eStorys: A visual storyboard system supporting back-channel communication for emergencies

This is the post-print version of the final paper published in Journal of Visual Languages & Computing. The published article is available from the link below. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. Copyright @ 2010 Elsevier B.V.In this paper we present a new web mashup system for helping people and professionals to retrieve information about emergencies and disasters. Today, the use of the web during emergencies, is confirmed by the employment of systems like Flickr, Twitter or Facebook as demonstrated in the cases of Hurricane Katrina, the July 7, 2005 London bombings, and the April 16, 2007 shootings at Virginia Polytechnic University. Many pieces of information are currently available on the web that can be useful for emergency purposes and range from messages on forums and blogs to georeferenced photos. We present here a system that, by mixing information available on the web, is able to help both people and emergency professionals in rapidly obtaining data on emergency situations by using multiple web channels. In this paper we introduce a visual system, providing a combination of tools that demonstrated to be effective in such emergency situations, such as spatio/temporal search features, recommendation and filtering tools, and storyboards. We demonstrated the efficacy of our system by means of an analytic evaluation (comparing it with others available on the web), an usability evaluation made by expert users (students adequately trained) and an experimental evaluation with 34 participants.Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation and Universidad Carlos III de Madrid and Banco Santander

The snowflake effect: the future of mashups and learning

Emerging technologies for learning report - Article exploring web mashups and their potential for educatio

Shortcomings of learning design approaches and a possible way out

Shifting away from traditional instructional design to younger research streams like personalized, workflow-based or collaborative e-learning, learning design (LD) has become an important issue in the field of technology-enhanced learning. Nevertheless, current LD approaches turn out to be rather unhandy or costly in teaching and research practice. In this paper, we discuss these shortcomings and propose an alternative solution approach which is based on a web application mashup, learner interactions, and a semantic layer for tool recommendations. As the evaluation of our first prototype is in progress, we can not highlight first experiences, but outline benefits and possible application scenarios in this position paper

Language design for a personal learning environment design language

Approaching technology-enhanced learning from the perspective of a learner, we foster the idea of learning environment design, learner interactions, and tool interoperability. In this paper, we shortly summarize the motivation for our personal learning environment approach and describe the development of a domain-specific language for this purpose as well as its realization in practice. Consequently, we examine our learning environment design language according to its lexis and syntax, the semantics behind it, and pragmatical aspects within a first prototypic implementation. Finally, we discuss strengths, problematic aspects, and open issues of our approach

Towards Run-Time Verification of Compositions in the Web of Things using Complex Event Processing

Following the vision of the Internet of Things, physical world entities are integrated into virtual world things. Things are expected to become active participants in business and social processes. Then, the Internet of Things could benefit from the Web Service architecture like today’s Web does, so Future ser-vice-oriented Internet things will offer their functionality via service-enabled in-terfaces. In previous work, we demonstrated the need of considering the behav-iour of things to develop applications in a more rigorous way, and we proposed a lightweight model for representing such behaviour. Our methodology relies on the service-oriented paradigm and extends the DPWS profile to specify the order with which things can receive messages. We also proposed a static verifi-cation technique to check whether a mashup of things respects the behaviour, specified at design-time, of the composed things. However, a change in the be-haviour of a thing may cause that some compositions do not fulfill its behaviour anymore. Moreover, given that a thing can receive requests from instances of different mashups at run-time, these requests could violate the behaviour of that thing, even though each mashup fulfills such behaviour, due to the change of state of the thing. To address these issues, we present a proposal based on me-diation techniques and complex event processing to detect and inhibit invalid invocations, so things only receive requests compatible with their behaviour.Work partially supported by projects TIN2008-05932, TIN2012-35669, CSD2007-0004 funded by Spanish Ministry MINECO and FEDER; P11-TIC-7659 funded by Andalusian Government; and Universidad de Málaga, Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tec

Future internet enablers for VGI applications

This paper presents the authors experiences with the development of mobile Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) applications in the context of the ENVIROFI project and Future Internet Public Private Partnership (FI-PPP) FP7 research programme.FI-PPP has an ambitious goal of developing a set of Generic FI Enablers (GEs) - software and hardware tools that will simplify development of thematic future internet applications. Our role in the programme was to provide requirements and assess the usability of the GEs from the point of view of the environmental usage area, In addition, we specified and developed three proof of concept implementations of environmental FI applications, and a set of specific environmental enablers (SEs) complementing the functionality offered by GEs. Rather than trying to rebuild the whole infrastructure of the Environmental Information Space (EIS), we concentrated on two aspects: (1) how to assure the existing and future EIS services and applications can be integrated and reused in FI context; and (2) how to profit from the GEs in future environmental applications.This paper concentrates on the GEs and SEs which were used in two of the ENVIROFI pilots which are representative for the emerging class of Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) use-cases: one of them is pertinent to biodiversity and another to influence of weather and airborne pollution on users’ wellbeing. In VGI applications, the EIS and SensorWeb overlap with the Social web and potentially huge amounts of information from mobile citizens needs to be assessed and fused with the observations from official sources. On the whole, the authors are confident that the FI-PPP programme will greatly influence the EIS, but the paper also warns of the shortcomings in the current GE implementations and provides recommendations for further developments

Mashup indices of development

Countries are increasingly being ranked by some new"mashup index of development,"defined as a composite index for which existing theory and practice provides little or no guidance to its design. Thus the index has an unusually large number of moving parts, which the producer is essentially free to set. The parsimony of these indices is often appealing -- collapsing multiple dimensions into just one, yielding unambiguous country rankings, and possibly reducing concerns about measurement errors in the component series. But the meaning, interpretation and robustness of these indices are often unclear. If they are to be properly understood and used, more attention needs to be given to their conceptual foundations, the tradeoffs they embody, the contextual factors relevant to country performance, and the sensitivity of the implied rankings to changing the data and weights. In short, clearer warning signs are needed for users. But even then, nagging doubts remain about the value-added of mashup indices, and their policy relevance, relative to the"dashboard"alternative of monitoring the components separately. Future progress in devising useful new composite indices of development will require that theory catches up with measurement practice.Economic Theory&Research,Information Security&Privacy,Governance Indicators,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Debt Markets

Collaborative Mapping of London Using Google Maps: The LondonProfiler

This paper begins by reviewing the ways in which the innovation of Google Maps has transformed our ability to reference and view geographically referenced data. We describe the ways in which the GMap Creator tool developed under the ESRC National Centre for E Social Science programme enables users to ‘mashup’ thematic choropleth maps using the Google API. We illustrate the application of GMap Creator using the example of www.londonprofiler.org, which makes it possible to view a range of health, education and other socioeconomic datasets against a backcloth of Google Maps data. Our conclusions address the ways in which Google Map mashups developed using GMap Creator facilitate online exploratory cartographic visualisation in a range of areas of policy concern