CASE

Ana-Elena Guerrero and Julià Minguillón

In this paper we describe a proposal for standardizing the concept of competency in a repository of learning objects, by means of an extension of the LOM and the IMS-LD standards, and the use of ontologies for ensuring consistency is also outlined. Following the recommendations from the Bologna Process, we identify the competencies required and developed by means of the current learning resources and formative and evaluation activities in a virtual e-learning environment and, using the most important taxonomies defined for such purposes in the literature, we identify the necessary metadata to describe the competencies related to such learning resources and activities. We discuss the process of shifting from content based metadata to competency based metadata, and we present an example of improving the description of learning resources by adding metadata for describing competencies, using a real case at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya.

METHODS OF ELECTRONIC EXAMINATION APPLIED TO STUDENTS OF ELECTRONICS - COMPARISON OF RESULTS WITH THE CONVENTIONAL (PAPER-AND-PENCIL) METHOD

Panagiotis Tsiakas, Charalampos Stergiopoulos, Maria Kaitsa, Dimos Triantis, Ioannis Fragoulis and Konstantinos Ninos

Electronic examination is of great interest from both educational and pedagogical point of view. Different methods have been applied during three examination periods in the Technological Educational Institute (T.E.I) of Athens for “Electronic Physics” which is one of the core modules of the Department of Electronics. For this purpose, an application named “e-examination” had been developed. The selection of the module was based on certain criteria regarding the applicability of the methods and preliminary preparations have been made for the conversion of the available educational material into an appropriate form for the creation of question sets for “e-examination”. Extra caution was taken in order to ensure the objectivity of the methods and therefore the reliability of the results. Thereafter, the results of the electronic and the conventional examinations were statistically processed and compared. This comparison indicated that the performance of students electronically examined was, in some of the cases, higher than the performance of students who were examined conventionally. The percentage of knowledge assimilation and the efficiency of the teaching process were also examined through these cases.

DESIGN GUIDELINES FOR E-LEARNING SYSTEMS

Daniela Zambarbieri, Carlo Robino, Sofia Crespi, Licia Calvi and A.Marco Luccini

The effectiveness of an e-learning system of actually transferring knowledge to the users is strictly related to its level of functionality and usability. Evaluation is usually performed through methods that are mainly subjective and qualitative. A new evaluation methodology has been developed within the European IST Project E-TRACKING which is based on the analysis of exploration eye movements made by the subjects during interaction with e-learning systems. Thus the methodology has the main characteristics to be objective and quantitative. This methodology has been applied to the evaluation of three e-learning systems by examining a wide population of subjects. Quantitative results derived from eye movement analysis have been further processed by statistical methods and the results have been used to identify a number of guidelines related to browsing and page layout aspects. These guidelines are aimed at the development of e-learning systems optimized in terms of usability and functionality. Guidelines have been implemented within the same e-learning material used for the experimentation and further validated through eye movement analysis.

INTRODUCING NEW ELEMENTS INTO THE SCORM STANDARD METADATA

Alina Stasiecka, Jacek Plodzien and Ewa Stemposz

In our recent research, through collecting and analyzing questionnaires filled out by users of e-learning materials, we have identified several useful metadata for describing such materials. In this paper we present our proposal of how to integrate those metadata into the SCORM standard. We propose to define two completely new categories for quality and reuse potential (reusability), and to put the other metadata into the categories already existing in the standard. We believe that our proposal, especially its fragment concerning the quality and reusability of e-learning materials, creates the direction in which SCORM should go in the near future.

LEARNING OBJECT MANAGEMENT AND EVALUATION - WORKING WITH IMS SPECIFICATIONS AND METADATA ON AHKME LOM TOOL

Hugo Rego, Tiago Moreira and Francísco García

AHKME e-learning platform’s main aim is to provide a system with adaptive and knowledge management abilities for students and teachers. This system is based on the IMS specifications representing information through metadata, granting semantics to all contents in the platform, giving them meaning. In this platform, metadata is used to satisfy requirements like reusability, interoperability and multipurpose. The system provides authoring tools to define learning methods with adaptive characteristics, and tools to create courses allowing users with different roles, promoting several types of collaborative and group learning. It is also endowed with tools to retrieve, import and evaluate learning objects based on metadata, where students can use quality educational contents fitting their characteristics, and teachers have the possibility of using quality educational contents to structure their courses. The metadata management and evaluation play an important role in order to get the best results in the teaching/learning process.

HYBRID ONTOLOGY-BASED FEEDBACK E-LEARNING SYSTEM FOR MOBILE COMPUTING

Ahmed Sameh, Abdalla Mahmoud and and Amr Ibrahim

An E-Learning system that provides vast quantities of annotated resources (fragments or learning objects) and produces semantically rich feedback is very desirable. It is an accepted psychological principle that some of the essential elements needed for effective learning are custom learning and semantic feedback. In this paper we are making use of a collection (ontology) of meta-data for the design of a custom E-Learning system that also provides learners with effective semantic educational feedback support. The learning domain is “Mobile Computing”. We define various concepts in the domain and the relationships among them as the ontology, and built a system to utilize them in customizing the E-Learning process. The ontology is also used to provide informative feedback from the system during learning and/or during assessment. The focus in this research is on the representation of ontology using languages/grammars, grammar analysis techniques, algorithms and AI mechanisms to customize the learning and create effective feedbacks. The proposed mechanisms, based on Ontology; are used to assemble virtual courses and create a rich supply of feedbacks, not only in assessment situations but also in the context of design-oriented education. We are targeting feedbacks similar to ones in programming environments and design editors.

X-TEC: TECHNO-DIDACTICAL EXTENSION FOR INSTRUCTION/LEARNING BASED ON COMPUTER - A NEW DEVELOPMENT MODEL FOR EDUCATIONAL SOFTWARE

Paula Escudeiro and José Bidarra

In this paper we propose a new development model for Educational Software called X-TEC (Techno-didactical extension for instruction/learning based on computer). It is based on the paradigms of software engineering applied to the construction of educational software. This model allows educational software developers to reduce the gap between instructional design and technical development. Our approach presents two overlapping extensions: the instructional model and the learning environment. The instructional model will be related to the instructor/educational software and the learning environment will be associated with the student/educational software. The X-TEC model promotes the interaction between these two extensions, allowing the deployment of a common development platform

IS THE JURY STILL OUT ON "BLENDED LEARNING"? - USE OF A WEB-BASED COLLABORATIVE TEACHING PLATFORM

Audrey Jennings, Alan Mullally, Catherine O'Connor, Dudley Dolan, Adrian Parkinson and James A. Redmond

Web-based collaborative platforms appear to show controversial potential for improving teaching and learning productivity and flexibility at Third Level. A pilot study was conducted at ******************* to explore pertinent operational, andragogical, support and social issues with a view to providing insights for the future. While a blended solution, i.e. a mixture of traditional and eLearning is often suggested, it appears that student support for it is not very high and proved disappointing in this study.

THE CLASSIFICATION OF E-LEARNING RESOURCES METADATA: A PROPOSAL

Alina Stasiecka, Jacek Plodzien and Ewa Stemposz

In the paper we present our proposal of identifying and classifying e-learning resources metadata. The research is based on the analysis of the results of a special questionnaire that we have developed to evaluate e-learning materials. During the analysis we identified and then categorized several items of information that proved to be essential; we especially focused on e-learning materials quality and reuse potential (reusability). We compared those information items with the definition of metadata in the SCORM 2004 standard to find out which of them are new and which are already available in the standard. The main contribution of the paper is the definition of the most important of our metadata categories: Didactics, Evaluation, Reusability, Quality, and their elements. As we will show, a lot of the elements are new. In our opinion, they could become a useful part of the SCORM standard.

A SYSTEM TO SUPPORT TUTORS IN ADAPTING DISTANCE LEARNING SITUATIONS TO STUDENTS

Élise Garrot, Sébastien George and Patrick Prévôt

Currently, tutor’s roles in distance learning are not clearly defined and few tools support him/her in his/her functions. Some tools help tutors to monitor learners and interact with them, but no tools assist them in the setting-up of learning sessions. Activities are created by instructional designers who envisage standard scenarios without knowing the learners. Thus, the aim of our research project is to create a system to help tutors to adapt learning situations to learners’ needs and characteristics. The first phase of our work consists in determine tutor’s roles in collaborative distance learning, in order to identify his/her needs. Then, we implement an assistance system based on an ontology containing learners’ characteristics and parameters of learning situations. An inference engine creates links between these characteristics by reasoning on the ontology. Finally, some rules deduce relations between ontology elements in order to give the tutor advice.

ANIMATING ALGORITHMS OVER THE WEB

Chittaranjan Mandal and Chris Reade

We discuss a novel technique for animating algorithms over the web. Although there are several existing software environments for the animation of algorithms, some of which are web-enabled, ours is designed specifically to simplify the process of adapting an algorithm for animation and delivering the animation over the web with a simple web interface. This provides a first stage for more advanced development of web-based interactions to support animation. Our goal is to provide general web-based support to enable much more widespread use of animation in teaching. In particular we want to address the active participation of the observer in using algorithm animation technology. We describe the current implementation of the animation engine which is based on a simple co-processing method with CGI implementation on a web-server, along with plans to use this as a base to include emerging technologies (web-services with XML to markup examples and asynchronous interaction). We also illustrate the current web interface with some examples.

A SYSTEM FOR AUTOMATIC EVALUATION OF PROGRAMS FOR CORRECTNESS AND PERFORMANCE

Amit Kumar Mandal, Chittaranjan Mandal and Chris Reade

This paper describes a model and implementation of a system for automatically testing, evaluating, grading and providing critical feedback for the submitted programming assignments. Complete automation of the evaluation process, with proper attention towards monitoring student's progress and performing a structured level analysis is addressed. The tool provides on-line support to both the evaluators and students with the level of granularity, flexibility and consistency that is difficult or impossible to achieve manually.

TECHNOLOGY ENHANCED PROFESSIONAL LEARNING - PROCESS, CHALLENGES AND REQUIREMENTS

Mohamed Amine Chatti, Ralf Klamma, Matthias Jarke, Vana Kamtsiou, Dimitra Pappa, Milos Kravcik and Ambjörn Naeve

Since we cannot transfer knowledge from one person to another person, learning, also known as knowledge creation, is the social process of acquiring and applying knowledge. Our claim is that the oscillating process of knowledge acquisition and application for workplace learning can be best described by the SECI model introduced by Nonaka in 1994. In this paper, we analysis the learning process in terms of the SECI model, identify the challenges for technology enhanced professional learning and define the requirements for future applications such as personalized adaptive learning. We report the results of a roadmap survey done in the framework of PROLEARN to disclose the desired state of the art in technology enhanced professional learning in the year 2015 and show ways how to proceed on the way to the desired state.

A MULTI-USER EDUCATIONAL ONLINE GAME WITH WEB BASED MATHEMATIC LEARNING BY USING ACTIVITY THEORY ANALYSIS

Chi-Yuh Shen, Gwo-Dong Chen and Kuo-Liang Ou

In this paper, we use activity theory to analyze the process and out come of mathematic learning by using MEOG (Multi-User Educational Online Game) based on the previous research (Gwo-Dong Chen, Gee-Yu Shen, 1997) described a multi-user educational online games which can motivate and guide students to learn and practice courses on the web. In order to reduce the obstacle of MSEOG applying in instructional activity in classroom, first, we adopt the factors of motivation as outcome and decided the tools and rule by found the cue in the questionnaires and server log. Second, we consider events of instruction and learning phrases (Gagne) and using Machine Learning Technique to get the potential rule (activity theory). From these, we want to develop a methodology to get stability of guiding online game applying in instruction of classroom.

MEASURES FOR ESTIMATING THE QUALITY OF E-LEARNING MATERIALS IN THE DIDACTIC ASPECT

Alina Stasiecka, Jacek Plodzien and Ewa Stemposz

The paper presents our research on the structure of e-learning materials and its effect on their quality in the didactic aspect. The research is based on a questionnaire and a statistical analysis of data collected through this questionnaire from e-learners. During the analysis three theses were verified: (1) time can be used as a partial measure for estimating the quality; (2) e-learning materials should follow the structure of good traditional (paper) learning materials proposed by experts; (3) the space of features necessary to determine the quality can be largely reduced.

USABILITY AND INSTRUCTIONAL EXPERIENCE IN A WEB-BASED REMOTE INTERNETWORKING LABORATORY ENVIRONMENT

Shyamala Sivakumar and William Robertson

A web based remote interactive laboratory (RIL) developed to deliver Internetworking laboratory experience to geographically remote graduate students is presented in this paper. The online Internetworking (INWK) laboratory learning environment employs hands-on interaction with equipment in both individual and group setting that correlates with the constructivist and collaborative pedagogical approaches. This paper discusses the pedagogical and technical factors that influence the usability of and instructional experience in the remote laboratory environment given the constraints of the special hardware and learning outcomes of the program. A survey instrument employing a 5 point scale has been devised to measure the usability and student instructional experience in the remote access INWK laboratory. These results demonstrate the success achieved in designing and implementing the remote access Internetworking laboratory.

JAPASSIST: AN ASSISTANT FOR STUDYING JAPANESE WHILE SURFING THE WEB

Shiori Daigo, Rosario Giunta, Giuseppe Pappalardo and Emiliano Tramontana

The web offers an increasing amount of pages written in several languages. Given the variety and the quality of some pages, these can be helpful as an additional language learning support. Actually, when studying a foreign language, reading newspapers, magazine, etc. allows learners to improve their abilities. However, without an adequate support the learner has to make an extensive use of the dictionary. This paper proposes Japassist, a browsing assistant that supplies users a customisable amount of suggestions, which can be found into dictionaries, useful to read and study the Japanese language while surfing the web. Japassist aims at supporting not only people that need a beginner-level understanding of Japanese documents, but also users that have a certain comprehension of the Japanese language. Actually, given the Japanese language intrinsic complexity, some help to read or appreciate the meaning of uncommon kanji is even useful to native speakers. We have employed aspect-orientation to customise a bare web browser with the ability to assist users reading and studying Japanese. Aspect-orientation allows the web browser classes to be unaware of assistance classes, thus promoting low coupling between different concerns.

ELML, THE E-LESSON MARKUP LANGUAGE - DEVELOPING SUSTAINABLE E-LEARNING CONTENT USING AN OPEN SOURCE XML FRAMEWORK

Joël Fisler and Susanne Bleisch

eLML, the open source “eLesson Markup Language”, is an XML framework allowing authors of eLearning lessons to create structured and sustainable content. The XML structure is based on the pedagogical concept ECLASS (adapted from Gerson, 2000), standing for entry, clarify, look, act, self-assessment and summary. Each lesson is divided into units that contain a number of smaller learning objects. To allow different teaching and learning scenarios most of the structure elements are optional or can be repeated several times and different orders. eLML-Lessons can be transformed into XHTML or PDF or be imported into a learning management system (LMS) using the SCORM or IMS Content Packaging format. The paper presents experiences from the development of eLML itself, the design of e-learning content based on the eLML-structure, and the use of eLML-based content in conjunction with a LMS.

E-EVALUATION TO DETECT LEARNING WEAKNESS - AN AGENT BASED ARCHITECTURE

Francisca Losavio, Nicole Levy and Parinaz Davari

A multi-agent architectural framework for evaluation in e-learning situations is proposed. The idea is to enable e-learning students to detect precisely their weaknesses in some goals within a course program. A course is composed of several objectives or goals to be mastered by students; a student can master some, but not necessarily all of them. Each of these objectives are in turn composed of sub-objectives. The architecture is focused as a tree of intermediate goals, where each node corresponds to a goal to be mastered, as each of its sub-goals. The flexibility of the architecture being a major concern, the goals to be mastered are dynamically defined based on the results of tests passed by the student. The corresponding educational materials are searched on demand and they can be located anywhere on the Web. The quality requirements of the architecture are specified and justified by a standard quality model. Our approach is illustrated with a case study of a computer architecture course.

USE OF TELEMATIC TOOLS AS A SUPPORT FOR TEACHERS’ TRAINING

Helena Caldeira and Carlos Gomes

The use of telematic tools by online learning communities, through the true involvement of all the participants, allows strengthening of net learning models. These models, if adequately designed, may stimulate the development of competencies in teachers’ training. Technological evolution has made the use of telematic tools more and more of an option in distance learning; these tools have become an indispensable support for the achievement of educational aims in learning institutions, namely through the provision of means for the interaction between participants. This work now aims at describing some of the results obtained from a study involving telematic tools in a model of online teachers’ training. In particular, we will describe the benefits and difficulties that were found and we add as some reflections on solutions for the improvement of this model.

WEB-BASED SUPPORT FOR RESOURCE-EFFECTIVE E-LEARNING

M.A. Rentroia-Bonito, Frederico Figueiredo, André Martins, Vitor Fernandes and Joaquim Jorge

We present work done at the Technical University of Lisbon, on web systems to support technologyenhanced learning. Based on our eighteen months practice with WebCast technologies and hands-on experience on commonly used Learning Management Systems, we have integrated both concepts and developed a simple, yet effective learning approach. This supports both students and professors in moving from the traditional classroom to technology-enhanced online settings. We present the evolution of our system and the results obtained from testing and evaluating the prototype, during the last Spring semester. One of the major features of our approach lies in combining both online and offline components of the e-Learning experience and incorporating desirable traits from traditional and technology-mediated learning experiences. This way, 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. Our assessment points to changes in the teaching approach, course organization, and highlights new factors of student motivation. Results indicate both the validity of our approach and the feasibility of implementing e-learning methodologies in a cost-effective manner to complement traditional offer in university settings.

THE VTIE COLLABORATIVE WRITING ENVIRONMENT

Bart Busschots, Luke Raeside, John G. Keating and Shelagh Waddington

This paper discusses the design of the VTIE Collaborative Writing Environment (CWE) and the functionality of the various components that make up this environment. The advantages of supporting collaborative writing are also discussed as well as different organizational schemes that can be used when structuring collaborative writing exercises. The paper also contains technical details on the implementation of the VTIE CWE.

AN EXPERIENCE OF THE USE OF “MOODLE” AT ISCAP - A CASE STUDY

Paula Peres, Manuel da Silva and Sandra Ribeiro

Nowadays, a constant concern with the quality level of the educative/educational offers in Institutions of Higher Education is verifiable. In order to accomplish that, they should acquire the capacity/capability to adapt to the new characteristics of their target audience and the new communication and information technologies that emerge every day. In such context, and as an answer to the upcoming demands, ISCAP (School of Accounting and Administration) has initiated a project called PAOL – Projecto de Apoio On-Line (On-Line Support Project). Its main goal is to provide support to the implementation of computer assisted teaching, it being constituted by human and material resources (software – an open source LMS, called Moodle, and hardware). This article intends to reveal the knowledge acquired throughout the experience in the use of the LMS Moodle at ISCAP, in the second semester of the 2004/2005 school year.

PARTICIPATION IN INTERNATIONAL VIRTUAL LEARNING COMMUNITIES - A SOCIAL LEARNING PERSPECTIVE

Beverly Trayner, John D. Smith and Marco Bettoni

A promise of new web-based technologies is that they provide learning opportunities for people distributed across the globe but who can participate across time and space in the same virtual learning community. How do they do it? In this paper we report on some of the experiences of a virtual learning community which has members from twenty-five countries across different time-zones and who communicate in English. Through a communities of practice perspective we focus on the social nature of learning and describe some of the challenges and design issues raised in this community as it explores and develops practices for learning in an international online environment. While our focus is on social practices, and on developing an identity of participation in relation to those practices, we also make some wishes for web-based technologies that would better support these practices in an international virtual learning community.

DYNAMIC PROFILING TO ENHANCE LEARNING AND REDUCE COGNITIVE LOAD ON EACH LEARNER

Keith Maycock, Sujana Jyothi and John Keating

This paper proposes extensions to the architecture of any Learning Management System (LMS) that utilizes the Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM), to incorporate Multiple Representation Approaches (MRA) and Exploratory Space Control (ESC) features, when interacting with a learner. The learners profile will consist of the traditional student modeling features such as students goals, preferences and knowledge. The profile will also incorporate a Cognitive Trait Model (CTM) to measure the learners cognitive abilities. The LMS provides functionality for dynamic login to reduce the time spent getting to know the learner. If a course is changed to ensure that the course is MRA compliant to suit the cognitive needs of that learner, the transformation that course encored is stored in a Learning Experience Repository (LER) for future reference. In effect, the learners profile becomes the author of educational content throughout the learning experience, ensuring that the content delivered will suit the cognitive ability of each learner to increase the throughput. ESC techniques are used throughout the LMS interaction with the learner once a learning experience has concluded to offer suitable links to other related courses. This paper also discusses various factors that must be taken into account when developing a LMS, for example, teaching styles, different types of students and learning styles. The proposed extensions will enhance the learning experience for individual users.

NEW ELECTRONIC MULTI-MEDIA ASSESSMENT SYSTEM

Simon Chester, Giles Tewkesbury and David Sanders

Assessment for learning is a new approach to assessment. Assessment for learning is the process of seeking and interpreting evidence for use by learners and their teachers to raise pupils’ achievement. The key principle of Assessment for Learning is that pupils will improve most if they understand the aim of their learning, where they are in relation to this aim and how they can achieve the aim (or close the gap in their knowledge). Studies have shown that student achievement has been raised significantly where this method of assessment has been implemented. This paper examines existing electronic assessment systems and then describes the creation of a new multi-user system that assists teachers in the implementation of assessment for learning in the classroom.