3

A CONCURRENCY COMTROL MODEL FOR MULTIPARTY BUSINESS PROCESSES

Juha Puustjärvi

Although the issue of atomicity of multiparty business processes is well understood and widely studied, the concurrency control issues of multiparty business processes is not studied nor well understood. In this paper, we restrict ourselves on this issue. First we motivate the need of concurrency control in this context. Then, we present a liberal correctness criterion, called set-serializability and a scheduler based on timestamp ordering rule that produces set-serializable executions. Technically the scheduler is very simple and it can be easily integrated with the protocol that ensures the atomicity of the multiparty business processes. In implementing the atomicity protocol and the scheduler we utilize the WS-Coordination, which is a general and extensible framework for defining protocols for coordinating activities that are part of business processes.

5

MODELING THE WEB AS A FOREST OF TREES

Fathi Tenzakhti

This study tries to demonstrate that the World Wide Web (the Web for short) could be modeled as a forest of trees. Each Web site has its own tree for which it is the root. Since trees were extensively studied in the literature, many problems related to performance, fault-tolerance and availability of the Web could be understood more easily and the existing body of knowledge about trees could be applied to solve these problems.

33

GEO-GAMING: THE MOBILE MONOPOLY EXPERIENCE

Mao Li, M. J. O'Grady and G. M. P. O'Hare

Advances in mobile computing technologies have proved an unheralded boon to mobile games developers. Increasingly, position-sensing technologies such as GPS and cellular techniques can be harnessed. This offers exciting opportunities for novel game development. However, classic board games can also be refined and extended, leading to, amongst other things, alternative modalities of interaction. The popular game of monopoly is one example. In this paper, a prototype game, termed Mobile Monopoly, is introduced. This game can be modelled on any arbitrary urban environment. Gamers participate by roaming about the environment, acquiring properties and paying rents as they proceed.

43

COLLABORATIVE OLAP WITH TAG CLOUDS - Web 2.0 OLAP Formalism and Experimental Evaluation

Kamel Aouiche, Daniel Lemire and Robert Godin

Increasingly, business projects are ephemeral. New Business Intelligence tools must support ad-lib data sources and quick perusal. Meanwhile, tag clouds are a popular community-driven visualization technique. Hence, we investigate tag-cloud views with support for OLAP operations such as roll-ups, slices, dices, clustering, and drill-downs. As a case study, we implemented an application where users can upload data and immediately navigate through its ad hoc dimensions. Algorithmically, our tag-cloud views are approximate range top-k queries over spontaneous data cubes. We present experimental evidence that iceberg cuboids provide adequate online approximations. We benchmark several browser-oblivious tag-cloud layout optimizations.

44

EVALUATION OF A READ-OPTIMIZED DATABASE FOR DYNAMIC WEB APPLICATIONS

Anderson Supriano, Gustavo M. D. Vieira and Luiz E. Buzato

In this paper we investigate the use of a specialized data warehousing database management system as a data back-end for web applications and assess the performance of this solution. We have used the Monet database as a drop-in replacement for traditional databases, and performed benchmarks comparing its performance to the performance of two of the most commonly used databases for web applications: MySQL and PostgreSQL. Our main contribution is to show for the first time how a read-optimized database performs in comparison to established general purpose database management systems for the domain of web applications. Monet's performance in relation to MySQL and PostgresSQL allows us to affirm that the widely accepted assumption that relational database management systems are fit for all applications can be reconsidered in the case of dynamic web applications.

47

ANALYSIS, DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF IDS USING DATA MINING

B. V. Patel and B. B. Meshram

To achieve the implementation of intrusion detection system(IDS), we have integrated the Fuzzy Logic with extended Aprori Association Data Mining to extract more abstract patterns at a higher level which look for deviations from stored patterns of normal behaviour of the computer network. Here the various packet formats of TCP, UDP, IP etc are used to study the normal behaviour of the network. Genetic algorithms are used to tune the fuzzy membership functions. The tuned data by genetic algorithms is processed by the modified Apriori algorithm. The association pattern is populated by genetic algorithm for the selection of best population of the network traffic. This best populated data is classified by the C4.5 algorithms to find intrusions. The deployment of IDS is done under the control of secure environment and the system is tested in the distributed environment.

51

A CONSTRAINT-AWARE QUERY OPTIMIZER FOR WEB-BASED DATA INTEGRATION

Jing Lu and Bernhard Mitschang

Web has brought forth opportunities to connect information sources across all types of boundaries. The information sources include databases, XML documents, and other unstructured sources. Data integration is to combine data residing at different sources and providing the user with a unified view of these data. Currently users are expecting more efficient services from such data integration systems. Indeed, querying multiple data sources scattered on the web encounters many barriers for achieving efficiency due to the heterogeneity and autonomy of the information sources. This paper describes a query optimizer, which uses constraints to semantically optimize the queries. The optimizer first translates heterogeneous constraints from data sources into constraints expressed at the global level, e.g., in the common schema and stores them in the constraint repository, again, at the global level. Then the optimizer can use semantic query optimization technologies including detection of empty results, join elimination, and predicate elimination to generate a more efficient but semantically equivalent query for the user. The optmizer is published as a web service and thus, can be invoked by many data integration systems. We carry out experiments using our semantic query optimizer and the first results show that performance can be greatly improved.

56

NDT & METRICA V3 - An Approach for Public Organizations based on Model Driven Engineering

M. J. Escalona, J. J. Gutiérrez, J. A. Ortega, I. Ramos and G. Aragón

In Spain, the Ministry of Public Administrations defined a methodological environment, named Métrica v3, to develop software system in public administrations in Spain. External companies that work for public administrations, internal software departments or software engineer have to follow the life cycle of Métrica for developing their software systems. However, when Web systems are developed, Métrica could be enriched with new approaches from the Web Engineering environment. In this paper, a fusion between Métrica and NDT, a web approach for requirements treatment and analysis, is presented. This fusion is being applying in real projects with very good results.

62

A TUPLE SPACE WEB SERVICE FOR DISTRIBUTED PROGRAMMING - Simplifying Distributed Web Services Applications

George C. Wells, Barbara Mueller and Loïc Schulé

This paper describes a new tuple space web service for coordination and communication in distributed web applications. This web service is based on the Linda programming model. Linda is a coordination language for parallel and distributed processing, providing a communication mechanism based on a logically shared memory space. The original Linda model has been extended through the provision of a programmable mechanism, providing additional flexibility and improved performance. The implementation of the web services is discussed, together with the details of the programmable matching mechanism. Some results from the implementation of a location-based mobile application, using the tuple space web service are presented, demonstrating the benefits of our system.

65

A DESCRIPTIVE APPROACH FOR THE LIFECYCLE SUPPORT OF DISTRIBUTED WEB-BASED SYSTEMS

Frederic Majer, Martin Nussbaumer and Martin Gaedke

Through the advancement in technology and the spreading of the internet, a wide range of different application types has evolved. To cope with the increased complexity of today’s Web-based systems, approaches facilitating development, operations and evolution of these heterogeneous and distributed systems are vital. The approach, presented in this contribution, is based on a dedicated information model allowing the description of the overall system and its components characteristics. At runtime, the relevant model information is processed and provided to different in the system’s lifecycle involved stakeholders and supports them to fulfill their activities. Due to this use in terms of orientation and guidance, our approach is called the Integrated Information Map (i²map). Furthermore, the descriptive information regarding the nominal status and behavior of the components is used for automated monitoring and testing to assure the quality of the overall system at deployment and throughout operations.

88

BSBC: TOWARDS A SUCCINCT DATA FORMAT FOR XML STREAMS

Stefan Böttcher, Rita Hartel and Christian Heinzemann

XML data compression is an important feature in XML data exchange, particularly when the data size may cause bottlenecks or when bandwidth and energy consumption limitations require reducing the amount of the exchanged XML data. However, applications based on XML data streams also require efficient path query processing on the structure of compressed XML data streams. We present a succinct representation of XML data streams, called Bit-Stream-Based-Compression (BSBC) that fulfills these requirements and additionally provides a compression ratio that is significantly better than that of other queriable compression techniques and that of non-queriable compression techniques like gzip. Finally, we present an empirical evaluation comparing BSBC with several other XML compression techniques that demonstrates the benefits of BSBC.

91

WEB SERVICE COMPOSITION USING THE WEB SERVICES MANAGEMENT LAYER

Niels Joncheere, Bart Verheecke, Viviane Jonckers, Sofie Van Hoecke, Gregory Van Seghbroeck and Bart Dhoedt

The Web Services Management Layer (WSML) is an academic middleware platform that is placed in between clients and web services. It takes care of dynamic integration, selection, composition and client-side management of web services, thus removing the need to take care of these concerns in clients. This paper describes how the WSML can be used to express web service compositions, and presents the results of a number of experiments which evaluate the performance and scalability of the current WSML implementation. These results show that the WSML induces only a small overhead compared to systems in which the WSML has not been deployed. The advanced features of the WSML therefore come a low cost in terms of performance and scalability, which makes it a viable option in real-life web services applications.

97

USING CONTENT SYNDICATION TECHNOLOGIES IN DISTRIBUTING AND PUBLISHING INFORMATION TO REACH ALL USERS

Serena Pastore

Content syndication is widely used as the method to distribute information structured in feeds, since it provides an easy and useful way to reach the larger amount of people adding the immediacy of information. Based essentially on XML technology to be distributed and interoperable across numerous platforms, syndication benefits both the website providing information with an up-to-date structure regardless of the different techniques to stored and manage content and the website consuming information that is displayed in a specific form. Several different specifications and standards have been developed to support such technology as XML dialect, all used in every context. The paper describes how the syndication technology has been used to distribute central Institute information within each headquarters’ local web site composing it. It describes the choices done both for producing the feed with the content to be distributed coming from different sources and visualizing the feed in each website as a specific section of the home page

98

USING ONTOLOGIES TO IMPROVE PERFORMANCE IN A WEB SYSTEM - A Web Caching System Case of Study

Carlos Guerrero, Carlos Juiz and Ramon Puigjaner

This paper gives the details of a web system architecture which uses ontologies to improve the behavior of the system from a performance point of view. As the performance of the web system depends on the state and parameters fixed in runtime period, the configuration of the system will be change during that period. We need to monitor the system and store that gather information. An knowledge base is use to store that information. We present the definition of an ontology, used in the knowledge base, to model the behavior and performance of the different elements in the web system. An example of the use of that ontology in the cache tier of the system is also presented. We propose the use of reasoners that use that gather information in the K.B. to change the configuration and setup of the system during runtime period. That configuration also is given by an ontological model in a knownledge base.

112

WORKFLOWS IN CONTENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS

Pedro Pico and Alberto Rodrigues da Silva

. Content Management Systems (CMS) are application platforms that strongly contribute to make organizations more agile, flexible and dynamic in what concerns the management of their contents and business information. A common CMS’s extra feature is workflow support since it automates tasks, ultimately increasing enterprise productivity. While there are different kinds of Workflow platforms in this paper, we concentrate in Content Management Workflow and we analyse their key features like: workflow definition, representation, instance management, object mapping and third party application communication. Finally, we also analyse and discuss the workflow support in existing CMSs such as Alfresco, Typo3, OpenADMS and Vignette.

137

A BROADCASTING ALGORITHM USING ADJUSTABLE TRANSMISSION RANGES IN MOBILE AD HOC NETWORKS

Toshihiko Sasama, Yasuhiro Abe and Hiroshi Masuyama

Reducing energy consumption is one of the major subjects in designing a good broadcasting algorithm for mobile ad hoc networks. This paper discussed 2 approaches to communication algorithms; 2-level clustering mesh approach and 1-level flat mesh approach, and proposes one of them which makes it appear that the total amount of expended energy becomes lesser. Wu and Dai previously proposed 2 approaches; 2-level clustering approach and 1-level flat approach. In mobile ad hoc networks mobile hosts move frequently, and these moves may cause a change in communicating relationships. In designing a minimum energy routing protocol for these mobile ad hoc networks with this inherent property, the use of a virtual backbone has become popular. This study is based on the virtual backbone conception. Our 2 proposed approaches change the clustering performed in into mesh so that energy consumption becomes smaller. The efficiency of the 1 level flat mesh approach is confirmed through our sim ulation study.

138

EVALUATION OF K-/LATTICE-CLUSTERING ALGORITHMS FOR RANDOM WIRELESS MULTI-HOP NETWORKS

Toshihiko Sasama, Ryo Monde and Hiroshi Masuyama

A k-clustering protocol is an algorithm in which the wireless network is divided into non-overlapping subnetworks, referred to as clusters, and where every node of a sub network is at most k hops from a distinguished station called the cluster-head. A lattice-clustering protocol is an algorithm in which a given area is divided by lattices and randomly distributed hosts in a lattice are one hop from the cluster-head. In this paper, we evaluated the energy efficiencies for the broadcasts designed in both k-clustering and lattice-clustering protocols. The evaluation showed that the k-clustering protocol is characterized by the smallest broadcasting power of each node, and a lattice-clustering protocol constitutes a characteristic feature of the most minimal total energy consumption. The main source of greater energy consumption in k-clustering protocol is a large number of transmissions between adjacent node pairs.

147

HARMONY - A FRAMEWORK FOR AUTOMATIC WEB SERVICE COMPOSITION

Viorica R. Chifu, Ioan Salomie, Emil Şt. Chifu and Constantin Pârţac

Web services are software components that were designed to improve interoperability and integration of applications developed on different platforms. Web Service composition offers the facility to create new services out of the existing services satisfying a complex functionality. Automatic Web service composition together with dynamic service discovery and selection are the most promising features that can be provided by Web services. This paper presents HARMONY, a framework for automatic Web service composition. Our approach for automatic Web service composition is based on the GraphPlan algorithm which considers only the viable services during the composition process. In HARMONY we use ontologies for the semantic annotation of Web services, so that the automatic service discovery, composition and execution can be realized based on ontology inference.

150

TOWARDS MKDA: A DATA MINING SEMANTIC WEB SERVICE

Vincenzo Cannella, Giuseppe Russo and Roberto Pirrone

Nowadays a huge amount of raw medical data is generated. These data, analyzed with data mining techniques, could be used to produce new knowledge. Unluckily such tasks need skilled data analysts, and not so many researchers in medical field are also data mining experts. In this paper we present a web based system for knowledge discovery assistance in Medicine able to advice a medical researcher in this kind of tasks. The experiment specifications are expressed in a formal language we have defined. The system GUI helps the user in the their composition. The system plans a Knowledge Discovery Process (KDP). The KDP is designed on the basis of rules in a knowledge base. Finally the system executes the KDP and produces a model as result. The system works through the co-operation of different web services specialized in different tasks. The choice of web services is based on the semantic of their functionalities, according to a common OWL ontology. The system is still under development.

151

A SECURE WEB APPLICATION PROVIDING PUBLIC ACCESS TO HIGH-PERFORMANCE DATA INTENSIVE SCIENTIFIC RESOURCES - ScalaBLAST Web Application

Darren Curtis, Elena Peterson and Christopher Oehmen

This work presents the ScalaBLAST Web Application (SWA), a web based application implemented using the PHP script language, MySQL DBMS, and Apache web server under a GNU/Linux platform. SWA is an application built as part of the Data Intensive Computer for Complex Biological Systems (DICCBS) project at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL). SWA delivers accelerated throughput of bioinformatics analysis via high-performance computing through a convenient, easy-to-use web interface. This approach greatly enhances emerging fields of study in biology such as ontology-based homology, and multiple whole genome comparisons which, in the absence of a tool like SWA, require a heroic effort to overcome the computational bottleneck associated with genome analysis. The current version of SWA includes a user account management system, a web based user interface, and a backend process that generates the files necessary for the Internet scientific community to submit a ScalaBLAST parallel processing job on a dedicated cluster.

159

MDA-BASED DEVELOPMENT OF DATA-DRIVEN WEB APPLICATIONS

Attila Adamkó and Lajos Kollár

In the past few years, the more or less static Web sites are evolving into Web-based distributed applications. This is due to the technological changes which took place in the last decade. Many competitive technologies have appeared but when modeling a Web application, details of current technologies should be detached from the model of the application domain since they are evolving very dinamically so they become obsolete relatively soon. We propose a method based on the Model Driven Architecture which can be used for designing and implementing Web Information Systems in the above mentioned manner. Web applications are composed of several models: structural model describes the underlying data structure, composition model defines an abstract page structure, while navigational paths are modeled by navigational diagrams and use cases capture common user activities. All of these models are expressed with UML2. By the help of XML, XSLT and XForms, prototypes can be generated from these UML models rapidly.

160

A DEVELOPMENT INFRASTRUCTURE FOR WEB SERVICES

Dionisis X. Adamopoulos

Web services are emerging technologies that can be considered as the result of the continuous improvement of Internet services due to the tremendous increase in demand that is being placed on them. They are rapidly evolving and are expected to change the paradigms of both software development and use, by promoting software reusability over the Internet, by facilitating the wrapping of underlying computing models with XML, and by providing diverse and sophisticated functionality fast and flexibly in the form of composite service offerings. In this paper, the different facets of Web services are identified and a flexible approach to engineering complex Web services is adopted in the form of a proposed framework for the development of Web services. After the examination of its main constituent parts, it is argued that its full potential and that of Web service engineering in general, is realized through the gradual formation of a rich service grid offering value-added supporting functionality and therefore the main desirable properties of such a service grid are highlighted. Finally, the paper outlines a validation approach for the proposed framework and assembles important pointers for future work and concluding remarks.

161

STRUCTURING DESIGN ACTIVITIES IN OPEN PROGRAMMABLE NETWORKS

Dionisis X. Adamopoulos

The advent of deregulation combined with new opportunities opened by advances in telecommunications technologies has significantly changed the paradigm of telecommunications services, leading to a dramatic increase in the number and type of services that telecommunication companies can offer. Building new advanced multimedia telecommunications services in a distributed and heterogeneous environment is very difficult, unless there is a methodology to support the entire service development process in a structured and systematic manner, and assist and constrain service designers and developers by setting out goals and providing specific means to achieve these goals. Therefore, in this paper, after a brief presentation of a proposed service creation methodology, its service design phase is examined in detail focusing on the essential activities and artifacts. In this process, the exploitation of important service engineering techniques and UML modelling principles is especially considered. Finally, alternative and complementary approaches for service design are highlighted and a validation attempt is briefly outlined.

164

A WEB-BASED SYSTEM TO REDUCE THE NOSOCOMIAL INFECTION IMPACT IN HEALTCARE UNITS

Hugo Rigor, José Machado, António Abelha, José Neves and Carlos Alberto

The nosocomial infection has a critical impact on the mortality and morbidity of the patients in healthcare units, especially in intensive care units, and has been studied in order to be mitigated. The registration of information about this phenomenon in databases is, more and more, a reality, turning viable the representation of this information through mathematical formalisms that, conjugated with the application of Artificial Intelligence techniques, will allow the discovery of knowledge related with the critical factors, processes and infectious agents. The ultimate goal has been to construct a web-based computational tool to automate the registration process to support the clinical body work, monitoring the performance and identifying the procedures that can be implemented in order to reduce the impact of the infections.

167

TRANSACTION SUPPORT FOR INTERACTIVE WEB APPLICATIONS

David Paul, Mark Wallis, Frans Henskens and Michael Hannaford

In the Web Services environment, traditional ACID transactions are not always sufficient to support the activities that businesses would like to process. While Web Services transactions standards do exist, it is still difficult for an end-user to combine services from loosely-coupled providers into a single action to be performed. We describe the use of a "Super Browser" that enables users to more easily find and combine Web Services into a single activity that they can view and manipulate throughout its life-cycle.

184

A SURVEY ON WEB SERVICE DISCOVERING AND COMPOSITION

Elena del Val Noguera and Miguel Rebollo Pedruelo

This paper reviews the existing techniques used in the discovering and composing of services. The task of selecting an adequate service can quickly grow tedious if all services that are listed under a certain description have to be compared manually for the final selection. And what is more, the final selection does not only depend on service parameters like executions costs or accuracy, but depends on the usefulness of objects or information that service offers. This problem is present in open environments where entities like web services or agents need to locate other entities to achieve cooperation, delegation or interoperation. For these reason these two approaches, web services an agents have deal with these problem proposing an automated and efficient mechanism to determine a structural and semantic match descriptions between entities.

185

IMPLEMENTATION OF A NEW SCHEDULING POLICY IN WEB SERVERS

Ahmad S. Al Sa'deh and Adnan H. Yahya

It is possible to reduce the response time of requests at a web server by simply changing the order in which we schedule the requests. Recently, the Shortest-Remaining-Processing-Time (SRPT) has been proposed for scheduling requests in web servers to reduce the mean response time. The SRPT assumes that the response time of the requested file is strongly proportional to its size. The correlation between the response time and the file size is unwarranted in Internet environment. Thus, we proposed a new scheduling policy for processing static HTTP requests in web servers that better estimates the response time by taking into consideration the client-server interaction on the Internet like diversity in bandwidth, round-trip-time (RTT) and packet loss in addition to file size. We call this policy, Shortest-Remaining-Response-Time (SRRT). The SRRT prioritizes requests based on a combination of the current RTT, TCP congestion window size (cwnd) and the size of what remains of the requested file. The RTT and cwnd were captured from the TCP implementation. The implementation of SRRT is done at the kernel level for controlling the order in which socket buffers are drained into the network. Our experiment uses the Linux operating system and the Apache web server. In the experiment the requests are generated by the Scalable URL Request GEnerator (SURGE) workload generator, and the WAN is represented by Network Emulation (netem). We compare SRRT to SRPT and Processor-Sharing (PS) policies. The SRRT shows the best improvement in the mean response time. SRRT gives an average improvement of about 7.5% over SRPT. This improvement comes at a negligible expense in response time for long requests. We found that under 100Mbps link, only 1.5% of long requests have longer response times than under PS. The longest request under SRRT has an increase in response time by a factor 1.7 over PS. For 10Mbps link, only 2.4% of requests are penalized, and SRRT increases the longest request time by a factor 2.2 over PS.

192

A MACHINE LEARNING APPROACH WITH VERIFICATION OF PREDICTIONS AND ASSISTED SUPERVISION FOR A RULE-BASED NETWORK INTRUSION DETECTION SYSTEM

José Ignacio Fernández-Villamor and Mercedes Garijo

Network security is a branch of network management in which network intrusion detection systems provide attack detection features by monitorization of traffic data. Rule-based misuse detection systems use a set of rules or signatures to detect attacks that exploit a particular vulnerability. These rules have to be hand-coded by experts to properly identify vulnerabilities, which results in misuse detection systems having limited extensibility. This paper proposes a machine learning layer on top of a rule-based misuse detection system that provides automatic generation of detection rules, prediction verification and assisted classification of new data. Our system offers an overall good performance, while adding an heuristic and adaptive approach to existing rule-based misuse detection systems.

194

BRINGING TOGETHER WHAT TOGETHER BELONGS - Applying Web Services to Couple SOA and Grid in Smaller Environments

Carsten Kleiner and Arne Koschel

This paper describes practical experiences from a project to couple Grid and SOA technologies in smaller environments. Web services have been applied in two structurally different case studies to solve tasks with a Grid that is integrated into a SOA and vice versa. The case studies have revealed important insight on how and when to couple SOA and Grid technologies including monitoring aspects. Some interesting general rules are derived on what has to be observed when combining SOA and grid in smaller environments. Performance and software technical analysis have been used in validating the results. They also clearly showed the benefits gained by employing SOA and grid concepts form both a performance as well as an architectural perspective.

195

FORENSIC CHARACTERISTICS OF PHISHING - Petty Theft or Organized Crime?

Stephen McCombie, Paul Watters, Alex Ng and Brett Watson

Phishing, as a means of pilfering private consumer information by deception, has become a major security concern for financial institutions and their customers. Gartner estimated losses in 2006 to phishing in the US were approximately USD$2.8 Billion. Little has been published on the forensic characteristics exhibited in phishing e-mail. We hypothesize that shared features of phishing e-mails can be used as the basis for grouping perpetrators using at least a common modus operandi, and at most, a level of criminal organization – i.e., we suggest that phishing activities are carried out by a small number of highly specialized phishing gangs, rather than a large number of random and unrelated individuals using similar techniques. Analysis of repeated phishing e-mails samples at a major Australian financial institution – using a criminal intelligence methodology - revealed that 6 groups, from a sample of 500,000 spam e-mails, could be uniquely classified by constructing simple decision rules based on observed feature sets, and that 3 groups were responsible for 86% of all incidents. These results suggest that – at least for the institution concerned – there appears to be a level of criminal organization in phishing attacks.

196

A LOGIC PROGRAMMING MODEL FORWEB RESOURCES

Giulio Piancastelli and Andrea Omicini

In the latest years, substantial achievements have been obtained in the description and formalization of the architectural principles and design criteria underlying the World Wide Web. First, the Representational State Transfer (REST) architectural style for distributed hypermedia systems was introduced, defining the resource as the key abstraction of information; then, the Resource-Oriented Architecture (ROA) was presented as a REST-based set of guidelines and best practices for implementing services on Web resources. However, a resource programming model is still missing, since procedural and object-oriented web programming focussed on different abstractions, such as page, controller, and service. Instead, we adopt the logic declarative paradigm to define our model for resource-oriented programming, also showing how its peculiar features lead to novel possibilities for dynamic modification and extension of resource behavior at runtime. In this paper, we first map novel REST and ROA abstractions onto elements of structured logic programming. Then, we present Web Logic Programming as a Prolog-based language for the World Wide Web embedding the core REST and ROA principles, by defining its computation model and discussing a bookshelf sharing web application example.

198

XML-IS: ONTOLOGY-BASED INTEGRATION ARCHITECTURE

Christophe Cruz and Christophe Nicolle

This paper presents a semantic architecture approach that aims at integrating XML documents. Today, information exchanges in business processes widely use XML to format data. But this is done without a common process management. For some applications it is necessary to archive data for future processes (error detections, logs, knowledge enquiry data mining). For this reason our architecture allows users to retrieve information from integrated XML. This is not possible without the help of a semantic level which shares the business knowledge on processes. To reach this goal we use the knowledge defined in an XML schema to build a domain ontology. of At a final step this ontology is used in the retrieval process by end-users to search and retrieve information.

202

IMPLEMENTING CONTENT SHARING AND SESSION HAND-OFF BETWEEN WEB BROWSERS - An Integration of SIP Stack into Mozilla Firefox Web Browser

Michael O. Adeyeye and Neco Ventura

A new idea referred to as HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) Mobility is introduced into web browsing. It entails transferring existing web session between Web Browsers or User Agents. This HTTP mobility will be achieved by extending present-day Web Browsers to support Session Initiation Protocol (SIP). Both HTTP and SIP are application layer protocols in the OSI (Open System Interconnection) Layer Model. SIP can be used to establish, modify and terminate multimedia sessions or calls. It has been chosen because it has clearly defined session mobility types namely Third-party Call Control and Session Hand-off. This paper identifies the modifications that will be made to the present-day Web Browsers Architectures and exhaustively explains the implementation of HTTP Mobility with the aid of SIP Stack integration. The two services that can be provided between two user agents during HTTP Mobility are Content Sharing and Session Hand-off.

205

DYNAMIC SLA-NEGOTIATION BASED ON WS-AGREEMENT

Antoine Pichot, Oliver Wäldrich, Wolfgang Ziegler and Philipp Wieder

In Grid, e-Science and e-Business environments, Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are often used to establish frameworks for the delivery of services between service providers and the home organisations of the customers. While this high level SLAs define the overall quality of the services (QoS), it is desirable for the end-user to have dedicated QoS also for individual services like the orchestration of resources necessary for composed services. Grid level scheduling services typically are responsible for the orchestration and coordination of resources in the Grid. Co-allocation e.g. requires the Grid level scheduler to coordinate resource management systems located in different domains. As the site autonomy has to be respected negotiation is the only way to achieve the intended coordination. Electronic SLAs emerged as a new way to negotiate and manage usage of resources in the Grid and are already adopted by a number of management systems. Therefore, it is natural to look for ways to adopt SLAs for Grid level scheduling. In order to do this, efficient and flexible protocols are needed, which support dynamic negotiation and creation of SLAs. In this paper we propose and discuss ongoing work on extensions to the WS-Agreement protocol addressing these issues.

206

DECENTRALIZED DIAGNOSIS FOR BPEL WEB SERVICES

Lina Ye and Philippe Dague

This paper proposes a decentralized diagnosis approach for BPEL Web services, where a local diagnoser is provided to each BPEL service and should cooperate with a coordinator. The strategy of local consistencybased diagnosis consists in abstracting diagnostic knowledge base from data dependencies contained in the enriched BPEL Petri net model of each service and reasoning from the observations with a set of local possible source faults. The coordinator has to put together all the local diagnosis information from local diagnosers and infer global diagnoses. We also provide this decentralized diagnosis algorithm with its testing on a simple BPEL process example.

207

AN ANALYSIS OF RELATIONAL STORAGE STRATEGIES FOR PARTIALLY STRUCTURED XML

Yasser Abdel Kader, Barry Eaglestone and Siobhán North

This paper presents a performance analysis of strategies that can be used to store XML data sets in relational databases, focusing on applications where the XML data set is a combination of structured and semi-structured data. The analysis demonstrates advantages of using a hybrid approach combining structure mapping and XML data type instances. However problems remain with current technology with regards to scaling of the approach for large data sets. Also, anomalous results are identified and a threshold at which the cost of data shredding out weighs the advantages of structure mapping.

211

A NEW CONCEPT FOR REAL-TIME WEB GAMES - Developing Highly Real-Time Web Games

Yoshihiro Kawano, Masahiro Miyata, Dai Hanawa and Tatsuhiro Yonekura

The online game has been rapidly popularized recently, with the improvement of the network speed and the computer performance. Accordingly, the problem of network latency has been significant in applications with a requirement of high interactivity such as the action game and real-time sports game. In general, a server-client type of architecture may be employed in such games, namely a Distributed Virtual Environment (DVE). In this paper, we focus on the Web system that is widely widespread as the infrastructure of this type. However, strategy of designing web games is not explicitly established. We propose a new concept to design the real-time Web game. In the former paper, we introduced new schemes, namely, Dead Reckoning and Allocated Topographical Zone. These are what we employed in the real-time Web games to overcome limitation of HTTP communication. As an example of the application, Web based real-time avatar operation game is implemented. As a result, we confirmed that our concept may sufficiently expand to the various types of the real-time Web applications.

227

DQRDFS - Towards a Semantic Web Enhanced with Data Quality

Ismael Caballero, Eugenio Verbo, Coral Calero and Mario Piattini

Nowadays data has become in one of the most critical resources. Using data of poor quality can be the source of several problems when developing a work. Web is currently the main showcase for a main amount of data. It would be desirable that machines can process the quality of the data contained in the Web Documents. This paper introduces a new view of the Semantic Web based on the concept of Quantity of Data Quality (QDQ), in which Data Quality issues will be used as a basis to enable machines to process the Semantic Web Documents for different activities like information retrieval or document filtering. This view can open new challenges in Semantic Webs oriented to improve users’ satisfaction with Internet.

259

A MATHEMATICAL FORMULATION OF A MODEL FOR LANDFORM ATTRIBUTES REPRESENTATION FOR APPLICATION IN DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS

Leacir Nogueira Bastos, Rossini Pena Abrantes and Brauliro Gonçalves Leal

In this work we presented a methodology based on non linear regression for Landform Attributes representation. The equations to estimates the parameters of a two dimensional polynomial are shown and, for testing the methodology, it was used the data of Landform Attributes from the state of Minas Gerais (Brazil) obtained by the Digital Model of Elevation (DME) from GTOPO30 project, in the form of a regular grid, with spacing of approximately 900m. The presented methodology can be used to minimize time in sending Landform Attributes information through network, to minimize space by storing the parameters of the estimated function and to make possible the distribution of the processing in different CPU, through internet network, for coefficients calculations.

269

MULTIAGENT DESIGN FOR DYNAMIC JOB-SHOP SCHEDULING USING PASSI

Claudio Cubillos, Silvana Roncagliolo and Leonardo Espinoza

The present work details the experience on designing a multiagent system devoted to a dynamic Job Shop setting using the PASSI methodology. The agent system is in charge of the planning and scheduling of jobs and their operations on a set of available machines, while considering the materials assigned to each operation. Dynamicity concerns job orders scheduling on-the-fly and the re-schedule caused by changes to the original plan due to clients, machines or material stocks. The system has been modeled with the PASSI Toolkit (PTK) and implemented over the Jade agent platform.

271

TOWARDS AN AGENT FRAMEWORK FOR A PASSENGER TRANSPORTATION VIRTUAL ENTERPRISE

Claudio Cubillos and Daniel Cabrera

This work presents the first approach for obtaining a framework based on the agent technology for the passenger transportation problem, considering a virtual enterprise domain. The agent architecture obtained provides a baseline for the integration between end-users of the transport service and multiple transport operators affiliated to a virtual enterprise, which provides flexibility in the incorporation and leaving of transport operators. The participation of governmental organizations and active destinations within the system allows the virtual enterprise having additional information on potencial opportunities of business and assures to the users of the transport system a wider and more complete service search. The PASSI methodology has been used as base modelling methodology for leveraging the multiagent architecture.

278

BLACKBIRD MONITORING SYSTEM - Performance Analysis and Monitoring in Information Systems

João P. Germano, Alberto R. Silva and Fernando M. Silva

This work presents the BlackBird system, which is an analysis and monitoring service for data-intensive enterprise applications, without restrictions on the targeted architecture or employed technologies. Monitoring systems are an essential tool for the effective management of Enterprise Applications and the attainment of the demanding service level agreements imposed to these applications. However, due to the increasing complexity and diversity of these applications, adequate monitoring systems are rarely available. The BlackBird monitoring system is able to interact with these applications through different technologies employed by the Monitored Application, and able to produce Metrics regarding the application service level goals. The BlackBird architecture is composed by several Application Interface Modules, and by a central component responsible for Metrics calculation and presentation. Application Interface Modules interact with the target monitored Application in order to get performance data in a common format. These data are stored in a common repository and used for Metrics calculation and presentation. The BlackBird system can be specified through a set of pre-defined Configuration Objects, allowing it to be extensible and adaptable for applications with different architectures.

290

XML DATA INTEGRATION IN PEER-TO-PEER DATA MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS

Tadeusz Pankowski

P2P systems are commonly accepted as an efficient means of sharing data among large, diverse and dynamic set of users. Nowadays sharing data imposes new challenges in P2P systems concerning supporting advanced querying beyond simple keyword-based retrieval. We assume that each peer stores schema of its local data, mappings between the schema and schemas of some other peers, and schema constraints (functional dependencies). The goal of the integration is to answer queries formulated against arbitrarily chosen peers. The answer consists of data stored in the queried peer as well as data of its direct and indirect acquaintances. We focus on defining and using mappings, schema constraints, query propagation across the P2P system, and query reformulation in such scenario. We show how some missing data can be discovered while integrating data from many sources. We propose algorithms translating high-level specifications of schemas and schema mappings to XQuery programs performing required executions and transformations. We show how the discussed method has been implemented in SixP2P system ({\it Semantic Integration of XML data in P2P environment}).

308

OFF-THE-RECORD SECURE CHAT ROOM

Jiang Bian, Remzi Seker, Umit Topaloglu and Coskun Bayrak

GOTR was proposed to address the privacy protection concerns in online chat room systems. It extended the original two-party OTR protocol to support more users while preserving the same security properties. A literature survey of different Diffie-Hellman (D-H) conference key implementations will be given to justify that in an application like a chat room, the virtual server approach is truly the most efficient way to establish a private communication environment among a group of people. However, GOTR's virtual server approach raises a trustworthiness concern of the chosen chair member. Since the chair member has full control over all encryption keys, there is no constraint to prevent him / her from altering the messages while relaying them. In this paper, we present a study of the GOTR protocol and a solution to the virtual server's trustworthiness problem via employing an additional MD5 integrity check mechanism. Having such an algorithm, makes the GOTR protocol more secure, in that, it gives the other chat members an opportunity to be aware of any potential changes made by the chair member.

311

DEVELOPING OPEN TRAVEL ALLIANCE-BASED ONTOLOGY OF GOLF

Agnieszka Cieslik, Maria Ganzha and Marcin Paprzycki

For usage of ontologies to become more prevalent, not only new ontologies have to be created to represent the world, but also ontological support for existing domain-specific real-world standards has to be provided. One of such standards that gains popularity is the Open Travel Alliance (OTA) messaging system that defines, among others, the way that entities should communicate about golf as a travel-related entity. The aim of this paper is to outline our efforts leading toward creating an ontology of golf that would match the OTA messaging specification.

318

AN EFFICIENT STREAMING ALGORITHM FOR EVALUATING XPATH QUERIES

Yangjun Chen

With the growing importance of XML in data exchange, much research has been done in providing flexible query mechanisms to extract data from XML documents. In this paper, we focus on the query evaluation in an XML streaming environment, in which data streams arrive continuously and queries have to be evaluated even before all the data of an XML document is available. We will propose an algorithm for this issue, working in O(|T|ÞQleaf) time and O(|T|ÞQleaf) space, where Tleaf stands for the number of the leaf nodes in a document tree T and Qleaf for the number of the leaf nodes in a query tree Q.

322

TOWARDS EFFICIENT CRYPTOGRAPHY FOR PRIVACY PRESERVING DATA MINING IN DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS

Emmanouil Magkos and Vassilis Chrissikopoulos

A common fact for both businesses and physical entities is that sensitive, accurate information would be more easily diffused if adequate measures for protection were in place. This could also lead to higher quality data mining results, in a privacy preserving manner. Recent research has proved that it is possible to provide both privacy and accuracy assurances in a distributed computing scenario, where all participants may be mutually untrusted, without the presence of an unconditionally trusted third party. We believe that valuable knowledge can be borrowed from the vast body of literature on e-auction and e-voting systems, in order to be adapted to privacy preserving data mining systems in a distributed environment. These systems tend to balance well the efficiency and security criteria, because they need to be implementable in medium to large scale environments.

335

INTERNET ACCESS QUALITY MONITOR

Bruno P. Ramos, Vasco N. G. J. Soares and Alexandre J. P. D. Fonte

Assessing the perceived Quality of Service (QoS) offered on Broadband Internet accesses from end-User standpoint is important not only to monitor the performance, but also to assist end-Users to quantify the effective quality offered by their Internet accesses and compare it with the quality parameters specified in the Service Level Specification (SLS) of the connectivity service contracted to the ISPs (Internet Service Providers). Other key benefits are end-Users being aware about the Geographic quality distribution of the Internet accesses, pinpointing congestion links or areas, and being able to make price-performance tradeoffs and subscribe better ISPs. In this paper, we present the design principles of a practical and comprehensible Internet Access Quality Monitoring (IAQM) system and some aspects regarding its deployment and security. IAQM aims at supporting accurate assessment of the performance of Internet Broadband accesses and satisfaction of end-Users at large scale. A collection of tests are planned to measure several Quality of Service metrics of an Internet access, such as (but not limited to) download and upload rates, latency, jitter or DNS (Domain Name System) lookup times.

336

RAPID VIRTUAL DESIGN AND SYSTEM DEVELOPMENT BASED ON EXTENDED MVC-BASED WEB APPLICATION FRAMEWORK AND INTERACTIVE XML PRODUCT MODEL

Cao Yan and Yang Lina

To integrate multiple aspects of an enterprise to improve design decision-making and control at all process levels, rapid virtual design based on virtual prototyping simulation (RVDBVPS) is put forward to carry out distributed cooperative product design. Its architecture and key technologies are discussed. To develop the system on Internet/Intranet, satisfy current requirements of Web applications and solve the existing problems in web application development, an extended MVC-based web application framework based on XML on J2EE platform is put forward that is more flexible, expansible and maintainable. According to the characteristics of structured and unstructured product data in Web based distributed cooperative design environment, product design information exchange based on Interactive XML product model is investigated to realize interactive information transaction across heterogeneous platforms.

4

SEREBIF - Search Engine Result Enhancement by Implicit Feedback

Ralph Weires, Christoph Schommer and Sascha Kaufmann

Web search engines are steadily using more and more complex techniques and algorithms to deliver the proper results for a query to the users. Often enough though, results show up which are not really relevant for a user. This paper describes the SEREBIF system, which is an approach for incorporating information taken from the users into the search engine results to increase the result quality. We take user feedback into account to collect information from previous searches (and from other users) to see which of the results have probably really been relevant for the queries. To do this, we especially focus on implicit feedback, which does not require the users to put any additional effort than usual into the search process. So just the behaviour of the users is observed (e.g. entered queries, clicked results). The recorded information is afterwards analyzed, and the results are then included into later search sessions. SEREBIF can generally be used on top of an existing search engine to improve its results. In this paper, we explain the basic idea of SEREBIF, the current state of the prototype we realized and first results.

8

QUERY ROUTING IN NOMADIC ENVIRONMENTS WITH PUMAS

Angela Carrillo-Ramos, Marlène Villanova-Oliver, Jérôme Gense Hervé Martin and Miguel Torres

PUMAS is a framework based on agents and a Peer to Peer (P2P) approach, which allows nomadic users to access several information sources through different types of devices (eventually mobile). PUMAS provide the nomadic user with information adapted to her/his preferences and to the characteristics of the context of use (i.e. location, connection moment, inherent characteristics of the connection device). In order to deliver adapted results, PUMAS has mechanisms of enrichment of the initial query, by means of adding criteria based on user preferences and context of use. This phase of query enrichment precedes a query routing process composed of three activities: query analysis, the selection of sources that are able to answer to the query and the redirection of the query towards these sources. We present PUMAS,, and a use scenario which describes the processes of enrichment and query routing which PUMAS executes in order to deliver adapted information.

30

FINDING THE WAY: SERVICES FOR A MULTI-VIEW AND MULTI-PLATFORM GEOGRAPHIC INFORMATION SYSTEM

Sergio Martín, Elio Sancristobal, Rosario Gil, Gabriel Díaz, Nuria Oliva, Manuel Castro and Juan Peire

Geographic information systems are getting more importance in the last years, especially in organizations where it is important to find an easy way to get to some place. The present paper describes the development carried out in order to make easier the business in organizations with high mobility requirements. The main result of this development is a system that generates in real time several views of the geographic information of an organization. The first view is a web information system that shows graphically all the points in a map, giving multimedia information. It allows interacting with all of them, creating the most suitable routes from one to another, finding hotel, restaurants, etc near the centre. On the other hand, the system also provides information of the points of interest through the main commercial GPS navigators.

36

AUTOMATIC TRANSFORMATION OF SQL RELATIONAL DATABASES TO OWL ONTOLOGIES

Irina Astrova and Ahto Kalja

This paper proposes a novel approach to automatic transformation of relational databases to ontologies, where the quality of transformation is also considered. The proposed approach is implemented in a tool called QUALEG DB. This tool parses an SQL script and generates an OWL file that contains an ontology, including classes, properties, restrictions and instances. The proposed approach can be used for making the vast amount of relational database information on the Web machine-processable.

41

DEALING WITH CONFLICTING MODIFICATIONS IN A WIKI

Stephan Lukosch and Andrea Leisen

Collaborative web-based applications support users when creating and sharing information. Wikis are prominent examples for that kind of applications. Wikis, like e.g. Wikipedia, attract loads of users that modify its content. Normally, wikis do not employ any mechanisms to avoid parallel modification of the same page. As result, conflicting changes can occur. Most wikis record all versions of a page to allow users to review recent changes. However, just recording all versions does not guarantee that conflicting modifications are reflected in the most recent version of a page. In this paper, we identify the requirements for efficiently dealing with conflicting modifications and present a web-based tool which allows to compare and merge different versions of a wiki page.

42

MoRe: A USER CONTROLLED CONTENT BASED MOVIE RECOMMENDER WITH EXPLANATION AND NEGATIVE FEEDBACK

Oznur Kirmemis and Aysenur Birturk

Recommendation systems have become a popular approach for accessing to relevant products and information. Existing approaches for movie recommendation systems are insufficient, because they do not provide transparency to the users through enabling them to view and edit their profiles. In addition, negative feedback, which is an important clue for the recommender, is not taken into account. In this paper we concentrate on the ideas of automatically generating user profiles from the user’s item preferences, and enabling users to view and edit their profiles to get satisfaction. In addition, taking negative feedback for specific values is examined and discussed, which is observed to produce more accurate recommendations. The system also provides the explanations for the produced recommendations and allows users to modify their profile accordingly and see their modifications’ effects on the results directly. Initial experimental results demonstrate that the system produces accurate recommendations and gets user trust and satisfaction with the transparency and explanation facility.

46

AUTOMATIC EVALUATION OF INFORMATION CREDIBILITY IN SEMANTIC WEB AND KNOWLEDGE GRID

Adam L. Kaczmarek

This article presents a novel algorithm for automatic estimation of information credibility. It concerns information collected in Knowledge Grid and Semantic Web. Possibilities to evaluate the credibility of information in such structures are much greater than those available for WWW sites which use natural language. The Internet enables everyone to publish information however this information is not always credible and it can be contradictory. When processed information is contradictory there are two possibilities. Either paraconsistent, Non-Boolean logic which enables reasoning with contradictions can be used, or it can be assumed that some of information is wrong. This article focuses on the second approach. The evaluation of information credibility is based on comparing data from different sources and analyzing their relations with other information. This information which is not credible and causes contradictions is excluded.

57

A FRAMEWORK AUTOMATING DOMAIN ONTOLOGY CONSTRUCTION

Yin-Fu Huang and Yu-Yu Huang

This paper proposed a general framework that could automatically construct domain ontology on a collection of documents with the help of The Free Dictionary, WordNet, and Wikipedia Categories. Both explicit and implicit features of index terms in documents are used to evaluate word correlations and then to construct Is-A relationships in the framework. Thus, the built ontology would consist of 1) concepts, 2) Is-A and Parts-of relationships among concepts, and 3) word relationships. Besides, the built ontology could be further refined by learning from incremental documents periodically. To help users browse the built ontology, an ontology browsing system was implemented and provided different search modes and functionality to facilitate searching a variety of relationships.

58

ADOPTING BUILDING AUTOMATION IN WEBLABS - Analysis of Requirements and Solutions

Ricardo J. Costa, Gustavo R. Alves and Domingos S. Santos

Several companies have been developing domotic Stds. for building automation, enabling users to locally and remotely control several home devices, like: lights, power sockets, heating, ventilation, and air conditioning systems, among others. Besides contributing to improve the building comfort, these Stds. may also be adopted for other purposes, namely in weblabs used in sciences and engineering remote experiments. To increase the sense of immersion in weblabs, we identify domotic Stds. as a standard solution for turning on/off the power infrastructure and controlling the light and temperature conditions of the physical space where a specific experiment may run, thus approaching the sense of being in the lab facilities while accessing them through the corresponding weblab interface. After identifying the added value to weblabs in terms of power savings and in the control of the environmental conditions, we used our knowledge and the WWW to conduct an extensive search on domotic Stds., and after analysing the results obtained, we choose the most appropriated one to be implemented in a Weblab. Regarding the adopted Std., a proof-of-concept is also described, enabling the control of an halogen lamp and a power socket, using a specific Web interface.

68

SENSOR DATA PUBLICATION ON THE WEB FOR SCIENTIFIC APPLICATIONS

Gilberto Zonta Pastorello Jr., Luiz Gomes Jr., Claudia Bauzer Medeiros and André Santanchè

This paper considers the problems of sensor data publication, taking advantage of research on components and Web service standards. Sensor data is widely used in scientific experiments -- e.g., for model validation, environment monitoring, and calibrating running applications. Heterogeneity in sensing devices hamper effective use of their data, requiring new solutions for publication mechanisms. Our solution is based on applying a specific component technology, CPT, which is capable of uniformly encapsulating data and software. Sensor data publication is tackled by extending CPTs to comply with geospatial standards for Web services from OGC (Open Geospatial Consortium). Using this approach, Web services can be implemented by CPTs, with publication of sensor data following standards. Furthermore, this solution allows client applications to request the execution of pre-processing functions before data is published. The approach enables scientists to share, find, process and access geospatial sensor data in a flexible and homogeneous manner.

90

XETA: EXTENSIBLE METADATA SYSTEM - For Extensibility, Accuracy, Suitability and Convenience

Yeojin Kim, SukBong Lee, SungJun Lee and SangGyoo Sim

This paper presents an eXtensible mETAdata system (XETA System) which makes it possible for the user to organize and extend the structure of metadata. We discuss four requirements of the advanced metadata system in semantic web and a methodology to implement the requirements. Using the XETA system, the user can flexibly extend metadata, enhance its semantic accuracy and selectively apply the metadata in context.

93

PANGAEA - An ICSU World Data Center as a Networked Publication and Library System for Geoscientific Data

Michael Diepenbroek, Uwe Schindler and Hannes Grobe

Since 1992 PANGAEA serves as an archive for all types of geoscientific and environmental data. From the beginning the PANGAEA group started initiatives and aimed at an organisation structure which -- beyond the technical structure and operation of the system -- would help to improve the quality and general availability of scientific data. Project data management is done since 1996. 2001 the ICSU World Data Center for Marine Environmental Sciences (WDC-MARE) was founded and since 2003 -- together with other German WDC -- the group was working on the development of data publications as a new publication type. To achieve interoperability with other data centers and portals the system was adapted to global information standards. PANGAEA has implemented a number of community specific data portals. 2007 - under the coordination of the PANGAEA group - an initiative for networking all WDC was started. On the long range ISCU supports plans to develop the WDC system into a global network of publishers and open access libraries for scientific data.

101

FINDING DISTINCT ANSWERS IN WEB SNIPPETS

Alejandro Figueroa and Günter Neumann

This paper presents ListWebQA, a question answering system aimed specifically at discovering answers to list questions in web snippets. ListWebQA retrieves snippets likely to contain answers by means of a query rewriting strategy, and extracts answers according to their syntactic and semantic similarities afterwards. These similarities are determined by means of a set of surface syntactic patterns and a Latent Semantic Kernel. Results show that our strategy is effective in strengthening current web question answering techniques.

105

A NEW APPROACH TO RECYCLE WEB CONTENTS - The DOM Tree as the Support for Building New Web Pages

Luis Álvarez Sabucedo and Luis Anido Rifón

After an initial period of populating the web with a large amount of resources; a new situation has to be faced in the scope of the WWW: the over production of web contents. Currently, there is a lot of resources available in the web and new approaches are scanned to improve some features. In particular, this paper tackles the reusability of contents. The aim of this paper is an alternative method to provide a simple and effective manner to reuse contents in order to create new web resources. This approach is based on the use of the DOM tree that defines the web resource to build up new web pages. The presented method involves minor changes on the server side and no change at all on the client side. Besides, this proposal can take advantage of resources already developed using on-the-fly technologies.

120

QUERY EXPANSION WITH MATRIX CORRELATION TECHNIQUES - A Systematic Approach

Claudio Biancalana, Antonello Lapolla and Alessandro Micarelli

This paper presents an Information Retrieval system that employs techniques based on Personalization and Query Expansion (QE). The system was developed in an incremental and iterative way, starting from a simpler system and reaching a more complex one, to the point that it is possible to talk about several systems each based on a specific, deeply analyzed approach: four systems sharing the concept of term co-occurrence. Starting from a simple system based on bigrams, we moved onto a system based on term proximity, through an approach known in the literature as Hyperspace Analogue to Language (HAL), and eventually developing a solution based on co-occurrence at page level. The latter presents a hybrid approach based on term proximity. This novel architecture is shown here for the first time to our knowledge.

130

A 3D WEB BASED GEOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION SYSTEM FOR REGIONAL PLANNING

Giuseppe Conti, Michele Andreolli, Stefano Piffer and Raffaele de Amicis

Managing a territory through web based Geobrowsers requires very interactive and scalable architectures, capable to access vast scale repositories and capable to provide real-time behaviour. This paper illustrates a web-service based infrastructure developed by Graphitech to access geographical information of environmental interest. The paper shows that a 3D Geobrowser, deployed as a web-start application, is used to access a variety of different remote repositories containing a wide range of geographical information at a regional scale. Each user can interactively navigate within the 3D environment and can also interactively send real-time information on environmental features using GeoRSS technology. The paper illustrates how the resulting system is currently in use by a urban planning authority during their daily activities.

131

EXPERIENCE WITH USABILITY TESTING OF WEB PORTALS

Andrina Granić, Ivica Mitrović and Nikola Marangunić

The paper reports on the experience regarding usability assessment of broad-reach web portals. Designed methodology, which argues scenario-guided user evaluations used to collect both quantitative data and qualitative "remarks" along with specialists' valuation, provided a comprehensive assessment feedback. Our experience accords with the claim that we should not rely on isolated evaluations, but instead combine assessment methods. In this paper we present and discuss the results obtained through employed usability test methods. They indicate that chosen research instruments, measures and methods for user-based usability evaluation were consistent. Conversely, results of the designed guideline inspection did not confirm to the ones obtained through the user test methods.

143

TAXONOMY LEARNING FOR THE ROMANIAN LANGUAGE USING SOTA AND WORDNET

Viorica R. Chifu, Ioan Salomie, Emil Şt. Chifu and Corina Grumazescu

Ontologies are widely used today in various domains such as information retrieval, semantic Web, NLP tasks or for describing specific domains like certain branches of medicine. While there are many tools that can be used for learning domain ontologies for English, when learning domain specific ontologies for Romanian, we face a lack of available tools and resources. Moreover, due to the complexity of the Romanian grammar, processing of Romanian text corpora is also difficult. This paper focuses on building a domain specific ontology for the Romanian language using machine learning techniques. The taxonomy learning process is based on an unsupervised neural network. The resulting modules are intended to be used for semantic annotations of traceability services in meat industry.

146

ONTOLOGY-BASED MODEL ANNOTATION OF HETEROGENEOUS GEOLOGICAL REPRESENTATIONS

Laura Silveira Mastella, Yamine Ait-Ameur, Michel Perrin and Jean-François Rainaud

In this work we will study the process of petroleum reservoir modelling as a case of study for applying ontology-based integration techniques and model annotation. This application domain is a case of multiple and heterogeneous interpretations and representations generated from different branches of earth sciences. A complete reservoir model shares information resulting from several interpretations and needs to identify one same object within various specialized representations. We propose that the different geological interpretations and representations should be annotated, for being integrated. We describe an approach based on local ontologies for the specific domains, whose concepts are mapped to a shared global ontology which contains the basic terms used in reservoir modelling.

149

DRANK+: A DIRECTORY BASED PAGERANK PREDICTION METHOD FOR FAST PAGERANK CONVERGENCE

Hung-Yu Kao, Chia-Sheng Liu, Yu-Chuan Tsai and Chia-Chun Shih, Tse-Ming Tsai

In recent years, most part of search engines use link analysis algorithms to measure the importance of web pages. The most famous link analysis algorithm is PageRank algorithm. However, previous researches in recent years have found that there exists an inherent bias against newly created pages in PageRank. In the previous work, a new ranking algorithm called DRank has been proposed to solve this issue. It utilizes the cluster phenomenon of PageRank in a directory to predict the possible importance of pages in the future and to diminish the inherent bias of search engines to new pages. In this paper, we modify the original DRank algorithm and propose a new ranking algorithm called MDRank to complement the weaker part of DRank which could fail while the number of pages in directory is not enough. The integrated algorithm is called DRank+, which combines DRank and MDRank. In our experiments, the modified DRank algorithm obtains more accuracy in predicting the importance score of pages at next time stage than the original DRank algorithm. DRank+ not only alleviates the bias of newly created pages successfully but also reaches more accuracy than Page Quality and original DRank in predicting the importance of newly created pages.

155

SEMANTIC ANNOTATION AND REVISION CONTROL

Kiavash Bahreini and Atilla Elci

Software engineers and programmers will probably find themselves needing to manage multiple versions of their software. This entails, among others, managing source codes, inserting metadata tags for annotation, tracing source changes from current to previous versions, checking respective change logs, retrieving different versions of the source code, etc. The issues are more pronounced for software teams and especially those working in distributed development environments. Applying security is very important in this spectrum of activities; and, there is need for maintaining classified information at different security levels, permitting simultaneous access by users with different security clearances, preventing users from obtaining access to information for which they lack authorization. Similar issues are observed in the case of dealing with OWL files and other enterprise systems documentation resources. It is noted that, although currently not being practiced, ontology-based annotation techniques in source code control can be influential in surmounting many of the problems associated with such issues. These issues and related new approaches on revision control are considered in this paper. We introduce a novel source code control approach based on semantic ontology annotation in distributed environments over enterprise systems which uses enhanced multilevel security for data sharing by programmers and software agents.

156

A NOVEL APPROACH TO SOCIAL TAGGING: GROUPME! - Enhancing Social Tagging Systems with Groups

Fabian Abel, Nicola Henze and Daniel Krause

Common social tagging systems like Flickr, del.icio.us and others lately became very popular. The key benefits of these systems include that users get involved in the content creation process, can easily --- without overhead -- comment or annotate Web content, share resources with fellow users, and benefit from the comments / annotations of other users with improved retrieval support. With GroupMe! we extend the idea of current social tagging systems by enabling users to not only tag Web resources they are interested in, but also to create collections ({\em groups}) of these Web resources by simple drag \& drop operations. The grouping metaphor is intuitive and easy for the users, and our evaluation shows that users appreciate the grouping facility, and use this feature to organize and structure Web content. Technically, the grouping of resources carries valuable information about Web resources and their relations, and can be exploited to improve the mining of Web content, e.g. for search and retrieval.

166

A COMBINED FUZZY SEMANTIC SIMILARITY MEASURE IN OWL ONTOLOGIES

Vincenzo Cannella, Giuseppe Russo, Pierluca Sangiorgi and Roberto Pirrone

An algorithm is presented in this paper to calculate a semantic similarity measure inside an OWL ontology. Our formulation is based on a combined measure taking into account the two most important aspects involved in the similarity computation. These are the structural properties of a concept, and the information content inside the ontology. We define a fuzzy system to blend these information sources with a training process over some ontologies. Finding a similarity measure between concepts of an ontology is a fundamental topic to accomplish information exchange on the Web. Through this measure it is possible to perform sophisticated queries over the web where the user is able to request concepts with a predefined (or even dissimilarity) degree.

169

ENHANCEMENT OF WEB BROWSER PROGRAMMING WITH GUEST - Visual Programinng Tool for Non-programmers

Yuka Obu, Kazuhiro Maruo, Tatsuhiro Yonekura, Masaru Kamada and Shusuke Okamoto

Many people have recently become interested in Web 2.0, which is a new Web service concept. Web sites have become sources of information and functionality that enables users to create new content of their own. Using this capability, users have been customizing Web pages as they like. Users are now looking for more versatile browsers that will enable them to edit and display content based on their own creative concepts and preferences. Motivated by this demand, we have been working on a project to develop a state-transition diagram-based Web browser programming scheme that supports participatory Web use and enables the end-user to interact with Web content. We implemented a prototype of our scheme called GUEST. Using GUEST, users can define behaviors of a Web browser easily even if they have no programming experience. However, there are parts of the scheme that are not easy for beginners to use. That is, there are complicated user interfaces that prevent the user from easily gaining an intuitive understanding of how to use GUEST. Therefore, in this paper, we focus on users’ difficulties in using the interface, and introduce a new concept of the design.

172

MINING CONSUMER OPINIONS FROM THE WEB

Christopher C. Yang and Y. C. Wong

The Web has provided an excellent platform for business to consumer (B2C) electronic commerce. B2C electronic commerce offers convenience, choice, lower cost and customization to consumers. The electronic shopping platform allows consumers to make intelligent comparison and purchasing decision on consumer products. In addition to comparing product specifications as described on electronic catalogue for better purchasing decision, consumers also hunger for consumer reviews to identify the best products that fit their preferences. For example, a professional photographer would like to identify a camera with lens of high quality and zooming power but a general user may like to find a camera that is cheap, light, and with a large LCD screen. When consumers take consumer reviews as reference, they are interested in both opinion orientation and product features that they are describing. Most of the prior works focus on identifying opinion orientation. Some recent works have started to classify product features but heavily rely on linguistic and natural language processing techniques. However, the writing of consumer reviews is usually less formal and many of them do not conform to the grammatical rules. Therefore, the linguistic and language processing approach is not satisfactory. In this work, we propose a sentiment analysis system to classify product features of consumer reviews by mining class association rules. The experimental result shows that the performance is promising. The content mining approach outperforms the natural language processing approach.

179

A FRAMEWORK FOR SEMANTICALLY RICH LEGAL DOCUMENTS AND APPLICATIONS

John Murphy and Robert Steele

This paper describes the use of SemanticWeb technologies for enriching legal documents within a framework that provides a base for the development of applications to reduce problems experienced by legal practitioners in the administration of justice. The framework builds upon the terms and concepts found within structured information sources in the document centric legal domain. Contributions of this paper include (1) the description of a bottom-up ontology development approach utilizing the terms and structures within legal documents; (2) an explanation of how this legal knowledge can be captured from existing document resources and represented using a Semantic Web languages; (3) an analysis of the comparative benefits of this bottom-up approach versus existing top-down approaches and (4) concrete examples of how to represent such legal knowledge using OWL/ RDF. We argue such bottom-up legal ontology development grounded in the terms and concepts found in existing legal resources will support direct and easier annotation of resources with the semantics of legal concepts and hence provide a base for the easier development of a legal applications layer.

182

MASHING UP THE DEEP WEB - Research in Progress

Thomas Hornung, Kai Simon and Georg Lausen

Deep Web (DW) sources offer a wealth of structured, high-quality data, which is hidden behind human-centric user interfaces. Mashups, the combination of data from different Web services with formally defined query interfaces (QIs), are very popular today. If it would be possible to use DW sources as QIs, a whole new set of data services would be feasible. We present in this paper a framework that enables non-expert users to convert DW sources into machine-processable QIs. In the next step these QIs can be used to build a mashup graph, where each vertice represents a QI and edges organize the data flow between the QIs. To reduce the modeling time and increase the likelihood of meaningful combinations, the user is assisted by a recommendation function during mashup modeling time. Finally, an execution strategy is proposed that queries the most likely value combinations for each QI in parallel.

183

TRIVIAL.GZ: A WEB-BASED COLLABORATIVE GAME TO PROMOTE GALICIAN CULTURE

Miguel R. Luaces, Oscar Pedreira, Ángeles S. Places and Diego Seco

We present in this paper the architecture and some implementation details of a web-based version of a Trivial game. Our implementation achieves such a high degree of interactivity between the players that they perceive the game as being played real-time. More importantly, no plug-in or applet is used in the architecture of the system. These properties are achieved by means of a carefully designed architecture that uses AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) for data exchange. Using this approach, it is possible to develop any type of web-based collaborative software with few load on the web server. In the paper, we analyze traditional architectures for web-based applications and we show how our approach overcomes their limitations. Furthermore, we proof the efficiency of our approach by means of an empirical comparison.

188

EFFECTIVENESS OF AVATARS FOR SUBJECTIVE ANNOTATION

Fuyuko Ito, Yasunari Sasaki, Tomoyuki Hiroyasu and Mitsunori Miki

CGM (Consumer Generated Media) such as weblogs, photos and discussions has been growing rapidly and the amount of contents has been increasing. However, consumers cannot extract the important contents and the existence of contents that recorded their experiences is forgotten. Since there're no methods or systems, which indicate the subjective value of the contents and ways to reuse them, subjective annotation that appends subjective information, such as feelings and intentions, to contents is needed. Representation of subjectivity depends on not only verbal expression, but also nonverbal expression. Linguistically expressed annotation as typified by collaborative tagging in social bookmarking systems became widespread to consumers, but there is no nonverbal-expressed annotation on the web. We proposed to use controllable avatars as nonverbal-expression of subjectivity, and ensured the consistency of feelings elicited by avatars over time for an individual and in a group of people from experiments. In addition, we compared expressiveness and ease of subjective annotation between collaborative tagging and controllable avatars. As a result, feelings that avatars remind participants of are consistent in both cases, and using controllable avatars is easier than collaborative tagging for representing feelings elicited by the contents that do not express meaning, such as photos.

197

DECLARATIVE PUSH ON WEB

Mikko Pohja

Push technology is a vital component of modern Web applications. With the ability of sending relevant information to users in reaction to new events, enables highly interactive applications on Web. What has been present in desktop applications for decades is only now coming online. The push technology is still in its infancy. Actually, the push is usually emulated using the pull technology, since, with the HTTP protocol alone, it is not possible to make a real push. Also, a declarative approach widely used on Web has not yet adopted for the push methods. In this paper are reviewed four declarative methods for the push-update on Web. The methods are defined by combining existing and upcoming Web technologies. This paper focuses on targeting the update and modifying the document on the client-side. To evaluate the methods, a use case is designed and implemented with all the methods.

218

A PROCESS MINING APPROACH TO ANALYSE USER BEHAVIOUR

Laura Mǎruşter, Niels R. Faber, René J. Jorna and Rob J. F. van Haren

Designing and personalising systems for specific user groups encompasses a lot of effort with respect to analysing and understanding user behaviour. The goal of our paper is to provide insights about patterns of behaviour of specific user groups; we consider agricultural users as a specific user group, during the usage of a decision support system supporting cultivar selection - OPTIRas. Combining these insights with decision making theories, we provide a method of analysing logs resulted from usage of decision support systems by means of process mining. For instance, farmers show difficulties in fulfilling the goal of OPTIRas, while other agricultural users seems to manage better. The results of our analysis can be used to support the redesign and personalization of decision support systems.

223

USER BEHAVIOR UNDER THE MICROSCOPE - Can the Behavior Indicate a Web User’s Task?

Anne Gutschmidt and Clemens H. Cap

The automatic recognition of a user’s current task by the surfing behavior requires detailed knowledge of the relationship between task and behavior. An exploratory study was conducted where 20 participants performed exercises on a given Web site. These exercises corresponded to the predefined user tasks Fact Finding, Information Gathering and Just Browsing following present research on user activities. The resulting behavior was recorded in detailed event log files which contain every action performed in the browser, such as mouse moves and clicks, scrolling, the use of the back button etc. The analysis of variance indicates that the three tasks can be differentiated with a combination of selected behavioral attributes.

224

OPTIMIZATION OF STUDENTS’ STUDY HABITS USING ON-LINE TESTING

Eva Milková

Multimedia applications give us an excellent chance how to support not only demonstrating and visualizing the explained subject matter to be much clearer and comprehensible, but also enable us prepare various kinds of test for students. The feedback provided through tests helps students to recognize what they already knew and what they didn’t know and need to improve. In the article we introduce several on-line testing applications that we use for our students and will discus their educational potential.

225

PERSONALIZED WEB SERVICE DISCOVERY

Sanaullah Nazir, Brahmananda Sapkota and Tomas Vitvar

Most of the existing work in web service discovery reflect providers perspective. These discovery techniques improve service descriptions so that the service clearly describes what it offers. This development has led to the use of semantic web technology for web service discovery. A lot of work has gone into improving web service descriptions to support improved web service discovery. In this paper we extend the existing approaches to semantic web service discovery and introduce personalization to it. We also show how personalization affects discovery. We provide a model to represent a user profile, and its usage for improving the accuracy of web service discovery.

226

A SEARCH ENGINE FOR WEB IMAGES USING DOCUMENT TEXT STEMMING

Ryan Hardt, Ethan V. Munson and Hien Nguyen

A Web image search application was built using a previously-developed image relevance model for retrieval of images via text-based image retrieval. The application includes a text stemmer that converts a word to a canonical form, making it possible to match text in the face of changes in tense or plurality that have little effect on semantics. The usefulness of stemming in Web image retrieval was evaluated via a test on ten queries that were submitted both with and without stemming. Relevance of retrieved images was determined via ratings by three trained individuals. With stemming, the average unique relevance recall (a measure of the proportion of relevant images returned by one algorithm and not another) was 27.7%, while without stemming, it was only 0.5%. Stemming also increased precision by 2.0%. These results may more accurately apply to queries containing at least one plural noun, present tense verb, present participle verb, or past tense verb.

228

SEMANTIC TURKEY - A New Web Experience in between Ontology Editing and Semantic Annotation

Francesca Falluchi, Maria Teresa Pazienza, Noemi Scarpato and Armando Stellato

In this work we describe Semantic Turkey, a Semantic Extension for the popular web browser Mozilla Firefox. Semantic Turkey can be used to keep track of relevant information from visited web sites and organize collected content according to a personally defined ontology. In this sense, Semantic Turkey can be seen both as an advanced semantic bookmarking system as well as an ontology editing assistant, which allows domain experts and ontology developers to build ontologies starting from the very raw source of information which they find on the web. The open architecture of Semantic Turkey and the specific three-layered approach of its design also allows for scaling the basic personal desktop application embodied by this tool up to a distributed framework for collaborative semantic annotation and ontology editing. This paper describes the architecture and the functionalities of the Semantic Turkey extension for Firefox, and describe possible evolutions for future improvement of the tool

229

SEMI-AUTOMATED TEST ENVIROMENT FOR WEB CONTENT ACCESSIBILITY BASED ON WCAG 2.0

Kathrin Malack, Reiner Dumke, Steffen Mencke and Cornelius Wille

Internet is becoming an important part of the lives of people with disabilities. Currently the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 (WCAG 2.0) has been published as a working draft. To reach the goal of accessible Web content for all people, including people with disabilities, the Web content has to satisfy the success criteria. We will present an approach for a semi-automated web based evaluation tool which helps to fulfil the WCAG 2.0 guidelines. The tool can be used by developers to evaluate how good Web content fulfils the success criteria. It also allows estimation of effort to change a n existing Web content to fulfil the WCAG 2.0 guidelines.

234

USABILITY AND ITS ROLE IN ENHANCING THE ONLINE USER EXPERIENCE IN THE EGYPTIAN WEB-BASED GOVERNMENTAL SERVICES PORTALS

Mostafa Mahmoud Aboul EL Neil

In Egypt we should start from where the others ended, we should shift the focus from programmer-computer interaction to user-computer interaction. The number of internet users in Egypt has been dramatically increased by 2.520.0% more than 10% of the population with change rate 5.59%. The research methodology based on analytical investigation using four most important usability issues toward enhancing the online user, beneficiaries and investors experience and in the same time related to the nature of the selected Egyptian Ministers websites and services portals. While the study focus is on how usability standards can improve the online user, beneficiaries and investors experience, it also presents insights on bridging the gap between what online beneficiaries want and what they really get from the Egyptian Governmental Portals, This paper also suggest some visual solutions that would better support beneficiaries’ needs.

236

FAST COMMUNITY BASED ALGORITHM FOR GENERATING WEB CRAWLER SEEDS SET

Shervin Daneshpajouh, Mojtaba Mohammadi Nasiri and Mohammad Ghodsi

In this paper, we present a new and fast algorithm for generating the seeds set for web crawlers. A typical crawler normally starts from a fixed set like DMOZ links, and then continues crawling from URLs that are found in these web pages. Crawlers are supposed to download more good pages in less iteration. Crawled pages are good if they have high PageRanks and from different communities. In this paper, we present a new algorithm with running time O(n) for generating crawler's seeds set based on HITS algorithm. A crawler can download qualified web pages, from different communities, starting from seeds set generated using our algorithm in less iteration.

247

TOWARDS AUTOMATIC CONTENT TAGGING - Enhanced Web Services in Digital libraries using Lexical Chaining

Ulli Waltinger, Alexander Mehler and Gerhard Heyer

This paper proposes a web-based application which combines social tagging, enhanced visual representation of a document and the alignment to an open-ended social ontology. More precisely we introduce on the one hand an approach for automatic extraction of document related keywords for indexing and representing document content as an alternative to social tagging. On the other hand a proposal for automatic classifica-tion within a social ontology based on the German Wikipedia category taxonomy is proposed. This paper has two main goals: to describe the method of automatic tagging of digital documents and to provide an overview of the algorithmic patterns of lexical chaining that can be applied for topic tracking and –labelling of digital documents.

267

PROCESSING AND MANAGING COMPLEX OWL DATA

Hussam Abuazab and Atilla Elci

In this paper we introduce new OWL class sets that can be obtained through and manipulated by Boolean operators. The need for new class sets come in order to process and manage complex OWL data, and to improve the expressive power of OWL language. A particular need for such sets arises in processing complex data involved in ontology for human disease which is being developed. The class sets introduced in this paper include the definition of minusOf, De Morgan's Law, and Auxiliary Identity properties.

268

A NOVEL WEB USAGE MINING METHOD - Mining and Clustering of DAG Access Patterns Considering Page Browsing Time

Koichiro Mihara, Masahiro Terabe and Kazuo Hashimoto

In this paper, we propose a novel method to analyze web access logs in detail. The proposed method defines a web access pattern as a DAG with page browsing time, and extracts the patterns using the latest closed frequent embedded DAG mining algorithms DIGDAG. By extracting closed patterns, the proposed method succeeds in reducing the number of patterns as small as necessary minimum. Besides, we cluster the extracted patterns and assist more efficient analysis of the patterns.

275

TAGLINK: AN EVOLUTIONARY APPROACH TOWARDS ADVANCED MOBILE TAGGING APPLICATIONS

Jan Buck, Frederic Majer, Matthias Schmitt, Patrick Freudenstein and Martin Nussbaumer

Within the last years camera phones have been established as an everyday appliance. Along with the advent of these appliances so called “mobile tagging applications”, arised. Physical objects are tagged with a visual code containing the URI of a resource. Camera phones are used to capture these visual codes and to access content related to physical objects. In most current mobile tagging applications the evolution of content associated with physical objects is not considered. Thus a later change and adding of resources is not supported. Taking these problems into account we present a novel framework for the development and evolution of advanced mobile tagging applications, called TagLink, consisting of a core ontology for mobile tagging applications as well as a supporting technical platform.

276

HEADER DETECTION OF DATA TABLES - Towards the Improvement of the Web Navigation for Impared Visual People

Juan Manuel Fernández, Vicenç Soler and Jordi Roig

The advantages of the new era of information are out of the capacities of the people with visual impairments. This is due to by the lack of sensibility of the Web contents developers and the low use of the accessibility guidelines. These situations can be solved with technology, and the result of the research presented in this paper offers a new system of solving one of the most important problems: the data table navigation. We present a solution that offers excellent results to make the natural complexity of these elements easy. The system is based on the visualization of the table’s content, in the same manner that uses a non-disabled person, but without the need made any image processing. The solution can help to us to obtain the total e-integration.

279

EVALUATING THE HYPONYM ATTACHMENTS IN AN UNSUPERVISED TAXONOMY ENRICHMENT FRAMEWORK

Emil Şt. Chifu and Viorica R. Chifu

The paper describes an unsupervised framework for domain ontology enrichment based on mining domain text corpora. Specifically, we enrich the hierarchical backbone of an existing ontology, i.e. its taxonomy, with new domain-specific concepts. The framework is based on an extended model of hierarchical self-organizing maps. As being founded on an unsupervised neural network architecture, the framework can be applied to different languages and domains. Terms extracted by mining a text corpus encode contextual content information, in a distributional vector space. The enrichment behaves like a classification of the extracted terms into the existing taxonomy by attaching them as hyponyms for the intermediate and leaf nodes of the taxonomy. We propose an evaluation setting in which we assess the power of attraction of the population of terms towards the branches of the taxonomy (recall) and the precision of attaching correct hyponyms (accuracy). The evaluation results presented are in the “four universities” domain.

282

COVERAGE AND INDEPENDENCE - Defining Quality in Web Search Results

Panagiotis Metaxas and Lilia Ivanova

Web search results enjoy an increasingly greater importance in our daily lives. But what can be said about their quality, especially when querying a controversial issue? The traditional information retrieval metrics of precision and recall do not provide much insight in the case of the web. In this paper we examine new ways of evaluating quality in search results: coverage and independence. We give examples on how these new metrics can be calculated and what their values reveal regarding the two major search engines, Google and Yahoo.

289

EMBODIED CONVERSATIONAL AGENT BASED ON THE DUAL COGNITIVE ARCHITECTURE

Stefan Kostadinov, Georgi Petkov and Maurice Grinberg

A working model of an ECA with cognitive capabilities based on the DUAL cognitive architecture is described. The cognitive model used inherits the advantages of a high context-sensitivity, mixed general and episodic memory, and reasoning by analogy of the DUAL/AMBR model. However, several crucial new mechanisms are proposed which allow for the continuous functioning of the agent and the completion of several question-answer cycles with meaningful priming and context effects. This paper presents these mechanisms and tests them in a simulation of a user-agent interaction session.

298

A USER INTERFACE FOR EXPLOITING WEB COMMUNITIES IN SEARCHING THE WEB

Kemal Efe, Alp V. Asutay and Arun Lakhotia

We have implemented a novel user interface for Internet search engines that allow users to visualize the graph neighborhood of search results returned. When the required information is not in the result set returned in response to a user query, it is likely that there is a path from one or more of the returned documents to another document that has the required information. Proposed interface allows exploring these paths. We performed user tests to measure user effectiveness in finding desired information with the proposed interface, and compared it with the effectiveness of users restricted to using a traditional interface for the same underlying search engine. Given equal time to perform a set of search tasks, on average, the users of our interface were able to find twice as many of the required documents as the users of the traditional interface. We also found that users of the proposed interface tried 31% fewer queries per search task.

304

USER PROFILES IN ORGANIZATIONAL ENVIRONMENTS

Cláudio Teixeira, Joaquim Sousa Pinto and Joaquim Arnaldo Martins

In an organizational/corporative environment, each user can perform different roles throughout the time: he can be promoted, demoted or can be moved to a different department. Even when his status doesn’t change, he may have specific permissions in a designated time gap. Every time this happens, the user is seen in a different perspective, bearing different permissions and accessing different information sets. Dynamic user profiles can be used to accomplish this variation specification. A user profile is a set of information about a given user in a given context and on a specific period of time. The concept of dynamic profiling simply means that the relevant information about the user can vary in time. User profiling is usually related to web advertisement of goods and services for a user in a web site, by means of gathering information of the user’s interests and then harvesting the web over these interests. The profile discussed in this paper is service related, directly depending from the user’s condition in an organization. This approach is being tested on our prototype. This prototype is an underway project in development at the university. The goal of the project is to provide an online web portal that can be used as a front-end for all University users – students, teachers, staff…- and services – library, administration, e-learning, email…

313

DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF GEOLOGICAL THESAURUS IN KOREA

Jaehong Hwang and Kwanghoon Chi

We divide into fifteen geological areas covered in this research contained ore deposit, geochemistry, petrology, and so forth. We analyze each geological area and we standardize the fields of Korean, English, abbreviation, and meaning about geological term. To construct the thesaurus for each thesaurus, we make out: First, we limited the real world to the geologic world in Korea literatures. Second, we extract the 15 areas, about 3000 terms and 236 spatiotemporal objects of each geologic literature in Korea. Third, we considered the standardization of geological term in Korean and English and make out each terms. Finally, we classify the geologic terms and make a guideline each area

314

THE CONSTRUCTION OF ONTOLOGICAL RETRIEVAL SYSTEM FOR GEOLOGICAL MAP IN KOREA

Kwanghoon Chi and Jaehong Hwang

Geological information is considered as one of the fundamentally national knowledge to be used in various fields such as environmental pollution, ground disaster, natural disasters, exploration of natural resources and so forth. However, it is difficult to find out the interesting data of end users in geology and geological information has been losing as the time past. Also, geological data were produced by different institutes and researchers for a long time. Investigated and published geological maps until a recent date have used different geological boundaries, geological ages, colors, symbols, patterns and acronyms due to different period because of a long period of geological investigation and a number of investigator, and moreover, two adjacent geological maps are included many problems. Major area to solve these problems is data modeling. Present data modeling are disappeared modelers' idea and are distorted by programmers. This also enables data to play a part the level of information but it is impossible to precede with the level of knowledge this problem occurred to be considered data model subsequently which is the most important coupling medium between modelers and programmers. This research prepares as data model, geological symbology and makes out GIS representation for digital geological map unit in Korea. To make out the spatiotemporal information system for geological map in Korea: first, we limited to geologic world to geological map in Korea. Second, we extract to rock units which is spatial object and to geologic time unit which is temporal unit from geological map. Third, we considered the standardization of geological term in Korean and English and make out geological terms for both spatial and temporal object. Fourth, we classify objects of geologic map unit and make a guideline about the specification of spatiotemporal ontology model for digital geological map unit. Finally, we construct the spatiotemporal retrieval system applied geological ontology model.

315

QUESTION ANSWERING AS A KNOWLEDGE DISCOVERY TECHNIQUE

Yllias Chali

The size of the publicly indexable world-wide-web has provably surpassed several billions of documents and as yet growth shows no sign of leveling off. Search engines are therefore increasingly challenged when trying to maintain current indices using exhaustive crawling. Focused Retrieval provides more direct access to relevant information. In this paper we investigate the various aspects of discovering knowledge about entities such as people, places, groups, and about complex events.

324

A NEW CONCEPT OF THE SEARCH ENGINE FOR THE WEB API

Yuka Obu, Minoru Sasaki and Tatsuhiro Yonekura

The World Wide Web has become a platform for many kinds of Web services. Millions of Web users have interests on the Web services, and there are still a lot of possibilities in it. We have focused on the capability of the Web, and been exploring the new demands and services on the World Wide Web. In this paper, from the viewpoint of the standardization of the Web API and the Web service that searches the best Web API for user’s demands, we propose a framework of information that is required for the standardization of the Web API, and finally propose the Web service that searches Web APIs for mash-up to create a new Web service.

330

NEW GENERATION 3D WEB-BASED GEOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION SYSTEMS - The Importance of Integrated Infrastructures for Territory Management

Giuseppe Conti and Raffaele De Amicis

This paper highlights the importance of developing new tools capable of providing interactive web-based access to cross-border geographical data. This new generation of tools could be essential to improve the management of the territory and its infrastructures as well as to support training of operators responsible for crisis management at large scale. The paper illustrates the benefit of integrating the potential of 3D computer graphics with integrated web-service based geographical infrastructures. The paper discusses how recent technical developments, together with the definition of an international legal framework, is paving the way for such a new generation of management and training tools.

343

THEMATIC OASES - Towards a Social Semantic Web

Maria Teresa Pazienza, Savino Sguera and Armando Stellato

A few years have passed from the first alarming yells about the unmanageable growth of data which is literally exploding from the Web. While Web2.0 technologies, born and grown from the crowd of the web community, are reaching their full maturity, and with W3C eventually managing to give concreteness to Berners-Lee Semantic Web Vision through a plethora of new languages and protocols, the same problem is still a living matter. Lots of vendors and providers offer social services with more-than-overlapping aspects, but with no intentions of sharing their data. RSS aggregators as well as blog and mailing list scrapers, erupt tons of data which are irritatingly replicated by search engines indexes. At the same time, most of the information services (wikis, blogs, mailing lists, forums, newsgroups etc...) still maintain their traditional functionalities and move no step forward reaching any kind of interoperability. In this paper we analyze the current scenario and propose our personal view on how new Semantic Web technologies could be employed to give life to a new generation of social, heterogeneous and coordinated informative services: Thematic Oases

11

COMBINATORIAL BUSINESS TRANSACTIONS - A Way for Increasing the Flexibility and Reliability of Electronic Marketplaces

Juha Puustjärvi

Electronic marketplaces are virtual places that reside somewhere in the Internet. Through electronic market places buyers and sellers are able to interact with each other inside an architecture that is easy to use and maintain. Recent research on electronic marketplaces and electronic auctions has focused on new formats such as on negotiation based business transactions, combinatorial business transactions and multi-attribute business transactions. These new formats of business transactions set new requirements on the software that runs the business transactions in the marketplace. Unfortunately due to the lack of appropriate transaction models and software that support them these new forms of business transactions cannot be processed in a transactional way. This is regrettable since only by guaranteeing transactional properties these business transactions can be processed in a reliable and correct way. In this article we introduce a new transaction model, called Combinatorial business transaction, which is tailored for supporting a variety of new formats of business transactions processed in electronic marketplaces. Within Combinatorial business transactions failure atomicity is achieved through splitting the Combinatorial transaction into two successive transactions, called reservation transaction and certification transaction, and execution atomicity is enforced through semantic locks.

31

IMPROVING THE USER-CENTREDNESS OF E-GOVERNMENT PROJECTS

Asbjørn Følstad

An important challenge for e-Government service providers is to increase service uptake among citizens. Usability is an important success factor in increasing service uptake, a success factor that is achieved through improved user-centredness of e-Government development projects. In the present study, 51 representatives of the domain of Norwegian e-Government service development provided data on how to improve the user-centredness of future development projects. The findings indicate that significant improvements in user-centredness of e-Government projects may be achieved through adherence to basic principles of user-centred design (UCD). This is particularly indicated through the most frequently suggested ways to improvement: define and analyse users and stakeholders, anchor the user-centred approach in management and the project team, and involve user in the development process. The findings are discussed in regard to the organisational UCD maturity levels they may reflect.

49

A TECHNOLOGY ACCEPTANCE STUDY OF ONLINE BANKING SERVICE IN MALAYSIA

Paul H. P. Yeow and Y. Y. Yuen

Online banking service (OBS) is new in Malaysia (introduced about 6 years ago). The study is the first research in Malaysia that investigates user acceptance of OBS based on Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology model (Venkatesh, Morris, Davis and Davis, 2003). Two hundred and eighty questionnaires were distributed and collected from two major cities, Kuala Lumpur and Melaka. Since this is a preliminary study, only descriptive statistics was used to analyse the data. The results show that Malaysians have intentions of using OBS (mean rating of close to 4.00). Moreover, Malaysians recognize the benefits of OBS by giving a high mean rating (close to 4.00) to performance expectancy. However, they give relative low mean ratings (close to 3.00) on other indicators of Behavioural Intention to Use OBS such as effort expectancy, social influence, facilitating conditions and perceived credibility. Recommendations were given to promote a safe, efficient and conducive

59

A CASE STUDY OF COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE AND ICT TOOLS IN KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT ON INTERNATIONAL COOPERATION IN SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY RESEARCH

Juan Miguel González-Aranda, Rafael Rodríguez-Clemente and Sebastián Lozano

This paper discusses how Formal Workgroups within the framework of Coordination Actions projects funded by the EU Commission within the context of the MEDA and the different Framework Programmes on Scientific and Technological Research (STR) initiatives, have assisted and nurtured the existing and emerging Communities of Practice (CoP) in International Cooperation on STR, Development and Innovation in the Euro-Mediterranean Area. It also illustrates how in some specific cases these CoP are evolving towards Formal Electronic Networks of Practice (NoP) thanks to the application of specialized thematic-oriented Knowledge Management (KM) methodologies, by means of the intensive use of new Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) instruments, mainly based on the adaptation of open source Content Management Systems (CMS) architectures. Hybrid platforms, specifically based on “mixed” schemes between LAMP (Linux+Apache+MySQL+PHP) and Plone/Zope (Python programming language scripting) architectures and technologies are proposed to achieve these ambitious objectives. A case study of the Euro-Mediterranean Integrated Water Resources Management (EU-MED-IWRM) CoP is presented as an example of an on-going development.

63

PEER-TO-PEER CONTENT DISTRIBUTION - An Analysis of the Internal and External Potentials and Obstacles

Jorn De Boever

The popularity of (illegal) peer-to-peer file sharing has a disruptive impact on the internet traffic and the business models of content providers. In addition, several studies have found an increasing demand for bandwidth consuming content. It is widely recognised that illegal file sharing applications demonstrated the potential of peer-to-peer systems to distribute popular content in a scalable and inexpensive way. However, there has been relatively little economic analysis of the potentials and obstacles of peer-to-peer systems as a legal and commercial content distribution model. Many content providers encounter uncertainties regarding the adoption or rejection of peer-to-peer to spread content via the internet. The recent launch of several commercial, legal peer-to-peer content distribution platforms, which are still mainly beta versions, increases the importance of an integrated analysis of the internal strengths / weaknesses and the external opportunities / threats. This paper explores these internal and external aspects by means of an integrated SWOT analysis.

64

EVALUATING LONGITUDINAL ASPECTS OF ONLINE BIDDING BEHAVIOR

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

Online auctions have become a major e-commerce strategy in terms of both number and diversity of participants and revenue. Recent works have considered online auctions as synchronous interactive computer systems, considering successive interactions as a "loop feedback" mechanism, called reactivity, where the user behavior affects the system behavior and vice-versa. Although they identify some factors that explain user behavior in terms of instantaneous conditions surrounding, they have not studied user’s background, that is, how bidder’s behavior changes over time. This work presents a temporal analysis of bidding behavior considering reactivity, that is, we study how the bidding behavior evolves over time, changing the bidder-auction interactions. The results show bidding behavior changes over time and these changes are not random, that is, there is a typical evolution trend. Moreover, we identify that reactivity affects bidding behavior evolution.

75

A SERVICE-ORIENTED INFRASTRUCTURE FOR ADVANCED CROSS-BORDER TRADE

Liana Razmerita and Niels Bjørn-Andersen

This paper presents an advanced e-custom infrastructure designed to streamline trade procedures, prevent potential security threats and reduce tax related fraud in cross-border trade. The paper focuses on the advantages of service infrastructure for the implementation of highly distributed systems, making use of internet to distribute and exchange data. In particular we highlight the use of service oriented architecture (SOA), web services, and smart seals in an integrated framework named EPCIS. The EPCIS system and its infrastructure are presented and analyzed in relation to the strategic objectives for future e-custom systems as expressed by the World Trade Organizations (WTO) and the authorities in major trading nations. The paper highlights the main advantages of use of such an architecture. The use of services insures interoperability of e-custom systems for all parties. The concrete case included in the paper illustrates how service oriented applications can ensure a more secure and advanced solution for monitoring goods along its supply chain. The conclusions highlights further research work and suggest some implications for the adoption of such a type of infrastructure.

92

E-GOVERNMENT IN AFRICA - Strengthening it through European Co-Operation

Michael Iniobong Eka

E-government remains the most efficient way in recent times to get on course government - citizen interaction programmes. Many European and Asian countries have standardized their e-government practices and certainly have their citizens using these facilities at ease. But the reverse is the case in Africa. Though some African countries have taken steps towards e-government practices, the process cannot be compared to that of Asia and Europe, while its citizens are yet to relate with the government through this medium in an effective manner. This paper X-rays e-government practices in Africa, with a case study of the state, Regional, and National governments in Nigeria. It also focuses attention at other African countries. This paper gathered its sources of information from a sample online questionnaire on IT personnel in government which we posted through www.afreel.com. I also used my experience as an IT personnel serving with a state government in Nigeria. The problems are highlighted and solutions proffered in a possible African - European countries co-operation.

95

APPLICABILITY OF WEBCAMS TO INVENTORY CONTROL OF TECHNICAL WHOLESALE ITEMS

Erno Salmela and Ari Happonen

This study aimed to determine whether webcams could be applied to the operative and tactical inventory control of technical wholesale items for which customers do not keep track of the inventory balance. The study was conducted as a ten-case study in Finnish industry with machinery industry companies as the customers and technical wholesalers as the suppliers. Even though none of the cases used webcams in their inventory control, the research results indicate that that webcams could be suitable for the purpose particularly in operative order-delivery process. However, webcam systems are considerably more challenging to apply to tactical inventory control.

102

WEBSITE SERVICE QUALITY IN IRELAND - A Consumer Perspective

Regina Connolly

Despite the fact that service quality is a critical determinant of website success, studies show that consumers frequently view the service quality delivered through websites as unsatisfactory. This paper outlines a study that is investigated the dimensions of website service excellence valued by Irish customers of a small to medium enterprise specialising in gifts. The e-S-QUAL measurement instrument was applied to the customers who purchase products online from this retailer, in order to determine their purchasing patterns and the dimensions of e-service quality that they value. This study makes a major contribution to the literature as it describes the application of the newly operationalised E-S-QUAL measurement instrument. The results of this study will indicate the effectiveness of the instrument in determining gaps in e-service quality. The findings will benefit both practitioners and researchers in developing an understanding of the factors that contribute towards the creation and maintenance of consumer satisfaction in Irish online transactions.

134

A WORKFLOW BASED APPROACH FOR E-ADMINISTRATION PROCESSES

Saïda Boukhedouma, Latifa Mahdaoui and Zaia Alimazighi

The use of ICT (s) led to the reengineering of business processes related to e-commerce, favoring continued orientation to the client. The same idea seems to be renewed in the area of governance. The e-administration appears at the center of any e-governance project. In fact, it covers the entire administrative processes (considered as business processes) whose mission is to serve citizens or businesses. On the other hand, the workflow based approach is appropriate for processes modelisation particularly, in the case of well structured processes and whose steps are clearly defined. In this context, we propose a solution for modeling e-administration processes, based on workflow at different levels highlighting the intra and inter-organizational interactions in the system. The solution is illustrated by a case study relative to the “voting process” (electoral process).

135

THE SNARE ARCHITECTURE OVERVIEW - Social Network Analysis and Reengineering Environment

Alexandre Barão and Alberto Rodrigues da Silva

Social network systems identify existing relations between social entities and provide a set of automatic inferences on these relations, promoting better interactions and collaborations between these entities. However, we find that most of existing organizational information systems do not provide in a native way, social network features, even though they have to manage somehow social entities. The focus on this paper starts from this fact, and proposes the SNARE system, short for “Social Network Analysis and Reengineering Environment”. The SNARE’s purpose is to promote social network capabilities in information systems not designed originally with that purpose. The paper overviews the architecture of SNARE system and discusses its applicability through different approaches.

136

PAYSTAR: A DENOMINATION FLEXIBLE MICROPAYMENT SCHEME

Sung-Ming Yen, Hsi-Chung Lin, Yen-Chang Chen Jia-Jun Hung and Jui-Ming Wu

In this paper, a micropayment scheme with flexible coin denomination mintage is proposed. This varying denomination approach might be more reasonable for most micropayment applications. Furthermore, the proposed scheme improves extensively the computational performance of both the customer as well as the merchant. Storage cost of the customer is exactly the same as in the original PayWord micropayment scheme and is thus applicable to implementations on small portable devices, e.g., smart card.

148

REFQUEST: A MULTIPLAYER ON-LINE GAME TO SUPPORT IDEA CREATION IN INNOVATION PROCESSES - An Ideation Game from the Laboranova Project

Heiko Duin and Jannicke Baalsrud Hauge

Innovation has become the main source for competitive advantage for European industry in the globalised economy. Most innovation processes implemented in companies are based on a stage-gate model starting with an ideation phase. This fuzzy front-end of the innovation process is mostly supported by traditional methods like co-located brainstorming. This paper presents a new approach for idea generation based on a multiplayer on-line computer game. The traditional application area of serious gaming – the field of educa-tion and training – is extended by another application: innovation gaming.

181

COMPARATIVE STUDIES OF SOCIAL CLASSIFICATION SYSTEMS USING RSS FEEDS

Steffen Oldenburg

This paper presents the results of practical studies comparing five well established social classification services for tagging of bookmarks (del.icio.us, BibSonomy bookmarks) and publications (BibSonomy publications, CiteULike, Connotea) in the context of service interoperability and integration. Contrary to most of current research we exclusively focus on the usage of RSS feeds for retrieval of tag-related data. Here we exploit recent feeds, as this method of data retrieval corresponds directly to the way users can retrieve data from these services, e.g. for tag suggestions. We motivate the preferred usage of feeds compared to full site grabbing, and present analysis results of feed data from a period of one month concerning feature distribution, growth, stability and convergence aspects. Furthermore we compare tag spaces and their intersections for potential interoperability and integration of these services, and reveal that tags in practice are not really as freely chosen as often promised.

186

ENHANCING SECURITY IN THE INTEGRATION OF E-GOVERNMENT - The e-School Initiative

Dimitrios Zissis, Anastasia-Evangelia Papadopoulou and Dimitrios Lekkas

This paper presents a security infrastructure design which is implemented to ensure safety in the e-School initiative that can escalate to meet the requirements of the entire electronic government system. The e-School initiative offers a number of ways that increase the effectiveness of education, student involvement in the process and is an element of the e-Government effort in Greece. A combination of existing technologies comprises the security solution presented, including Public Key Infrastructure, Shibboleth, Smart cards and Lightweight Directory Access Protocol. In this system, Pki is responsible for binding a public key to an entity, Ldap is the repository of keys and certificates and SSO is a method of access control that enables a user to authenticate once and gain access to the resources of multiple independent web services.

265

AN INFRASTRUCTURE FOR SHARING AND EXECUTING CHOREOGRAPHIES

Alan Massaru Nakai, Carla Geovana N. Macário, Edmundo Madeira and Claudia Bauzer Medeiros

The main attractiveness of Web services is their capacity to provide interoperability among heterogeneous distributed systems. Increasingly, companies and organizations have adopted Web services as a way to interoperate with their business partners. In such a scenario, Web services choreography can be applied in the specification of interorganizational business processes. However, the dynamic nature of business partnerships requires mechanisms for agile designing and deploying choreographies. In this paper, we present an infrastructure that aims to address the above concern. Our approach, which is based on WS-CDL, BPEL, and UDDI standards, aims to reach flexibility by providing mechanisms for sharing, finding and executing choreographies in a friendly manner for the user. We also present a prototype implementation.

293

B2B INTEGRATION WITH SEMANTIC WEB SERVICES IN AN E-BUSINESS FRAMEWORK

Seyyed Ali Rokni Dezfouli, Jafar Habibi and Soheil Hassas Yeganeh

E-business requires interoperability of information systems and, therefore, standardization of information sharing. Several XML-based e-business frameworks are developed to define standards for information sharing within and between companies. These frameworks only standardize structure of messages and aren’t able to define semantics. It leads to slow and costly dynamic Business-to-Business (B2B) integration. The use of Semantic Web Service (SWS) technologies has been suggested to enable more dynamic B2B integration of heterogeneous systems and partners. We present a semantic B2B mediator based on the WSMX –a SWS execution environment, to tackle heterogeneities in RosettaNet messages. We develop a rich RosettaNet ontology and use the axiomatized knowledge and rules to resolve data heterogeneities. We modelled natural language constraints with formal language that used with WSMX. This is illustrated through a purchasing and shipping scenario. We used a reasoner in interaction with WSMX for automatic consistency checking of instances in run-time. The benefits of applying SWS technologies include more flexibility in accepting heterogeneity in B2B integrations and easing back-end integrations. This allows introducing more competition into the purchasing process within e-business frameworks.

296

BEING THERE - AND GOING BEYOND

Ivan Tomek, Rick Giles, Li Di and Hai Zhang

As the use of information technology and Internet grows and as globalization of economy increases geographical dislocation of work teams, electronic support for collaboration (groupware) assumes increasing importance. Yet, there is little agreement on the best direction of its design. The natural approach is partial emulation of physical work space in software but influential literature argues against this and it appears that current groupware follows this opinion. This paper presents both sides of this debate, argues that easily adaptable space-based groupware is the most powerful and fruitful underlying metaphor, and describes the principles of an application built on this principle. It is also noted that groupware and socialware face similar challenges and have similar needs, and a common framework could simplify their development and improve their quality.

297

LIVE SERVICES FOR CITIZENS WITH LIVE TECHNOLOGIES - e-Payment in Romania as First Step to an Effective e-Government

Veronica Stefan and Antoniu Stefan

The European Commission’s i2010 strategy aims to build on the increasing convergence of the Internet, telecommunications and broadcasting to reap the benefits of Europe’s strength in ICT research and development. One of its priorities is to provide all of Europe’s citizens with access to the information Society, a society that delivers better public services and quality of life. Interactive web technologies have enhanced live collaboration and sharing among users. These innovations have resulted in a shift towards a more dynamic and interactive web experience and the increasing provision of online service delivery channels. The purpose of this paper is to describe an application for on-line tax filing and e-Payment in the context of electronic government in Romania and also to provide evidence regarding the degree to which it was determined the development of other applications in the fields of e-Services for citizens. We will explore how the public sector can use the live technologies more effectively, optimizing usability and increasing public engagement and loyalty and also focuses on emerging business and technology developments, investigating how the Web will impact on the citizen’s life and for the internationalization processes in the world economy.

303

IS WEBCAM PERFORMANCE SUFFICIENT FOR THE INVENTORY CONTROL OF INDUSTRIAL WHOLESALE ITEMS WITH NO CUSTOMER INVENTORY BALANCE RECORDS? - Case: Technical Wholesale Items

Ari Happonen, Erno Salmela and Jukka Nousiainen

This study deals with the adequacy of the technical performance of modern webcams for the remote monitoring of the inventory balance of industrial wholesale items on which customers keep no inventory records. The approach chosen was a case study, in which the suppliers were technical wholesalers and the customers were enterprises representing the machinery industry. This paper presents a study on the technical suitability of webcams for the remote monitoring of inventory levels. In order to establish a remote monitoring system, the images must meet certain quality criteria, thus enabling the assessment of inventory levels. The study includes image quality tests performed on a webcam in different conditions, and compares the results to the Finnish Illuminating Engineering Society’s lighting regulations for industrial work. The quality tests aimed to ascertain whether the image quality was sufficient in typical industrial lighting conditions. The results indicate that the image quality of modern webcams is sufficient for remote monitoring within the limits set by the distance of the camera from the monitored objects and by lighting conditions. However, according to the tests, the technical performance of surveillance cameras on the market five years ago, taking budget constraints into consideration, was not adequate for monitoring.

325

GOVERNMENTAL ACCESS TO ENCRYPTED INFORMATION - To What Extent and How to Achieve that Extent?

Hamid Turab Mirza

No body can deny the importance of encryption technology in today’s communications, with all the benefits it has also posed some threats, due to which, governments and regulatory bodies have great concern about encrypted information and have set out some policies and are still busy in regulating the wide spread use of encryption technology. In an attempt to control the encryption technology to make the society safe from the threats of terrorism and crime, governments have over shadowed the benefits of encryption technology for the privacy, liberty of the citizens and economic growth of the nation. There has been a lot of opposition and criticism on these policies, and society has objected to the demands of governments over encryption technology, and have demanded balanced solutions that should take safety within the context of free society and not otherwise.

332

AN ONTOLOGY-BASED APPROACH TO SUPPORTING DEVELOPMENT AND PRODUCTION OF MICROSYSTEMS - Process-Related Documentation for Process and Application Knowledge Management in Microsystems Technology

Markus Dickerhof, Oliver Kusche, Daniel Kimmig and Andreas Schmidt

Knowledge about relations among process steps or dependencies of materials, technologies, designs, tools, and machines is mostly stored in the product developer’s mind. This also happens when it is talked about product-related knowledge and the respective technological requirements. This knowledge is lost, if the per-son leaves the company. The present paper describes a knowledge management approach for a product-independent description of microsystems processes and outlines a data modelling concept for process-related information.

21

DESIGN OF DIGITAL EDUCATIONAL MATERIALS FOR PRIMARY EDUCATION

Isabel Cuadrado Gordillo and Inmaculada Fernández Antelo

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

23

E-LEARNING ACTIVITIES DESIGN AND INDIVIDUAL LEARNING STYLES - Case Study

Cláudia Fernandes and Luís Rocha

With this paper the authors aim to explore the importance of e-learning activities and matherials’ design towards attaining learning and development o bjectives. This work rests on the belief that activities’ design must be thought according to different learning styles, and is based on a case study from a hands-on-project – “Think Industry” (TIP) focused on experiencing. TIP is running since 1995 and it has encompassed more than 7600 youngsters with ages between 13 and 17 years old and enrolled on the formal teaching system. The main objective for the TIP is to develop a positive vision of industry and of employment opportunities and technical careers in the industrial sector. TIP activities are clustered in three main categories: (1) awareness; (2) experiencing; and (3) complementary support actions. The authors will focus on one e-learning experiencing activity’ design and implementation: “This is an Idea!” (TiaI!), a game designed with the objective of fostering entrepreneurial spirit and creative in a sustainable and global way. Pedagogy, technology use and global impact were the main drivers for the development of the e-learning game TiaI!. The game is used according to different styles of learning: (1) reading; (2) seeing; (3) hearing; (4) watching; (5) doing – experiential learning; (6) learning by teaching/selling. Some reflection for the future, based on this e-learning experiencing game are: (1) people have basic styles of learning, usually tent to prefer one. So if we provide different styles we can strive higher mastery; (2) Blending more than one approach improves retention and proficiency; (3) e-learning lacks socialization, but with this program it is a complement to one global understanding of pré-determined issue (e.g. renewable energies, fuel cell energy, new products design, global impact of technology use, development of green technologies); (4) Feedback and global contextualization are mentioned to be important issues for the development of a “new” or “renewed” conscienceless for the globe; (5) Youngsters approve the use of different means for the attainment of the same objective; (6) The design stage and the learning point are crucial to success; (7) Personal values need to be spoken and challenged in an entrepreneurial fashion to promote awareness.

25

INTRODUCING E-LEARNING 2.0 IN SME - A Practical Guide

Ileana Hamburg

e-Learning 2-0 can support corporate training to assure a fast transfer of knowledge by meeting small and medium sized-companies (SME) needs of flexibility, to be oriented to their business and be easier integrated into their workflow with a suitable personalized content at a lower cost to the organization In this paper after the presentation of some reasons of the low use of e-Learning in European SMEs examples of training strategies including e-Learning 2.0 for improving this situation are given. It is important, however, to help SMEs to develop and to implement such training strategies because many of them have not always the resources and knowledge to do this alone.

27

HAPTICS AND EXTENSIBLE 3D IN WEB-BASED ENVIRONMENTS FOR E-LEARNING AND SIMULATION

Felix G. Hamza-Lup and Ivan Sopin

Knowledge creation occurs in the process of social interaction. As our service-based society has been evolving into a knowledge-based society, there is an acute need for more effective collaboration and more effective knowledge-sharing systems for use by geographically scattered people. We present the use of 3D components and standards such as Web 3D in combination with the haptic paradigm for e-learning and simulation.

28

APPLICATION OF A WEB-BASED EDUCATION SYSTEM IN INDUSTRIAL PROCESSES

Perfecto Mariño, Miguel Ángel Domínguez, Santiago Otero and Miguel Merino

The authors present a multidisciplinary project called PROPYME, which is a team effort of the University of Vigo (Spain) and the FEUGA autonomous government foundation (Galicia, North West of Spain), both supported by several industrial enterprises from the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) market. The main purpose of PROPYME project was to accomplish an innovative technology-transfer task from university industrial researchers, to Small and Medium Enterprises (SME), for enhancing their productivity by the automation of their industrial and management processes. This involves a SME´s effort not only by a financial point of view, but adaptation, knowledge acquisition and organizational changes. Moreover, embedding ICT´s involves adapting Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) tools to integrate vertically process and systems, owned by the SME itself, facing to decision challenges based on economic value, knowledge and communication concepts. The PROPYME first phase is a portal Web with a demonstration multimedia tool, text, graphics, animations, audio and video, that shows fifteen industrial processes based on diverse technologies frequently used for industrial enterprises.

29

E-LEARNING AS A SOLUTION TO THE TRAINING PROBLEMS OF SMEs - A Multiple Case Study

Andrée Roy and Louis Raymond

Facing pressures from an increasingly competitive business environment, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are called upon to implement strategies that are enabled and supported by information technologies and e-business applications. One of these applications is e-learning, whose aim is to enable the continuous assimilation of knowledge and skills by managers and employees, and thus support organisational training and development efforts through the use of Internet technologies. Little is known however as to the actual role played by e-learning with regard to the training problems faced by SMEs. A multiple case study of 16 SMEs in the Atlantic region of Canada, including 12 that use e-learning with varying degrees of intensity, was designed to explore this question. We observed the firms’ training process in terms of training needs analysis, method selection, tool selection and evaluation, and ascertained how this process is impacted by their use of e-learning. E-learning is then characterised in terms of opportunity and feasibility for the development of SMEs and their region.

71

LEARNING PERSONALIZATION - Design Solutions in an e-Learning System

Ileana Trandafir, Ana-Maria Borozan and Alexandru Balog

This article describes theoretical and practical aspects regarding the process of personalizing services and content for an e-learning environment. The work carried out within the framework of a research project “Innovative System for Personalized and User-centered Learning with Application to Project Management (SinPers)” proved that the learning personalization needs innovative solutions for three main domains: the design of the teaching-learning process (actors roles, activities structure and flow, events and conditions specification), the creation and maintenance of an individual model for each learner (goal, preferences, knowledge level, learning results) and the structuring and accessing mode of the educational digital content (based on domain and competences ontology, learning objects, metadata).

87

INTERACTIVE, COLLABORATIVE AND ADAPTATIVE LEARNING TOOLS - The TexMat Example

A. M. Breda, E. M. Rocha and M. M. Rodrigues

The purpose of this paper is to describe a model for long distance learning/teaching tools that uses the World Wide Web (WWW) as a vehicle for the design and delivery of a learning/teaching environments in the context of mathematics basic education. We will illustrate such applications through TexMat, aimed specifically for the 5th and 6th grades of Basic Portuguese School - 10 to 12 years old youths. The goal of these tools is to paint a bigger vision of how technology can impact learning, teaching and training. We begin by giving an overview of the general principles underlying these applications, emphasizing the understanding of how cultural, cognitive and technological tools shape a support learning and knowing environment. A concrete example is also present.

103

A GENERAL FRAMEWORK FOR REPLICATED EXPERIMENTS IN VIRTUAL 3D ENVIRONMENTS

D. Biella and W. Luther

This paper reports on a parameterizable 3D framework that provides 3D content developers with an initial spatial starting configuration, metaphorical connectors for accessing exhibits or interactive 3D learning ob-jects or experiments, and other optional 3D extensions, such as a multimedia room, a gallery, username identification tools and an avatar selection room. The framework is implemented in VRML and uses a Web-based content management system. It has been successfully used for an interactive virtual museum for key historical experiments and in two additional interactive e-learning implementations: an African arts museum and a virtual science centre. It can be shown that, by reusing the framework, the production costs for the latter two implementations can be significantly reduced and content designers can focus on developing educa-tional content instead of producing cost-intensive out-of-focus 3D objects.

111

TOWARDS WEB 2.0 DRIVEN LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS

Mohamed Amine Chatti, Daniel Dah, Matthias Jarke and Gottfried Vossen

Over the last decade, it has been widely argued that technology-enhanced learning could respond to the needs of the new knowledge society and transform the way we learn. However, despite isolated achievements, technology-enhanced learning has not really succeeded yet in revolutionizing our education and learning processes. In fact, most current initiatives do not focus on the social aspect of learning and learning content is still pushed to a pre-defined group of learners in closed environments. Recently, Web 2.0 concepts have started to open new doors for more effective learning and have the potential to overcome many of the limitations of traditional learning models. In this paper we show in which way the community-driven platform Learnr, under development at the University of Münster, puts crucial success factors for future technology enhanced learning into practice, applying well known concepts like networking and social tagging. As a consequence, a Web 2.0 perspective on learners, learning content and learning communities can be derived.

113

A TRANSLITERATION ENGINE FOR ASIAN LANGUAGES

Sathiamoorthy Manoharan

Transliteration maps the alphabets of one script using alphabets of another script. It is commonly used when proper nouns of one language need to be written in the script of another language. This typically involves constructing approximate phonetically equivalent words. This paper illustrates the design and develop-ment of a transliteration engine which suits syllabary and alphasyllabary scripts. A syllabary is an alphabet set that represent syllables. The Japanese Katakana and Hiragana scripts fall under this category. An alphasyllabary is an alphabet set that represent consonants, vowels, and syllables composed of consonants and vowels. Scripts such as Thai, Sinhala, Burmese, and most of the Indian scripts such as Devanagari, Tamil, and Malayalam come under this category. The engine is useful in teaching and learning ethnic scripts. It is a useful tool for the internationalization and localization of computer programs, publishing ethnic scripts over the Internet, and to compose electronic documents in ethnic scripts.

125

LAUNCHING AN E-LEARNING SYSTEM IN A SCHOOL - Cross-European e-/m-Learning System UNITE: A Case Study

Maja Ćukušić and Andrina Granić and Ivan Maršić

The paper presents a case study of e-/m-Learning implementation of theories and practices in one elementary school. Within the framework of the UNITE project, the organisational, pedagogical, technical and infrastructural support was provided to the network of 14 European schools. This paper describes activities preceding and those undertaken through the launch of the UNITE system from the perspective of the enrolled school and its project partner. The system implementation, presented as iterative four stage process, covers scenario planning and implementation, validation plus platform and process improvement. Achieved intermediate results from the first iteration of the implementation process are offered as well.

165

CASE STUDIES VIA THE WEB FOR CONTINUOUS PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT - Use of the ViCoCITY Web-based Case Study Support Tool

James A. Redmond, Audrey Stenson and Alan Mullally

Web-based case studies offer some significant advantages over the traditional paper-based ones. The results from three uses of a Web-supported case study tool giving advantages and disadvantages are discussed from the viewpoints of student, lecturer and administrator with some discussion as to potential future improvements.

173

E-LEARNING TOOLS FOR WOUND IMAGE UNDERSTANDING

Augustin Prodan, Mădălina Rusu and Remus Câmpean and Rodica Prodan

This paper presents an e learning framework for analyzing, processing and understanding wound images, to be used in teaching, learning and research activities. We intend to promote e-learning technologies in medical, pharmaceutical and health care domains. Our approach to e-learning is so called blended learning, which combines traditional face-to-face and Web-based on-line learning, with focus on principles of active learning. Using Java and XML technologies, we build models for various categories of wounds, due to various aetiologies. Based on colour and texture analysis, we identify the main barriers to wound healing, such as tissue non-viable, infection, inflammation, moisture imbalance, or edge non-advancing. This framework provides the infrastructure for preparing e learning scenarios based on practice and real world experiences. We make experiments for wound healing simulation using various treatments and compare the results with experimental observations. Our experiments are supported by XML based databases containing knowledge extracted from previous wound healing experiences and from medical experts knowledge. Also, we rely on new paradigms of the Artificial Intelligence for creating e-learning scenarios to be used in a context of active learning, for wound image understanding. To implement the e-learning tools, we use Java technologies for dynamic processes and XML technologies for dynamic content.

180

USING EVALUATION AS A QUALITY ASSURANCE TOOL IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF SERIOUS GAMES - A Case Study based on the PRIME Game

Jannicke Baalsrud Hauge, Heiko Duin and Manuel Oliveira

This paper describes how formal evaluation of learning outcomes is an important Quality Assurance (QA) tool in the development of serious games. The case study is based on the PRIME project, which aimed to develop a serious game for learning global strategic manufacturing. The paper discusses the benefits of im-plementing a formal evaluation for learning outcomes to validate the game, using the alpha prototype. The process allowed the identification of shortcomings and provided valuable feedback to the development ac-tivities of the serious game. In the particular case of PRIME, the QA process involved the evaluation within a classroom setting during a total of 6 weeks. Whilst the outcome of the evaluation methodology revealed interesting results, the most important was the rich data collated that contributed significantly towards the final version of the software.

193

TRANSFORMING A COMPETENCY MODEL TO ASSESSMENT ITEMS

Onjira Sitthisak, Lester Gilbert and Hugh C. Davis

The problem of comparing and matching different learners’ knowledge arises when assessment systems use a one-dimensional numerical value to represent “knowledge level”. Such assessment systems may measure inconsistently because they estimate this level differently and inadequately. The multi-dimensional competency model called COMpetence-Based learner knowledge for personalized Assessment (COMBA) is being developed to represent a learner’s knowledge in a multi-dimensional vector space. The heart of this model is to treat knowledge, not as possession, but as a contextualized space of capability either actual or potential. The paper discusses the automatic generation of an assessment from the COMBA competency model as a “guide-on-the–side”.

200

OPEN SOURCE LMS CUSTOMIZATION - A Moodle Stadistical Control Aplication

Carlos Muñoz, Miguel Ángel Conde, Jorge Reyero and Francisco José García

This paper reflects the possibility of doing adaptations on a LMS depending on the necessities of a company or institution. In this case, ACEM allows the definition of course-level and platform-level reports and the automatic generation of certificates and diplomas for Moodle LMS. These adaptations are intended to complement all the different learning platforms by contributing added-value features like the generation of customizable diplomas and certificates and reports, which allow the obtaining information about both grades and participation in every activity of a course. All this necessities are not provided by default.

214

FORMALIZING A MODEL TO REPRESENT AND VISUALIZE CONCEPT SPACES IN E-LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS

Antonina Dattolo and Flaminia L. Luccio

Zz-structures offer graph-centric views capable of representing contextual interconnections among different information. In this paper we use them to represent and visualize concept space in e-learning environments and we present their formal analytic description in terms of graph theory. In particular, we focus our attention on the formal description of two views (H and I views), and we extend these notions to a number n > 2 of dimensions. We also apply both formal description, together with the particular properties of zz-structures, to an example in the Web-based education field.

232

USEFUL E-LEARNING PROCESS DESCRIPTIONS

Steffen Mencke, Fritz Zbrog and Reiner Dumke

E-learning is nowadays one of the most interesting of the “e-”domains available through the Internet. Defining e-learning as a single process, just with content development and content delivery/maintenance, only depicts a limited view to its complex nature. Many more detailed processes exist and can be described, analysed and optimised. This paper addresses this aspect. It is intended to provide background information about e-learning processes and their possible descriptions. They are used to start a discussion about useful and applicable e-learning process descriptions.

233

PROACTIVE AUTONOMOUS RESOURCE ENRICHMENT FOR E-LEARNING

Steffen Mencke, Dmytro Rud, Fritz Zbrog and Reiner Dumke

Information mastering is the major use case for learners in e-learning systems. Therefore they need appropriate search and retrieval mechanisms. An approach to overcome potentially occuring problems, like e.g. high recall and low precision or the high result sensibility to the used vocabulary, is the presentation of preselected content. This paper presents an approach for the automatic ontology-based enrichment of e-learning content.

235

INTEROPERABILITY GUIDELINES FOR DIGITAL LIBRARY OF EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES AND SERVICES

Kurilovas Eugenijus and Kubilinskienė Svetlana

The main scientific and technologic problems investigated in this work deal with creation of flexible cost effective e-Learning content and services system (referred here as Digital library of educational resources and services: DLE) providing learning customisation possibilities for its users. The principle of ultimate increase of Learning Objects’ reusability is considered, and DLE scheme based on flexible, modular architecture, as small as possible open source reusable e-content and e-services components is presented in the article. Standards and interoperability are key factors in the success of the introduction of such kind of DLEs, and therefore the main attention in the work was paid to investigating possible interoperability guidelines for DLE components. The major issues here are: what standards, why, how to adopt and apply these standards for e-Learning, and clear guidelines. Lithuanian DLE for primary and secondary education based of this approach is presented in more detail.

266

DESIGNING 3D COLLABORATIVE VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENTS TO UTILIZE THE PEDAGOGICAL BENEFITS OF CSCL

Th. Tsiatsos and A. Konstantinidis

In this paper, we aim to aid designers of 3D collaborative virtual environments in their work by presenting the pedagogical benefits of computer supported collaborative learning (CSCL) and discussing how these can be utilized in the definition of certain design guidelines for CVEs. We also present the challenges faced by CVE designers due to both the inherent characteristics of CVEs and the purpose these applications are designed to fulfil. Finally, based on bibliographical studies we suggest how these challenges can be overcome through thoughtful consideration of certain design principles.

273

TEACHING PROGRAMMING WITH A COMPETITIVE ATTITUDE TO FOSTER GROUP SPIRIT

Pedro Guerreiro and Katerina Georgouli

Socialization is an important aspect of university life. We believe that if students feel that they fit in the group, their commitment will be higher and their results will be better. In introductory programming courses, most tasks are elementary and are usually performed on an individual basis. If we manage to give greater visibility to those lonely activities, students will find out that the difficulties they face are shared by many, and realize that they are not alone. We do that by adding a competitive flavour to the tasks in the course. For example, programming assignments are modelled after programming competitions; quizzes are given after each lecture, students get points for it, and a ranking is kept, much like those in some sports; we organize tournaments, where students’ programs play against one another in a computer game. This provides a supplement of excitement to tasks that otherwise might be uninteresting to newcomers, and fosters group spirit. As a consequence, student participation is higher and results were better than before.

284

IMS-CLD: A NEW SPECIFICATION FOR LEARNING SCENARIOS IN COPES

Azeddine Chikh, Lamia Berkani and Akila Sarirete

In the present study we focus on the problem of capitalization of techno-pedagogic knowledge, tacit and explicit in the domain of e-learning. We attempt to solve this problem within the framework of a CoPE (Communities of Practice of E-learning). It is about considering a virtual space of exchange, sharing, and resolution of problems encountered by the actors of the e-learning during all phases of an online learning system life cycle. The purpose of this article is to propose a new specification language for learning scenarios in CoPEs, called IMS-CLD. This new language is inspired from IMS-LD language, but enriched with CoPE’s concepts in order to capture the richness of interactions, which are inherent to collaborative activities and more particularly within CoPEs. The closeness of the two specification languages IMS-LD and IMS-CLD aims to facilitate the communication between the LMS (Learning Management System) in one side and the CoPE’s environment in the other side. After a detailed description of the elements of this new language, we present a case study in order to depict their use through the specification of learning scenarios in a given CoPE.

309

USING ALTERNATE REALITY GAMES TO SUPPORT THE TEACHING OF MODERN FOREIGN LANGUAGES

Thomas M. Connolly

It is recognised that games play an important role in child development. Nowadays with children growing up in a highly technologically-rich society, many of these games are computer/console based. These types of games, which we will refer to generically as computer games in this paper, have been of interest to researchers from many different perspectives, some positive (for example, motivation, engagement, learning, skills development) and some negative (for example, violence, aggression, gender stereotyping). One particular type of game that has not been explored in detail for teaching and learning is the Alternate Reality Game (ARG), a form of interactive narrative, often involving multiple media and game elements, to tell a story that may be affected by participants’ ideas or actions. In this paper we discuss the use of an ARG to help support the teaching and learning of modern foreign languages by European secondary school children (ages 11-18).

339

ABOUT THE BENEFITS OF EXPLOITING NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING TECHNIQUES FOR E-LEARNING

Diana Pérez-Marín, Ismael Pascual-Nieto and Pilar Rodríguez

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a research field that studies how to automatically interpret/generate information in natural language. Currently, the quality and number of developed NLP resources and techniques permit their application to educational systems, with the potential of widening access to training and opening new ways of teaching. In this paper, the benefits of exploiting the current NLP techniques to improve e-learning systems will be discussed. A brief overview of the state-of-the-art of NLP will be provided and, some real e-learning and e-assessment applications based on the use of NLP techniques will be described to illustrate the benefits of using NLP techniques for e-learning.

342

PREDISPOSITION-BASED INTELLIGENT TUTORING SYSTEM - Adaptive User Profiling in Human-Computer Interaction

Andrzej Niesler and Gracja Wydmuch

The aim of the article is to present the conception of the new approach to human-computer interaction in intelligent tutoring systems. Teaching supported by technology is one of the most important issues these days. The crucial problem is how to learn effectively and how to substitute the student-tutor contact. However, traditional education also does not provide individual, predisposition-oriented teaching programs. Many of the people all over the world choose electronic way of studying. Therefore, it is crucial to evolve methodology of user-adapted solutions. In this paper we present the learning predisposition-based tutoring in intelligent instruction system, with individual user profiling, based on psychological conditions.