WEB SERVICES COMMUNITIES - CONCEPTS & OPERATIONS

Zakaria Maamar, Mohammed Lahkim, Djamal Benslimane, Philippe Thiran and Subramanian Sattanathan

This paper discusses the concepts and operations related to the specification and management of a community of Web services, respectively. A Web service is an accessible application that humans and other peers can discover and trigger to satisfy multiple needs like hotel booking. Web services offering the same functionality are gathered into one community, independently of their origins. The community is led by a master component, which is responsible among others for attracting new Web services to the community, retaining existing Web services in the community, and identifying the Web services in the community that will participate in composite Web services. The identification of these Web services happens in accordance with the contract-net protocol. A demonstration of this protocol through a prototype is, also, presented in the paper.

STACK ENCODING REVISITED

Yangjun Chen

The twig join, which is used to find all occurrences of a twig pattern in an XML database, is a core operation for XML query processing. A great many strategies for handling this problem have been proposed and can be roughly classified into two groups. The first group decomposes a twig pattern (a small tree) into a set of binary relationships between pairs of nodes, such as parent-child and ancestor-descendant relations; and transforms a tree matching problem into a series of simple relation look-ups. The second group decomposes a twig pattern into a set of paths. Among all this kind of methods, the approach based on the so-called stack encoding [N. Bruno, N. Koudas, and D. Srivastava, Holistic Twig Hoins: Optimal XML Pattern Matching, in Proc. SIGMOD Int. Conf. on Management of Data, Madison, Wisconsin, June 2002, pp. 310-321] is very interesting, which can represent in linear space a potentially exponential (in the number of query nodes) number of matching paths. However, the available processes for generating such compressed paths suffer some redundancy and can be significantly improved. In this paper, we analyze this method and show that the time complexities of path generation in its two main procedures: TwigStack and TwigStackXB can be reduced from O(m2Þn) to O(mÞn), where m and n are the sizes of the query tree and document tree, respectively. Experiments have been done to compare TwigStackXB and ours, which shows that using our method much less time is needed to generate matching paths.

MODELING AND MANAGING FEDERATED WEB-BASED SYSTEMS

Johannes Meinecke, Martin Gaedke, Frederic Majer and Alexander Brändle

Among the various aspects of Web applications that are subject to modeling, like navigation, interaction or business processes, the architectural aspect is receiving growing attention. This is related to the fact that the Web is increasingly used as a platform for distributed services which transcend organizational boundaries to form so-called federated applications. In this context, we use the term “architecture” to denote the composition of the overall solution into individual Web applications and Web services that belong to different parties and invoke each other. The design and evolution of such systems calls for models that give an overview of the federation structure and reflect the technical details of the various accesses. We introduce the WebComposition Architecture Model (WAM) as an overall modeling approach tailored to aspects of highly distributed systems with federation as an integral factor.

ADJUSTMENT NEEDS IN SOA BASED E-LEARNING APPLICATIONS

Antonio Ortiz, Juan Manuel de Blas and José María Gutiérrez

This paper describes the solutions made to solve some interoperability issues found while carrying out an interconnection project of two SOA based systems. It is supposed that the solutions can help to avoid the problems in the future or solve incompatibilities. Both systems were developed using the same programming language, although they were based on different software platforms. These solutions are based on the analysis and the tests accomplished, where simple data structures were sent and received, using the Java language. This document also demonstrates the current state of interoperability in today’s frameworks, which are not fully compliant yet, and are still rather weak using complex data structures.

USING DATA TOGETHER WITH METADATA TO IMPROVE XML INFORMATION ACCESS

Alda Lopes Gançarski and Pedro Henriques

In this paper, we address the use of data together with metadata to improve information access to XML document collections. We first emphasize the possibility to associate meta-information to parts of XML documents, and not only entire documents. This is accordingly to the fact that XML elements are considered as retrieval units. We, then, propose to explicitly search the desired information using a query language that is composed of XML search and metadata search. We focus our ideas in two types of metadata: Dublin Core and ontologies.

COZO - CONTENT ZONING FOR SPAM EMAILS

Claudine Brucks, Cynthia Wagner, Michael Hilker and Ralph Weires

Spam is an increasing problem when using email as communication medium. Spam is detected and removed using spam filters. Furthermore, the spammers use more and more intelligent and complex techniques and novel approaches are required to enhance existing spam filters. One promising technique is the Argumentative Zoning that classifies a text in different parts where each part has a meaning. In this paper, we want to use this technique in order to fragment an email in different zones and evaluate whether the email is spam or not. We introduce the technique Content Zoning, the way we use it, the implementation, and our results.

MATCHING OF ENHANCED XML SCHEMAS WITH A MEASURE OF STRUCTURAL-CONTEXT SIMILARITY

Amar Zerdazi and Myriam Lamolle

Schema matching is a critical step in integration of heterogeneous data sources. Recent integration work has mainly focused on developing matching techniques to find equivalent elements among the different XML sources. In this paper we propose a new approach to structural similarity measure based on the notion of context, between entities of the Enhanced XML Schemas, called EXS. In our approach, the set of the EXS schemas, are considered like a federation of XML schemas descended of different heterogeneous sources schemas (relational, object, XML, etc.) and enriched by the semantic metaknowledge. We present here the major problems bound to this crucial task, notably with regard to the semantic of schemas. So, we propose a structural matching algorithm. The algorithm takes two schema graphs as input, and produces as output a mapping between corresponding nodes of the schema graphs. After our algorithm runs, we expect a human to check and adjust the results.

AN ONTOLOGY MAPPING ARCHITECTURE TO FACILITATE SEMANTIC INTEGRATION

Yingzi Wang, Deren Chen and Yanyun Wang

Mapping between ontologies is the major bottleneck in semantic integration. In this paper, we present MCMA, a mediator-centric mapping architecture that facilitates the integration between ontologies of interrelated companies. The main feature of MCMA is that different ontologies are mapped through some middle concepts and the Mapping Service acts as a bridge to connect them. In order to improve the similarity between ontologies, some common ontologies are provided for the reusing. On the assumption that the participators may make reference to common definitions while developing their individual ontologies, some basic mapping relations can be defined conveniently. Based on these basic mapping relations, the Mapping Service infers more mapping relations and organizes them in a layered manner. In MCMA, We present the idea of combining heuristics or machine-learning techniques with common ontology approach in the mapping discovery.

DISCOVERY CHALLENGES AND AUTOMATION FOR SERVICE-BASED APPLICATIONS IN GRID

Serena Pastore

Distributed environments like grid computing systems and web services frameworks pose service discovery challenges especially with regard to search for and find the best resource according some metric. Discovery is therefore a critical element in large scale, open distributed systems. Adequate tools must be implemented to facilitate dynamic identification, searching and finding of services in such infrastructures. In the framework of deploying grid web service-based applications for interacting with astronomical dataset, different discovery mechanisms have been evaluated. Solutions consist of methods coming from grid and web services specifications. The main hurdle of all these approaches is however a lack of automation. The paper describes the different methodologies analyzed in solving discovery challenges by dealing with the use case of a specific WSDL-based application. The need of automation has required the introduction of semantic components into the process both to discover and describe the application semantically. In this study, a possible solution whose technical implementation is under development has been outlined. By analyzing the actors and their transactions, semantic may be added in the interactions between an application provider and its client or directly to the broker whose role is to discover services for the client and to register application for the provider.

WEB SECURITY ENHANCEMENT BASED ON KEYSTROKE DYNAMICS

Michał Choras and Piotr Mroczkowski

Many online access systems (e.g. e-banking) require stronger protection than the login-id password pair can provide. Other, more sophisticated techniques of identity verification are in demand: one-time passwords, smart cards or biometric technologies. Among several biometric approaches the web-based solution that incorporates keystroke dynamics is the most relevant due to the low cost of the implementation, satisfactory results as well as the degree of transparency it offers. In the article we present methods of extracting user keystroke characteristics. Then we present results of our password hardening online access control system based on keystroke dynamics.

DISPATCHING REQUESTS IN PARTIALLY REPLICATED WEB CLUSTERS - AN ADAPTATION OF THE LARD ALGORITHM

Jose Daniel Garcia, Laura Prada, Jesus Carretero, Felix Garcia, Javier Fernandez and Luis Miguel Sanchez

raditional alternatives for Web content allocation have been full replication and full distribution. An hybrid alternative is partial replication where each content element is replicated to a subset of server nodes. Partial replication gives advantages in terms of balancing reliability and storage capacity. However, partial replication has architectural implications. In this paper we present a Web cluster architecture which may be used in single switched Web clusters and multiple switched Web clusters. We present an algorithm for Web content allocation which determines the number of replicas for each content based on its relative importance and that performs the allocation keeping in mind resource constraints in clusters with heterogeneous storage capacity. We also provide an adaptation of the LARD algorithm for request dispatching that copes with the fact that contents are partially replicated. Our evaluations show that performance of partial replication solutions is comparable to performance of traditional fully replicated solutions.

SEMANTICS-BASED ACCESS CONTROL - ONTOLOGIES AND FEASIBILITY STUDY OF POLICY ENFORCEMENT FUNCTION

Anton Naumenko

The current Web evolves to the Web 2.0 that is an intermediate step towards Semantic Web. Conventional security measures fall short to serve both, emerging Internet technologies and innovative web-based information systems. The paper presents our research and development results towards the consolidated framework of adoption Semantic Web standards for the creation of unified view on the access control area that enables flexible, collaborative and distributed management of access control based on semantic relations amongst relating concepts. The integration of Semantic Web and access control disciplines leads to the elaboration of new more intelligent, flexible and reusable access control mechanisms and tools. The paper has practical orientation, evaluating research results and ideas with the development and testing of the prototype for the enforcement of access control policies based on the ontologies.

A DESIGN PATTERN FOR AUTOMATIC GENERATION OF WEB SERVICES FROM DOMAIN ONTOLOGIES

Bob Dourandish, Nina Zumel and Michael Manno

Web Services and Service-Oriented Architecture have become ubiquitous and are increasingly embedded in every aspect of systems architecture. At the same time, advances in workflow tools now enable us to compose complex new applications by dynamically orchestrating existing web services in new and previously unanticipated execution sequences. The combination of the two is slowly transforming software engineering to a service-centric discipline, with the focus shifting from creating expansive systems to building small, specialized services that can be sequenced, on demand, to support previously unanticipated missions. Implementing and deploying specialized services in this way presents significant challenges in design and programming, as well as long-term maintenance. A fundamental challenge is to maintain the underlying program code long after it has been released and, potentially, incorporated in numerous other processes. This paper presents a methodology and a design pattern to automatically generate web services based on domain ontology. Our approach promises to significantly reduce the programming and maintenance burden of creating and deploying web services, particularly in mission-critical, collaborative, and distributed operations such as emergency response, supply-chain, or healthcare.

SECURITY RISK ANALYSIS IN WEB APPLICATION DESIGN

Rattikorn Hewett, Phongphun Kijsanayothin and Meinhard Peters

Web-based information systems play increasingly important roles in providing functions and business services for many organizations. Because of their ubiquitous natures dealing with a huge and diverse population of users, web applications must be tolerant to errors, adverse interactions and malicious attacks. The ability to quickly estimate security risks early in the system development life cycle can be beneficial in making various decisions. This is particularly crucial for large and complex web applications that are asset-critical and evolve rapidly through long life cycles. This paper presents a systematic approach for the automated assessment of security risks, at the design stage, of web-based information systems. The approach combines risk concepts in reliability engineering with heuristics using characteristics of software and hardware deployment design to estimate security risks of the system to be developed. It provides a simple early estimate of security risks that can help locate high-risk software components. We discuss limitations of the approach and give an illustration in an industrial engineering and business-to-business domain using a case study of a web-based material requirements planning system for a manufacturing enterprise.

A DECENTRALIZED WIKI ENGINE FOR COLLABORATIVE WIKIPEDIA HOSTING

Guido Urdaneta, Guillaume Pierre and Maarten van Steen

This paper presents the design of a decentralized system for hosting large-scale wiki web sites likeWikipedia, using a collaborative approach. Our design focuses on distributing the pages that compose the wiki across a network of nodes provided by individuals and organizations willing to collaborate in hosting the wiki. We present algorithms for placing the pages so that the capacity of the nodes is not exceeded and the load is balanced, and algorithms for routing client requests to the appropriate nodes. We also address fault tolerance and security issues.

DYNAMIC SERVICE COMPOSITION FOR VIRTUAL UPNP DEVICE CREATION IN HOME NETWORK ENVIRONMENT

Sheng-Tzong Cheng, Chun-Yen Wang, Mingzoo Wu, Wan-Ting Ho and Chia-Mei Chen

Exploiting UPnP techniques, home users can easily control intelligent devices through control points. However, UPnP devices lack a composition mechanism to complete a novel application or value-added service. This paper proposes a dynamic service composition system which coordinates the primitive UPnP services at home to create a virtual UPnP device. At first, we define data type ontology for UPnP devices to describe their service interfaces. Afterwards, the interface matching mechanism is employed to construct a service graph that describes which services can be composed together. Finally, the proposed system travels on the service graph, and probes a suitable execution path to generate a new device. Home users can invoke this new generated device through the control point, as if the device is real in the house. In addition, a virtual UPnP Karaoke device generated by the proposed service composition system is demonstrated as well. From the demonstration, it can be seen that the service composition system is feasible in practice.

ROBUSTNESS ANALYSIS USING FMEA AND BBN - CASE STUDY FOR A WEB-BASED APPLICATION

Ilaria Canova Calori, Tor Stålhane and Sven Ziemer

Time pressure and quality issues represent important challenges for those who develop web-based systems. The ability to analyze a system’s quality and implement improvements early in the development life cycle is of great practical importance. For our study we have considered robustness as a critical quality issue. Our objective is to propose a general framework for conducting robustness analysis of web-based systems at an early stage of software development, providing a tool for evaluating failure impact severity and supporting trade-off decisions during the development process. The framework makes use of Jacobson’s analysis method to decompose a system in its functional components, Failure Modes and Effects Analysis to identify all the failure modes that characterize each component, and Bayesian Belief networks to deal with failure cause-effect relationships and evaluate the uncertainty of their impact.

WEB SERVICE-BASED TRACEABILITY IN FOOD SUPPLY CHAINS

Andréia Akemi Kondo, Claudia Bauzer Medeiros, Edmundo Roberto Mauro Madeira and Evandro Bacarin

Supply Chains present many research challenges in Computing, such as the modeling of theirs processes, communication problems between theirs components, logistics and processes management. This paper presents a supply chain traceability model that relies on a Web service-based architecture to ensure interoperability. Geared towards assisting quality control in the agricultural domain, the model allows to trace products, processes and services inside chain. The model has been validated for real life case studies and the Web service implementation is under way.

PROVIDING SCALABLE ACCESS TO LARGE XML DOCUMENTS

Arno Puder

XML documents often tend to be voluminous and accessing them through a DOM (Document Object Model) interface poses particular challenges. All the existing DOM implementations require an XML document to be completely collocated before it can be parsed. This solution does not scale for huge XML documents. In this paper we introduce an architecture, called VDOM (Virtual DOM) that allows scalable access to large XML documents through a DOM interface. In the VDOM architecture, the actively used portions of an XML document are transferred to the application. The application can begin to traverse this portion without requiring that the complete DOM tree is collocated. As the application traverses the DOM tree, portions of the XML document are loaded on-demand. Using the VDOM architecture is transparent to the application which uses a standard DOM interface to access the DOM tree.

FUTURE TRUST FORECAST IN OPEN MOBILE AGENT ENVIRONMENT

Kłopotek A. Mieczysław and Wolski Michał

Open Mobile Agent Environment is composed of distributed entities that directly interact with each other and make local autonomous decisions in the absence of a centralized coordinating authority. Such decentralized applications, where entities can join and leave the system at any time, are particularly susceptible to the attacks of malicious entities. Hence intense studies of potential solutions of related problems are needed. A frequent approach is to use an appropriate simulator software. This paper presents the design of our Open Mobile Agent Simulator. We describe its behaviour and structure using the UML framework. We demonstrate the features of the simulator by comparing two reputation metrics (eBay and BetaSystem) for mobile agents travelling through different nodes. We show results of simulations comparing the effectiveness of reputation discovery using the original algorithm and the optimized (forecasting reputation) one.

PROCESSING REMOTE MEASUREMENT DATABASES BY THE MEANS OF MOBILE AGENTS

Steffen Kernchen, Dmytro Rud, Fritz Zbrog and Reiner Dumke

This paper discusses possible approaches for using mobile agents for accessing and processing of big remote databases containing measurement data. There are several reasons that make it inappropriate to dispatch raw data over the network. (a) Those data may be confidential and therefore need to be anonymized. (b) The amount of the data can be too big. In this case it could be advisable to generalize the data on the database provider node and to transfer only these generalization results to the customer. (c) Furthermore, this special information processing can be not in line with qualifications of both the database holder and its clients. The usage of agents gives the possibility to outsource the development and installation of additional software to an external agent provider, which is then responsible for regular updates of the software considering aspects like new algorithms. Application scenarios are outlined and certain kinds of service will be described and motivated with examples.

HARNESSING THE WEB TECHNOLOGY TO ENRICH VISUALLY CHALLENGED USERS NAVIGATION

Hulya Francis, Madjid Merabti and A. Taleb Bendiab

Navigating urban streets without sight is fraught with difficulty and is often dangerous. Visually challenged people rely on ancillary equipment such as a white cane to probe the immediate area in front of them as well as developing other pre-existing personal physiological senses such as tactile, auditory, and olfactory senses, to train themselves to walk along pavements. Conventional navigation systems based on geo-maps alone are of little use to a visually challenged pedestrian. Hence, there is a need to develop a navigation client-server system capable of providing information appropriate for a visually challenged pedestrian to use to navigate urban pavements. This paper describes a navigation system that includes an enriched information model and a technology to deliver such information in an easy-to-use, accessible fashion. The paper introduces the technical challenge to the creation of a digital database for the navigation server that stores appropriate data. A prototyped digital navigation model of Hoylake Town Centre has been used to test and validate the proposed model. This paper describes the role and function, and outlines the architecture for the Web-based mobile computing location-based services navigation support systems.

DYNAMIC DECENTRALIZED SERVICE ORCHESTRATIONS

Ustun Yildiz and Claude Godart

This paper reports a new approach to decentralized orchestration of service compositions. Our contribution is motivated by the recent advances of service orchestration standardizations that enable the exchange of modeled processes among different tools and organizations. Precisely, we provide an efficient process transformation technique that converts a process conceived for centralized orchestration to a set of nested \textit{peer processes}. Each peer process is conceived to be executed by a dynamically orchestrated service. Assuming that services are invokable with peer processes, we provide a decentralized orchestration setting where services can establish direct interconnections via the peer processes that they execute. Our proposition considers conversation-based services and dynamic service binding.

GRID INFRASTRUCTURE ARCHITECTURE - A MODULAR APPROACH FROM COREGRID

Augusto Ciuffoletti, Antonio Congiusta, Gracjan Jankowski, Michal Jankowski, Norbert Meyer and Ondrej Krajicek

The European Union {\em CoreGRID} project aims at encouraging collaboration among european research institutes. One target of such project is the design of an innovative Grid Infrastructure architecture, specifically addressing two challenging aspects of such entity: scalability and security. This paper outlines the results of such activity, ideally extending the content of the official deliverable document.

USER AND APPLICATION INTERFACE FOR A DISTRIBUTED E-LEARNING SYSTEM

Takao Kawamura, Kazuo Kuramochi, Junya Kishida, Shinichi Motomura and Kazunori Sugahara

In this paper, the user and application interface of our previously proposed e-Learning system is presented to demonstrate how user interfaces for distributed systems should be composed. The proposed e-Learning system has two distinguishing features. Firstly, it is based on P2P architecture for scalability and robustness. Secondly, all exercises in the system are not only data but also agents so that they have functions, such as scoring user's answers, telling the correct answers, and showing some related information without human instruction. The interface provides three kinds of communication: communication between a user and an exercise agent, communication between an exercise agent and support applications, and communication between a user and other users. The interface consists of two parts: an interface agent and a plugin for Firefox web browser. An interface agent hides the existence of the P2P network and other agents from the Firefox plugin and users. The developed e-Learning system including the interface is examined by experiments in classroom.

THE APPLICABILITY OF BALANCED ESI FOR WEB CACHING - A PROPOSED ALGORITHM AND A CASE OF STUDY

Carlos Guerrero, Carlos Juiz and Ramon Puigjaner

In this paper, we present an algorithm to improve the cases in which the caching of fragments pages (ESI standard) has a worse performance than expected. A layer between the web cache and the clients has been developed and has tested over a web application using a fragment and non fragment version of web pages. Through the results of this case study we demonstrate that the proposed algorithm improve the general performance of the web application.

NEW IMPLEMENTATION OF RMI TO PROTECT INTEGRITY AND CONFIDENTIALITY FOR MOBILE AGENTS

Shinichi Motomura, Takao Kawamura and Kazunori Sugahara

A new implementation of RMI named OnePort RMI is proposed in this paper. OnePort RMI consists of new RMI runtime, classes which are implemented interfaces by RMI specification, and MultiChannelSocketFactory. Using OnePort RMI, when an object on a client invokes methods of remote objects on a server, the client can use sockets of different types to connect one destination port at the same time, and the server can accept incoming call from the sockets on only the port. In order to protect integrity and confidentiality of our mobile agent framework named Maglog, OnePort RMI is introduced into Maglog. %In consequence, each agent can select a secure channel depending on In consequence, each agent can select a socket depending on importance of data and programs which are contained in their agents. We emphasize that the proposed OnePort RMI is not only for mobile agent frameworks such as our Maglog but also for any RMI applications.

DEVELOPING NEW SERVICES FOR THE AUTOMOTIVE INDUSTRY USING MATRIX

Silvia Alén, Daniel Glez-Peña and Florentino Fdez-Riverola

This progress report explores how multi-agent systems can be applied to the automotive industry in order to create an intercommunication platform. Our proposal called MATRIX (Multiagent Architecture for TRaffic Information eXchange) provides the basis for information exchange between cars (Car2Car) and between cars and infrastructural elements (Car2Infrastructure). In this work we also discuss how the most prominent technologies in both areas (JADE and OSGi) can be integrated in order to achieve new functionalities and security improvements in present cars.

SERVICE ORIENTED ATMOSPHERIC RADIANCES (SOAR) - A WEB SERVICE RESEARCH TOOL FOR THE GRIDDING AND SYNTHESIS OF MULTI-SENSOR SATELLITE RADIANCE DATA FOR WEATHER AND CLIMATE STUDIES

Milton Halem, Curt Tilmes, Yelena Yesha, Sharon Shen, Mitchell Goldberg and L. H. Zhou

Three decades of Earth remote sensing from NASA, NOAA and DOD satellites carrying successive generations of atmospheric instruments have resulted in petabytes of radiance data with successive increases in spatial and spectral resolutions stored at different data archives in various data formats. The complexity of accessing, processing and analyzing such varied massive data sets has hampered their utilization for climate studies by the general science community. We describe here the Service Oriented Atmospheric Radiance (SOAR) program sponsored by NASA to provide a web service tool that will enable more scientists to participate in the conduct of climate analysis with these valuable data records. SOAR is designed to respond to user requests to transparently access, collocate and perform spatial gridding operations on data from multiple instruments and transform the massive data volumes to reduced data structures in the more traditional grid format used in studying the trends in climate. SOAR is based on a service- oriented architecture employing the standard XML based protocol suite of SOAP, WSDL and UDDI service descriptions for aggregating atmospheric instrument radiance data into user specified spatial grids. SOAR consists of three subsystems, a Client Server, a Repository Server, and a Process Server, connected to a compute cluster and storage grid by a Service Bus. The process server employs optical communications to access data and invoke algorithms on the compute/storage cluster for on-demand spatial, temporal, and spectral subsetting Scientists can choose a variety of statistical averaging techniques for combining the footprints of satellite observed radiances from multiple instruments to form spatial-temporal grids for their respective studies. Animation services are also provided for viewing atmospheric anomalies. The results of a prototype web service version of SOAR, supporting client requests for arbitrary regional subsetting of high-resolution multi-instrument pre-gridded fields has been implemented. A second phase of SOAR capable of responding to client requests for arbitrary spatial grids derived from the raw data on demand is planned for the spring of 2007. The final phase will provide the broader community of Earth scientists a web service capability to invoke multi-sensor multi-satellite gridding algorithms for a 30-year data record to study global warming and their effects on regional weather and climate.

XLIVE: INTEGRATING SOURCES WITH XQUERY - AN EFFICIENT XQUERY EVALUATION PROTOTYPE WITH TGV

Nicolas Travers, Tuyêt-Trâm Dang-Ngoc and Tianxiao Liu

This paper presents an efficient evaluation of XQuery in a heterogeneous distributed system.XQuery(W3C, 2005) is a rich and so a complex language. Its syntax allows us to express a large scale of queries over XML documents. We have extended (Chen et al., 2003) proposal to rewrite XQuery expressions in "canonical XQuery" in order to support the full XQuery specification. The XQuery expressiveness makes difficulties to obtain an exclusive internal representation within a system.Models based on Tree Patterns have been proposed, and we have extended the tree pattern model to a model called TGV that (a) integrates the whole functionalities of XQuery (b) uses an intuitive representation that provides a global visualization of the request in a mediation context and (c) provides a support for optimization and for cost information.Our paper is based on the XLive mediation system. XLive integrates sources in a uniform view. It is a running research vehicle designed at PRiSM Laboratory for assessing the integration system at every stage of the process starting from sources extraction to the user interface and is already used in several projects.

WEB SERVICE RETRIEVAL BASED ON ENVIRONMENT ONTOLOGY

Budan Wu and Zhi Jin

Web Services are basic entities for Service Oriented Architecture whose goal is to build superior software system by reusing loose coupling software agents automatically and dynamically. Web Services are provided with various description format from providers, the understanding of Web Service capability is the prerequisite of retrieval and composition. The industry and academe bring forward some description and messaging standards to facilitate Web Service invoking, yet these descriptions of Web Service are in syntax level, and still relies on people to understand and decide what a Web Service can do, which encumbers automatic and dynamic Web Service retrieval. How to encode Web Service description in a computer-understandable form, and add enough semantics to depicting the capability of Web Service, is the key issue to solving the problem. In this paper, we propose environment ontology as the base of describing semantic of Web Services, whose resource and state transitions reflect Web Service’s behavior. We construct the description format based on environment ontology and put forward a road map approach towards automatic and dynamic Web Service retrieval.

ENSURING HIGH PERFORMANCE IN VALIDATING XML PARSER

Donglei Cao, Shuang Yu, Beijie Dai and Beihong Jin

An XML parser is the fundamental software for analyzing and processing XML documents. This paper presents the optimized validation algorithms in OnceXMLParser, a full-validating XML Parser. OnceXMLParser adopts a lightweight architecture and implements several efficient algorithms for validating. Since the element validating is a great challenge to the performance of a validating XML parser, this paper focused on two key algorithms to resolve it. The first one involves in an optimized automaton used to build these element validating rules efficiently. The second one is a statistical predictive algorithm to reduce the name string recognizing process. For a valid document, this algorithm could make precise prediction when the child elements are sequentially defined, and could fulfil the least cost prediction according to the cost function when the child elements are optionally defined. Performance testing shows OnceXMLParser after performance tuning has outstanding parsing efficiency.

A PERFORMANCE EVALUATION OF MOBILE WEB SERVICES SECURITY

Satish Narayana Srirama, Matthias Jarke and Wolfgang Prinz

It is now feasible to host basic web services on a smart phone due to the advances in wireless devices and mobile communication technologies. The market capture of mobile web services also has increased significantly, in the past years. While the applications are quite welcoming, the ability to provide secure and reliable communication in the vulnerable and volatile mobile ad-hoc topologies is vastly becoming necessary. Even though a lot of standardized security specifications like WS-Security, SAML exist for web services in the wired networks, not much has been analyzed and standardized in the wireless environments. In this paper we give our analysis of adapting some of the security standards, especially WS-Security to the cellular domain, with performance statistics. The performance latencies are obtained and analyzed while observing the performance and quality of service of our Mobile Host.

TRAP/BPEL - A FRAMEWORK FOR DYNAMIC ADAPTATION OF COMPOSITE SERVICES

Onyeka Ezenwoye and S. Masoud Sadjadi

TRAP/BPEL is a framework that adds autonomic behavior into existing BPEL processes automatically and transparently. We define an autonomic BPEL process as a compositeWeb service that is capable of responding to changes in its execution environment (e.g., a failure in a partner Web service). Unlike other approaches, TRAP/BPEL does not require any manual modifications to the original code of the BPEL processes and there is no need to extend the BPEL language nor its BPEL engine. In this paper, we describe the details of the TRAP/BPEL framework and use a case study to demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of our approach.

POSITION INFORMATION FOR VOIP EMERGENCY CALLS - ORIGINATING FROM A WIRELESS METROPOLITAN ACCESS NETWORK

Jaume Barceló, Boris Bellalta, Carlos Macián, Miquel Oliver and Anna Sfairopoulou

This article describes a mechanism to provide location information about users of a wireless metropolitan wireless access network to trusted and authorized third parties. A case of particular interest is that of pro- viding emergency centers with the location of the VoIP caller. The location information is obtained from the association tables of the wireless access points using SNMP polling, and stored in a location server. The outbound SIP proxy server requests the user’s location and includes it as in the SIP invite message when the callee is an emergency center.

WEWORM: AN ETHICAL WORM GENERATION TOOLKIT

Mark Wallis and Frans A. Henskens

One of the largest threats to network security in Internet-connected corporate networks is attack via worms. Worms infiltrate the network and compromise security, consuming processor cycles and network bandwidth that would otherwise be available for corporate use. This research analyses a particular strain of network worm called the “Ethical worm”, which is targeted towards beneficial means rather than malicious. Also presented is a design for an Ethical worm generation toolkit (named WEWorm) that will aid System administrators in the cleanup of an infected network.

WEB SERVICES-BASED QUERY REWRITING AND RESOLUTION IN LOOSELY COUPLED INFORMATION SYSTEMS

Mahmoud Barhamgi, Pierre-Antoine Champin and Djamal Benslimane

Recent research works in Peer-to-peer data management systems have focused on integrating and inter-operating traditional data sources, where usually data portions are put in forms like XML, RDFS/OWL instances. Then, received queries are directly applied on data in order materialize the answers. However, recently a great deal of information resources has been exposed in the form of Data-Providing Web services in Peer-to-peer based e-collaboration environments. With this new form of data accessibility, queries can not be applied squarely on data, rather they should be resolved by composing available Data-Providing Web services. In this paper, we extend previous P2P data management systems with capability to handle data sources exposed as services. In our solution we model Data-providing services as RDF parameterized views. Then we devise an algorithm capable to compute the different data-providing services' compositions that answer the received query. Our composition is Data-Driven, therefore we apply extra data treatments on data flow between composed services before getting the desired result.

A COLLABORATIVE FILTERING APPROACH TO PERSONALIZED INTERACTIVE ENTERTAINMENT USING MPEG-21

Giorgos Andreou, Phivos Mylonas and Kostas Karpouzis

In this paper we present an integrated framework for personalized access to interactive entertainment content, using characteristics from the emerging MPEG-21 standard. Our research efforts focus on multimedia content presented within the framework set by today’s movie content broadcasting over a variety of networks and terminals, i.e. analogue and digital television broadcasts, video on mobile devices, personal digital assistants and more. This work contributes to the bridging of the gap between the content and the user, providing end-users with a wide range of real-time interactive services, ranging from plain personalized statistics and optional enhanced in-play visual enhancements to a fully user- and contentadaptive platform. The proposed approach implements and extends in a novel way a well-known collaborative filtering approach; it applies a hierarchical clustering algorithm on the data towards the scope of group modelling implementation. It illustrates also the benefits from the MPEG-21 components utilization in the process and analyzes the importance of the Digital Item concept, containing both the (binary) multimedia content, as well as a structured representation of the different entities that handle the item, together with the set of possible actions on the item. Finally, a use case scenario is presented to illustrate the entire procedure. The core of this work is the novel group modelling approach, on top of the hybrid collaborative filtering algorithm, employing principles of taxonomic knowledge representation and hierarchical clustering theory. The outcome of this framework design is the fact that end-users are presented with personalized forms of multimedia content, thus enhancing their viewing experience and creating more revenue opportunities to content providers.

A PERFORMANCE MODELLING OF WEB SERVICES SECURITY

Kezhe Tang, David Levy, Shiping Chen, John Zic and Bo Yan

While Web Services Security (WSS) enhances the security of web services, it may also introduce additional performance overheads to standard web services due to additional CPU processing and larger message sizes. In this paper, we present a simple performance model for WSS. Based on our observations of WSS performance in our previous work, we extend a web service performance model by modelling WSS extra security operations and increased messages sizes into the existing model. As fitting the parameters on one testing environment, we validate our performance model on another different environment with different messages sizes and WSS security policies. Our testing results show that our performance model is valid and can be used to predicate the performance of web services with a variety of WSS configurations.

IMPLEMENTATION OF INDEX SCHEMA FOR XML DOCUMENTS BASED ON STRUCTURE OF DATABASE

Youngrok Song, Kyonam Choo, Yoseop Woo and Hongki Min

In this paper, structural information between tree nodes is presented without any structural changes in tree by converting number information added to tree into bit streams. It is also shown that other structural information can be retrieved and added to index schema, and that in query schema it is possible to restore host nodes by exploiting the given node information in case relative route query expressions as well as absolute query expressions are given. It has an advantage of making derived query expressions through a query. In addition, in the query-processing process, response time can be minimized by conducting bit operation between bit streams with index schema and query schema in use, and accurate results can be reached by searching only with information of record set by node in index files.

END USER AUTHENTICATION (EUA)

George S.Oreku, Jianzhong Li and Fredrick J. Mtenzi

AbAuthentication is one among a set of services that constitute a security sub-system in a modern computing or communications infrastructure. End User Authentication flexibility model would proposed in this paper allow the user to have multiple authentication mechanisms with varying levels of guarantee, and for suppliers to request and rely on mechanisms appropriate to the service requested. Authentications to end-user in a simple three level ticket request model algorithms solution on open distributed environment. This paper describes the ticket used by clients, servers, and Kerberos to achieve authentication toward prevention of unauthorized access to in sourced data on applications level. However we explore an approach to end user authentication that generalizes the notion of a textual password that, in many cases, improves the security. Our approach is based on the use of Kerberos authentication technique and Diffie-Hellman Key exchange.

TUNING SEARCH ENGINE TO FIT XML RETRIEVAL SCENARIO

Kurt Englmeier, Gilles Hubert and Josiane Mothe

XML usage is growing to describe documents. Consequently, systems to search in XML collections are necessary. Various proposals of systems for XML retrieval intend to provide solutions to handle XML documents. This paper describes an XML approach based on direct contribution of the components constituting an information need. The search engine is largely configurable in order to be adapted to different context of search. Beyond being globally adapted to a collection of documents an important objective is to define a search engine that can be adapted to different retrieval scenarios and to identify how to adapt it. This paper presents first experiments on INEX testbeds that show how the engine can be adapted to better respond to different retrieval scenarios.

A NETWORK-BASED ANOMALY DETECTION SYSTEM USING MULTIPLE NETWORK FEATURES

Yuji Waizumi, Yohei Sato and Yoshiaki Nemoto

Accuracy of anomaly-based intrusion detection greatly depends on features, the numerical values representing characteristics of network trafc. In order to increase accuracy, it is necessary to choose appropriate features that can correctly detect anomalous events. In this paper, we stress the fact that a specic kind of anomaly changes specic features. We propose a highly accurate and robust intrusion detection system using multiple features. Each feature is used for evaluating anomalous events independently by a statistical detection method. Through experiments, we investigate the accuracy of the proposed scheme.

A LOW COST WORM DETECTION TECHNIQUE BASED ON FLOW PAYLOAD SIMILARITY

Youhei Suzuki, Yuji Waizumi, Hiroshi Tsunoda and Yoshiaki Nemoto

Recently, damages of information systems by worms have been reported at global level. Signature based Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs) are widley used to prevent these damages. To handle newly created worms, automatic signature generation techniques based on common strings in the payloads of multiple worm flows of the same kind have been proposed. Because these techniques need to use multiple strings as a signature for each kind of worm to acheive high detection accuracy, the calculation cost to detect worms is a serious issue. In this paper, we propose a novel scheme that does not use common character strings. The proposed scheme uses a 256-dimensional vector based on the appearance frequencies of 256 character codes. This vector is used as a mean to detect worms with low cost. In addition, we construct a cheap worm detection system by using the proposed method as the first stage analysis of conventional IDS. We evaluate the proposed scheme through experiments and present its performance.

A NOVEL APPROACH OF ALARM CLASSIFICATION FOR INTRUSION DETECTION BASED UPON DEMPSTER-SHAFER THEORY

Huiqiang Wang, Guangsheng Feng and Qian Zhao

As the number of the alarms is increasingly growing, which are generated by intrusion detection systems (IDS), automatic tools for classification have been proposed to fulfil the requirements of the huge volume of alarms. In addition, it has been shown that an accurate classification requires the evidences from different sources, such as different IDS. Further more, Dempster-Shafer theory is a powerful tool in dealing with the uncertainty information. This paper proposes multiple-level classification model, which aims to classify the large sizes of alarms exactly. Experimental results show that this approach has an outstanding capability of classification. Especially it is quite effective in avoiding alarms grouped into the wrong classes in the case of short of evidences.

MODELING ARCHITECTURAL LEVEL REPAIR IN WEB SERVICES

Francisco Moo-Mena and Khalil Drira

Failures during Web service execution may depend on a wide variety of causes, such as network faults, server crashes, or application-related errors, such as unavailability of a requested Web service, errors in the orchestration or choreography of applications, missing data or parameters in an execution flow, or low Quality of Service (QoS). Providing efficient solutions requires handling of adaptability not only at the behavioral level, but also at the architectural level. Most of existing standard solutions focus on the behavioral level using reconfiguration mechanisms. In this paper, we propose a model-based strategy providing adaptability actions at the architectural level. Typical architectural repair actions, such as duplication of services or substitution of a faulty service are introduced. An example is illustrated and discussed with respect to a running example involving coordinated Web services.

DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION PRINCIPLES FOR INTEGRATED NETWORK AND SYSTEM MANAGEMENT

Martin H. Knahl

A significant number of IT systems are managed in an ad hoc style without an overall plan and lack appropriate Network and System Management tools for the provision of integrated Management Services. This paper provides an analysis of the requirements for Management Services. The paper presents a framework that provides a basis for the planning and operation of Management Services. Management Systems are divided into different functional areas and can be derived from a set of Building Blocks in order to accommodate the range of requirements and environments applicable to Integrated Service Management. The paper further presents ways to utilize SW implementations for the provision of integrated Management Services based on the proposed principles. The construction and maintenance of Management Systems is facilitated by the use of existing solutions.

AN OPTIMAL EVALUATION OF GROUPBY-JOIN QUERIES IN DISTRIBUTED ARCHITECTURES

Mohamad Al Hajj Hassan and Mostafa Bamha

SQL queries involving join and group-by operations are fairly common in many decision support applications where the size of the input relations is usually very large, so the parallelization of these queries is highly recommended in order to obtain a desirable response time. Several parallel algorithms that treat this kind of queries have been presented in the literature. However, their most significant drawbacks are that they are very sensitive to data skew and involve expansive communication and Input/Output costs in the evaluation of the join operation. In this paper, we present an algorithm that overcomes these drawbacks because it evaluates the "GroupBy-Join" query without the need of the direct evaluation of the costly join operation, thus reducing its Input/Output and communication costs. Furthermore, the performance of this algorithm is analyzed using the scalable and portable BSP (Bulk Synchronous Parallel) cost model which predicts a linear speedup even for highly skewed data.

POLICY-BASED MANAGEMENT OF DIFFSERV USING XML TECHNOLOGIES

Ntanzi M. Carrilho and Neco Ventura

A design, implementation, and evaluation of a Policy-based Management framework for DiffServ networks using XML technologies is presented. XML is used for policy representation throughout the entire policy life cycle, as well as in the communication protocol, reducing development costs, while promoting clarity, simplicity, and interoperability. Furthermore, performance evaluation results show that the proposed scheme generates less network traffic than its COPS-PR counterpart when protocol messages are compressed. Moreover, XML messages generate higher processing delays. The added processing overhead caused by compression to XML messages is very small, thus the gains in reduced network traffic generated outweigh the losses in terms of processing overhead.

A FRAMEWORK FOR THE MANAGEMENT OF CONTEXT-AWARE WORKFLOW SYSTEMS

Liliana Ardissono, Roberto Furnari, Anna Goy, Giovanna Petrone and Marino Segnan

This paper presents the CAWE framework for the context-aware management of applications based on the composition of Web Services in complex workflows. We introduce a representation of context-dependent activities based on an abstraction hierarchy which supports the specification of synthetic and clear workflows. Moreover, we propose a framework architecture which enriches the capabilities of a workflow engine in order to support the execution of possibly complex adaptation rules. We have exploited the CAWE framework to develop a prototype application handling a medical guideline which specifies the activities to be performed in order to monitor patients treated with blood thinners from their home. The application coordinates actors playing different roles (e.g., patient, doctor, etc.) and can be accessed by using different client devices.

THE PRIVACY ADVOCATE (PRIVAD) - A FRAMEWORK FOR NEGOTIATING INDIVIDUAL PRIVACY CONTRACTS

Michael Maaser, Steffen Ortmann and Peter Langendörfer

Privacy has been a hot topic in research for several years. A lot of different approaches to protect privacy have been proposed recently. Among these are several tools for negotiation of privacy contracts. In this paper we present our privacy negotiation framework called “Privacy Advocat (PrivAd)”. It consists of three main parts: the policy evaluation unit, the signature unit and the preferences. In addition our frame supports an interface for negotiation strategies, so that they are independent of the framework. The preferences can be expressed with a combination of P3P and APPEL. The test we executed using a state of the art PDA clearly indicate that our framework can be used by mobile devices. The completion of a negotiation takes about 2 sec. including message transfer via an 802.11b wireless link. The processing itself is done in less than 250 msec.

ERLANG/OTP FRAMEWORK FOR COMPLEX MANAGEMENT APPLICATIONS DEVELOPMENT

Carlos Abalde, Víctor M. Gulías, Laura M. Castro, Carlos Varela and J. Santiago Jorge

This paper presents our experience in the development of a large scale management client/server application, using the distributed functional language Erlang. We will explain our ideas about how to evolve a first and early architecture to a more sophisticated one, which could be reused in other developments, significantly reducing the development life cycles of future versions. We also expose some problems that arised in the process and suggest some solutions. The use of the proposed architecture, some formal verification techniques, and an interface definition language, let us glimpse a framework with similar features to those which have made J2EE so popular, with the additional benefits inherited from the declarative languages area.

SPECIFICATION-BASED INTRUSION DETECTION SYSTEM FOR CARRIER ETHERNET

Pan Jieke, João Redol and Miguel Correia

Layered network architectures, like the OSI and TCP/IP models, separate functionality in layers, where the lower layers provide services for the higher layers. These flexible models provide a form of separation of concerns, which allows the layers to be designed and implemented independently. However, from the security point of view, once a lower layer is compromised, the reliability of the higher layers can also be affected. This paper is about the security of the Data Link Layer (layer 2) of the OSI model, which can affect the reliability of higher layers, like TCP or HTTP and other World-Wide Web protocols. The paper analyzes security-wise a layer 2 protocol – the Spanning Tree Protocol (STP), part of the Ethernet suite – and presents a solution to detect attacks against this protocol using Specification-based Intrusion Detection.

ACCELERATING XPATH AXES THROUGH STRUCTURAL PARTITIONING

Olli Luoma

The query evaluation algorithms of practically all XML management systems are based on structural joins, i.e., operations which determine all occurrences of parent/child, ancestor/descendant, preceding/following etc. relationships between node sets. In this paper, we present a simple method for accelerating structural joins which is very easy to implement on different platforms. Our idea is to split the nodes into disjoint partitions and use this information to avoid unnecessary structural joins. Despite its simplicity, our proposal can considerably accelerate XPath evaluation on different XML management systems. To exemplify this, we describe two implementation options of our method - one built from the scratch and one based on a relational database - and present the results of our experiments.

ANALYSIS OF WEB-PROXY CACHE REPLACEMENT ALGORITHMS UNDER STEADY-STATE CONDITIONS

Luis Guillermo Cárdenas, Ana Pont, Julio Sahuquillo and José Antonio Gil

Web-Proxy servers are used to reduce the bandwidth consumption and users’ perceived latency while navigating the WWW, by caching the most frequent objects accessed by users. Since they were introduced most of the evaluations studies related to Web-Proxy caches have focused on the replacement algorithms performance using simulation techniques. But few of them have been done assuring the representativeness of the studies and considering real traces and cache sizes. This paper describes a methodology that permit fair performance comparison studies of the replacement algorithms i.e., the system reaches the steady-state and the results are provided showing narrow confidence intervals. An experimental evaluation study applying this methodology is also presented. The study uses a trace-driven simulation framework, real traces containing more than one hundred million of user’s requests, and compares three replacement algorithms implemented in actual Web-Proxy caches.

DISTRIBUTED BLOOM FILTER FOR LOCATING XML TEXTUAL RESOURCES IN A P2P NETWORK

Clément Jamard, Laurent Yeh and Georges Gardarin

Nowadays P2P information systems are considered as large scale distributed databases where all peers can publish and query data in the network. The main challenge for query processing remains locating relevant resources. In the case of XML documents, keywords and structures must be indexed. However, the major problem for maintaining indexes of huge textual XML documents is the cost for connecting/disconnecting and updating: Indexing a quantity of keys or propagating updates requires the transit of many messages in the network. To reduce this cost, we adapt the Bloom Filter principle (a data structure for testing membership of an element in a set) to summarize peer content. Our Bloom Filter summarizes both structures and values of XML documents and is used to locate resources in a P2P network. The originality of our approach is to propose techniques to distribute the Bloom Filter by splitting it into segments using a DHT network. As experiments demonstrate, the system is scalable and reduce drastically the number of network messages for indexing data, maintaining the index, and locating resources.

ON THE INTEGRATION OF QOS MANAGEMENT IN WEB SERVICE ARCHITECTURE

Abdallah Missaoui and Kamel Barkaoui

The web service consumer requires sometimes a service provider which gives functional and non-functional requirement especially in e-business domain. In this paper, an overview on web services and their qualities are described. We propose a new architecture which permits the management of QoS, by integrating a new layer in the web service architecture.

DYNAMIC PROVISIONING AND MONITORING OF STATEFUL SERVICES

Peter Tröger, Harald Meyer, Ingo Melzer and Marcus Flehmig

While tools for service-oriented architectures promise a seamless combination of stateless basic services to new applications, reality looks different. Real-world services wrap stateful behavior using application-specific concepts (e.g. session identifiers) and use different variations of Web protocols. The monitoring of these services, needed for dynamic re-composition facilities, is only available through vendor-specific interfaces. Services are bound to particular execution hosts, where load balancing and fault tolerance are only achievable with expensive low-level solutions. We present the ASG Services Infrastructure (SI) architecture as our practical solution to real-world service integration issues. Our framework is based on established Web service standards and supports the dynamic hosting and monitoring of heterogeneous and stateful service implementations. The resulting reference implementation currently acts as service infrastructure provider for the Adaptive Services Grid research project.

TRADE-OFF’S IN WEB APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT - HOW TO ASSESS A TRADE-OFF OPPORTUNITY

Sven Ziemer and Tor Stålhane

This paper discusses a trade-off strategy for small projects and presents a preliminary guidelines for assessing the appropriateness of a trade-off. The motivation of this work is to make the development team aware of the performed trade-offs and to see both the associated opportunities and risks, to assess the appropriateness of a trade-off and to gather information for the future development of the system. The development environment of a web application is changing over time and it is important to know what the success criteria are at any time.

THE EFFECT OF PACKET LOSS ON THE RESPONSE TIMES OF WEB SERVICES

Johan Garcia, Per Hurtig and Anna Brunstrom

Web services have today become an important technology for information exchange over the Internet. Although web services are designed to support interoperable machine-to-machine interaction, humans are often the final recipients of the produced information. This makes the performance of web services important from a user perspective. In this paper we present a comprehensive experimental evaluation on the response times of web services. The limited amount of data transfered in a typical web service message makes its performance sensitive to packet loss in the network and we focus our investigation on this issue. Using a web service response time model, we evaluate the performance of two typical web services over a wide range of network delays and packet loss patterns. The experiments are based on network emulation and two real protocol implementations are examined. The experimental results indicate that a single packet loss may more than double the response times of the evaluated services and lead to noticeable delays for the end user. We briefly review previous solutions that can be applied to improve performance and outline an improved approach that is based on packet loss detection at the receiver.

3D MONITORING OF DISTRIBUTED MULTIAGENT SYSTEMS

Sergio Ilarri, Juan L. Serrano, Eduardo Mena and Raquel Trillo

In the last years, multiagent systems have been proposed to solve a wide range of applications in distributed contexts, as they provide many advantages, such as parallelism, robustness, and scalability. A key element for the performance and reliability of the multiagent system is to design carefully the interaction and synchronization among the agents. Particularly, debugging and monitoring multiagent systems is a challenging task, due to the number of agents involved and the complex communication patterns that they may exhibit. In this paper, we present a 3D interactive monitoring framework that we have developed to observe how the agents in a multiagent system communicate among themselves and other interesting events. It offers many desirable features, such as the possibility of analyzing the communications and events in real-time, or perform a query-based filtering of the relevant or problematic events. Besides, the framework can be easily customized and extended in order to debug a variety of multiagent systems.

WSRS: A WEB SERVICE RECOMMENDER SYSTEM

Esma Aïmeur, David Daboue, Flavien Serge Mani Onana, Djamal Benslimane and Zakaria Maamar

Despite Web services widespread adoption, users still struggle with the problem of locating the Web services that best satisfy their needs and meet their requirements. Unfortunately, current Web services repositories suffer from various limitations, such as providing Web services to users regardless of these users’ past experiences and these Web services’ intrinsic characteristics like popularity and credibility. In this paper, we introduce a Web Service Recommender System (WSRS) that uses three techniques, namely collaborative filtering, demographic filtering, and content-based filtering, to help facilitate the search of Web services. The WSRS system has the capacity to take into account the profile of both users and Web services in the process of recommending Web services.

XML BASED FRAMEWORK FOR CONTACT CENTER APPLICATIONS

Nikolay Anisimov, Brian Galvin and Herbert Ristock

W3C languages, VoiceXML and CCXML all play an important role in contact centers (CC) by simplifying the creation of CC applications. However, they cover only a subset of contact center functions, such as simple call control and interactive voice response (IVR) with automatic speech recognition. We discuss ways to complement VoiceXML and CCXML in order to cover all necessary contact center functions required to script end-to-end interactions in a consistent and seamless way. For this purpose we introduce an XML forms-based framework called XContact comprising the CC platform and applications, multi-script and multi-browsing, and interaction data processing. We also discuss how routing as a key CC capability can be scripted/captured within such framework in order to demonstrate the overall approach

A FLEXIBLE MODEL FOR PROVIDING TRANSACTIONAL BEHAVIOR TO SERVICE COORDINATION IN AN ORTHOGONAL WAY

Alberto Portilla, Genoveva Vargas-Solar, Christine Collet, José-Luis Zechinelli-Martini and Luciano García-Bañuelos

A key step towards consistent services coordination is providing non functional properties. In that sense,transactional properties are particularly relevant because of the business nature of current applications. While services composition has been successfully addressed, transactional properties have been mainly provided by ad-hoc and limited solutions at systems' back end. This paper proposes a flexible transactional behavior model for services coordination. We assume that given a flow describing the application logic of a service based application, it is possible to associate to it a personalized transactional behavior in an orthogonal way. This behavior is defined by specifying contracts and associating a well defined behavior to the activities participating in the coordination. Such contracts ensure transactional properties at execution time in the presence of exceptions.

A GRAPH-BASED APPROACH FOR WEB SERVICES COMPOSITION

Salima Benbernou, Djamal Benslimane, Mohand Said Hacid, Hamamache Kheddouci and Kamel Tari

The automatic web services composition plays an important role in the area of semantic web services. In fact, in a real life it is not usual to discover \textit{atomic} web services matching with the user's query. So composing services fulfilling the query is needed. This paper discusses the web services composition model based on an oriented graph. It is based on Bcov algorithm \cite{Benatallah05,Farouk05}, initially defined for web services discovery. We propose two algorithms handling the oriented graph reasoning for web service composition. At first glance, a basic composition version for Bcov algorithm is given. That algorithm composes services over the induced subgraphs of each transversal provided by Becov algorithm, and gives a covering ratio satisfying the query. The second algorithm used a composed services graph maintained by a web services provider. The composition in that case is based on Dijkstra algorithm, where for each two consecutive services in the best minimal transversal provided by Bcov algorithm, a shortest path is computed regarding the composed services graph.

THE DATA COLLECTION MODULE OF THE AGENT BASED SEARCH SYSTEM (ABSS)

Remigiusz Baran, Andrzej Zeja, Tomasz Orzechowski, Andrzej Dziech and Michał Lutwin

The main purpose of this paper is analysis and description of the Data Collection Module (DCM) that is the main unit of the ABSS system. The aim of the DCM module is to process the metadata for the learning resources and preparing them for the search algorithms. The components of the DCM module are analysed with respect to technologies and standards used to their implementation. Advantages of proposed solutions are also discussed. The subject of the paper is related to the Calibrate (Calibrating eLearning in Schools) project.

MODELING BPEL WEB SERVICES FOR DIAGNOSIS: TOWARDS SELF-HEALING WEB SERVICES

Yingmin Li, Tarek Melliti and Philippe Dague

An approach generating automatically the data dependency diagrams of the orchestrated complex Web services is presented. The method is derived from the Model-Based Reasoning paradigm, whose origin comes from Artificial Intelligence applied to engineered systems. It is achieved by modeling BPEL activities by Petri nets, enriched to represent data dependencies, and by proposing aggregation rules of these dependency relations. The algorithm to aggregate the basic enriched Petri nets, producing the data dependency diagram of the orchestrated Web service, is given. The model obtained can be directly exploited by a diagnosis algorithm.

TRANSPARENT SCHEDULING OF WEB SERVICES

Dmytro Dyachuk and Ralph Deters

Web Services are applications that expose their services to consumers via public interfaces. Since these interfaces are defined, described and consumed using XML-based standards, Web Services outperform other middleware approaches (e.g. CORBA, RPC) in terms of platform interoperability and ease of use. Web Services support the concept of loosely coupled components, which in turn enables the development of more agile and open systems. However, this flexibility comes at the price of reduced control over the usage of the services that are exposed via the interfaces. This paper focuses on the transparent scheduling of inbound requests by introducing a proxy that prevents clients from directly accessing the provider. By manipulating the order and volume of requests sent to the provider it becomes possible to improve throughput and mean response time and to ensure consistent performance in overload situation.

2SAP: A FLEXIBLE ARCHITECTURE FOR WEB SERVICE ENABLEMENT OF COMMUNICATION SERVICES

Li Li, Wu Chou, Dan Zhuo and Feng Liu

In this paper, we present a flexible web service enablement middleware framework of 2SAP, two-way web service application proxy. 2SAP is to address some critical issues in web service enablement of communication services that require session based stateful transactions, two-way full duplex web service interaction, asynchronous operations and event notification. We introduce the concept of meta-service and base-service in the middleware architectural design and address the three options that can be applied in web service description integration. Based on the dependency and interaction pattern analyses, we describe the middleware architecture of 2SAP that modularizes each service implementation along two dimensions, i.e. stateful vs. stateless and core vs. extension. We show that the architecture of 2SAP can support a variety of collocated and distributed service integration configurations. Our experimental studies indicated that the service platform of proposed 2SAP architecture can support the need for web service and SOA enablement of real-time communication services.

SET: A QUESTIONABLE SECURITY PROTOCOL

Charles A. Shoniregun and Songhe Zhao

The Secure Electronic Transaction (SET) was given high expectation to provide high level of security in e-Commerce. However, it is discontinued after a short-lived appearance. Besides discussing SET’s dual signature, this paper makes efforts to find out SET’s weaknesses which led to the failure of its adoption. The complexity of SET has not been fully addressed therefore this paper investigates the possible solution, based on elliptic curve cryptography (ECC).

AUGMENTING SEARCH WITH CORPUS-DERIVED SEMANTIC RELEVANCE

Zachary Mason

This paper describes such a contextual search system. It enables one to make queries of the form {\it ``search conference context:pagerank''}. The {\it context} field indicates that for a search result to get a high ranking it must be semantically relevant to the term ``pagerank'', although there is no requirement that it contain the word ``pagerank'' itself. In the above query, we say that ``search conference'' is the {\it root query} and ``pagerank'' is the {\it context query}. Context search works by getting 100 web-pages for the root query from a search engine (in this case, Google \cite{google}) and then sorting them according to their semantic relevance to the context query. The system measures relevance by comparing vocabulary vectors associated with a queries and web-pages. For queries, the vocabulary is from the snippets of text of web-pages in the search results for that query on a search-engine. For web-pages, the vocabulary is from that page and other web-pages that are nearby that page in terms of links. Bayesian methods are used to find the similarity between two vocabulary vectors.

PATTERN-ORIENTED ARCHITECTURE FOR WEB APPLICATIONS

M. Taleb, A. Seffah and A. Abran

A number of Web design problems continue to arise, such as: (1) decoupling the various aspects of Web applications (for example, business logic, the user interface, navigation and information architecture; and (2) isolating platform specifics from the concerns common to all Web applications. In the context of a proposal for a pattern-oriented architecture for Web applications, this paper identifies an extensive list of patterns aimed at providing a pool of proven solutions to these problems. The patterns span several levels of abstraction, from information architecture and interoperability patterns to navigation, interaction, visualization and presentation patterns. The proposed architecture will show how several individual patterns can be combined at different levels of abstraction into heterogeneous structures, which can be used as building blocks in the development of Web applications.

ANALYSING TERMS, PAIRS, TRIPLETS AND FULL QUERIES USED IN INTRANET SEARCHING

Dick Stenmark

Web search engines have become often-used tools for many ordinary people today and a growing number of researcher are therefore studying how these lay-persons interact with such tools. However, an overwhelming majority of these studies have focused on the public web and not equally much effort has yet been devoted to the use of intranet search engines. In this paper we report from a transaction log analysis of a large corporation’s intranet search engine covering the period 2000-2004. We conclude that in order to understand web searchers’ information needs a mere search term list is not sufficient. Instead the whole query must be analysed in order not to bias the analysis.

SIMILARITY OF DOCUMENTS AND DOCUMENT COLLECTIONS USING ATTRIBUTES WITH LOW NOISE

Chris Biemann and Uwe Quasthoff

A small number of attributes per document ensures efficient comparisons procedures. We show that low frequent words are excellent attributes for textual documents as well as link targets for web documents. In the cases of web documents, co-occurrence analysis is used to identify similarity. The documents are represented as nodes in a graph with edges weighted by similarity. A graph clustering algorithm is applied to group similar documents together. Evaluation for textual documents against a gold standard is provided.

LIFE CASES - AN APPROACH TO ADDRESS PRAGMATICS IN THE DESIGN OF WEB INFORMATION SYSTEMS

Klaus-Dieter Schewe and Bernhard Thalheim

On a high level of abstraction a Web Information System (WIS) can be described by a storyboard, which in an abstract way specifies who will be using the system, in which way and for which goals. While syntax and semantics of storyboarding has been well explored, its pragmatics has not. This paper contributes the first step towards closing this gap. For this we present life cases, which capture observations of user behaviour in reality. We discuss the facets of life cases and present a semi-formal way for their documentation. Life cases can be used in a pragmatic way to specify a story space, which is an important component of a storyboard.

SOME ASPECTS OF DESIGNING ACCESSIBLE ONLINE FORMS FOR THE YOUNG ELDERLY

Sergio Sayago and Josep Blat

Two key aspects related to the design of accessible online forms for the young elderly are addressed in this short paper. Online forms are frequently used in many web applications. Nevertheless, revolutions in longevity and the special needs of the elderly notwithstanding, little research has been done on designing accessible online forms for the older population. Drawing on some difficulties elderly people have filling in online forms, which came up during the course of designing a website for elderly Spanish adults, and literature review, two hypotheses are tested: (i) separating required and optional fields into two sections will improve the common design strategy which uses asterisks in order to distinguish between required and optional information in online forms; (ii) checkboxes and radio-buttons are easier for the elderly to use than list-boxes in selection tasks because of a reduction in the number of clicks and precision using the mouse. Both hypotheses are tested with seven young elderly people. Four online forms, which aimed to simulate existing ones, are designed. The results initially confirm the two hypotheses. Separating required and optional fields into two sections, and using checkboxes and radio-buttons instead of list-boxes are valuable requirements working towards designing accessible online forms for the elderly

A FRAMEWORK FOR BUILDING A WEB-BASED DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEM FOR JOB ASSIGNMENT

Patravadee Vongsumedh

In order to achieve the concept of “Putting the right man on the right job”, the job director has to clearly understand job’s requirements, related job’s skills, and, especially, employee who is possible to be assigned to do the given jobs. The fulfillment of these concerned issues could be done by one of the information systems called “Decision Support System” (DSS), which provides capabilities of identifying possible alternatives (that is, the appropriate employees), supporting the alternative-comparison process, and making-choice process. The DSS’s capabilities in supporting job assignment process increase not only the job director’s satisfaction in assigning job, but also the employee’s satisfaction in doing the assigned job. Moreover, the “Flexibility” is another factor required by the job directors in performing job assignment, and communicating with their employees. Therefore, this research proposes a framework for building a Web-based DSS for job assignment.

RANKING ALGORITHMS FOR WEB SITES - FINDING AUTHORITATIVE ACADEMIC WEB SITES AND RESEARCHERS

Dalibor Fiala, François Rousselot and Karel Jezek

In this paper, we discuss several common ranking algorithms for Web pages and we present a methodology based on them for finding authoritative researchers by analyzing academic Web sites. We show a case study in which we concentrate on a set of French computer science departments’ Web sites. We analyze the relations between them via hyperlinks and find the most important ones. We then examine the contents of the research papers present on these sites and determine the most authoritative French authors. We also propose some future improvements.

AUTOMATIC PLAYBACK OF 3D BLOG ENTRIES BASED ON 3D VIEWPOINT SIMILARITY

Rieko Kadobayashi

The 3D Blog system allows a user to interact with a 3D model, annotate any spot on the model, and publish the annotations in a blog so that the user can easily communicate with other people and share interests, idea, and questions about 3D models of interest to the user. The main features of the system is that each annotation is saved as a blog entry with 3D viewpoint information, i.e., the user's viewpoint and view direction as well as 3D information on annotated points. With this 3D viewpoint information, readers of a 3D Blog can reconstruct the exact same 3D scene the blogger saw when reading the blog entry, and, therefore, the readers may understand it better. The system also uses the 3D viewpoint information to detect similar entries and sends trackback links automatically to enable users to easily find people who may have similar interests. Users can easily and intuitively compare the similar entries using the ``playback'' function which renders the 3D scece in the similar entries. The 3D Blog system is expected to promote emergence of communities of people who share interests and support their communication.

KNOWLEDGE DISCOVERY AND EXCHANGE - TOWARDS A WEB-BASED APPLICATION FOR DISCOVERY AND EXCHANGE OF REVEALED KNOWLEDGE

Sietse J. Overbeek, Patrick Van Bommel, H. A. (Erik) Proper and Daan B. B. Rijsenbrij

Web technologies enable the discovery and exchange of knowledge from many different locations using many different channels. This implies that one is able to discover and exchange knowledge while using a PDA when traveling by train for instance. A provisional Web-based application referred to as DEXAR: Discovery and EXchAnge of Revealed knowledge is therefore introduced to illustrate the possibilities of the Web in the process of knowledge discovery and exchange. This is illustrated by an example from the medical domain. Before focussing on this Web application however a better understanding of knowledge discovery and exchange is needed to be able to determine what kind of Web-based support is desired and feasible. Thus, a knowledge market paradigm and a knowledge discovery paradigm are discussed in detail.

MODEL DRIVEN DEVELOPMENT OF DIGITAL LIBRARIES - VALIDATION, ANALYSIS AND CODE GENERATION

Esther Guerra, Juan de Lara and Alessio Malizia

This paper shows our model-driven approach for the formal construction and validation of Digital Libraries (DLs). We have defined a Domain Specific Visual Language (DSVL) called VisMODLE, which allows the description of a DL using five different viewpoints: services, behaviour, collections, structure and society. From a meta-model based description of the different viewpoints, we have generated a modelling environment for VisMODLE. We have provided the environment with a code generator that produces XUL code for the DL's user interface and composes the application using predefined components that implement the different services. Moreover, we have also added validation and simulation capabilities to the environment. Using the behavioural models (state-machine based), we can visually animate the system. In addition, the combined behaviour of actors and services can be transformed into a Petri net for further analysis.

CREATING A META-MODEL FOR SEMANTIC WEB SERVICE STANDARDS

Florian Lautenbacher and Bernhard Bauer

Annotating web services with semantic information is a tremendous piece of work for persons who are not familiar with the languages and underlying logic. However, a graphical model can assist users to achieve this goal easily. Therefore, we reviewed existing standards and developed a meta-model and UML profile for semantic web services based on the current W3C submissions to enable an automatic generation of code and to reduce this normally time-consuming task.

AISLES THROUGH THE CATEGORY FOREST - UTILISING THE WIKIPEDIA CATEGORY SYSTEM FOR CORPUS BUILDING IN MACHINE LEARNING

Rüdiger Gleim, Alexander Mehler, Matthias Dehmer and Olga Pustylnikov

The Word Wide Web is a continuous challenge to machine learning. Established approaches have to be enhanced and new methods be developed in order to tackle the problem of finding and organising relevant information. It has often been motivated that semantic classifications of input documents help solving this task. But while approaches of supervised text categorisation perform quite well on genres found in written text, newly evolved genres on the web are much more demanding. In order to successfully develop approaches to web mining, respective corpora are needed. However, the composition of genre- or domain-specific web corpora is still an unsolved problem. It is time consuming to build large corpora of good quality because web pages typically lack reliable meta information. Wikipedia along with similar approaches of collaborative text production offers a way out of this dilemma. We examine how social tagging, as supported by the MediaWiki software, can be utilised as a source of corpus building. Further, we describe a representation format for social ontologies and present the Wikipedia Category Explorer, a tool which supports categorical views to browse through the Wikipedia and to construct domain specific corpora for machine learning.

TASK MODELS FOR PROACTIVE WEB APPLICATIONS

Melanie Hartmann, Daniel Schreiber and Matthias Kaiser

In this paper, we propose a task modeling language for augmenting web applications with a proactive user interface (PUI). PUIs cooperate with the user to accomplish his tasks and facilitate the usage of web applications. PUIs provide user-sensitive support mechanisms like explanations and process guidance, and offer to adapt the interface to the user's needs and preferences. Further, they can suggest which data to enter by inferring it from the context or previous interactions. For these purposes, the required knowledge about the application is stored in a task model. We propose a task modeling language that allows to easily enrich the automatically created initial task model with additional semantics. We define requirements for such a language and show that none of the existing languages like CTT or UML meets all of them. As UML statecharts meet the most requirements, we use them as basis for our task modeling language. We show the applicability of this language and the capabilities of PUIs by enhancing an existing web application with a PUI.

ONTOLOGY-BASED ADAPTIVE QUERY REFINEMENT

Lefteris Kozanidis, Paraskevi Tzekou, Nikos Zotos, Sofia Stamou and Dimitris Christodoulakis

Query refinement is the process of providing Web information seekers with alternative wordings for ex-pressing their information needs. Although alternative query formulations may contribute to the improve-ment of retrieval results, nevertheless their realization by Web users is intrinsically limited in that alterna-tive query wordings do not convey explicit information about neither their degree nor their type of correla-tion to the user-issued queries. Moreover, alternative query formulations are determined based on the se-mantics of the issued query alone and they do not consider anything about the search intentions of the user issuing that query. In this paper, we introduce a novel query refinement technique which uses a lexical on-tology for identifying alternative query formulations that are both informative of the user’s interests and re-lated to the user selected queries. The most innovative feature of our technique is the visualization of the al-ternative query wordings in a graphical representation form, which conveys explicit information about the refined queries correlation to the user issued requests and which allows the user select which terms to par-ticipate in the refinement process. Experimental results demonstrate that our method has a significant poten-tial in improving the user search experience.

AN ADAPTATION MANAGER FOR PERSONALIZED MOBILE WEB SEARCHES

Wolfgang Woerndl and Huda Yousef

Context-aware and personalized information access becomes more and more important, especially in a mobile scenario. In this paper, we present an Adaptation Manager which customizes Web searches to a user’s context and profile attributes. The approach allows for reuse of personal information for different services such as the Google Web Service API. We identify personalization components as parts of our Adaptation Manager and explain the design of the system. We have also implemented the most important parts of the system and thereby show the usability of the approach. Our solution is extensible, for example to incorporate a rule system to (semi-)automatically switch between services.

CONTEXT-AWARE INFORMATION RETRIEVAL BASED ON USER PROFILES

Santtu Toivonen and Heikki Helin

In mobile Web usage scenarios, taking advantage of user context in information retrieval (IR) and filtering becomes evident. There are multiple ways to approach this, of which we present some alternatives and discuss their performance independently and in combination. The investigation is restricted to Semantic Web like structured content consisting of statements. The discussed approaches address relative importances of statements constituting the content, dependencies between statements, and close matches. Simulated results of the various approaches are provided.

SEARCH ON THE WEB WITH SPATIAL CRITERIONS - IMPROVING A SEARCH ENGINE WITH SPATIAL QUERIES

Jose Eduardo Corcoles Tendero and Pascual González López

In tackling the Semantic Web, a rich domain that requires special attention is the Semantic Geospatial Web. In order to achieve the Semantic Geospatial Web, an approach to query non-spatial resources using spatial criterions is presented in this paper. The non-spatial resources are well-known web resources represented by HTML, GIF, PDF, etc. However, to use spatial criterions a set of spatial resources with spatial information represented with GML (geographic Markup Language) is necessary. In this way, queries with spatial operators (touch, within, near, etc.) can be carried out over resources. In this approach, the relations between spatial and non-spatial resources are carried out “on the fly” in each query, i.e., they are not manually pre-stored. So, the main aim of this approach is to boost the capacity of Search Engines (such as Google, Yahoo!, etc) in order to include spatial criterions in the queries and not only string matches.

DOMINANT PATTERN OF VISUAL DESIGN IN ONLINE CLOTHING WEBSITES

M. L. Anitawati, M. N. Nor Laila and M. Nagamachi

Visual design of a website covers the content and its layout. In the context of content, the use of trendy technologies has been suggested as a method to deliver a better look and feel of clothing products in the online environment, in an effort to provide positive consumer experience in online shopping. However, it has been recognized by the studies in the literature that the use of these technologies is less popular and there seemed to be a paradigm shift towards instilling positive consumer experience in online shopping via emotional usability engineering. This shift is seen in previous studies that linked consumer purchase decision making based on emotional connectivity. In line with this paradigm, this research seeks to outline the dominant pattern of visual design of online clothing websites as practised by designers. 163 online clothing websites were selected based on their visible differences in both content and layout context. A content analysis was conducted based on usage of colour, page orientation, typology and product visualization techniques employed. Based on the analysis, a descriptive model of the dimension of a web visual design is derived and a model for the use visual technology on online clothing website is proposed. The results of this research is targeted to be used in the study of identifying consumer’s emotional responses towards visual design of a website in the attempt to incorporate emotional appeal on a website as an alternative for online shopping experience.

TOWARDS POLYGON-BASED SIMILARITY AGGREGATION IN ONTOLOGY MATCHING

Feiyu Lin and Kurt Sandkuhl

Due to an increased awareness of potential ontology applications in industry, public administration and academia, a growing number of ontologies are created by different organizations and individuals. Although these ontologies are developed for various application purposes and areas, they often contain overlapping information. In this context, it is necessary to find ways to integrate various ontologies and enable use of multiple ontologies. A number of concepts and approaches for ontology alignment and matching have been developed in this field. In this paper, we introduce our preliminary work on ontology matching using polygon-based similarity aggregation. The main ideas we contribute to the research field are (1) to aggregate the results of distance calculations between concepts in different ontologies by creating polygons for each ontology and (2) to compare the area of these polygons for deciding on similarity.

FORMAL DESIGN OF SMIL DOCUMENTS

Abdelkader Belkhir and Samia Bouyakoub-Smail

This paper presents a new formal model for modelling and verifying the temporal and hyper-temporal consistency of SMIL documents. The complexity of these documents can lead authors, in certain cases, to specify synchronization relations which could not de satisfied during the presentation of the document, thus characterizing the occurrence of inconsistencies. This article introduces a new formal technique based on extended timed Petri nets, called SMIL-Net for the modelling and the verification of SMIL presentations. We also propose a technique for the temporal and hyper-temporal consistency checking of the document based on the SMIL-Net model.

WEB PAGE CLASSIFICATION CONSIDERING PAGE GROUP STRUCTURE FOR BUILDING A HIGH-QUALITY HOMEPAGE COLLECTION

Yuxin Wang and Keizo Oyama

We propose a web page classification method for creating a high quality collection of researchers’ homepages considering page group structure. We use support vector machine (SVM) with textual features obtained from each page and its surrounding pages. The surrounding pages are grouped according to connection type (in-link, out-link, and directory entry) and relative URL hierarchy (same, upper, or lower in the directory hierarchy); then an independent feature subset is generated from each group. Feature subsets are further concatenated to compose the feature set of a classifier. We use two types of textual feature: plain-text-based and tagged-text-based. The experiment results using the NW100G-01 sample data set and the Web->Kb data set show the effectiveness of the proposed features compared with a baseline. By tuning the classifiers, we then build a recall-assured and a precision-assured classifier, and use them in combination to accurately select the pages that need manual assessment to assure the required quality. Its effectiveness in reducing the need for manual assessment is also shown.

COINCIDENCE BASED MAPPING EXTRACTION WITH GENETIC ALGORITHMS

Vahed Qazvinian, Hassan Abolhassani and S. Hossein Haeri

Ontology Aligning is an answer to the problem of handling heterogenous information on different domains. After application of some measures, one reaches a set of similarity values. The final goal is to extract mappings. Our contribution is to introduce a new genetic algorithm (GA) based extraction method. The GA, employs a structured based weighting model, named “coincidence based model”, as its fitness function. In the first part of the paper, some preliminaries and notations are given and then we introduce the coincidence based weighting. In the second part the paper discusses the details of the devised GA with the evaluation results for a sample dataset.

A MULTILINGUAL DIALOGUE SYSTEM FOR ACCESSING THE WEB

Marta Gatius, Meritxell González and Elisabet Comelles

In this paper we propose the use of multilingual multichannel dialogue systems to improve the usability of web contents. In order to improve both the communication and the portability of those dialogue systems we propose the separation of the general components from the application-specific, language-specific and channel-specific aspects. Following this proposal we developed a multilingual dialogue system for accessing web contents. This paper is particularly focused in two main components of the system: the dialogue manager and the natural language generator.

FROM THE BWW CONCEPTUAL MODEL TO THE DESIGN OF FAMILY OF WEB APPLICATION

Roberto Paiano, Andrea Pandurino and Enrico Pulimeno

The phase of analysis and design of a modern web application with its multi-user and multi-device features is surely a real complex task. Moreover during the design, the aspects of ergonomics, of usability and of human computer interaction have to take in consideration in leading way. To answer to these requirements, many methodologies are born. Such approaches are yet valid for the design of a single WA but became in crisis when the main goal is to develop a framework for family of applications in a specific domain. In this paper, starting from knowledge base obtained with an ontological approach in BWW, we propose the guidelines of changeover from the domain conceptual model to the IDM model for application family. From the IDM model, it will be possible to derive the single applications through the specialization. In order to check the validity of the proposed considerations, we create a case study in the environmental domain. Starting from the conceptual model, first we design the IDM model of the application family and then we derive from it the IDM model of a specific web application.

VECTOR BASED MAPPING OF POLYGONS ON IRREGULAR TERRAIN MESHES FOR WEB 3D MAP SERVICES

Arne Schilling, Jens Basanow and Alexander Zipf

In this paper we show how to efficiently integrate traditional GIS data into terrain models in order to generate complete 3D maps with little overhead for textures. The results meet the requirements for Web 3D Services, a proposal for the standardization for delivering 3D web maps. Our approach is designed to create fully vectorized 3D scenes that deliver the best possible quality and do not require dynamic texture generation and handling. We describe the mesh operations for integrating polygonal GIS data of forests, parks, buildings blocks and streets into the terrain mesh and compare the results with a texture based approach

ADAPTIVE PREDICTIONS IN A USER-CENTERED RECOMMENDER SYSTEM

Anne Boyer and Sylvain Castagnos

The size of available data on Internet is growing faster than human ability to treat it. Therefore, it becomes more and more difficult to identify the most relevant information, even for skilled people using efficient search engines. A way to cope with this problem is to automatically recommend data in accordance with users' preferences. Among others, collaborative filtering processes help users to find interesting items by comparing them with users having the same tastes. This paper describes a new user-centered recommender system relying on collaborative filtering and grid computing. Our model has been implemented in a Peer-to-Peer architecture. It has been especially designed to deal with problems of scalability and privacy. Moreover, it adapts its prediction computations to the density of the user neighborhood.

A BROWSER EXTENSION FOR PROVIDING VISUALLY IMPAIRED USERS ACCESS TO THE CONTENT OF BAR CHARTS ON THE WEB

Stephanie Elzer, Edward Schwartz, Sandra Carberry, Daniel Chester, Seniz Demir and Peng Wu

This paper presents the SIGHT (Summarizing Information GrapHics Textually) system that enables visually impaired users to gain access to information graphics that appear on a web page. The user interface is implemented as a browser extension that is launched by a keystroke combination. The output of SIGHT is a textual summary of the graphic, the core content of which is the hypothesized intended message of the graphic designer. The textual summary of the graphic is then conveyed to the user by screen reading software (such as JAWS). This approach has the benefits of 1) not requiring any action on the part of the web page developer, and 2) providing the user with the message and knowledge that one would gain from viewing the graphic rather than requiring the user to form a mental map of the graphic.

SEMANTIC WEB BROWSING

Ioannis Papadakis and Michalis Stefanidakis

The employment of semantic web technologies like ontologies, give the opportunity to web engineers to model the information space of web sites according to the conceptualization of the broader domain they refer to. In this paper, an innovative highly interactive semantic web browsing methodology is presented, that is applicable to a wide range of current web sites of rich and at the same time diverse content. The proposed approach is demonstrated through a prototype semantic web application based on current web technologies such as OWL and Ajax.

AN ONTOLOGY FOR A WEB DICTIONARY OF ITALIAN SIGN LANGUAGE

Rosella Gennari and Tania di Mascio

Sign languages are visual languages used in deaf communities, mainly. They are essentially tempo-spatial languages: signs are made of manual components, e.g., the hand movements, and non-manual components, e.g., facial expressions. The e-LIS project aims at the creation of the first web-based bidirectional dictionary for Italian sign language--verbal Italian. Whereas the lexicographic order is a standard and `natural' way of ordering hence retrieving words in Italian dictionaries, there is nothing similar for Italian sign language dictionaries. Stokoe-based notations have been successfully employed for decomposing and ordering signs in paper dictionaries for Italian sign language; but then consulting the dictionaries requires knowing the adopted Stokoe-based notation, which is not as easy-to-remember and well-known as Italian alphabet is. Users of a web dictionary cannot be expected to be expert of this. There our ontology comes into play. The ontology presented in this paper analyses and relates the formational components of a sign; in some sense, the ontology `enriches' the e-LIS dictionary with expert information concerning classes of sign components and, above all, their mutual relations. We conclude this paper with several open questions at the intersection of knowledge representation and reasoning, semantic web, sign and computational linguistics.

DESIGNING TEMPLATES FOR MINING ASSOCIATION RULES FROM XML DOCUMENTS

F. H. Ismail, H. K. Mohammed, M. A. Ismail and I. EL-Maddah

Meta-rule guided mining of association rules is a rule template in the form of "P1 ….. Pm Q1 ….. Qn" where Pi (for I=1,…..,m) and Qj (for j=1,…,n) are predicates. Each predicate name is an attribute name of a database relation and can be instantiated by a certain value. The rule template is used to describe what forms of rules are expected to be found in the database and used as a constraint in the data mining process. However, relational databases are structured with a predefined schema. Nowadays, some information is semi-structured. The main characteristic of semi-structured data (XML) is that they have irregular structure. There is no distinction between data and structure. Even though, it is quite common that semi-structured objects representing the same sort of information have similar, though not identical, structure (pattern). Fing (2004) introduced templates for mining association rules from XML based on prior knowledge about the structure of the XML document. If the users do not have any knowledge about the structure in advance, what would be their clue in writing templates? In this paper, we introduce a new approach for designing association rule templates based on the automatic discovery of frequent structure in the XML document. Frequent structure serves as a schema built over the semi-structured data. This layer guides the user to the useful structure that might yield useful associations rather than choosing any piece of structure at random. The structured layer is displayed from which the user can select templates of interest. Association rules that comply with the specified templates are generated.

HOW DO GREEK SEARCHERS FORM THEIR WEB QUERIES?

Fotis Lazarinis

This paper presents an initial analysis of a large log of Greek Web queries. The main aim of the study is to understand how users form their queries. The analysis showed that users include terms of low discriminatory value and form their queries in various non lemmatised forms. Lower case queries are the most common case, although several query instances are in upper case. Accent marks are usually left out by query terms. These conclusions could be utilized by local and worldwide search engines so as to improve the services offered to the Greek Web community and to users of other morphologically complex natural languages.

ECA RULE ONTOLOGY - MODELLING PRESCRIPTIVE RULES AS DESCRIPTIVE ONTOLOGY

Vandana Kabilan and Pernilla Svan

Ontology is said to be descriptive in contrast to the prescriptive nature of typical behaviour, process or rules. However, rules and behaviour models are in themselves a domain of re usable shared knowledge. Whether in the domain of enterprise systems or in military modelling and simulations, we find instances of such ’prescriptive’ body of knowledge. While capturing such ’rules’ as programmatic axioms using rule languages may be viable, it does not help us is establishing the reusable domain knowledge. In this paper, we combine software engineering technique based on the Event Condition Action logic to propose the ECA Rule Ontology as a mechanism for capturing such prescriptive rules as ontological conceptualisations. We exemplify our approach by applying it to the domain of military operations modelling and simulations.

DYNAMIC DEPLOYMENT OF SEMANTIC-BASED SERVICES IN A HIGHLY DISTRIBUTED ENVIRONMENT

Christos E. Chrysoulas and Odysseas Koufopavlou

Owing to the increase in both heterogeneity and complexity in today’s networking systems, the need arises for an architecture for network-based services that provides flexibility and efficiency in the definition, deployment and execution of the services and, at the same time, takes care of the adaptability and evolution of such services. In this paper we present an approach that applies a Web-service-based Service deployment framework, which enables the provision of parallel applications as QoS-aware, whose performance characteristics may be dynamically negotiated between a client application and service providers. Our component model allows context dependencies to be explicitly expressed and dynamically managed with respect to the hosting environment, computational resources, and dependencies on other components.

USAGE BASED INDEXING OF WEB RESOURCES WITH NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING

Armelle Brun and Anne Boyer

Due to the huge amount of available information via Internet, the identification of reliable and interesting items becomes more and more difficult and time consuming. This paper is a position paper describing our intended work in the framework of multimedia information retrieval by browsing techniques within web navigation. It relies on a usage-based indexing of resources: we ignore the nature, the content and the structure of resources. We describe a new approach taking advantage of the similarity between statistical modeling of language and document retrieval systems. A syntax of usage is computed that designs a Statistical Grammar of Usage (SGU). A SGU enables resources classification to perform a personalized navigation assistant tool. It relies both on collaborative filtering to compute virtual communities of users and a new distance dependent trigger model. The resulting SGU is a community dependent SGU.

WAINE - AUTOMATIC GENERATOR OF WEB BASED APPLICATIONS

Antonio Delgado, Antonio Estepa and Rafael Estepa

This paper presents WAINE (Web~Application~\&~INterface~Engine), a system for quick web application development based on a novel architecture which provide multiple benefits like: zero programming, integrated security, high re-usability and many degrees of independence. The architecture is well suited for development of multi-user applications and is based on an abstract model which captures all the elements of a typical application. The sample applications developed validate the advantages of the proposed architecture.

MODELING BROWSING BEHAVIOR AND SAMPLING WEB EVOLUTION FEATURES THROUGH XML INSTANCES

Ioannis Anagnostopoulos, Christos-Nikolaos Anagnostopoulos and Dimitrios D. Vergados

Web search services have been widely acknowledged as an important tool for accessing and distributing on the web. However, their efficiency is hampered to some extent, due to by the data overload, the poor organization and presentation of the disseminated information, as well as the powerlessness of the search services to follow the evolution of the web. In this paper we propose a meta-search algorithm, capable of self-adapting over the continuous changes that occur on the indexed web, using a web evolution adaptation mechanism. The algorithm also supports personalization features based on the user browsing behavior. The paper provides the implementation details of the proposed meta-search web technology along with its initial assessment. The experimental results show that the efficiency of the proposed algorithm is increased over time in terms of relevancy on the re-ranked third- party results, which are collected form five known web search services.

AN ONTOLOGY MANAGEMENT TOOL FOR QOS-BASED WEB SERVICES DESIGN

Marco Comerio, Flavio De Paoli and Gianluigi Viscusi

Web Services are the current most promising technology based on the concept of Service Oriented Computing that provides the basis for the development and execution of business processes that are distributed over the network and available via standard interfaces and protocols. Quality of Services (QoS) represents a major issue that covers the challenges in the service composition area and in the service oriented engineering. In this paper, we present the Web Services Design Tool (WSDTool). This tool allows the different actors involved in Web services design to define and address QoS requirements.

A SYSTEM OF LEARNING LINKS BETWEEN UTTERANCES WITH META-INFORMATION IN CHARACTER BASED MULTI-PARTY CONVERSATION BY DECISION TREE

Junpei Nakamura, Yasuhiro Tajima and Yoshiyuki Kotani

It is important to find out interactive links between pairs of utterances in multi-party conversation like a chat. Though the usage of linguistic information is necessary to do this, we showed the better performance to this criterion by using physical meta-information that consists of the number of conversation members, the distance between utterances, and the frequency of individual utterance. The result of the examination of Decision Tree learning showed the accuracy is 84.1%, the precision is 87.1% and the recall is 66.9% for link between same speaker’s utterances, and the accuracy is 77.5%, the precision is 68.5% and the recall is 56.8% for link between others’ utterances. The result of the examination without meta-information showed the accuracy is 62.7%, the precision is 86.7%, the recall is 64.5% for same speaker’s utterances, and the accuracy is 77.9%, the precision is 73.8% and the recall is 49.9% for others’. These results showed we could find new links by using meta-information.

ACCEPTANCE BY THE USERS OF SERVICES INTEGRATED IN THE HOME ENVIRONMENT

Michele Cornacchia, Vittorio Baroncini and Stefano Livi

Whether or not ICT represents the most important vehicle to transform the society seems to be out of discussion. The point of interest diverts from how people do really feel with these services and from the way they perceive the advantages as acceptable to improve the quality of life and work. It is matter of fact that the technical innovation is characterized by a certain risk, the problem of how to implement the technology for sure and, ahead of this phase, the problem of predicting its influence on the social, working and private life in view of the high costs effort to produce. This study applies a predictive model for the acceptance to a services integrated home environment properly set-up in a special laboratory. A class of users was selected from the employees of the company which hosted the trial in order to participate at the evaluation sessions. The tasks were designed to point out the main innovative features of the services presented. The questionnaires were suitably designed and submitted to collect the end-users opinions. The analysis was carried out to assess the performance by the side of the real users and to predict their intentions of use.

A MULTIMEDIA-BASED GUIDANCE SYSTEM FOR VARIOUS CONSUMER DEVICES

Michael Kropfberger, Roland Tusch, Michael Jakab, Julius Köpke, Michael Ofner, Hermann Hellwagner and Laszlo Böszörmenyi

This paper introduces a Web-based guidance system which supports optimized presentations of sights or exhibited objects on different types of available stationary and mobile consumer devices, possibly running different operating systems. This is accomplished by adapting both the objects' content, as well as their presentation to the current usage context. Content thereby may be encoded in different presentation formats like video, audio, image, and marked-up text. The usage context embraces a set of properties describing the current usage environment of the guide. This includes, for example, the consumer device's capabilities, its current location, and the user's preferences. Both, the content adaptation and presentation services are based on standard Web technologies for increased interoperability. Finally, the guidance system is augmented with a Web-based content management and a statistics module, which enable for remote content administration and usage evaluations, respectively.

MELIS - AN INCREMENTAL METHOD FOR THE LEXICAL ANNOTATION OF DOMAIN ONTOLOGIES

Sonia Bergamaschi, Laura Po, Maurizio Vincini, Paolo Bouquet, Daniel Giacomuzzi and Francesco Guerra

In this paper, we present MELIS (Meaning Elicitation and Lexical Integration System), a method and a software tool for enabling an incremental process of automatic annotation of local schemas (e.g. relational database schemas, directory trees) with lexical information. The distinguishing and original feature of MELIS is its incrementality: the higher the number of schemas which are processed, the more background/domain knowledge is cumulated in the system (a portion of domain ontology is learned at every step), the better the performance of the systems on annotating new schemas. MELIS has been tested as component of MOMIS-Ontology Builder, a framework able to create a domain ontology representing a set of selected data sources, described with a standard W3C language wherein concepts and attributes are annotated according to the lexical reference database. We describe the MELIS component within the MOMIS-Ontology Builder framework and provide some experimental results of MELIS as a standalone tool and as a component integrated in MOMIS.

FORMAL DESCRIPTION OF WEB USER INTERFACES FOR AUTOMATIC GENERATION

Vincenzo Cannella, Daniele Peri, Roberto Pirrone and Edoardo Ardizzone

In this work we present an extension of a paradigm for abstract description of user interfaces using data structures described in the Set Description Language (SDL). An experimental software system for the automatic design and generation of web client interfaces has been developed too, which makes use of the Extended SDL (ESDL). At first, an interface is described at the highest level of abstraction through the data it operates on, and it is generated in a way that enforces data correctness. Generation of interfaces is executed by an expert system on the basis of a set of rules expressed in first order logic. The development of the system relies on AJAX technology, which makes the developing process adaptive and allows the feasibility of dynamic web interfaces.

RICH DIGITAL BOOKS FOR THE WEB

Rui Lopes, Hugo Simões, Carlos Duarte and Luís Carriço

This article presents an architecture for the production and delivery of Rich Digital Books on the Web. These books are transformed and enriched with supporting media, like images and sound, pursuing the goal of reaching broader audiences and enlarging usage possibilities. The architecture affords for the production process' automation, and thus has the potential to increase digital books' availability. The architecture also enjoys a high flexibility degree, allowing the production of books that can be read with Web-based technologies, such as Web browsers.

EXPLOITATION OF ONTOLOGY LANGUAGES FOR BOTH PERSISTENCE AND REASONING PURPOSES - MAPPING PLIB, OWL AND FLIGHT ONTOLOGY MODELS

Chimene Fankam, Yamine Ait-Ameur and Guy Pierra

Ontologies are seen like the more relevant way to solve data understanding problem and to allow programs to perform meaningful operations on data in various domains. However, it appears that none of the proposed models is complete enough by itself to cover all aspects of a knowledge application. In this paper, we analyse existing modeling approaches and classify them according to some revelant characteristics of knowledge modeling we have identified. Finally, this paper present transformation rules between ontology models in order to get benefits of their strengths and to allow a powerful usage of ontologies in data management and knowledge application.

BROWSING A STRUCTURED MULTIMEDIA REPOSITORY

Rui Lopes and Luís Carriço

Browsing large amounts of assorted multimedia poses several challenges on creating a supporting user interface. Even further, if metadata, structures and relations are defined on top of multimedia fragments, the complexity of a multimedia repository increases. However, this is also a path for exploiting new browsing mechanisms. This paper presents insights on which aspects should be available on a task-oriented user interface for browsing a structured multimedia repository, centred on speeding up interaction through media independent navigation schemes and user advisory mechanisms.

PLATFORM FOR ELABORATION OF SEARCH RESULTS

Ari Korhonen, Juha Litola and Jorma Tarhio

We introduce a system called VisElabor that is a platform for elaborating search results. It is a local meta search engine utilizing general search engines. The system downloads a number of documents from the search results and is dynamically able to cluster them and show them on multiple views. VisElabor visualizes relations of documents based on clustering, and it coordinates the information among the views based on user actions in order to better maintain the user context. In addition, VisElabor has been designed so that it is fairly easy to integrate new visualizations and other elaborations into the system.

WEB CONTENTS AND STRUCTURAL ADAPTIVITY BY KNOWLEDGE TREE - THE HERCULANEUM EXCAVATION HYPERMEDIA

Silvia Rossi, Vincenzo Scognamiglio and Ernesto Burattini

The aim of this work is the design and the implementation of a system prototype for supporting a user through the navigation in a web-site. We exploit the potentiality of having a semantic structure for a knowledge tree in order to use some adaptivity processes, typical of many hypermedia systems without the limitation of having a fixed set of resources. Our prototype was implemented for the archaeological Herculaneum Excavations, but the novelty of this work is an attempt to combine methodologies coming from Adaptive Hypermedia, Recommendation Systems and Semantic Web in order to have a context-independent approach that manages Hypermedia on the Web. What we propose is an architecture with modules that can be reused and adapted in many different contexts. The central point is a representation of the knowledge of an hypermedia, based on the concept of an abstract semantic description of the knowledge tree. In order to have a context independent behavior the system was implemented with a structural adaptivity itself. This means that changing the tree the system adapts itself to the modifications and dynamically regenerates the code of its components.

EXPRESSIVE REASONING ABOUT CULTURAL HERITAGE KNOWLEDGE USING WEB ONTOLOGIES

Dimitrios A. Koutsomitropoulos and Theodore S. Papatheodorou

The cultural heritage knowledge domain is often characterized by complex semantic structures and a great lot of legacy information, possibly scattered on the Web that is not always properly structured. Thus, to achieve proper reasoning about this kind of knowledge one needs first a rather expressive model of representation that would also accommodate for its web distributed nature; and secondly a set of techniques that would allow for its intelligent and productive manipulation. The former can be served by the CIDOC-CRM which we first transform to the Semantic Web standard language, OWL and then augment with more expressive structures, possible only after this transformation. To show the latter we conduct a series of experimental inferences based on this CRM augmented form, using our Knowledge Discovery Interface. Our results clearly demonstrate the potential as well as the limitations of such an approach.

SEMANTIC SERVICE DESCRIPTION TO SUPPORT EDUCATION AND TRAINING - AN EASY-TO-APPLY SERVICE DESCRIPTION MODEL AND SERVICE REGISTRY

Karsten Krutz, Tilmann Kuhn, Christophe Gnad and Sebastian Abeck

This work describes a semantic service description model based on existing service description approaches like WSDL-S and OWL-S and a service registry to support the creation of service oriented applications in the area of education and training. Our uncomplex service description is based on an OWL ontology and combines a message- and state-oriented approach in order to reduce the effort for the creation of the descriptions that are a major drawback of a lot of existing, powerful semantic service description approaches. Furthermore, the proposed service description enables the matchmaking algorithm of the service registry to use not only the data-oriented input and output parameters to identify suitable services but also considers the preconditions and effects of a service. The usage of the service description model and the search capabilities are demonstrated by a specific publishing service from the education and training area.

RECOMMENDATION OF WEB RESOURCES FOR ACADEMICS - ARCHITECTURE AND COMPONENTS

Pavel Cech and Vladimir Bures

Vast amount of resources in digital libraries and on the Internet makes the selection of relevant and appropriate resources rather difficult especially for novices and less experienced academics such as students. The article presents an architectural solution for personal recommendation system of web pages targeted to the academic sphere. The solution aims to meet the objective of minimizing the overheads and provide support for PDF documents. The solution is based on a set of heterogeneous components connected via web services.

XMODEL-BASED TESTING OF XSLT APPLICATIONS

Antonia Bertolino, Jinghua Gao, Eda Marchetti and Andrea Polini

Model-based testing, according to which test case should be derived from a model of the system, is nowadays the emerging paradigm for software testing in many domains. Previous work has proposed the adoption of such a paradigm over XML Schemas for the black-box validation of applications processing XML data. XML Schema provides in fact an explicit and formalized model of the input domain, which can be fruitfully exploited for automatic generation of XML instances, according to a selected test criterion: the proposed tool TAXI (Testing by Automatically generated XML Instances) in particular implements the well-known Category-partition methodology. In this paper we introduce an improvement of TAXI to test XSLT Stylesheets, which are today the standard way to specify the transformation from a XML input document to another XML target document. Indeed, with XSLT Stylesheets increasingly getting larger and more complex, their correctness becomes a crucial factor for software quality and hence we believe that they need careful validation. We illustrate the application of TAXI to the testing of two case studies, namely covering a XML to XML transformation, and a XML to XHTML transformation.

HARVESTING AND AGGREGATION OF DIGITAL LIBRARIES USING THE OAI FRAMEWORK

Alon Kadury and Ariel J. Frank

Digital Libraries (DLs) are an important tool for quality information retrieval over the Internet. However, with the information explosion on the Internet and the increase in the number of DLs, users might need to search several DLs before finding the relevant information looked for. Federated DLs (FDLs) and Harvested DLs (HDLs) can solve this problem. To overcome the lack of uniformity and interoperability problems between DLs and to develop standards that can ease the distribution of information between them, an initiative called OAI established the OAI-PMH (Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting) protocol. While this protocol enables the construction of FDLs, HDLs are hardly found. This paper presents the RIDDLE model for construction and aggregation of HDLs using the OAI-PMH protocol. The use of RIDDLE can provide for better information retrieval from digital libraries on the Internet.

WEB PAGE RECOMMENDATION BY URL-BASED COLLABORATIVE FILTERING

Kiyotaka Takasuka, Minoru Terada and Kazutaka Maruyama

Because the number of WEB pages is very huge, and still increasing, many people have difficulty to reach pages they want. Although social bookmarking and search engines are helpful, they have to still find pages themselves Our goal is to recommend WEB pages which are supposed to be interesting for a user, without active effort by the user. We first analyzed the http traffic data in our university collected by a sniffer, and developed a recommendation system that works on URLs and their viewers (IP address). Our system has four features: (1) collaborative filtering, (2) implicit build of user profiles, (3) exclusion of popular web pages, (4) and use of the real activity in our university. We evaluated the effectiveness of our system by applying it to the real http transaction data and found that there were 18 successful recommended users of 50 users.

A PROTOTYPE FOR KNOWLEDGE EXTRACTION FROM SEMANTIC WEB BASED ON ONTOLOGICAL COMPONENTS CONSTRUCTION

Nesrine Ben Mustapha, Hajer Baazaoui-Zghal and Marie-Aude Aufaure

Adding a semantic dimension to web pages is a response to some problems of the present web and is known as the semantic web. Many methods and methodologies can be found in the literature. Generally, they are dedicated to particular data types like text, semi-structured data, relational data, etc. This paper presents a prototype for knowledge extraction from web pages based on ontological components construction. The described prototype is based on an architecture of ontological components for the Semantic web, which will be present first. The implementation and experimentation of the proposed prototype will be detailed.

SOFTWARE TOOLS FOR NAVIGATION IN DOCUMENT DATABASES - DEVELOPMENT OF INFORMATION NAVIGATION SERVICE BASED ON CLASSIFICATION SCHEMES

Pavel Shapkin and Alexander Shapkin

Internet allows accessing large document databases contained in different information centres across the world. Each database has its own search engine which is based on an index or classification scheme. Prob-lems occur when a user tries to search different databases at once: different databases use different classifi-cation schemes. This article describes a classification scheme mapping service which is useful in integration of different databases in one search engine.

THE EFFECTS OF THE AJAX TECHNOLOGY ON WEB APPLICATION USABILITY

Jonas Kluge, Frank Kargl and Michael Weber

The Ajax technology is said to make the Internet faster, more interactive and user-friendly. It is spreading rapidly throughout the web. By allowing scripts being executed inside the user’s browser to communicate with a remote server, it enables new forms of interaction for web-pages and -applications. On the other hand the use of Ajax may lead to problems with the browser navigation and accessibility. In this paper we analyze Ajax usability, taking into account both advantages and imposed problems. Subsequently we present a user study with two typical scenarios in web-applications and compare Ajax-enabled and non-Ajax-enabled versions. This allows us to verify and quantify the assumed effects. As a result, we show that Ajax significantly enhances both user satisfaction and efficiency of use, at least in some scenarios.

TOWARDS A SELF-ADAPTIVE MULTI-AGENT APPROACH FOR ENHANCING THE QUALITY OF SERVICE PROVIDED BY OPEN INFORMATION SYSTEMS

Valérie Camps and Glize Pierre

Current information systems are plunged into highly dynamical environments which produce occurrences of unpredictable situations. This dynamics combined with the inherent geographical and functional distribution of such systems, make usual adaptation techniques which are global or dependent of the intended global function realised by the system, unsuitable. Our contribution concerns a partial instantiation of a local adaptation method, based on adaptive multi-agent systems, to manage the QoS of information systems. This management is done according to two points of view addressed in an integrate way: a quantitative one and a qualitative one. First obtained results, showing the benefits of cooperation to the adaptation of such systems, are then discussed.

RDF COLLECTIONS

Saket Kaushik and Duminda Wijesekera

We add collection types such as sets, bags and lists to the resource description framework (RDF).

TOOLS TO FOSTER SEMANTIC-BASED COLLABORATION - A KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT APPROACH BASED ON A SEMANTIC WIKI AND PERSONAL ONTOLOGIES

Flavio De Paoli and Marco Loregian

Increased mobility and team distribution may hinder collaboration in organization by hampering spontaneous communication in workplaces. Tools are required to be integrated and not intrusive with respect to users’ activities, in order to provide effective support to workers for the development of joint projects. In this paper we present the enhancement of a knowledge-based collaborative system by means of a Semantic Wiki, which is a wiki exploiting ontologies to create machine-processable annotation of documents. Moreover, we present a simple tool to edit personal ontologies, that can be shared with other team or organization members.

GEOGRAPHICAL QUESTION ANSWERING SYSTEM

Ehsan Behrangi, Hamed Ghasemzadeh, Kyumars Sheykh Esmaili and Behrouz Minaei Bidgoli

Question Answering systems are one of the hot topics in context of information retrieval. In this paper, we develop an open-domain Question Answering system for spatial queries. We use Google for gathering raw data from the Web and then in a few iterations density of potential answers will be increased, finally based on a couple of evaluators the best answers are selected to be returned to user. Our proposed algorithm uses fuzzy methods to be more precise. Some experiments have been designed in order to evaluate the performance of our algorithm and results are totally promising. We will describe that how this algorithm can be applied to other type of questions as well.

AUTOMATIC CONVERSION TOOL FOR ACCESSIBLE WEB

Juan Manuel Fernández, Vicenç Soler and Jordi Roig

A tool for automatic conversion for making accessible Web pages is presented. It is set in the Help to the Integration of Disabled Persons to the New Technologies field. The project tries to bring the Web to as much people as possible. To get it, we analyze HTML documents and style sheets to adequate them to the regulation of the accessibility dictated by World Wide Web Consortium. The application of this project means a substantial improvement to the access of the information contained in the Web, even though a disability is suffered or not. It improves navigation with all kinds of devices and the view of the Web contents.

USING XSD INHERITANCE FOR XML-DRIVEN PRESENTATION LAYOUT IN WWW, ITV AND MULTI-CHANNEL PUBLISHING - FACILITATING LARGE-SCALE PUBLISHING

Daniel Farré Giribet

The usage of abstract XML layout languages has proven an effective technique of agile, adaptable and multi-channel media and multimedia publishing. This general strategy employs an XML definition file specifying the widget layout and relative disposition without committing itself to a specific presentation medium. Then, whenever a new presentation medium is added or new content is generated, the XML file is parsed to produce final output if needed. This strategy has been successfully applied for WWW, MHP, WAP, PDA and in any general multiplatform presentation-aware media publishing and there exist several existing proposals and implementations. However, not many general formal strategies have been developed to address some XML-based layout language design challenges such as general structure, validation and schema development. Additionally, there are implementation and practical problems if the outlined techniques are applied in certain straightforward ways (many are outlined in detail). In this paper, a simple yet powerful general strategy of solving these problems is described: the XSD standard is leveraged to help in designing and validating XML layout languages as well as aiding in the development of any GUI layout application. This strategy is proposed as a practical approach valid in many large-scale publishing environments.

EFFICIENT NAVIGATION ON THE WORLD WIDE WEB FOR THE PHYSICALLY DISABLED

Leo Spalteholz, Kin Fun Li and Nigel Livingston

One of the major obstacles with current web access solutions for the physically disabled is the efficient selection of links and other web page elements, especially for the single switch users. Past solutions simply built a list of the selectable web page elements and used a linear scan to iterate through them, selecting the highlighted link when the user activated their input device. We propose a new method based on incremental searching of the link text to select elements. This approach, paired with well-established switch typing solutions, allows a single switch user to select any element on a web page by typing very few (most often only one) letters.

HEI - A HIGH EDUCATION INSTITUTIONS ORIENTED CONTENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM - MAKING EASY THE WEB CONTENT PUBLISHING FOR HIGH EDUCATION INSTITUTIONS

Roger Wagner and Francisco Assis Moreira do Nascimento

This work presents a content management system (CMS) oriented to high education institutions, allowing the optimization of the internal web publishing processes in a way that encourages the uniformity of the information exhibition on the Web. Our CMS tool also enforces that the portal of the institution must be the starting point for any resource offered by the many faculties of the Institution. We applied our CMS tool to develop the portal of a high education institution and this case study has shown the efficiency and practicability of our approach.

DESIGN OF A WEB-BASED INTERFACE FOR IMAGE RETRIEVAL SYSTEMS

Liam M. Mayron and Oge Marques

In this work we present a new interface for image retrieval system that highlights the potential of a real-time, Web-based application. This system, the Perceptually-Relevant Image Search Machine (PRISM), combines the capabilities of content-based, content-free, and semantic annotation-based image retrieval. Each of the aforementioned image retrieval methods has its own strengths, weaknesses, and impracticalities. It is our hope that the PRISM interface, by enabling the simultaneous expression of all three methods, will lead to more robust image retrieval systems.

SCUBA DIVER: SUBSPACE CLUSTERING OF WEB SEARCH RESULTS

Fatih Gelgi, Srinivas Vadrevu and Hasan Davulcu

Current search engines present their search results as a ranked list of Web pages. However, as the number of pages on the Web increases exponentially, so does the number of search results for any given query. When the user is unable to formulate a keyword search phrase for their need, the problem becomes even more difficult to find relevant documents and focus their search. We present a novel subspace clustering based algorithm to organize keyword search results by simultaneously clustering and identifying distinguishing terms for each cluster. Our system, named Scuba Diver, enables users to (i) to better interpret the coverage of millions of search results and (ii) to refine their search queries through a keyword guided interface. We present experimental results illustrating the effectiveness of our algorithm by measuring purity, entropy and F-measure of generated clusters based on Open Directory Project (ODP).

ACCESSIBILITY OF MULTIMEDIA RESOURCES IN WEB

Lourdes Moreno, Ana Iglesias and Paloma Martínez

This paper emphasises the importance of provide accessibility of Web-based information resources for everybody, not only for people with disabilities. Due to the continuous technical and social changes of the Web, it is necessary to have in mind that new scenarios and user behaviour are appearing. Nowadays, most of Web sites use multimedia resources and it is indispensable to provide accessibility not only to the resource content, but the access to the resource in the Web site. Currently, there is enough information about accessibility standards and technologies for making multimedia resources accessible, but unfortunately only few Web sites provide universal access to the resources. This work summarises the main items to take into account in order to make accessible a multimedia resource (legislation issues, technologies, standards, etc.) and present some best practices including on-line multimedia resources in a Web site. In these practices, different design alternatives have been provided, explaining their advantages and disadvantages.

SIMPLE EVOLUTION OF COMPLEX WEB SYSTEMS

Lech Krzanik

Usability implies effective, efficient and satisfactory interaction with a system when using it. Similar properties are not usually considered when an end user is faced with developing a system – an activity more and more often when the context of using a system changes significantly. Project Nomadic Media investigated possibilities of user-participative effective, efficient and satisfactory evolution of nomadic systems. We considered geographically distributed, context-sensitive, personalized systems, exploiting various web services and allowing for a general function referred to as nomadic blogging. In this paper we demonstrate the general policies of evolution and specific ways of end-user interaction with the evolving system. The overall strategy may be generally described as simplicity – effective with regard to clear and straightforward goals, efficient in terms of resources spent at each small evolutionary delivery step and satisfactory in terms of reaching the explicit planned user targets. Results of experiments with such systems are demonstrated.

FINDING SUITABLE KEYWORDS FOR A WEB PAGE FROM CACHES BASED ON SIMILARITY AND FREQUENCY

Yasuhiro Tajima and Yoshiyuki Kotani

Meta data are most important entry in a web page for summarization, indexing, and so on. Unfortunately, there are many kind of matadata item but there are few guidelines for construct the metadata for a web page. We propose an metadata finding method for a web page by searching the internet caches and selecting suitable items for the target page. Our method is based on a bayesian method which is used in the area of text retrieval. We evaluate this method by an experiment to find a set of suitable keywords for a source web page. Compareing the original metatagged keywords and the system output, we obtain 74\% precision and 76\% recall. We can conclude that this method finds the tendency of metadata which is annotated to the pages similar to the target page.

LOG4P: AN INNOVATIVE LOGGER FRAMEWORK FOR WEB PORTALS - TOWARDS NEW METRICS FOR WEB PORTALS

Gennaro Costagliola, Filomena Ferrucci, Vittorio Fuccella and Luigi Zurolo

Content Management Systems and Web Portal Frameworks are more and more widely adopted in Web development. Those kinds of software often produce web pages whose layout is divided in sections called, in the case of Web Portals, “portlets”. Portlets can be produced by different sources and then aggregated in the same page by the portal. For Web portals, traditional web metrics based on page visits can be inadequate for fully understanding user’s interest, due to the heterogeneity of content and the variety of sources. This paper proposes a system for evaluating the web traffic at a deeper level than the page visit one: the level of the sections, or of the portlets. The interest of the user in the sections of the page is gauged through implicit interest indicators, such as, section visibility, mouse movements and other client-side interactions. Our system is composed of two different products: a framework that, opportunely instantiated in a web portal, allows the production of a log, and a log analyzer. The possible uses and benefits gained by research in the fields of web traffic analysis, portal design and usability are investigated in depth.

PERSONAL ARCHIVING AND RETRIEVING IMAGE SYSTEM (PARIS)

Pei-Jeng Kuo and Terumasa Aoki

PARIS (Personal Archiving and Retrieving Image System) is an experiment personal photograph library, which includes more than 80,000 of consumer photographs accumulated within a duration of approximately five years, metadata based on our proposed MPEG-7 annotation architecture, Dozen Dimensional Digital Content (DDDC), and a relational database structure. The DDDC architecture is specially designed for facilitating the managing, browsing and retrieving of personal digital photograph collections. In annotating process, we also utilize a proposed Spatial and Temporal Ontology (STO) designed based on the general characteristic of personal photograph collections. This paper explains PRAIS system.

CONTEXT-AWARE MODEL DRIVEN DEVELOPMENT: APPLICATIONS TO WEB SERVICES PLATFORM

Slimane Hammoudi, Samyr VALE and Stéphane LOISEAU

Context-aware applications are being developed since the last decade but until today it does not have yet a common definition about what means context. One thing everybody agree, this system generation retells that applications must be more adaptable for each user. Context-aware applications aggregate different types of context to be more personalized and to respond more effectively the user needs. Nowadays, Context-awareness is often seen as recently emerged research field within information technology, and in particular within the domain of the web. In this domain, most of the proposed approaches insert personal context information into application code. This will limit application adaptivity, software development productivity and reuse. We propose in this work the separation of business logic from context properties in different models, as context depends essentially on a particular environment and user situation. We use the Model Driven Development approach (MDD) to design context-aware applications. Context information as models can improve reusability and interoperability in contextual applications. We define some metamodel context elements and suggest merging model technique with a specific semantic to build CPIM (Contextual Platform Independent Model). By traditional transformation techniques a CPSM (Contextual Platform Specific Model) can be built from a CPIM. Web Service is the target platform for our experimentations. The choice of this platform is motivated by the fact that future Context-aware, Web applications will be supported often by this platform.

EVALUATING THE USERS’ EXPERIENCE OF A PDA-BASED SOFTWARE APPLIED IN ART MUSEUMS

María Lozano, R. Tesoriero, J. A. Gallud and V. M. R. Penichet

Mobile devices as smartphones or PDAs are common in our daily life. Museums and art galleries provide electronic guides in order to do more pleasant a visit or exhibition. The problem tackled in this paper is to prove the suitableness of using a PDA, instead of the traditional guides. In this case an application was specially developed to provide users that are visiting the museum additional information and help. It is interesting to know how to adapt these devices to guide and improve visitors’ experience. Moreover, we have to take into account that technology should not be the centre of attention in art museums or exhibitions, it should be unperceivable. Thus, in this paper, we describe an evaluation of a real system deployed in an emblematic museum in Spain, called Cutlery Museum of Albacete. Our approach offers visitors a PDA that employs a wireless network to show additional information about old knives, jack-knives and scissors which are exhibited in the museum. In this way, art and technology are combined with success. The system supports four languages and incorporates special functions for disabled people. This article shows the users’ satisfaction results collected during the last 18 months. These results lead to a detailed analysis suggesting some improvements for future versions of the software as a conclusion and future work.

THE DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF A SEMANTICS-BASED WEB CONTENT ADAPTATION FRAMEWORK FOR MOBILE DEVICES

Chichang Jou and Cheng-Ze Ho

With the rapid development of wireless communication technology, many users are accessing the internet from mobile appliances, such as notebooks, PDAs, and cellular phones. These devices are miscellaneously limited in computing resources, like CPU speed, memory, temporary storage, power supply, installed software, and communication bandwidth. The web accesses in these mobile devices thus encounter distorted user interface, broken images, slow responses, etc. To overcome this problem, we design and implement a semantics-based web content adaptation framework to provide automatically adapted contents to miscellaneous mobile devices. RDF Semantics of client device configurations and web page tag structures are extracted to determine the proper parameters for the format and layout of web contents. Heuristic transcoding rules in the Jena Inference System are then applied to transform the web contents for each particular device. The functionality of this framework is illustrated by its capability of adjusting the layout of one web page and of adjusting the width and height parameters of images in that page.

X3D IN RADIATION THERAPY PROCEDURE PLANNING

Felix Hamza-Lup, Ivan Sopin, Dan Lipsa and Omar Zeidan

Radiation therapy, an increasingly available and effective cancer treatment solution, involves sophisticated machinery as well as careful planning. Interactive 3D simulations combined with accurate 3D patient specific data can improve the planning process saving time and resources in generating the optimal treatment plan. We illustrate the potential of X3D in radiation therapy, specifically radiation treatment planning. Embedding patient specific data (2D CT scans) in the interactive virtual setup improves the radiation therapy planning by early detection of collision cases. The X3D system may be used to support the decision making process as well as innovations in medical planning and training.

THE ORGANIZATIONAL EFFECTS OF E-COMMERCE - A CROSS-SECTIONAL STUDY

Efthymios Constantinides

Electronic Commerce (EC) is increasingly perceived as a mainstream element of the marketing strategy. With more firms trying to extract value from the virtualized and global marketplace of the 21st century it is essential that managers effectively address the problems related to the organizational adoption and internal implementation of EC. The paper evaluates the aptitude of the stages model, one of the well-known approaches describing the adoption of EC, in accurately mapping and explaining this complex process. Based on a study of ten commercial firms the study concludes that in the majority of cases the stages model does not adequately describe the EC adoption process. The model suffers from a fundamental flaw, namely overlooks the irregular pattern of the EC assimilation in the internal organizational processes who are shaped by EC with different intensity, in different ways and at different times rather than in a linear way the stages model suggests. The paper proposes a more flexible approach recognizing the complexity of this process and providing a more accurate and representative picture of the EC adoption by commercial firms.

A STUDY OF CONSUMER TRUST IN ON-LINE SHOPPING: METHODOLOGICAL & RESEARCH CONSIDERATIONS

Regina Connolly

Research as to how consumer trust can be built in an on-line environment is limited and varies considerably in terms of the dimensions of the problem that are examined. Consequently, much of our understanding of the antecedents of trust in on-line shopping context remains fragmented. This paper outlines an in-progress study in which a previously validated measurement instrument was applied in Ireland and in the United States in order to investigate the existence and importance of specific perceptions and factors that are thought to predict the generation of consumer trust in Internet shopping. It is expected that the results of this study will provide a refined understanding of the predictors and moderators of trust in an electronic purchase environment and thus make a valuable contribution not only to information systems research but also to the overall body of marketing, trust and diffusion research. In addition, the detailed insights afforded by this study are likely to be of benefit to vendors operating in a global environment in their attempts to engender consumer trust in their websites and thus increase their success in the competitive electronic commerce marketplace.

CITIZEN TRUST IN E-GOVERNMENT IN IRELAND - THE ROLE OF WEBSITE SERVICE QUALITY

Regina Connolly

The emergence of the concept of e-government in the 1990s, the use of information and communications technology in the public sector turned from being inward looking and administration-focused to outward looking and service-focused. One aspect of this has been on-line tax filing which in Ireland takes the form of the Revenue Online Service (ROS). The purpose of this paper is to outline a research project that is currently being undertaken with the Irish Revenue Commissioners to evaluate the quality of ROS and the relationship between these e-service quality dimensions and citizen trust in the Revenue Commissioners. It describes the application of a newly developed website service quality measurement instrument in the unique context of electronic government. It is anticipated that the findings from this study will provide insight regarding the dimensions of website service quality that are most valued by users of ROS and also identify the dimensions of e-service quality that engender, or in their absence inhibit, citizen trust in this service. The application of this recently operationalised website service quality instrument will also provide evidence regarding the degree to which it is culture independent.

USING UDDI REGISTRY AND WORKFLOW ENGINE FOR MANAGING E-PROCUREMENT PROCESSES

Juha Puustjärvi

In electronic business buyers and sellers should be able to interact with each others inside an architecture that is easy to use and maintain. Electronic auctions are an interesting approach to achieve this goal by bringing together business in the Web. Further the greatest benefits lie in cost reduction for buyers and sellers. Technically, an electronic marketplace is a virtual place that resides somewhere in the Internet. They can provide several types of business processes depending upon their target audience. A form of such processes is e-procurement. E-procurement technology is any technology designed to facilitate the acquisition of goods by a commercial or a government organization over the Internet. A form of e-procurement is reverse e-auctioning. In such auctions the supplier that made the lowest offer wins the auction. In this paper we describe the e-procurement system that we are developing. In particular we present how taxonomies and user profiles can be utilized in improving the effectiveness of the e-procurement process. From technological point of view we present how suppliers’ Web services support e-procurement specific operations, and how BPEL4WS (Business Process Execution Language for Web Services) can be used in orchestrating these Web services. In addition, we present how UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration) registry can be utilized in storing the used taxonomies and the profiles of the suppliers. In this way we can achieve high recall and precision fractions in searching relevant suppliers.

BUSINESS-TO-BUSINESS E-COMMERCE ADOPTION: A CASE STUDY APPROACH

Moses Niwe

Eliminating paper based business transactions with its expenses has been the main motivation behind business to business (B2B) adoption. The more able larger organizations have seen tremendous growth in doing their business-to-business electronic transactions over the widely accepted standards of the US (ANSI X12) for the North American organizations and, UNCEFACT, for the Swedish organizations. In this paper we examine North American and Swedish based firms, and present a synopsis of the adoption for the two predominant standards. The focus of the U.S. discussion is on the leader in e-commerce transactions, ..

A TWO-STAGED APPROACH FOR ASSESSING FOR THE QUALITY OF INTERNET SURVEY DATA

Chun-Hung Cheng, Chon-Huat Goh and Anita Lee-Post

With the Internet, surveys can be conducted to reach out a large number of potential survey subjects and data may be collected more efficiently. However, the subjects enter their responses almost without any assistance. Data collected through this means may contain errors, which adversely affects the quality of the Internet surveys. Although several approaches have been developed, they suffer many limitations. For instance, many approaches require prior knowledge of data and hence they need different procedures for different applications. Others have to test a large number of parameter values and hence they are not very efficient. In this work, we try to understand the nature of this quality problem and establish a linkage with a travelling salesman problem (TSP). Based on TSP problem structure, we propose a two-staged approach based on a genetic algorithm to assess the quality of Internet survey data.

OPTIMIZATION CONTROL OF E-BUSINESS INCOME BASING ON INTERVAL GENETIC ALGORITHM OF MULTI-OBJECTIVE

Qin Liao and Zhonghua Tang

In order to control the E-Business income, the relationship between 9 influencing factors and 3 controlling objectives is built by neural network. Then an interval genetic algorithm of multi-objective (IGAMO) is proposed to obtain the satisfactory interval solution instead of a single point solution provided by traditional algorithm. The IGAMO is constructed with 2-step genetic algorithm which respectively finds the optimal individual and the expending interval satisfying the multiple income objectives, thus we gain the control conditions for influencing factors to make the income indexes fall in the anticipant intervals. At the end of the algorithm, a statistical test is carried out to evaluate the controlling effect of the interval solution. The optimal control of E-Business income is proved to be feasible according to the analysis of the data collected from example e-Business enterprises of Guangzhou.

RECIPIENT SPECIFIC ELECTRONIC CASH - A SCHEME FOR RECIPIENT SPECIFIC YET ANONYMOUS AND TRANFERABLE ELECTRONIC CASH

Chittaranjan Mandal and Chris Reade

A new scheme for electronic money is described where e-cash is created for a specific recipient in any transaction. This has benefits for the efficiency of implementing measures against double spending. Details of the scheme are provided to show that anonymity and transferability are still possible with recipient specific e-cash. The scheme ensures both authentication and integrity of the electronic instrument. A method for giro payments based on the scheme is also discussed.

KNOWLEDGE INTENSITY OF ORGANIZATIONS IN KNOWLEDGE ECONOMY

Vladimir Bures and Pavel Cech

Attention paid to knowledge can be seen at different levels. At the supranational and national levels, potential of single knowledge economies can be measured. To do this, we can use, for example, the Knowledge Assessment Methodology. It would also be useful to develop a similar methodology at the organizational level. The aim of this paper is to present the basics of our project, in which principles of this idea and an outline of a possible way how to sort out this problem based on the four pillars of knowledge management in organizations are currently elaborated.

A STUDY OF THE INFLUENCE IN E-SHOPPING BY CUSTOMER SATISFACTION

C. F. (Connie) Hsu and Y. A. (Andreas) Hsu

Online customer satisfaction is an influential key to reach the purpose. The development of E-commerce brings the new economic type; it is unable to increase more company value and higher customer satisfaction by the tradition customer relationship management. Hence, understanding what customers consider the most importance help establish a suitable e-business model, new to be systematic, the new method or the new mechanism which can intense also in the fast changing market subdues in e-competition. E-commerce management depends on the different strategy adopted by environments and enterprises overall transport business goal. This research aims at understanding how customer satisfaction influences B2C, interactions between customers and the medium; through customer data analysis to know the consumer behavior pattern. By advantages of this draws up the role of customer satisfaction, it help B2C implementation, and promotes the customer cognition value, and then increase the enterprise profit.

AUTOMATIC SUMMARIZATION OF ONLINE CUSTOMER REVIEWS

Jiaming Zhan, Han Tong Loh and Ying Liu

Online customer reviews offer valuable information for merchants and potential shoppers in e-Commerce and e-Business. However, even for a single product, the number of reviews often amounts to tens or hundreds. Thus, a summary of multiple reviews is helpful to extract the important issues that customers are concerned about. Existing methods of multi-document summarization divide the documents into non-overlapping clusters first and then summarize each cluster of texts individually with the assumption that each cluster discusses a single topic. When applied to summarize customer reviews, it is difficult to determine the number of clusters without the prior domain knowledge, and moreover, topics often overlap with each other in a collection of customer reviews. In this paper, we propose a summarization approach based on the topical structure of multiple customer reviews. Instead of clustering and summarizing, our approach extracts topics from the whole collection of reviews and further ranks the topics based on their frequency. The final summary is generated according to this topical structure. The evaluation results show that our approach outperforms the baseline summarization systems, i.e. Copernic summarizer and clustering-summarization, in terms of users’ responsiveness.

APPLICABILITY OF WEB-BASED INFORMATION SYSTEMS FOR SMALL KNOWLEDGE-ORIENTED SERVICE COMPANIES - CASE STUDY FROM FINLAND

Erno Salmela, Ari Happonen and Jukka Hemilä

The aim of this study was to explore the applicability of web-based information systems to the business processes of small knowledge-oriented service companies from Finland. The study explains the current status of web applications in the corporate sector researched, and discusses the future possibilities for applying web-based information systems, taking into consideration the special features of the sector. The applications have mainly been focused on contacts with authorities, paying invoices, marketing on public web sites and extranet services for customers. In two of the cases, web systems were used rather extensively in service processes. These two cases were far ahead of the others in applying web-based systems. However, also they applied web-based solutions mainly in the company's internal processes. In the studied companies, the application of web systems should in the future focus more on knowledge management support than on the automation of individual transactions. In many of the studied cases, the automation of transactions is not sensible due to their small number. The application of web technologies to knowledge-oriented work based on creativity and innovation seems, however, to be challenging since the related processes normally produce unique solutions tailored to customers’ needs, which cannot easily be replicated and thus automated. Therefore, the automation of the entire creative process is impossible, but web technologies may produce added value to individual stages of the creative process, such as collecting and distributing data.

ANALYZING EBAY NEGOTIATION PATTERNS

A. Pereira, L. Rocha, F. Mourão, T. Torres,W. Meira Jr. and P. Goes

Online auctions have several aspects that violate the common assumptions made by the traditional economic auction theory. An online auction can be seen as an interactive economic information system, where user-system interactions are usually very complex. It is important to note that the interactions are not isolated, but successive interactions become a loop-feedback mechanism, that we call reactivity, where the user behavior affects the auction negotiation and vice-versa. In this paper we describe a new hierarchical characterization model for online auctions and apply this model to a real case study, showing its advantages in discovering some online auction negotiation patterns. The results demonstrate that our characterization model provides an efficient way to open the auction dynamics's "black box". We also propose a tool named Auction Model Graph (AMG) which enables the temporal analysis of the negotiation. This work is part of a research to analyze reactivity in e-business, that may contribute to understand the business dynamics and has wide applicability to activities such as designing recommendation agents, service personalization, and site interaction enhancement.

FROM CYBORG TO CYBERPUNK - THE ART OF LIVING IN THE CYBERAGE

A.T. Nuyen

Cyber technologies have changed the way we live and work. In addition to such technologies, and interwoven with them, are biological technologies, such those in the areas of cloning and genetic engineering. Some of us welcome the technological age, some are hostile to it, most are ambivalent, and hardly anyone approaches it with the Socratic question “How should one live?”, which is not a trifling matter as Socrates puts it. Indeed, the new technologies have changed the way we conduct ourselves so drastically, and the way we think about ourselves so fundamentally, that Socrates’ question must now be asked with urgency. In this paper I explain the need to answer the Socratic question in terms of Foucault’s analysis of power politics, and then discuss the views of Leary and Haraway as two possible answers.

INSTANT COLLABORATION - DEVELOPING A FRAMEWORK TO SUPPORT NEW PATTERNS OF TEAM-COOPERATION

Alexander Schatten, David Pölz and Matthias Epheser

Communication and collaboration is supported by a multitude of different (client) applications and backend systems. At the same time, new patterns of collaboration between knowledge workers arise: people want to communicate in-time, share resources, keep track of their issues and yet do not want to be unnecessarily disturbed in their concentration. We analyse several systems and approaches to support team-collaboration and finally introduce our understanding of “instant collaboration”. In our research we support first patterns with a middleware and client-side prototype. The system is built upon proven systems for (instant) messaging, communication and repositories, and suggest a system that allows support for new work-patterns, yet integrates seamlessly into existing IT and workgroup infrastructure and company policies.

A RULE-BASED DSS FOR THE QUALITATIVE PREDICTION OF THE EVOLUTION OF E-SALES

Luca Canetta, Naoufel Cheikhrouhou and Rémy Glardon

Many parameters have a significant influence on e-commerce evolution. This complicates the assessment of the requirements for and the consequences of e-sales adoption. In order to support the decisions of companies thinking about a possible e-sales channels introduction a Decision Support System (DSS) is proposed. The relevant e-commerce success factors, which constitute the DSS input, have been identified and their influence described relying upon a literature review. The DSS output aims at describing typical e-commerce evolution patterns taking into account the speed of adoption and the steady state potential diffusion (saturation level). These variables point out the considerable discrepancies between the e-commerce evolution charactering different industrial sectors. The DSS, which is based on a system of rules, allows to qualitatively predict the expected e-sales evolution for companies introducing a specific e-sales channels strategy in a given environment and to explain it in terms of different e-commerce success factor configurations.

EMPOWERING PRIMARY HEALTH CARE SERVICES THROUGH E-GOVERNANCE - A CASE STUDY FROM DELHI GOVERNMENT

Rajan Vohra

In the field of health care services the responsibility for their delivery is shared by many agencies in the public sector namely – Directorate of health services of the Government of Delhi, Municipal corporation of Delhi (MCD), New Delhi Municipal corporation (NDMC), Central government and Delhi Cantonment board. In addition there are central government ministries each with their own institutions like CGHS, Railways, ESI and Defence. Each of these agencies provides health care services in Delhi through a variety of outlets like dispensaries and hospitals. These institutions function independently and there is neither proper coordination between the government agencies managing them nor between the institutes themselves at the operational level. This coordination is essential from the point of view of having a structured patient referral system and sharing of resources between institutes in addition to providing feedback to shape government health policies. In this research paper the study focuses on primary health service centres of Delhi Government. The research objectives of this paper are: • Study the working of Primary health centres including services provided. • Study the level of IT usage in these dispensaries • Analyze key problems faced by these dispensaries • Propose an e Governance model to manage these dispensaries • Determine obstacles & challenges in implementation of this model. This research paper uses some technologies that are being used by National health services (NHS) of UK. These technologies include use of call centers for service delivery and Decision support systems(DSS) that are being used in patient interaction.

EXPERTS’ PERSPECTIVES ON BARRIERS TO THE DEPLOYMENT OF MOBILE GOVERNMENT SERVICES

Tarek El-Kiki, Elaine Lawrence and Gordana Culjak

Effective management is considered the crucial factor that decides the success or failure of any mService project. This paper is a further step into a research project that aims to measure the effectiveness of mGovernment services. As a preparatory step to developing a users’ opinion survey, this paper analyses and defines barriers to the success of mGovernment service projects from the perspective of mobile government and mobile technology experts from nineteen countries around the world. The outcome is compared to the findings from an extensive literature review. The results show a very close correspondence between the literature review and the opinions of the experts.

A COMPUTING MODEL TO BRIDGE A GAP BETWEEN REAL SPACE AND WEB SPACE

Kenji Sugawara, Shigeru Fujita, Norio Shiratori, Takuo Suganuma and Tetsuo Kinoshita

In this paper, we propose a computing model named "symbiotic computing" to bridge an e-Gap between the real space (RS) and the web space (WS). The symbiotic computing is a post ubiquitous computing model based on an agent-based model to bring in social heuristics and awareness of the RS into the WS. The symbiotic computing is defined as a space of computing model spanned by three axes of the Ubiquitous computing, the Web computing and P/S computing, which consists of Perceptual computing and Social computing. The last section of this paper describes a prototypical system of a symbiotic computing-based application of uEyes, which is a gentle watch over system for elderly people in an ubiquitous computing environment.

TASK MODEL REPRESENTATION OF A COLLABORATIVE SYSTEM USING HYPERMEDIA NETWORKS

Beatriz Jiménez, Miguel Sánchez, Francisco L. Gutiérrez and Nuria Medina

This paper presents a method for representing the task models of collaborative systems using hypermedia networks. The aim is to represent these models flexibly and extensibly so that they may be managed in web environments. This approach considers three relevant aspects of collaborative systems: the organization’s structure (roles), the tasks to be performed by organization members, and the resources necessary for carrying out these tasks. The AMENITIES methodology will be used to represent the initial models which describe these three aspects in collaborative systems. These initial models will be the basis for representing the transformation process for achieving our hypermedia network.

INTERNET AND IT IN THE TMAD REGION - A METHODOLOGY TO PROMOTE THEIR USE BY GENERAL COMMUNITIES

Gina M. M. C. Santos, Maria G. A. D. Reis, Nuno M. V. Vieira and Manuel J. C. S. Reis

This paper summarises our experience in furthering the use of the Internet by general communities of northeast Portugal. We discuss the problems and constraints that we faced and the approach taken. Some of the resources made available and the most relevant results achieved are described and discussed.

MULTI-INTEREST COMMUNITIES AND COMMUNITY-BASED RECOMMENDATION

Fang Wang

This paper introduces an approach to organising multi-interest communities in which a user may belong to more than one community. The interests of a user are first identified from the resources he handled and then refined through interest association analysis in order to remove false or redundant interests. To each identified interest topic, users who have this topic are clustered together, so a series of multi-interest communities are formed. Because members of a community may have interest in the topics of other communities, the formed communities are also connected with each other, resulting in a kind of community network indicating interest associations of groups of users. Based on formed multi-interest communities, users will receive useful recommendations within their own communities and from other related communities. This provides users opportunities to obtain information beyond their current interests so new interests of the users may be discovered. The multi-interest communities approach has been examined on the EachMovie data. The experimental results showed that the formed multi-interest communities were more cohesive and condensed when users were clustered according to their refined interest topics. The users also received much more recommendations based on multi-interest communities.

COMPARISON BETWEEN COMMUNITY NETWORKS IN U.S.A. AND IN SOUTH KOREA

“John” J. H. Im and Jin-Wan Seo

In this paper, we will discuss (1) past, present, and future of the community network in the United States with an analytic framework of the community network lifecycle (2) planning and implementation of the Information Network Village (INVIL) project, a South Korean version of the community network; (3) similarities and dissimilarities between those two for comparison in terms of expected benefits, and (4) recommendations based on our analysis. Contributions of this paper are two folds: helping the South Korean government to improve the INVIL project and other governments to learn lessons on similar projects as part of their e-government programs.

MINING CONSUMER OPINIONS ON THE WEB - ORGANIZATIONAL LEARNING FROM ONLINE CONSUMER-TO-CONSUMER INTERACTIONS

Irene Pollach

Consumer-opinion websites are becoming important sources of marketing intelligence for companies, enabling them to turn consumer opinions into opportunities for enhancing customer satisfaction. Grounded in media richness theory, this paper examines a sample of consumer-opinion websites to identify mechanisms that render the information disseminated on these websites more suitable for data mining activities. The results indicate that feedback mechanisms, member profiles, active hyperlinks, and spellcheckers are means of raising data quality. However, a key challenge for mining consumer opinions remains the identification and elimination of emotional content such as humor.

WEB-BASED INFORMATION SYSTEMS SATISFACTION - THEORETICAL DEVELOPMENT AND TESTING OF COMPETING MODELS

Christy M.K. Cheung and Matthew K.O. Lee

User satisfaction has been widely used in evaluating the performance of web-based information systems (WIS) since the growth of the World Wide Web. This study aims at investigating the structure and dimensionality of the WIS satisfaction construct. We tested the competing models built upon the web satisfaction model proposed by McKinney et al. (2002) and assessed the psychometric properties of the factors and measuring items using confirmatory factor analysis. Our findings suggested that WIS satisfaction can be explained by a higher-order factor model with six first-order factors (i.e., understandability, reliability, usefulness, access, usability, and navigation) and two correlated second-order factors (i.e., web information satisfaction and web system satisfaction). The model provides a good-fit to the data and is theoretically valid, reflecting the logical or formal consistency. Implications of the current investigation for practice and research are provided.

E-RELATIONSHIP MARKETING BY CLOSED MEMBER AREAS IN THE GERMAN HEALTH INSURANCE INDUSTRY

Salmi Said, Dirk Frosch-Wilke and Hilke Spoerel

German compulsory health insurance companies are in intense rivalry and for most of these companies customer loyalty is a critical success factor. The marketing departments in the health insurance industry have developed different e-relationship-tools to attract their customers. One of the new strategies that are used today by industries in general and compulsory as well as private health insurances in particular is the implementation of an online closed member area that offers exclusively some benefits for their customers in order to create a long term customer relationship. Because there is no automatism between customer lock-in and competitive advantages of a company, we have analyzed the market structure and industry rivalry of the health insurance sector in Germany. Further we have benchmarked different national and international closed member areas of some health insurances. Using these results, we have developed a concept of an effective closed member area for a German health insurance, the IKK-Direkt, as a part of the customer loyalty policy of this company. In fact, implementing this closed member area by the IKK-Direkt will be very helpful in enhancing a long-term customer relationship and maintaining the competitive policy of the company.

UNIVERSITY INFORMATION SYSTEM RUSSIA: MULTIFUNCTIONAL RESOURCE FOR RESEARCH, EDUCATION AND PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION

Tatyana Yudina and Anna Bogomolova

Described in the paper is the Moscow State University-based Information System RUSSIA (uisrussia.msu.ru) – a multifunctional resource that have been started in 2000 as an electronic library for economic and social investigations and innovative education programs. NLP-technologies implemented under the project provide for content-based cross-collections search and query refinement. Research-assisting services are provided. Accomplished under the project is a statistical information system that integrates main RF state agencies data collections and makes data analysis available at federal, regional and local levels. Work underway is on an ontology to integrate data and knowledge products. Currently the system is in growing demand for public administration.

EZK: A ZERO KNOWLEDGE TOOL FOR GENERATING, HANDLING, AND SECURING ELECTRONIC BILLS OF LADING

Andrea Visconti

EZK is a tool for generating, handling, and securing electronic bills of lading. EZK implements the cryptographic protocol suggested by XXXX and XXXX in (XXXXXXXXXXX), cryptographic protocol that is based on a shipper-carrier-holder model. This protocol makes use of (a) blind merchandise counts, or zero-knowledge counts,  that is, counts that do not reveal any information about the quantities actually counted,  (b) secure timestamps, and (c) digital signatures. We show how EZK generates and handles order e-BOLs and how the cryptographic techniques implemented in EZK make a number of common fraud schemes impossible.

SUPPORT FOR KNOWLEDGE AND INNOVATIONS IN SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT - COMMUNITY WITHIN COMPANY: INNER SOURCE ENVIRONMENT

Mirja Pulkkinen, Oleksiy Mazhelis, Pentti Marttiin and Jouni Meriluoto

This case study considers a software development support portal adapted from open source developer communities into a company internal, so called inner-source development environment. With theoretical insights into knowledge management models, recent advancements in KM theory building, and observations of the inner source platform we make suggestions for its further development. Both technological and human components of KM are considered. The results of this study, analysing the inner source service with knowledge life cycle concepts, can be generally applicable to the knowledge creation and innovation support in the SWD ecology. We believe that many software companies are following the example and building virtual environments to support the knowledge processes and innovation in their activies. The case company, Nokia, is a pioneer in KM efforts for the software organization.

MOBILE FINANCIAL SERVICES: A SCENARIO-DRIVEN REQUIREMENTS ANALYSIS

Kousaridas Apostolos, Parissis George and Apostolopoulos Theodore

Mobile devices are expected to extend financial information systems, providing additional communication interfaces and new dimensions in computing. The evolution in mobile and wireless technologies is creating new opportunities for financial systems’ development, by offering advanced capabilities in a market with millions of mobile users. Several architectures and commercial systems have been proposed and implemented during the last years for m-payment and m-banking services. However, few of them have met wide acceptance. In this paper, a real case scenario is described; where payment and banking services are taking place using a mobile phone. Through this scenario, we identify the main characteristics and the fundamental functional and technological requirements that should be satisfied by advanced mobile financial systems.

AUTOMATIC & UNMANNED STOCK REPLENISHMENT PROCESS USING SCALES FOR MONITORING

Ari Happonen and Erno Salmela

This paper presents a process description for a fully integrated, unmanned warehouse inventory replenishment system. This description serves as a springboard for discussion on the TEMO project (TEMO-Project, 2006), where the Vendor Managed Inventory (VMI) model’s current situation and future possibilities in the Finnish engineering industry are being studied. In this paper we concentrate exclusively on C-class products and challenges present when managing these products. Because of the exceptional characteristics of these products, C-class product monitoring cannot be directly adapted to the VMI methods used by the food industry, which are usually based on Point of Sale (POS) information. By presenting the “ideal” model, as well as an adapted version that can be carried out using currently available technology, the researchers would like to open scientific discussion on the subject, especially considering the challenges and limitations of distance monitoring in this context. The suggested solution clearly has potential to offer a higher level of service level to customers as well as business opportunities to service providers. Implementing the solution brings new challenges to supply chain management and brings new areas for research, such as information management, communications engineering, as well as e-commerce and added value services, to the forefront.

VCS: AN OPEN SOURCE WEB-BASED VACCINATION MANAGEMENT INFORMATION SYSTEM

Carlos Theobaldo Renck, Leandro Sorgetz and Francisco Assis Moreira do Nascimento

The present work presents VCS (Vaccination Control System), a Web based application implemented using the PHP script language, the PostgresSQL DBMS and the Apache web server under a GNU/Linux platform. VCS is a management information system tool for the vaccination process control, which was modelled and designed towards the necessities of the Brazilian public health system. The current version of VCS includes the management of vaccines, patients, mass immunization campaigns, access control to the recorded information, record of immunizations and history of immunizations per individual, and many statistical reports. An important social benefit provided by VCS is the improvement in the strategic planning for the public vaccination system, which results in a better assistance to the population in general and resources savings by governments with the reduction of vaccine lost.

SEMANTIC LIFE EVENT ENVIRONMENT FOR EGOVERNMENT SERVICES - TOWARDS A HOLISTIC SUPPORT TO HOST EGOVERNMENT SERVICES IN A SCALAR MANNER

Luis Álvarez Sabucedo and Luis Anido Rifón

The huge amount of resources that are being devoted to eGovernment projects makes possible the soaring of new solutions. This onrush of contributions leads us to some shortcomings such as lack of interoperability or poor scalability. To overcome this situation, the use of Life Events is proposed. Introduced in the paper, Life Events are the cornerstone for a semantic proposal to provide eGovernment services in an organized manner. A methodology for the use of Life Events and, also, the modelling of the entire system are presented.

AN ANALYSIS OF INTERNET DEPLOYMENT AND GOVERNANCE

Martin H. Knahl

Internet governance is a hotly debated and relevant issue referring to the global management and operation of the key internet resources (e.g. root server system, IP address allocation or domain names). Today the technical operation of the internet is relevant for the global economy and the internet provides a globally adopted communication medium. Thus political and technological aspects and considerations are interwoven and cannot be separated. Research suggests that the existence of an open market, transparency and competition are having a major impact on internet governance. Current trends and developments regarding internet governance must be observed to evaluate current and future implications on the internet. The World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) and the key players such as the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) are currently in the process of formulating the scope and agenda of future internet governance. The research suggests that institutional (e.g. government) as well as market governance will remain present for the network access and content. Additionally network governance is having a major impact upon these aspects and is further strongly present in the control and operation of the internet. The results of the research further suggest that the internet is having more diversity with respect to governance and more prominent network governance than other communication channels. It further considers future developments and proposes a set of alternative perspectives.

QUERYING WORKFLOWS OVER DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS

Hanna Kozankiewicz, Krzysztof Stencel and Kazimierz Subieta

We present an architecture supporting querying workflows built atop systems at multiple locations. Such systems are specific for e-Government. We propose to use virtual object-oriented updatable views as a means to integrate data and services being controlled by various institutions. Such views deliver virtual updatable objects to workflow application. In this paper we also describe a novel approach to workflow, where an activity is modelled as an object which can have other activities as subobjects. All activities have pre- and post-conditions determining when they can be started and what is necessary for their completion. The whole proposal is based on the Stack Based Approach (SBA) to query languages which easies the examination of the state of an integrated workflow

SPINNING A CORPORATE SEMANTIC WEB FOR PRODUCT ENGINEERING

Uwe Keller, Stijn Heymans, Alois Reitbauer and Michael Neswal

Engineering of products is a complex, ubiquitous task. Nowadays, these tasks have two important domain-independent aspects: (i) they are knowledge-intensive and (ii) collaborative endeavors. For such processes, information systems used within the industry today provide focal solutions rather than a principled approach towards efficient and holistic support for engineers during the overall process or across different processes. In particular, it is up to individuals to (manually) create and manage their own information space to increase the efficiency of their personal work process. This space is not represented explicitly in a dedicated system and it cannot be shared with others. Furthermore, support systems are usually passive, i.e. the user has to repeatedly ask for information, rather than getting notified about relevant information whenever it is available. For this reason, we propose a novel approach towards a generic engineering support environment that combines Semantic Web technologies, Semantic Desktops, Group Memory Systems and Multi-Agent Systems to overcome the problems. It aims at transferring the principles underlying the Semantic Web into an enterprise. This paper provides a motivation for our research, discusses economical relevance and overviews the proposed solution.

PERSPECTIVES OF E-GOVERNEMENT DEVELOPMENT IN POLAND

Anna Dziech

This paper attempts to describe the phenomenon of e-Governement, which has recently appeared in the modern governance as the derivative of the global information society. First part of the article explains the definition and the essence of e-Governement. It also presents some main programmes that are being implemented in Poland in order to popularise e-Governance. The results of surveys held in year 2005, which show the actual condition of e-Governement in Poland conclude the article.

INTERACTIVE HOMEPAGE OF NON-PROFIT ORGANIZATION

Kim Fagerudd and Eija Koskivaara

This paper presents how local orienteering club with the interactive homepage attract new members, and communicate with people interested in or involve with the club. Especially, the children and youth sector is presented. This communication way is important in the city, where orienteering places are around the city and surroundings. Orienteering really is a hobby for the whole family – a real sport for all who wants to promote physical activity with metal and social well-being. It can be practised almost anywhere in the world, in all kinds of terrain from parks to woods. A map and a compass, and suitable outdoor clothes are all you need to get started. Orienteers navigate their way round a with the map and compass. To reach orienteering places is challenging, especially for newcomers, as the physical activity place changes almost every time, otherwise orienteer’s learns the terrain too well and the mental feedback is not so rewarding anymore. The interactive homepage of youth sector have eight items.

HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT VIA THE WEB: OPPORTUNITIES AND THREATS

Tanya V. Bondarouk and Huub Ruël

Web-based Human Resource Management (HRM) is coming to a more full-grown stage within organisational life. Much is assumed and expressed about its advantages, however scientific proof of these advantages is scarce. No clarity exists about the answer to the question whether Web-based HRM contributes to the effectiveness of HRM processes. This paper contributes to the Web Information Systems sciences in two ways. Firstly, findings-wise, we present results from the quantitative study on the contribution of Web-based HRM to HRM effectiveness. The data is collected in a Dutch ministry of Internal Affairs. Results show that actual use of the Web-based HRM application correlates with HR effectiveness, especially its content and design. Regression analysis confirms that the experienced quality of the Web-based HRM application is the only significant explanatory factor of technical and strategic HRM effectiveness. Secondly, in this paper we integrate two approaches, namely Web technology-oriented approach, and organizational processes-oriented approach. An intersection of Web- and HRM- studies reveals new possibilities both for scientific and practical implications.

TRENDS IN TEACHING WEB-BASED DEVELOPMENT - A SURVEY OF PEDAGOGY IN WEB DEVELOPMENT COURSES

Ralph F. Grove

Many universities now offer a computer science course covering the development of information systems for the World Wide Web. Over the last ten years much has been written about experiences gained in developing and teaching such a course. This paper summarizes these experiences, including curriculum, common problems, and lessons learned. It also provides a suggested model curriculum and argues for more emphasis on fundamental concepts in addition to the standard core set of Web development technologies.

AUTHORING REUSABLE SLIDE PRESENTATIONS

Alberto González Téllez

Slide presentations have become a common method used by lecturers to prepare and deliver teaching content. The amount of effort invested in authoring this material is usually very high and then it is desirable to be able to reuse it. Unfortunately commonly used slide editors offer very little reuse capabilities. In this paper we present a method of authoring teaching slide presentations that has the advantage of being able to automatically port slide contents into other delivering formats (textbooks, synchronized multimedia presentations, e-learning platforms, etc). The technique is based on using an XML compliant language with available tools that are user friendly and free.

WEB-BASED COMMUNITIES IN E-LEARNING

Gavin McArdle, Teresa Monahan and Michela Bertolotto

E-learning is a growing online service, its convenience appealing to many users. An abundance of e-learning applications have been developed which provide many features aiding both tutors and students. However, despite the growth and development of online communities in other areas, the effective establishment of these communities within e-learning is still lacking. Communication and social interaction among students forms an important part of any learning scenario. Therefore, it should also be provided for online learners. This paper presents guidelines for the development of e-learning systems which foster the establishment of communities and encourage interaction among users. The paper describes CLEV-R, our own development which employs these techniques to realise an effective online learning community.

LEARNING AND RETENTION OF LEARNING IN AN ONLINE POSTGRADUATE MODULE ON COPYRIGHT LAW AND INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY

Carmel McNaught, Paul Lam, Shirley Leung and Kin-Fai Cheng

Various forms of knowledge can be distinguished. Low-level learning focuses on recognition and remembering facts. Higher level learning of conceptual knowledge requires the development of some form of mental structural map. Further, application of knowledge requires learners to put theories and concepts into use in authentic and novel situations. This study concerns learning at a number of levels. The context is a fully online module on copyright laws and intellectual property, designed as an introductory course for all postgraduates at a university in Hong Kong. The paper also explores whether the knowledge learnt through the web-based medium was retained after three to six months. Findings ascertained the effectiveness of the new medium, not only in delivering facts but also for assisting the learning of higher level knowledge. As expected, the performance of students declined in the delayed post-tests but not to any alarming degree. Retention of factual knowledge, however, was much lower than retention of other forms of knowledge. This perhaps suggests that the role of e-learning, just as in face-to-face classes, should focus on concepts and the applied knowledge, rather than on memorization of facts alone.

IUMELA - THE INCEPTION OF AN INTELLIGENT MODULAR EDUCATION LEARNING ASSISTANT

Elaine McGovern, Rem Collier and Eleni Mangina

University College Dublin has made an unprecedented transition from its once traditional educational metaphor to a modularised education framework, the first of its kind in Ireland. This paper questions whether students, who are unfamiliar with the concepts of modularisation, can successfully make informed decisions, ensuring achievement from specifically tailored module combinations. It presents IUMELA, an intelligent mobile modularised-education learning assistant to aid in this career-building decision making process. Using multi-agent systems and their associated expert systems, it recommends appropriate modules based on the students own requirements. Proclaimed as a new departure, the ubiquitous multi-agent systems technologies are capable of transcending the boundaries of the traditional, into a world of innovative intelligent mobile learning, where software components embedded with intelligent learning assistants can enhance the third level students academic career.

A WEBLOG IN PRACTICE - EXAMINATION OF A GLOBAL TELECOLLABORATIVE PROJECT BLOG

Cynthia C. Choi

Students in three elementary schools in the Northeastern area of the US and their partners in a primary school from a small coastal town of Papua New Guinea have used technology to initiate dialogue with one another through collaborative classroom activities—a web-based learning community that spans across the globe. Within an established model of teaching and learning online through online networking, application of the weblog component is examined. Preliminary findings suggest the use of weblog to be an effective component in regards to maintaining student motivation. And, the ease of implementation was manageable to participating teachers.

GUIDANCE AND MONITORING OF LEARNING VIA INTERNET - ANALYSIS OF A PRACTICAL EXPERIMENT

Isabel Cuadrado Gordillo and Inmaculada Fernández Antelo

During the 2005/6 academic year, we experimented with adapting the subject of Psychology of Instruction in the undergraduate Psychopædagogy degree course to the European Higher Education Area (EHEA). This involved transforming presencial tutorials into virtual tutorials. We here describe our experience and analyze the strengths and weaknesses that we encountered in using different tools of synchronous and asynchronous virtual communication to monitor the students' learning. The results showed a greater willingness of the students to become involved in the study of the material, a significant increase in their grades and in particular in the number of passing grades, and a change of attitude from one of total passivity to an optimal degree of activity, responsibility, and commitment.

INTEGRATION OF KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT AND E-LEARNING MANAGEMENT FOR CONSTRUCTION COMPANIES

N. Forcada, M. Casals, M. Gangolells and X. Roca

Knowledge and learning are the basis for the development of whatever business activity. There are plenty of knowledge management tools and also e-learning management tools. Basically, they are separated initiatives and their approach is specific to the targets of each particular area. The main problem is the inexistence of a common language which difficults the exchange of experiences and information. This paper describes the background and methodology to integrate a Knowledge Management Strategy (KMS) for a construction company and an e-learning management system. Two central objectives structure this Paper: 1. To identify categories of important information generated and shared between knowledge management and e-learning, 2. To integrate vast amounts of contents from diverse repositories created in several KM systems as well as e-learning platforms by implementing “Concept Indexes” for tagging contents.

NEW WEB SERVICES BASED ON-THE-FLY SMIL GENERATOR ARCHITECTURE FOR HIGHLY AVAILABLE ELEARNING PRESENTATION

Al-Zoubi A. Y. and Akram Alkouz

Learning objects are usually targets to transfer from one repository to another or subject to modifications due to the unavailability of the server running the repository. Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL) has recently become increasingly important in eLearning environments to integrate learning objects into a synchronized complex multimedia web presentation. However, this standard specification lacks the ability to provide alternative links in the case of repository unavailability and may occasionally lead to broken links. An outline of various aspects of the design and implementation of web services based on-the-fly SMIL generator architecture (WSOSGA) is presented in this paper. WSOSGA consists of three tiers which cooperate together in a simple way to search for multimedia learning objects both locally and in the internet, rank them based on learning objects (LO) author considerations, generate and publish the corresponding SMIL document and its XML profile. The latter will be used by the web services tiers on the target web server to generate SMIL documents on-the-fly. The major advantage of WSOSGA is thus achieved to give SMIL presentations high availability in eLearning instructional content

E-LEARNING IN CONTINUOUS PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT ACROSS THE GLOBE - AN EXPERIENCE IN WATER ENGINEERING

Joaquín Izquierdo, P. Amparo López, Vicente S. Fuertes and Francisco J. Izquierdo

Based on our wide experience in continuous professional development (CPD) through traditional activities and hands-on experience on several commonly used Learning Management Systems, we have integrated both concepts and developed a simple, yet effective e-learning approach to help professionals in the water field to fill the gap between their sometimes not updated background and the new features that characterize the water field in the present days. We argue that this task can make use of the same approach that is essential to the knowledge discovery process, to which the e-learning process boils down to. In this contribution we present the work performed at the Polytechnic University of Valencia, within the Multidisciplinary Team of Fluid Modelling, on web systems to support technology enhanced learning specifically addressed to professionals in the Water field. Our approach hinges on the joint use of the online as well as the offline characteristics of the e-learning process and puts to work together in a synergic way both traditional and technology-based learning know-how. As a result, a number of distance courses have been produced that are used for Engineering CPD across the globe, since many professionals worldwide, mainly from Spanish speaking countries, have followed our courses. We present the evolution of our system and the results obtained from testing and evaluating the prototype during the last three years. We have identified issues significant to users in order to better manage the system and changes required to adapt our system to organizational processes and context. Feedback received from trainees indicates both the validity of our approach and the feasibility of implementing e-learning materials to contribute to CPD in the water field in particular and in any field in general, since the methodology herein presented can be exported in a straightforward manner.

CREATING STRUCTURE FROM DISORDER - USING FOLKSONOMIES TO CREATE SEMANTIC METADATA

Hend S. Al-Khalifa, Hugh C. Davis and Lester Gilbert

This paper reports on an on-going research project to create educational semantic metadata out of folksonomies. The paper describes a simple scenario for the usage of the generated semantic metadata in teaching, and describes the ‘FolksAnnotation’ tool which applies an organization scheme to tags in a specific domain of interest. The contribution of this paper is to describe an evaluation framework which will allow us to validate our claim that folksonomies are potentially a rich source of metadata.

FLOOR CONTROL IN COMPLEX SYNCHRONOUS CSCL ENVIRONMENTS

Jacques Lonchamp

Complex synchronous CSCL environments are dual space environments providing a task space where users "do things" through a set of collaborative tools and a communication space where users "talk of what they do". The most recent systems provide several tools in each space. In such complex dual space environments, the definition and role of floor-control (FC) in relation to other control paradigms has to be clarified. FC can be associated to very different granularity levels: environment, space, tool/artefact, component or attribute. If FC is associated to the tool or space level, the coexistence of different FC policies has to be considered. This paper discusses FC in complex synchronous CSCL environments and describes the particular approach and solution implemented in the Omega+ generic synchronous CSCL framework.

LINKING CONVERSATIONS AND TASK OBJECTS IN COMPLEX SYNCHRONOUS CSCL ENVIRONMENTS

Jacques Lonchamp

In CSCL systems, linking conversations and task objects is essential for establishing joint attention and constructing shared meaning. This paper proposes an application-independent linking mechanism, well adapted for expressing complex inter-tool links as required by the most recent synchronous CSCL environments. The sticky annotated snapshot concept and its more classical derivatives, sticky note and persistent graphical pointer, are described together with their implementation. Preliminary experiments are discussed which show, in addition to normal linking usages, a somewhat unanticipated way of using sticky annotated snapshots as fully-fledged intermediary objects during creative processes.

ABEL-GUI: AN AGENT-BASED GRAPHICAL USER INTERFACE FOR E-LEARNING

Steffen Kernchen, Fritz Zbrog and Reiner R. Dumke

In this paper we present an agent-based graphical user interface (GUI) for the domain of e-Learning: the ABEL-GUI. It is developed following a structured approach for the analysis, specification and design of agentbased graphical user interfaces. Therefore a logical goal/task hierarchy is designed and depicted by a society of agents. By this an implicit partition of the GUI takes shape and gets connected with the particular agents. The result takes benefits from the cooperation idea behind agent technology and focuses on specialization, personalization and interaction support.

ARCHITECTURE FOR A REMOTE ACCESS LABORATORY WITH APPLICATION TO ELECTRONICS ENGINEERING TEACHING

Marco Túlio Chella and Elnatan Chagas Ferreira

This article presents an architecture for the development of Internet remotely controlled experiments with focus on educational applications. We use the Internet as the communication infrastructure; hardware and applications specific for computer based instrumentation; a system composed of an electronic board and applications for monitoring and controlling real experiments. The experiments created with the tools presented make it possible for a user with a computer connected to the Internet to control and get information about the experiment upon which he/she is acting.

DESIGNING LEARNING ACTIVITY TO BE INDIVIDUALIZED

Sofiane Aouag

The modelling of the learning individualization process is a complex problem which needs multidisciplinary knowledge. The variety of decision problems and of complex domain will never be just one method of model-based decision support. For that making rational decision should be distributed in different levels using various types of knowledge and models. The multi-modelling of the learning activity imply specifying for model of each activity: The didactic model, the knowledge object model, the interface model and the cognitive model given by the actors of design. We propose in this paper a new current of learning activity design based on activity theory where the design of the learning activity means the specification of its specific teaching materials called pedagogical instruments, this material has the mediation role between the leaner and the object presented in the activity.

APPLYING GAMES-BASED LEARNING TO TEACH SOFTWARE ENGINEERING CONCEPTS

Thomas M. Connolly, Mark Stansfield and Tom Hainey

For some time now, computer games have played an important role in both children and adults’ leisure activities. While there has been much written on the negative aspects of computer games, it has also been recognised that they have potential advantages and benefits. There is no doubt that computer games can be highly engaging and incorporate features that are extremely compelling. It is these highly engaging features of computer games that have attracted the interests of educationalists. The use of games-based learning has been growing for some years now, however, within software engineering there is still a dearth of empirical evidence to support this approach. In this paper, we examine the literature on the use of computer games to teach software engineering concepts and describe a computer game we have been developing to teach these concepts.

SERIOUS GAME DEVELOPMENT BY DISTRIBUTED TEAMS - A CASE STUDY BASED ON THE EU PROJECT PRIME

Manuel Oliveira and Heiko Duin

This paper describes as a case study the first 12 months of a 2 year project developing a serious game tar-geted at a number of industrial sectors: aeronautical, automotive, civil construction, software and electron-ics. The paper presents the devised methodology to address the problems that emerged, mostly associated to the inherent barriers of managing a distributed team with equal participatory roles and responsibilities in the creative process of developing a serious game. Some of the lessons learnt are shared with the reader

DEFINING ADAPTIVE ASSESSMENTS - CONSTRUCTION OF ADAPTIVE ASSESSMENTS BASED IN THE LEARNING STYLE OF THE STUDENTS

Héctor Barbosa Leon, Francisco García Peñalvo and Maria José Rodríguez Conde

This article presents a proposal to define learning objects for adaptive assessments. Two adaptation processes are described here, the first one is the adaptation in the level of complexity of the questions, and the second one is our proposal to adapt the final presentation according to the user’s learning style. To define the items and exams, a model to construct adaptive assessment and a proposal of three levels of integration is detailed.

VIRTUAL LEARNING ENVIRONMENT - CHALLENGE TO INCREASE TEACHING AND LEARNING

Eva Milková and Antonín Slabý

The present paper summarizes the authors' experience of application of distance aspects in the education. In the article the main reasons why the authors use a virtual learning environment as an indivisible part of the part-time study program, and as a support of the full-time study program at their university, are explained there.

ON-LINE DISTANCE LEARNING PLATFORM

Sergio Ramírez, Hugo Rosales and Oswaldo Trelles

In this work we report a software platform for synchronous distance learning, which makes the presence of teachers in the student’s house possible, deploying the same class, in the same time, with the same mates, through the internet. Thus the working scenery is a normal student room, in which some students are present and some others are virtual students with interactive presence that allows to participate, be interrogated by the professor, and maintaining a fluid communication with partners. Several important technical aspects has been solved using public domain components: web-browsers, blackboards, on-line messaging –chats, forums-, and real time sound delivery. All these components have been integrated in a user friendly environment with record of use, and interface customisation for different age-levels. The participation of learners, psychologist, computer-science technicians and teachers has allowed a very simple but powerful way to integrate our children in the educational circuit.

A MODEL FOR COMPETENCE GAP ANALYSIS

Juri L. De Coi, Eelco Herder, Arne Koesling, Christoph Lofi, Daniel Olmedilla, Odysseas Papapetrou and Wolf Siberski

Modeling competences is an integral part of many Human Resource (HR) and e-Learning related activities. HR departments use competence descriptions to define requirements needed for performing specific tasks or jobs. The same competences are acquired by employees and applicants by e.g. experience or certifications. Typically, HR departments need to match such required and acquired competences in order to find suitable candidates. In e-Learning a similar situation arises. Curricula or training programmes need to describe prerequisites that must be fulfilled before joining and the competences that will be acquired after successful completion. This paper analyses the limitations and extends existing approaches for modeling competences in order to allow (semi-)automatic competence matching.

LEARNING STYLE ESTIMATION USING BAYESIAN NETWORKS

Sotiris Botsios, Dimitrios Georgiou and Nikolaos Safouris

In order to improve the efficiency of Learning Style estimation, we propose an easily, applicable, Web based, expert system founded on Bayesian networks. The proposed system takes under consideration learner’s answers to a certain questionnaire, as well as classification of learners who have been examined before. As a result, factors such as cultural environment will add value to the learning style estimation. Moreover, influence of fault answers, caused by various reasons, is expected to be reduced.

HUMAN-TECHNOLOGY INTERACTION - ACCESSIBLE INTERFACES DESIGN IN SPANISH UNIVERSITY E-LEARNING PLATFORMS

Nuria Lloret Romero and Lilia Fernandez Aquino

At the moment e-learning platforms are being applied in the University studies of ascending form. The objective of this work is to analyse the e-learning platforms of different European Universities, to analyse their user interaction capacities and the degree of accessibility developed in these platforms.Interaction in e-learning platforms is vital for potential users; in many cases the bad development of these platforms encourages the abandonment of these studies. Starting off with this hypothesis, we develop an evaluation study of the interaction of e-learning platforms in European Universities and we study the degree of interaction with the user, we also consider the level of accessibility developed according to W3C standards.

DESIGNING FOR FLEXIBLE LEARNING: DEVELOPING WIRED AND WIRELESS APPLICATIONS

David M. Kennedy and Doug Vogel

Mobility is an intrinsic property of learning encompassing spatial, temporal and developmental components. Students’ expectations on how and when they learn are creating increasingly heavier demands upon all aspects of their learning and young people, more than any other group, are making mobile devices extensions of their personal space and fundamental to their daily lives. In response, the world is moving very rapidly to engage with the opportunities and flexibility offered by mobile technologies. Educators and developers are faced with the dilemma: do you develop applications for the mobile or the wired environment? In this paper we argue that learning environments will remain combinations of wired and wireless for the foreseeable future. However, not all affordances offered by wired environments are transferable to small mobile devices. In fact, some tasks involving student-generated content are better served by applications that are designed to be entirely mobile. The paper will present initial results and evaluations of five of learning tools with the properties mobility, flexibility and either instructor- or student-generated content.

WEB-BASED ANNOTATION AND COLLABORATION - ELECTRONIC DOCUMENT ANNOTATION USING A STANDARDS-COMPLIANT WEB BROWSER

Trev Harmon

The Internet provides a powerful medium for communication and collaboration through web-based applications. However, most web-based annotation and collaboration applications require additional software, such as applets, plug-ins, and extensions, in order to work correctly with the web browsers typically found on today’s computers. This in combination with the ever-growing number of file formats poses an obstacle to the wide-scale deployment of annotation and collaboration systems across the heterogeneous networks common in the academic and corporate worlds. In order to address these issues, a web-based system was developed that allows for the freeform (handwritten) and typed annotation of over twenty common file formats via a standards-compliant web browser without the need of additional software. The system also provides a multi-tiered security architecture that allows authors control over who has access to read and annotate their documents. While initially designed for use in academia, flexibility within the system allows it to be used for many annotation and collaborative tasks such as distance-learning, collaborative projects, online discussion and bulletin boards, graphical wikis, and electronic grading. The open-source nature of the system provides the opportunity for its continued development and extension.

DEVELOPMENT AND EVALUATION OF PERSONALISED REMOTE EXPERIMENTS IN AN ENGINEERING DEGREE

M. C. Levesley, P. Culmer, K. Page, J. Gallagher, A. P. H. Weightman, B. B. Bhakta, A. Tennant and P.Cripton

A system to allow remote access to experimental equipment via the internet has been developed at the University of Leeds in the UK. This system, called ReLOAD (Real Labs Operated At a Distance), has been used to deliver laboratory sessions to over 200 undergraduate engineering students at the University of British Columbia, using laboratory equipment located at Leeds. The laboratory sessions were developed from well established face-to-face sessions used at the University of Leeds for many years. New equipment was built and a personalised experiment for each student was generated to ensure student’s learning objective remained the same but the data used to present the experimental problem varied. As part of the experiment, students were asked to determine the length of a vibrating beam from their experimental data. Using prizes for the closest answer to the measured length as an incentive, students were asked to record their calculated beam length, to assess their performance. A web-based student feedback system was developed to provide anonymous feedback. Initial results are very encouraging, with students able to undertake remote experimentation with high levels of measurement precision and feedback suggesting the system easy to use. Further experiments and international collaborations are underway using ReLOAD.

WEBELS E-LEARNING PLATFORM AND PROPOSAL FOR AUTOMATIC VIDEO SUPPORT

Mahfuzur Rahman, Haruki Ueno and Hidoyuki Sato

This paper focuses on the video contents in WebELS e-learning platform. WebELS provides a web-based, multi-platform tool, by which traditional instructors can archive their learning materials on the web and students can do their personal learning over the internet. Uploaded contents can be used either in standalone or group learning in real-time with discussion. WebELS supports contents with text, images, audio and video. However, VIDEO, because of its nature and high volume of involved data causes series of problems regarding its capturing, uploading, transmission, downloading, viewing, code conversion, compression and so on. The vision of this paper is to point out these problems and propose their probable solution in the context of WebELS, a wide expanding distance learning platform.

AN APPLICATION OF REMOTLEY CONTROLLED EXPERIMENTS TO PERFORM FEEDFORWARD AND FEEDBACK DAMPING CONTROL OF AN ELECTRO MECHANICAL SERVOMECHANISM

Andrew P. H. Weightman, Peter R. Culmer, Martin C. Levesley and Ben Hanson

This paper presents the findings of a pilot study to examine the possibility of delivering a control and dynamics laboratory session, using equipment located at the University of Leeds, to 25 students at University College London (UCL), utilising the ReLOAD (remote access to real experimental equipment) system. The ReLOAD system has been developed to provide improved access to experimental equipment used as part of undergraduate engineering degree programmes. Key to its operation is the availability of the system to serve video clips that record the experiment in progress, providing essential visualisation plus an improved sense of realism for the user. Students at UCL remotely performed an experiment to determine the effect of varying the feedforward and feedback gain on the dynamics of an electro mechanical servomechanism. Evaluation of the ReLOAD system, performed by the module leader at UCL, shows the system has huge potential to allow more efficient and collaborative use of laboratory equipment across the global engineering education community.

IN SEARCH FOR FUTURE STRATEGIES FOR E-LEARNING SERVICES TO BRIDGE THE DIGITAL DIVIDE

Insook Lee, Hyunju Jeung and Hyeokjun Kwon

Korea Agency for Digital Opportunity & Promotion (KADO) has envisioned working as a national body of information communication and technology (ICT) education for the lifelong learning to the public. Along this line, KADO begins to provide e-learning from 2001 through the site, Baeumnara, to the underserved 4 groups including the disabled, the elder, housewives, and the others such as farmers and the low-income classes. However, the number of enrollments gradually decreased each year from 2002 to 2005. Thus, this research was proposed to provide the strategies and directions for the development and management of Baumnara content in the future.

USING HYPERMEDIA AS A SUPPORT FOR COMPUTER SCIENCE COURSES IN PRIMARY SCHOOL - DESIGN AND EVALUATION OF A WEB BASED MULTIMEDIA FRAMEWORK FOR PRIMARY SCHOOL

Alessandro De Gloria, Massimiliano Margarone and Fabrizio Bracco

Teaching children is a very critical task due to several factors. Attention in children is limited in time, very often the kind of information they face at school is conveyed in abstract and formal way and, most of all, it is not playful. Moreover, they have to deal with devices normally designed for adults (i.e. mouse and keyboard among all) and could have psychomotor difficulties to their firs use. For these reasons, the learning-by-doing approach, together with the edutainment philosophy, are ideal learning methods in courses designed for children. In this work we present a teaching framework based on the learning-by-doing approach to support several subjects in primary school curricula, especially computer science courses preparation, but also used successfully in foreign language courses preparation. The target of users we considered is children of the Italian primary school (five years cycle). The aim of this framework is the integration of multimedia technologies in the traditional learning styles using different combinations of learning strategies: dialogues, digital games, virtual characters and paper versions. In order to design and evaluate this challenge, a multidisciplinary group of teachers, children, psychology and HCI experts was established.

INSTRUCTIONAL DESIGN IMPLICATIONS FOR ENHANCING TIME MANAGEMENT STRATEGIES IN E-LEARNING ENVIRONMENT

Insook Lee

The current study inquires if time management training program (called independent design approach) and blending with this training program and LMS embedded time management support functions (called combined design approach) can enhance time management scores. Through this inquiry, it tries to discover instructional design implications for time management strategy enhancement within e-Learning environment.

A UML DEFINITION OF A MANAGEMENT FRAMEWORK FOR E-LEARNING SESSION-CENTRIC SERVICES

Theodore Apostolopoulos and Anna Kefala

During the last decade, we are witnessing an evolution in WWW, communication and device technologies that enables access to e-Services via diverse means and locations. Systems that present different features and functionality and offer various e-learning services are implemented en masse. Proposed management framework aims at acting as a facilitator among e-learning systems, learners, underlying communication infrastructure and access devices, content and learning/delivery methods, offering an integration management middleware, while at the same time acts as a broker for e-learning and content providing systems. Our framework is session profile centric, since a key characteristic is the dynamic creation of user session by detecting and managing information and parameters that are either derived by stored profiles or change dynamically at each user session. In this paper, we present content and e-learning provision services' context, along with the proposed architecture overview. We present a reference architecture, as well as a formal definition of session profile and its creation process, using UML diagrams. We conclude with summarizing the main points of the proposed framework.

METADATA CHALLENGES IN INTRODUCING THE GLOBAL IEEE LEARNING OBJECT METADATA (LOM) STANDARD IN A LOCAL ENVIRONMENT

Lars Fredrik Høimyr Edvardsen and Ingeborg Torvik Sølvberg

The world of closed Learning Management Systems (LMS) is being replaced by open systems for sharing and reusing digital Learning Objects (LOs) between users, courses, institutions and countries. This poses new challenges in describing these LOs with detailed and correct metadata. This information background is needed for querying services to perform accurate queries for LO retrieval. In this paper we present metadata specific challenges when converting from a local LMS with proprietary metadata schema to a global metadata schema. We have uncovered extensive LO description possibilities based on the existing, local LMS, registered metadata, its LO types and the local context. Files can contain extensive metadata descriptions, though require special attention. We have confirmed that technologies developed as crosswalks are valid for usage in this projects for a one-time metadata transferral. However, transferring of all local metadata elements can result in incompatibility issues with other LMSs. This, even when keeping with the global metadata schema.

E-MEDI: A WEB-BASED E-TRAINING PLATFORM FOR BREAST IMAGING

I. Pratikakis, V. Virvilis, D. Kosmopoulos, S. Perantonis, A. Damianakis and D. Tsatsos

This paper concerns a Web-based e-Training platform that is dedicated to multimodal breast imaging. The assets of this platform are summarised on the following : (i) the efficient representation of the curriculum flow that will permit efficient training; (ii) efficient tagging of multimodal content appropriate for the completion of realistic cases and (iii) ubiquitous accessibility and platform independence via a web-based approach.

A LOCATION BASED E-LEARNING SYSTEM

Georg Schneider, Patrick Arnoldy and Tobias Mangerich

Much information is inherently coupled with a certain place. Accessing this information at the given place is often the key to understand it or at least it helps understanding the information much better than accessing it elsewhere. e-Learning systems free the learners from the chains of time and place. However they are normally used with PCs or laptop computers either at home or at certain premises. Especially in a city like Trier, which is full of history, it is easy to verify that learning about the Romans and seeing a picture of a historic site is different to the real world experience of this site. This reflection leads us to the idea to extend the capabilities of a conventional E-learning system in a way that information can be accessed where it can be understood more easily, i.e. on its place. Therefore we have extended the system MOVII (Moving Images and Interfaces), which is a flexible and visually appealing E-learning Platform with a possibility to geocode information entities and to access them appropriately.

BUILDING VIRTUAL LEARNING COMMUNITY WITH AUTHENTIC PROBLEM-BASED LEARNING ACTIVITIES - FOR EXPLORING EMERGING SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

Satoru Fujitani, Tadayuki Kishimoto and Kumiko Iwazaki

The authors have worked with developing and evaluating educational programs dealing with emerging scientific and technological. The programs promote collaborative learning activities that research and examine emerging science and technology through interfacing between middle and high school students with volunteers via websites. Upon abstracting empirical knowledge from the actual experiences of high school club activities and evaluating the effectiveness of the information system, the learners took the initiative in uploading what they had learned from their club activities to the websites, received necessary information from the explanations and queries of the waiting online volunteers, and were ultimately able to translate that into such activities as presentations on that basis.

DEVELOPMENT OF A WEB-BASED PLANT SCIENCE TEACHING RESOURCE FOR USE BY UNIVERSITY LECTURERS - THE GATSBY PLANTS TEACHING RESOURCE

Aurora Levesley, Juliet Jopson and Celia Knight

Undergraduate interest in plant science has reached a new critical low; with so few students taking plant-based options that some Universities no longer do a separate Plant Science degree. This raises the question “where is the next generation of British plant science researchers going to come from?”. The Gatsby Plants Teaching Resource aims to support research academics to provide stimulating and inspiring plant science teaching to reverse this downwards trend. The on-line resource will supply a mix of novel teaching ideas, images and practical protocols, as well as holding a database of plant science lecturer contacts so the lecturing community can work together to spread good teaching practice.

INTERACTIVITY WITHIN IMS LEARNING DESIGN AND QUESTION AND TEST INTEROPERABILITY

Onjira Sitthisak, Lester Gilbert, Mohd T Zalfan and Hugh C Davis

We examine the integration of IMS Question and Test Interoperability (QTI) and IMS Learning Design (LD) in implementations of E-learning from both pedagogical and technological points of view. We propose the use of interactivity as a parameter to evaluate the quality of assessment and E-learning, and assess various cases of individual and group study for their interactivity, ease of coding, flexibility, and reusability. We conclude that presenting assessments using IMS QTI provides flexibility and reusability within an IMS LD Unit Of Learning (UOL) for individual study. For group study, however, the use of QTI items may involve coding difficulties if group members need to wait for their feedback until all students have attempted a question, and QTI items may not be able to be used at all if the QTI services are implemented within a service-oriented architecture.

PEDAGOGICAL RESOURCES REPRESENTATION IN RESPECT IN ONTOLOGY AND COURSE SECTION

Patitta Suksomboon, Daniele Hérin and Michel Sala

E-Learning or online learning refers to the use of computer technologies to design, create, deliver, manage and support learning for students and help teachers to provide their resources on the internet. And each web site contains sets of pages and associated indexes. To organize learning resources to facilitate the access to these resources by teachers or students, many useful queries and computations over such repositories involve traversal and navigation of the Web graph. In this paper we purposed learning resources cauterization by applying S-Node graph with respect in ontology or concept structure.

MOBILE FEEDBACK SYSTEM FOR SUPPORTING INTERACTIVE LEARNING

Harri Hämäläinen, Tomi Ruuska and Ari Happonen

Nowadays in some cases the lack of interaction between teacher and students is a huge challenge. Because of this the teachers may have difficulties to diagnose the level and preliminary knowledge of the students. In this paper we take a look at the wireless web-based education system supporting the traditional learning environment. We have earlier developed a pilot that can be used to develop the interaction between different parties. First virtual learning applications have had an approach where studying is independent from time and place. The goal for our application was instead to develop the current learning event and lecture. Our solution is founded on WWW-based service. Students have access to the application for participating using their devices. Teachers as well as students have their own interfaces. Based on a questionnaire we completed, there is a need for this type of applications. This paper introduces a pilot application and its usage in a Wireless Service Platform. This platform gives completely new possibilities for taking advantage of the eLearning application. The end-user devices are still a limiting resource but this solution at least reduces the need for existing network infrastructure.

SUPPORTING EFFECTIVE AND USEFUL WEB-BASED DISTANCE LEARNING

Santi Caballé, Thanasis Daradoumis, Fatos Xhafa and Joan Esteve

Learners interacting in a Web-based distance learning environment produce a variety of information elements during their participation; these information elements usually have a complex structure and semantics, which makes it rather difficult to find out the behavioral attitudes and profiles of the users involved. User modelling in on-line distance learning is an important research field focusing on two important aspects: describing and predicting students’ actions and intentions as well as adapting the learning process to students’ features, habits, interests, preferences, and so on. This work provides an approach that can be used to greatly stimulate and improve the learning experience by tracking the students’ intentions and helping them reconduct their actions that could evolve accordingly as the learning process moves forward. In this con-text, user modelling implies a constant processing and analysis of user interaction data during long-term learning activities, which produces large and considerably complex information. In this paper we show how a Grid approach can considerably decrease the time of processing log data. Our prototype is based on the master-worker paradigm and is implemented using a peer-to-peer platform called Juxtacat running on the Planetlab nodes. The results of our study show the feasibility of using Grid middleware to speed and scale up the processing of log data and thus achieve an efficient and dynamic user modelling in on-line distance learning.

DIGITAL RIGHTS AND E-PAYMENT IN E-LEARNING - COMPLETING THE LEARNING OBJECT LIFECYCLE

Luis de Marcos, Carmen Pages, José Javier Martínez, José Antonio Gutiérrez, Juan Manuel de Blas and José María Gutiérrez

The learning objects paradigm actually drives the majority of researches and commercial developments in e-learning field. Nevertheless, this paradigm has been harshly criticized due to the fact that it has not achieved the objectives proposed in its initial definition. This, together with some false assumptions surrounding the e-learning concept, have led costumers and organizations to the belief that e-learning have not met its initial expectations, and have borne e-learning marketplace to a expansion lower than was expected. This paper describes how two emerging areas within e-learning field, digital right aggregation to learning objects and payment systems integration, can help the learning object paradigm to meet its initial expectations and can help the e-learning marketplace to go beyond its current barriers. Digital rights and e-payment will enable to complete the learning object lifecycle in an automated way, thus permitting on-demand, high-quality, low-cost learning.

DEVELOPMENT OF AN ON-LINE ASSESSMENT SYSTEM TO TRACK THE PERFORMANCE OF STUDENTS

Raquel Trillo, Sergio Ilarri, Juan R. López and Nieves R. Brisaboa

An important feature of an e-learning environment is the ability to continuously assess the progress of the students. With an adequate tracking of the students' knowledge and performance, it is possible to re-orient the teaching strategies in time to ensure the success of the learning process. Suitable computer tools are required to help the teachers to achieve such difficult goal. In this paper, we present a tool for the definition, execution and evaluation of on-line tests, which can be easily integrated in an existing e-learning system. Prior to the development of the tool, we performed an extensive study of other existing alternatives, both commercial and free, that led our design. Thus, the developed tool boosts the desirable features of those alternatives and others that we consider interesting.

APPLYING QUALITY HYPERMEDIA DESIGN PRINCIPLES TO A WEB-BASED EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM

Roberto F. Arroyo, Nuria Medina, Miguel J. Hornos and Fernando Molina

We present a web-based educational system modeled using hypermedia design principles. The design establishes two interrelated and interacting layers: a data storage layer and an adaptation layer, linked by the user model. The data storage layer is structured in a data level and an object level. The first level is responsible for maintaining a relational representation of all data, and the second one converts data from the relational schemes into object oriented structures, used out of the storage layer. The adaptation layer performs an adaptive process in two levels: contents and presentation. The former decides what must be shown and depends on the user’s capabilities, while the latter determines how it must be shown and depends on the user’s preferences. Moreover, the system uses dynamic role assignments based on users’ capabilities.

AN ELEARNING EXPERIENCE USING THE SAKAI ENVIRONMENT - A CASE-STUDY FOR ONLINE COURSES IN OPERATING SYSTEMS

Félix Buendía García and Antonio Hervás Jorge

In the context of the Bologna process, e-learning experiences are being promoted in many European universities. Recently, the Universidad Politécnica of Valencia (UPV) has implemented the Poliformat platform that is based on the Sakai environment. Last year, a pilot experience was developed to test this environment for undergraduate courses in a Computer Engineering degree. The current work describes an elearning application of the Poliformat platform in an Operating Systems online course. The experience has been evaluated using survey techniques that analyse online learning issues and also technical aspects related to the Poliformat platform. Globally, the experience was rather positive although some problems were detected in the evaluation process that revealed that e-learning methods and tools have to be improved.

THE ROLE OF USABILITY TESTING IN AN INTEGRATED APPROACH TO CAT DEPLOYMENT - EXPERIENCE FROM THE WELKOM PROJECT

Maurice Grinberg and Evgenia Hristova

The main features of an integrated Computer Assisted Training (CAT) system design and deployment methodology, developed in the WELKOM project, are summarized and discussed. The two main dimensions of the methodology – educational efficiency and usability – are presented with a focus on the latter. Selected results from usability and learning style testing during the application of the methodology in the development of three different CAT systems in three different educational contexts (a factory, a SAP training company and an university) are presented and the results are discussed with regard to their impact on the implementation process and to the applicability of the integrated methodology as a whole.

POIESIS AND TECHNOLOGIES - E-LEARNING MATERIAL DEVELOPMENT IN LITERATURE

Laura Borràs and Joan Elies Adell

We wanted our students to act as literary critics of works of digital literature so we designed a work of digital literature with different surfing possibilities so that students could undertake an authentic and complete exercise of literary criticism. This piece of Digital Literature (the Diary of an Absence) is an e-learning tool to show them what a piece of digital narrative could be and to provide them the real and complex experience of reading the new literature in its own medium and with its own rules. With different technologies such as Director, Flash, Quick-time, HTML, etc. the Diary is an eminently textual product, situated in a determinate visual and musical dimension, which also offers the reader a journey to be undertaken. It presents six possible approaches to the text and therefore six different possible readings: 1- An exploratory immersion in the house-scenario that offers words acting as passwords and points of access to the text. 2- A nominal reading that comes from the universe of words that have been selected from the text. 3- A numerical reading by looking at the ‘treasure map’ of the numbers allowing a chronological reading of the diary pages. 4- A topological reading allows consulting the plan of the house and its surroundings to see which objects or locations give us an access to the text and where it is situated. 5- A reading trough objects permits to reach the text from the different objects in which the words have been assigned and 6- A musical reading since the map situates the different lyrics that constitute this particular melody in space. In a word: an immersive experience to approach e-literature from e-learning.

CAPTURING USER BEHAVIOR IN E-LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS

Enric Mor, Julià Minguillón and Francesc Santanach

In this paper we describe a proposal for embedding hidden marks in the web pages of a complex web site with the aim of simplifying the process of collecting and analyzing users' behavior. Usually, server log files are used for tracking user actions, but these files present typical drawbacks due to their huge size and the lack of discrimination between user actions (and intentions) and automated responses from the web server. We propose two different strategies for embedding usage marks into web server log files, action-oriented marks and content-oriented marks. Action marks are button-oriented and keep track of user behavior oriented to perform tasks thorough the system buttons and menus. Content marks are those that keep track of page loads and navigation thorough links pointing to contents that act as traps. Both strategies are complementary, and can be used at the same time. A simple experiment designed to capture user behavior once the initial web site page has been loaded is described as a real example of such proposal usage, showing the advantages of reducing the number of relevant log entries and focusing on specific user actions.

A COMPUTER GAMES APPROACH TO EXPLORATORY LEARNING - LAVA: A CASE STUDY IN SYSTEM DESIGN

K. Getchell, J. Nicoll, C. Kerbey, A. Miller, C. Allison, R. Sweetman, J. Complin and R. Michaelson

This paper presents an approach to utilising computer games technologies and methodologies to support explorative learning. This approach has particular relevance to subjects such as archaeology and geography which contain a significant field work component. A detailed case study, the LAVA project, is presented. LAVA was motivated by the need to provide support for explorative learning and an understanding of field work for classes of students in the face of the very few opportunities available for participating in real archaeological excavations. The aim is not to replace real world field work but rather to provide a realistic simulation that allows students to better prepare for real excavations. These objectives have initially been achieved through the use of a 3D game engine, 2D maps and a group-based learning environment.

THE USE OF INTERACTIVE INSTRUCTORS OF RECREATIONAL MATHEMATICS IN SECONDARY SCHOOLS

Gabriel López-Morteo, Marcos Galaviz-Férman, Gilberto López and M. Andrade-Aréchiga

A methodology for secondary math teachers, designed to introduce information technology through Interactive Instructors of Recreational Mathematics (IIRM) and an electronic ludic learning environment in its practice, is studied. First, an instrument designed to find the level of knowledge of the teachers in information technologies was applied. We show the preliminary results of applying this device in 20 secondary schools of the region, which allowed us to choose three different representative scenarios, to make the case of study. As a result of the observations and interviews that were made, we show the form in which the teachers obtained a greater degree of interaction and participation from the students in the particular subjects that were taught. It allowed them to identify different levels of abilities and different learning progress among the students. Another important result of the investigation is the stable and reliable answer of the learning environment in realistic scenarios.

ADAPTIVE ONLINE TEACHING MATERIALS FOR INTERNET, INTRANET AND MOBILE DEVICES FOR MCUC STUDENTS

D. Balaji, J. Akbar Ali and B. Malathi

Academicians in this Information age are trying different teaching methods for the effective learning by different background students. Online teaching method is not only effective for distance learning but also for teaching in a traditional method through intranet. Since MCUC has WLAN, allowing the students to access online materials through mobile devices with in college premises and also through internet it can be accessed anywhere and anytime. Since different program students are using laptops, PDA's and mobile phones to access these information it is necessary to provide personalised experience for their convenience while learning through showing the frequently accessed links or arranging the links based on the accessibility or listing the links as per the students preference using Adaptive Navigation Support technique. We also tried to use different methods to improve the performance of the website and reduce the development cost

A LEARNER-CENTERED SEMANTIC WEB-BASED ARCHITECTURE

T. Kerkiri, A. Manitsaris and I. Mavridis

In this paper the architecture of a system that uses semantic web technologies to provide qualified, personalized learning material is presented. In the proposed approach, the learner has a central role in the decision-making for the distribution of learning material. The main idea relies on the formation of appropriate reputation metadata based on the learner’s evaluation. As a result, the quality of the learning material is ranked by learners, in order to be matched to future learners having the same profile. The proposed architecture has been implemented to the e-Learning area and interesting results have obtained that prove the applicability and usefulness of the proposals.

APPLYING HCI DESIGN PATTERNS TO PDA APPLICATIONS ON ART MUSEUMS

R. Tesoriero, M. Lozano, Jose A. Gallud and F. Montero

Mobile activities such as m-commerce, m-learning, etc, are being increasingly adopted by people. Actually, new mobile activities are being explored, and one of them is supporting Augmented and Immersive Reality (A&IR) features on physical spaces. An example of this vision is exposed in at The Cutlery Museum in Albacete, know as MCA in Spain. Based on users’ suggestions and usability reports, we discovered a set problems and improvements that could leverage HCI in a future new version of the application. To design the new version we used HCI design patterns for Space Structured Applications (SSA). As MCA application is a SSA, this paper presents a proposal of a new version of UI for the MCA application applying these patterns.

INTERFACING TASK SCHEDULING FOR A B-LEARNING ENVIRONMENT

Roberto F. Arroyo, José L. Garrido, Miguel Gea and Pablo A. Haya

Computer aided learning environments is one of the main interests for computer scientists. Ambient Intelligence represents a novel and promising paradigm to be applied to blended-learning systems. These systems handle very dynamic contextual information that can be used in task scheduling to increase the benefits of proactiveness and context-aware characteristics. This paper proposes the use of the calendar metaphor to solve the scheduling of contextualised tasks in b-learning systems. In particular, the proposal is centred on building of calendars on the basis of multi-view interfaces. The aim is to provide direct and more suitable access to structured contextual information according to specific requirements. The proposal is applied to a particular blearning case study.

THE MUSEÉ IMAGINAIRE - SCIENCE, ART AND TECHNOLOGY: USING PDA IN CULTURAL ENVIRONMENTS

Daniel Del Saz, Sylvia Molina and Ana Navarrete

“Mobile devices for an imaginary museum” is a proposal of a new mobile device, specifically created for its use in museums. Through the analysis of existing devices’ characteristics, and the satisfaction grade by their users, we cogitate on how it could be like, and which features it should include.

A MOBILE SOFTWARE DEVELOPED FOR ART MUSEUMS: CONCEPTUAL MODEL AND ARCHITECTURE

M. Lozano, R. Tesoriero J. A. Gallud and V. M. R. Penichet

Mobile devices as smart phones or PDA are common devices in our daily life. Museums and art galleries are provided with some electronic guides in order to do more pleasant the visit to the exhibition. Our research group has been working in the design and development of mobile software for art museums based on PDA. The problem tackled in this paper is to prove the suitableness of using PDA instead of the traditional electronic guides. It is interesting to know how to use these devices as a medium to guide and improve the visitors’ experience. Before presenting the components of our solution we introduce the important items and concepts by means of our conceptual model.

FROM PLATO’S DUALISM TO USER INTERFACE DEVELOPMENT

Francisco Montero and Víctor López-Jaquero

Today, many devices are available, and they use different languages. From a user point of view, the system is its user interface, and this idea is used in this paper to provide a pattern-based design solution where platform independent and dependent levels are connected in a model-based user interface development and reflective environment. Platform independent and dependent levels have similarities with Plato’s dual view of reality.

MINOS - THREADS OF KNOWLEDGE

Verónica Perales and Fred Adam

Minos is a proposal developed within the project INDEVOL:NEM – Dinamic Interfaces Evolutive: Navigation into Multidimensional Space- Knowledge is a series of virtual threads located in cultural spaces, open to the public, which can be accessed through mobile phones, PDA, laptap computers or any other technological device which can be connected to the web. Its purpose is to visualize information either in real space or at a distance through the internet. It’s a tool for the future for e-culture focused on the expansion of the classroom.

EXPLOITING MOBILE DEVICES TO SUPPORT MUSEUM VISITS THROUGH MULTI-MODAL INTERFACES AND MULTI-DEVICE GAMES

Fabio Paternò and Carmen Santoro

Mobile devices are enabling innovative ways to enjoy museum settings. In particular, their multimodal interfaces can provide unobtrusive support while users are freely moving and new applications, such as games, can benefit from the combined availability of mobile and stationary devices. In this paper we report on our new solutions and experiences in the area of mobile support for museum visits.