MusA: Using Indoor Positioning and Navigation to Enhance Cultural Experiences in a museum

In recent years there has been a growing interest into the use of multimedia mobile guides in museum environments. Mobile devices have the capabilities to detect the user context and to provide pieces of information suitable to help visitors discovering and following the logical and emotional connections that develop during the visit. In this scenario, location based services (LBS) currently represent an asset, and the choice of the technology to determine users' position, combined with the definition of methods that can effectively convey information, become key issues in the design process. In this work, we present MusA (Museum Assistant), a general framework for the development of multimedia interactive guides for mobile devices. Its main feature is a vision-based indoor positioning system that allows the provision of several LBS, from way-finding to the contextualized communication of cultural contents, aimed at providing a meaningful exploration of exhibits according to visitors' personal interest and curiosity. Starting from the thorough description of the system architecture, the article presents the implementation of two mobile guides, developed to respectively address adults and children, and discusses the evaluation of the user experience and the visitors' appreciation of these application

Knowledge Organization Systems (KOS) in the Semantic Web: A Multi-Dimensional Review

Since the Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) specification and its SKOS eXtension for Labels (SKOS-XL) became formal W3C recommendations in 2009 a significant number of conventional knowledge organization systems (KOS) (including thesauri, classification schemes, name authorities, and lists of codes and terms, produced before the arrival of the ontology-wave) have made their journeys to join the Semantic Web mainstream. This paper uses "LOD KOS" as an umbrella term to refer to all of the value vocabularies and lightweight ontologies within the Semantic Web framework. The paper provides an overview of what the LOD KOS movement has brought to various communities and users. These are not limited to the colonies of the value vocabulary constructors and providers, nor the catalogers and indexers who have a long history of applying the vocabularies to their products. The LOD dataset producers and LOD service providers, the information architects and interface designers, and researchers in sciences and humanities, are also direct beneficiaries of LOD KOS. The paper examines a set of the collected cases (experimental or in real applications) and aims to find the usages of LOD KOS in order to share the practices and ideas among communities and users. Through the viewpoints of a number of different user groups, the functions of LOD KOS are examined from multiple dimensions. This paper focuses on the LOD dataset producers, vocabulary producers, and researchers (as end-users of KOS).Comment: 31 pages, 12 figures, accepted paper in International Journal on Digital Librarie

A semantic sensor web for environmental decision support applications

Sensing devices are increasingly being deployed to monitor the physical world around us. One class of application for which sensor data is pertinent is environmental decision support systems, e.g., flood emergency response. For these applications, the sensor readings need to be put in context by integrating them with other sources of data about the surrounding environment. Traditional systems for predicting and detecting floods rely on methods that need significant human resources. In this paper we describe a semantic sensor web architecture for integrating multiple heterogeneous datasets, including live and historic sensor data, databases, and map layers. The architecture provides mechanisms for discovering datasets, defining integrated views over them, continuously receiving data in real-time, and visualising on screen and interacting with the data. Our approach makes extensive use of web service standards for querying and accessing data, and semantic technologies to discover and integrate datasets. We demonstrate the use of our semantic sensor web architecture in the context of a flood response planning web application that uses data from sensor networks monitoring the sea-state around the coast of England

Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Mashup Personal Learning Environments

Wild, F., Kalz, M., & Palmér, M. (Eds.) (2008). Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Mashup Personal Learning Environments (MUPPLE08). September, 17, 2008, Maastricht, The Netherlands: CEUR Workshop Proceedings, ISSN 1613-0073. Available at http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-388.The work on this publication has been sponsored by the TENCompetence Integrated Project (funded by the European Commission's 6th Framework Programme, priority IST/Technology Enhanced Learning. Contract 027087 [http://www.tencompetence.org]) and partly sponsored by the LTfLL project (funded by the European Commission's 7th Framework Programme, priority ISCT. Contract 212578 [http://www.ltfll-project.org

On the systematic development of domain-specific mashup tools for end users

The recent emergence of mashup tools has refueled research on end user development, i.e., on enabling end-users without programming skills to compose their own applications. Yet, similar to what happened with analogous promises in web service composition and business process management, research has mostly focused on technology and, as a consequence, has failed its objective. In this paper, we propose a domain-specific approach to mashups that is aware of the terminology, concepts, rules, and conventions (the domain) the user is comfortable with. We show what developing a domain-specific mashup tool means, which role the mashup meta-model and the domain model play and how these can be merged into a domain-specific mashup meta-model. We exemplify the approach by implementing a mashup tool for a specific domain (research evaluation) and describe the respective user study. The results of the user study confirm that domain-specific mashup tools indeed lower the entry barrier to mashup development. © 2012 Springer-Verlag