1,585 research outputs found
Developing front-end Web 2.0 technologies to access services, content and things in the future Internet
The future Internet is expected to be composed of a mesh of interoperable web services accessible from all over the web. This approach has not yet caught on since global user?service interaction is still an open issue. This paper states one vision with regard to next-generation front-end Web 2.0 technology that will enable integrated access to services, contents and things in the future Internet. In this paper, we illustrate how front-ends that wrap traditional services and resources can be tailored to the needs of end users, converting end users into prosumers (creators and consumers of service-based applications). To do this, we propose an architecture that end users without programming skills can use to create front-ends, consult catalogues of resources tailored to their needs, easily integrate and coordinate front-ends and create composite applications to orchestrate services in their back-end. The paper includes a case study illustrating that current user-centred web development tools are at a very early stage of evolution. We provide statistical data on how the proposed architecture improves these tools. This paper is based on research conducted by the Service Front End (SFE) Open Alliance initiative
Declarative Ajax Web Applications through SQL++ on a Unified Application State
Implementing even a conceptually simple web application requires an
inordinate amount of time. FORWARD addresses three problems that reduce
developer productivity: (a) Impedance mismatch across the multiple languages
used at different tiers of the application architecture. (b) Distributed data
access across the multiple data sources of the application (SQL database, user
input of the browser page, session data in the application server, etc). (c)
Asynchronous, incremental modification of the pages, as performed by Ajax
actions.
FORWARD belongs to a novel family of web application frameworks that attack
impedance mismatch by offering a single unifying language. FORWARD's language
is SQL++, a minimally extended SQL. FORWARD's architecture is based on two
novel cornerstones: (a) A Unified Application State (UAS), which is a virtual
database over the multiple data sources. The UAS is accessed via distributed
SQL++ queries, therefore resolving the distributed data access problem. (b)
Declarative page specifications, which treat the data displayed by pages as
rendered SQL++ page queries. The resulting pages are automatically
incrementally modified by FORWARD. User input on the page becomes part of the
UAS.
We show that SQL++ captures the semi-structured nature of web pages and
subsumes the data models of two important data sources of the UAS: SQL
databases and JavaScript components. We show that simple markup is sufficient
for creating Ajax displays and for modeling user input on the page as UAS data
sources. Finally, we discuss the page specification syntax and semantics that
are needed in order to avoid race conditions and conflicts between the user
input and the automated Ajax page modifications.
FORWARD has been used in the development of eight commercial and academic
applications. An alpha-release web-based IDE (itself built in FORWARD) enables
development in the cloud.Comment: Proceedings of the 14th International Symposium on Database
Programming Languages (DBPL 2013), August 30, 2013, Riva del Garda, Trento,
Ital
Data integration through service-based mediation for web-enabled information systems
The Web and its underlying platform technologies have often been used to integrate existing software and information systems. Traditional techniques for data representation and transformations between documents are not sufficient to support a flexible and maintainable data integration solution that meets the requirements of modern complex Web-enabled software and information systems. The difficulty
arises from the high degree of complexity of data structures, for example in business and technology applications, and from the constant change of data and its
representation. In the Web context, where the Web platform is used to integrate different organisations or software systems, additionally the problem of heterogeneity
arises. We introduce a specific data integration solution for Web applications such as Web-enabled information systems. Our contribution is an integration technology
framework for Web-enabled information systems comprising, firstly, a data integration technique based on the declarative specification of transformation rules and the construction of connectors that handle the integration and, secondly, a mediator architecture based on information services and the constructed connectors to handle the integration process
Before-Commit Client State Management Services for AJAX Applications
Heavily script-based browser applications change the manner in which users interact with Web browsers. Instead of downloading a succession of HTML pages, users download a single application and use that application for a long period of time. The application is not a set of HTML pages, but rather a single page that can possible modify its own presentation based on data exchanged with a server. In such an environment, it is necessary to provide some means for the client to manage its own state. We describe the initial results of our work in providing client-side state management services for these script-based applications. We focus on browser-based services that can help the user before any data is committed on the server. Our services include state checkpointing, property binding, operation logging, operational replay, ATOM/RSS data updates, and application-controlled persistence
A Scalable Architecture for Incremental Specification and Maintenance of Procedural and Declarative Clinical Decision-Support Knowledge
Clinical guidelines have been shown to improve the quality of medical care and to reduce its costs. However, most guidelines exist in a free-text representation and, without automation, are not sufficiently accessible to clinicians at the point of care. A prerequisite for automated guideline application is a machine-comprehensible representation of the guidelines. In this study, we designed and implemented a scalable architecture to support medical experts and knowledge engineers in specifying and maintaining the procedural and declarative aspects of clinical guideline knowledge, resulting in a machine comprehensible representation. The new framework significantly extends our previous work on the Digital electronic Guidelines Library (DeGeL) The current study designed and implemented a graphical framework for specification of declarative and procedural clinical knowledge, Gesher. We performed three different experiments to evaluate the functionality and usability of the major aspects of the new framework: Specification of procedural clinical knowledge, specification of declarative clinical knowledge, and exploration of a given clinical guideline. The subjects included clinicians and knowledge engineers (overall, 27 participants). The evaluations indicated high levels of completeness and correctness of the guideline specification process by both the clinicians and the knowledge engineers, although the best results, in the case of declarative-knowledge specification, were achieved by teams including a clinician and a knowledge engineer. The usability scores were high as well, although the clinicians’ assessment was significantly lower than the assessment of the knowledge engineers
Mediated data integration and transformation for web service-based software architectures
Service-oriented architecture using XML-based web services has been widely accepted by many organisations as the standard infrastructure to integrate heterogeneous and autonomous data sources. As a result, many Web service providers are built up on top of the data sources to share the data by supporting provided and required interfaces and methods of data access in a unified manner. In the context of data integration, problems arise when Web services are assembled to deliver an integrated view of data, adaptable to the specific needs of individual clients and providers. Traditional approaches of data integration and transformation are not suitable to automate the construction of connectors dedicated to connect selected Web services to render integrated and tailored views of data. We propose a declarative approach that addresses the oftenneglected data integration and adaptivity aspects of serviceoriented
architecture
XFormsDB - An XForms-Based Framework for Simplifying Web Application Development
WWW:n luonne muuttuu jatkuvasti vastatakseen paremmin käyttäjien kasvavia tarpeita. Vaikka tämä kehitys kohti hyödyllisempiä vuorovaikutteisia palveluita ja sovelluksia on parantanut WWW:n käyttö- ja käyttäjäkokemusta, niin se on myös samalla tehnyt WWW-sovellusten kehittämisestä paljon monimutkaisempaa.
Tämän työn päätavoitteena oli tutkia, miten WWW-sovellusten kehittämistä voitaisiin helpottaa deklaratiivisen ohjelmoinnin keinoin. Työssä esitetään laajennus, jonka avulla yleisimmät palvelinpään toiminnallisuudet voidaan saumattomasti liittää osaksi XForms-merkintäkieltä. Myös laajennuksen käyttökelpoisuus ja mahdollisuudet validoidaan prototyyppitoteutuksen, nimeltään XFormsDB-ohjelmistokehys, ja kahden WWW-esimerkkisovelluksen avulla.
Tulokset osoittavat, että XFormsDB-ohjelmistokehyksen avulla voidaan kirjoittaa hyödyllisiä, erittäin vuorovaikutteisia monen käyttäjän WWW-sovelluksia nopeasti ja helposti vain yhtä dokumenttia ja yhtä ohjelmointimallia käyttäen.The nature of the World Wide Web is constantly changing to meet the increasing demands of its users. While this trend towards more useful interactive services and applications has improved the utility and the user experience of the Web, it has also made the development of Web applications much more complex.
The main objective of this Thesis was to study how Web application development could be simplified by means of declarative programming. An extension that seamlessly integrates common server-side functionalities to the XForms markup language is proposed and its feasibility and capabilities are validated with a proof-of-concept implementation, called the XFormsDB framework, and two sample Web applications.
The results show that useful, highly interactive multi-user Web applications can be authored quickly and easily in a single document and under a single programming model using the XFormsDB framework
A Semantic Web of Know-How: Linked Data for Community-Centric Tasks
This paper proposes a novel framework for representing community know-how on
the Semantic Web. Procedural knowledge generated by web communities typically
takes the form of natural language instructions or videos and is largely
unstructured. The absence of semantic structure impedes the deployment of many
useful applications, in particular the ability to discover and integrate
know-how automatically. We discuss the characteristics of community know-how
and argue that existing knowledge representation frameworks fail to represent
it adequately. We present a novel framework for representing the semantic
structure of community know-how and demonstrate the feasibility of our approach
by providing a concrete implementation which includes a method for
automatically acquiring procedural knowledge for real-world tasks.Comment: 6th International Workshop on Web Intelligence & Communities (WIC14),
Proceedings of the companion publication of the 23rd International Conference
on World Wide Web (WWW 2014
Storing XML Documents in Databases
The authors introduce concepts for loading large amounts of XML documents into databases where the documents are stored and maintained. The goal is to make XML databases as unobtrusive in multi-tier systems as possible and at the same time provide as many services defined by the XML standards as possible. The ubiquity of XML has sparked great interest in deploying concepts known from Relational Database Management Systems such as declarative query languages, transactions, indexes and integrity constraints. This chapter presents now bulkloading is done in Monet XML, a main memory XML database system, and evaluates the cost of bulkloading and bulk deletion with respect to strategies which base on insertion and deletion of individual nodes. Additionally, we survey the applicability of the techniques to a wider class of XML storage schemas
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