Tabulator Redux: writing Into the Semantic Web

A first category of Semantic Web browsers were designed to present a given dataset (an RDF graph) for perusal, in various forms. These include mSpace, Exhibit, and to a certain extent Haystack. A second category tackled mechanisms and display issues around linked data gathered on the fly. These include Tabulator, Oink, Disco, Open Link Software's Data Browser, and Object Browser. The challenge of once that data is gathered, how might it be edited, extended and annotated has so far been left largely unaddressed. This is not surprising: there are a number of steep challenges for determining how to support editing information in the open web of linked data. These include the representation of both the web of documents and the web of things, and the relationships between them; ensuring the user is aware of and has control over the social context such as licensing and privacy of data being entered, and, on a web in which anyone can say anything about anything, helping the user intuitively select the things which they actually wish to see in a given situation. There is also the view update problem: the difficulty of reflecting user edits back through functions used to map web data to a screen presentation. In the latest version of the Tabulator project, described in this paper we have focused on providing the write side of the readable/writable web. Our approach has been to allow modification and addition of information naturally within the browsing interface, and to relay changes to the server triple by triple for least possible brittleness (there is no explicit 'save' operation). Challenges which remain include the propagation of changes by collaborators back to the interface to create a shared editing system. To support writing across (semantic) Web resources, our work has contributed several technologies, including a HTTP/SPARQL/Update-based protocol between an editor (or other system) and incrementally editable resources stored in an open source, world-writable 'data wiki'. This begins enabling the writable Semantic Web

Mavo: Creating Interactive Data-Driven Web Applications by Authoring HTML

Many people can author static web pages with HTML and CSS but find it hard or impossible to program persistent, interactive web applications. We show that for a broad class of CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) applications, this gap can be bridged. Mavo extends the declarative syntax of HTML to describe Web applications that manage, store and transform data. Using Mavo, authors with basic HTML knowledge define complex data schemas implicitly as they design their HTML layout. They need only add a few attributes and expressions to their HTML elements to transform their static design into a persistent, data-driven web application whose data can be edited by direct manipulation of the content in the browser. We evaluated Mavo with 20 users who marked up static designs---some provided by us, some their own creation---to transform them into fully functional web applications. Even users with no programming experience were able to quickly craft Mavo applications

Seamlessly Editing the Web

The typical process of editing content on the web is strongly moded. Authors are forced to switch between editing and previewing and publishing modes before, during, and after the editing process. This thesis explores a new paradigm of editing content on the web called seamless editing. Unlike existing techniques for editing content on the web, seamless editing is modeless, enabling authors to directly edit content on web pages without the need to switch between any modes. The absence of modes reduces the amount of cognitive complexity involved with the editing process. A software framework called Seaweed was developed for providing seamlessly editable web pages in any common web browser, and is shown that it can be integrated into any content management system. For the purposes of experimentation, the content management system WordPress was selected, and a plugin using the Seaweed framework developed for it that provided a seamlessly editable environment. Two experiments were conducted. The first study observed users with no or minimal experience with using WordPress, following a set of prescribed tasks, both with and without the plugin. The second study was conducted over a longer time period in a real-world context, where existing WordPress users were naturally observed using the plugin within their own blogs. Analysis of logged interactions and pre-questionnaires and post-questionnaires showed that, in both studies, the participants found the Seaweed software to be intuitive and the new way of editing content to be easily adaptable. Additionally, the analysis showed that the participants found the concept of seamless editing to be useful, and could see it being useful in many other contexts, other than blogs

Using GIS to Support Midland County Parks and Recreation Department’s Trail Management Plan

Trail management is an important function performed by the Director of the Parks and Recreation Department, Midland County, Michigan. The Director has determined that a GIS system is a necessary tool for aiding him with the different management issues surrounding the twenty-one mile rail-trail and other numerous hiking, mountain biking and cross country ski trails located throughout the county. As of 2003, the National Park Service Inventory and Monitoring program has only been implemented on the federal level in 270 I&M parks with plans to spread to all national parks. Seeing how the program has grown over the last decade, with major strides in the past five years, the Director of Parks and Recreation determined that Inventory and Monitoring could, and should, be used within Midland County Parks system, with the Pere Marquette Rail-Trail being the pilot study for management of the park systems’ natural resources. The project describes an extension built in ArcGIS, an ArcPad applet and an ArcIMS that help the director with organization, operation and management of the different trails within the county and the Inventory and Monitoring program

Model-Driven User Interface Generation and Adaptation in Process-Aware Information Systems

The increasing adoption of process-aware information systems (PAISs) has resulted in a large number of implemented business processes. To react on changing needs, companies should be able to quickly adapt these process implementations if required. Current PAISs, however, only provide mechanisms to evolve the schema of a process model, but do not allow for the automated creation and adaptation of their user interfaces (UIs). The latter may have a complex logic and comprise, for example, conditional elements or database queries. Creating and evolving the UI components of a PAIS manually is a tedious and error-prone task. This technical report introduces a set of patterns for transforming fragments of a business process model, whose activities are performed by the same user role, to UI components of the PAIS. In particular, UI logic can be expressed using the same notation as for process modeling. Furthermore, a transformation method is introduced, which applies these patterns to automatically derive UI components from a process model by establishing a bidirectional mapping between process model and UI. This mapping allows propagating UI changes to the process model and vice versa. Overall, our approach enables process designers to rapidly develop and update complex UI components in PAISs

An IoT System for Converting Handwritten Text to Editable Format via Gesture Recognition

Evaluation of traditional classroom has led to electronic classroom i.e. e-learning. Growth of traditional classroom doesn’t stop at e-learning or distance learning. Next step to electronic classroom is a smart classroom. Most popular features of electronic classroom is capturing video/photos of lecture content and extracting handwriting for note-taking. Numerous techniques have been implemented in order to extract handwriting from video/photo of the lecture but still the deficiency of few techniques can be resolved, and which can turn electronic classroom into smart classroom. In this thesis, we present a real-time IoT system to convert handwritten text into editable format by implementing hand gesture recognition (HGR) with Raspberry Pi and camera. Hand Gesture Recognition (HGR) is built using edge detection algorithm and HGR is used in this system to reduce computational complexity of previous systems i.e. removal of redundant images and lecture’s body from image, recollecting text from previous images to fill area from where lecture’s body has been removed. Raspberry Pi is used to retrieve, perceive HGR and to build a smart classroom based on IoT. Handwritten images are converted into editable format by using OpenCV and machine learning algorithms. In text conversion, recognition of uppercase and lowercase alphabets, numbers, special characters, mathematical symbols, equations, graphs and figures are included with recognition of word, lines, blocks, and paragraphs. With the help of Raspberry Pi and IoT, the editable format of lecture notes is given to students via desktop application which helps students to edit notes and images according to their necessity