74,337 research outputs found
Enabling High-Level Application Development for the Internet of Things
Application development in the Internet of Things (IoT) is challenging
because it involves dealing with a wide range of related issues such as lack of
separation of concerns, and lack of high-level of abstractions to address both
the large scale and heterogeneity. Moreover, stakeholders involved in the
application development have to address issues that can be attributed to
different life-cycles phases. when developing applications. First, the
application logic has to be analyzed and then separated into a set of
distributed tasks for an underlying network. Then, the tasks have to be
implemented for the specific hardware. Apart from handling these issues, they
have to deal with other aspects of life-cycle such as changes in application
requirements and deployed devices. Several approaches have been proposed in the
closely related fields of wireless sensor network, ubiquitous and pervasive
computing, and software engineering in general to address the above challenges.
However, existing approaches only cover limited subsets of the above mentioned
challenges when applied to the IoT. This paper proposes an integrated approach
for addressing the above mentioned challenges. The main contributions of this
paper are: (1) a development methodology that separates IoT application
development into different concerns and provides a conceptual framework to
develop an application, (2) a development framework that implements the
development methodology to support actions of stakeholders. The development
framework provides a set of modeling languages to specify each development
concern and abstracts the scale and heterogeneity related complexity. It
integrates code generation, task-mapping, and linking techniques to provide
automation. Code generation supports the application development phase by
producing a programming framework that allows stakeholders to focus on the
application logic, while our mapping and linking techniques together support
the deployment phase by producing device-specific code to result in a
distributed system collaboratively hosted by individual devices. Our evaluation
based on two realistic scenarios shows that the use of our approach improves
the productivity of stakeholders involved in the application development
Accessible user interface support for multi-device ubiquitous applications: architectural modifiability considerations
The market for personal computing devices is rapidly expanding from PC, to mobile, home entertainment systems, and even the automotive industry. When developing software targeting such ubiquitous devices, the balance between development costs and market coverage has turned out to be a challenging issue. With the rise of Web technology and the Internet of things, ubiquitous applications have become a reality. Nonetheless, the diversity of presentation and interaction modalities still drastically limit the number of targetable devices and the accessibility toward end users. This paper presents webinos, a multi-device application middleware platform founded on the Future Internet infrastructure. Hereto, the platform's architectural modifiability considerations are described and evaluated as a generic enabler for supporting applications, which are executed in ubiquitous computing environments
Video summarisation: A conceptual framework and survey of the state of the art
This is the post-print (final draft post-refereeing) version of the article. Copyright @ 2007 Elsevier Inc.Video summaries provide condensed and succinct representations of the content of a video stream through a combination of still images, video segments, graphical representations and textual descriptors. This paper presents a conceptual framework for video summarisation derived from the research literature and used as a means for surveying the research literature. The framework distinguishes between video summarisation techniques (the methods used to process content from a source video stream to achieve a summarisation of that stream) and video summaries (outputs of video summarisation techniques). Video summarisation techniques are considered within three broad categories: internal (analyse information sourced directly from the video stream), external (analyse information not sourced directly from the video stream) and hybrid (analyse a combination of internal and external information). Video summaries are considered as a function of the type of content they are derived from (object, event, perception or feature based) and the functionality offered to the user for their consumption (interactive or static, personalised or generic). It is argued that video summarisation would benefit from greater incorporation of external information, particularly user based information that is unobtrusively sourced, in order to overcome longstanding challenges such as the semantic gap and providing video summaries that have greater relevance to individual users
Hop and HipHop : Multitier Web Orchestration
Rich applications merge classical computing, client-server concurrency,
web-based interfaces, and the complex time- and event-based reactive
programming found in embedded systems. To handle them, we extend the Hop web
programming platform by HipHop, a domain-specific language dedicated to
event-based process orchestration. Borrowing the synchronous reactive model of
Esterel, HipHop is based on synchronous concurrency and preemption primitives
that are known to be key components for the modular design of complex reactive
behaviors. HipHop departs from Esterel by its ability to handle the dynamicity
of Web applications, thanks to the reflexivity of Hop. Using a music player
example, we show how to modularly build a non-trivial Hop application using
HipHop orchestration code.Comment: International Conference on Distributed Computing and Internet
Technology (2014
Towards engineering ontologies for cognitive profiling of agents on the semantic web
Research shows that most agent-based collaborations
suffer from lack of flexibility. This is due to the fact that
most agent-based applications assume pre-defined
knowledge of agents’ capabilities and/or neglect basic
cognitive and interactional requirements in multi-agent
collaboration. The highlight of this paper is that it brings
cognitive models (inspired from cognitive sciences and HCI)
proposing architectural and knowledge-based requirements
for agents to structure ontological models for cognitive
profiling in order to increase cognitive awareness between
themselves, which in turn promotes flexibility, reusability
and predictability of agent behavior; thus contributing
towards minimizing cognitive overload incurred on humans.
The semantic web is used as an action mediating space,
where shared knowledge base in the form of ontological
models provides affordances for improving cognitive
awareness
Conceptual models of urban environmental information systems - toward improved information provision
Cities are the hub of European society - for over a millennium, they are the locus of social, political
and economic development. As the core of intensive and creative human activity, they are also the
place where the environmental externalities that accompany rapid development are most visible.
The environmental consequences of urban development have been recognised long ago, as in the
case of London, where in 1388 legislation was introduced to control pollutant emissions
(Lowenthal, 1990). Similar historical environmental regulations can be demonstrated for many
cities in Europe. However, while for most of history those who govern the city (be it the sovereign,
city elders or local government) where responsible for the control, mitigation and management of
the common environment in the city, the last 30 years are a period of profound change. This is due
to the trend toward improved participation in environmental decision making . a more inclusive and
open approach to decisions that deal with the city commons. This change did not occurre overnight
but rather gradually. For example, in the United Kingdom, it was the Town and Country Planning
Act of 1947 which introduced public scrutiny to changes in the urban form (Rydin, 1998), or the
development of public involvement in environmental impact assessment of urban projects as
developed in many countries throughout the developed world during the 1970s and 1980s (Gilpin
1995). These changes accelerate within the last three decades, and especially since the publication
of .Our Common Future. (WCED and Brundtland 1987), the acceptance of the .Sustainable
Development. principles and the Rio conference. A quiet (mini) revolution happened in Europe not
long ago, toward the end of 1998 when the members of the United Nations Economic Commission
for Europe (UN/ECE) signed the .Convention on Access to Information, Public Participation in
Decision Making and Access to Justice in Environmental Matters. - the Aarhus Convention
(UN/ECE 1998). The convention is expected to come into force by the end of 2001, and calls the
governments and public authorities to open up access to environmental information as a means to
improve public participation in environmental decision making and awareness of environmental
issues (UN/ECE, 1998).
However, these declarations on the value and importance of environmental information do not
match our level of understanding on the role of environmental information in decision making
processes, and especially on the role of information in improving awareness and participation.
Therefore, it is useful to take a step back, and to try and evaluate how environmental information
and access to it and its use support public involvement in such processes.
This paper is aimed to offer a framework that can assist us in the analytical process of
understanding environmental information use. It focuses on public access and assumes that
environmental information will be delivered to the public through the Internet. Such assumption is
based on the current trend within public authorities is to use Information and Communication
Technology (ICT) as a major delivery medium and it seems that it will become more so in the near
future (OECD 2000).
The framework which this paper presents, is based on Soft Systems Methodology (SSM) study
which unpacked some of the core issues relating to public access and use of environmental
information (Haklay, 2001). Although the aim here is not to discuss the merits of SSM, but to focus
on the conceptual models, some introduction to the techniques that are used here is needed.
Therefore, the following section opens with introduction to SSM and its techniques. The core of the
paper is dedicated to the development of conceptual models. After presenting the conceptual
models, some conclusions about these models and their applications are drown
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