Achieving Accessible Rich Internet Applications

This work presents guidelines on making accessible Rich Internet Applications (RIAs). The guidelines have been developed based on a thorough literature review, summarizing the current accessibility issues related to RIA. Existing solutions and recommendations have been processed and converted into a set of guidelines, aimed at those responsible for developing RIA solutions. Participants working with web development and accessibility evaluated the guidelines. The most important contribution from this project to the field of web accessibility research is strong indications of a need for process oriented accessibility guidelines

eHealth and the Internet of Things

To respond to an ageing population, eHealth strategies offer significant opportunities in achieving a balanced and sustainable healthcare infrastructure. Advances in technology both at the sensor and device levels and in respect of information technology have opened up other possibilities and options. Of significance among these is what is increasingly referred to as the Internet of Things, the interconnection of physical devices to an information infrastructure. The paper therefore sets out to position the Internet of Things at the core of future developments in eHealt

Semantic Gateway as a Service architecture for IoT Interoperability

The Internet of Things (IoT) is set to occupy a substantial component of future Internet. The IoT connects sensors and devices that record physical observations to applications and services of the Internet. As a successor to technologies such as RFID and Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN), the IoT has stumbled into vertical silos of proprietary systems, providing little or no interoperability with similar systems. As the IoT represents future state of the Internet, an intelligent and scalable architecture is required to provide connectivity between these silos, enabling discovery of physical sensors and interpretation of messages between things. This paper proposes a gateway and Semantic Web enabled IoT architecture to provide interoperability between systems using established communication and data standards. The Semantic Gateway as Service (SGS) allows translation between messaging protocols such as XMPP, CoAP and MQTT via a multi-protocol proxy architecture. Utilization of broadly accepted specifications such as W3C's Semantic Sensor Network (SSN) ontology for semantic annotations of sensor data provide semantic interoperability between messages and support semantic reasoning to obtain higher-level actionable knowledge from low-level sensor data.Comment: 16 page

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

Reviews

Eta De Cicco, Mike Farmer and James Hargrave, Using the Internet in Secondary Schools, London: Kogan Page (2nd edn), 2001. ISBN: 0–7494–3459–7. Softback, x + 192 pages, £16.99

Using technology to support curriculum development

This guide takes you through a process of curriculum innovation, from planning to evaluation, and considers: how technology can extend when and where learning can take place; how technology can affect how learning takes place; how technology can involve a broader range of individuals in the learning process

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