SEMA4A: An ontology for emergency notification systems accessibility

This is the post-print version of the final paper published in Expert Systems with Applications. 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 @ 2009 Elsevier B.V.Providing alert communication in emergency situations is vital to reduce the number of victims. Reaching this goal is challenging due to users’ diversity: people with disabilities, elderly and children, and other vulnerable groups. Notifications are critical when an emergency scenario is going to happen (e.g. a typhoon approaching) so the ability to transmit notifications to different kind of users is a crucial feature for such systems. In this work an ontology was developed by investigating different sources: accessibility guidelines, emergency response systems, communication devices and technologies, taking into account the different abilities of people to react to different alarms (e.g. mobile phone vibration as an alarm for deafblind people). We think that the proposed ontology addresses the information needs for sharing and integrating emergency notification messages over distinct emergency response information systems providing accessibility under different conditions and for different kind of users.Ministerio de Educación y Cienci

Metrics for the Adaptation of Site Structure

This paper presents an overview of metrics for web site structure and user navigation paths. Particular attention will be paid to the question what these metrics really say about a site and its usage, and how they can be applied for adapting navigation support to the mobile context

Effect of oil palm empty fruit bunches (OPEFB) fibers to the compressive strength and water absorption of concrete

Growing popularity based on environmentally-friendly, low cost and lightweight building materials in the construction industry has led to a need to examine how these characteristics can be achieved and at the same time giving the benefit to the environment and maintain the material requirements based on the standards required. Recycling of waste generated from industrial and agricultural activities as measures of building materials is not only a viable solution to the problem of pollution but also to produce an economic design of building

The Open University Library in your pocket

The Open University library is working to support mobile learners through provision of mobile access to information management skills tutorials, the library website, and the library helpdesk. In 2007, we joined hands with the Athabasca University library team to develop the first mobile-friendly version of our library website. Since then, we have been actively researching and developing around other mobile library services, and more recently have consulted users to identify their requirements and what services they–d prefer to access through mobile phones. Recommendations from this user consultation (and from other sources, including regular users' feedback and by tracking user behavior through Google Analytics) include revamping the mobile version of the Library website to offer only the most used services on the home page, implementing SMS (Short Messaging Service) such as loan reminders or library reference service, and developing a consolidated search to offer results from various sources including the library catalogue and e-journals collection

User-centred design of flexible hypermedia for a mobile guide: Reflections on the hyperaudio experience

A user-centred design approach involves end-users from the very beginning. Considering users at the early stages compels designers to think in terms of utility and usability and helps develop the system on what is actually needed. This paper discusses the case of HyperAudio, a context-sensitive adaptive and mobile guide to museums developed in the late 90s. User requirements were collected via a survey to understand visitors’ profiles and visit styles in Natural Science museums. The knowledge acquired supported the specification of system requirements, helping defining user model, data structure and adaptive behaviour of the system. User requirements guided the design decisions on what could be implemented by using simple adaptable triggers and what instead needed more sophisticated adaptive techniques, a fundamental choice when all the computation must be done on a PDA. Graphical and interactive environments for developing and testing complex adaptive systems are discussed as a further step towards an iterative design that considers the user interaction a central point. The paper discusses how such an environment allows designers and developers to experiment with different system’s behaviours and to widely test it under realistic conditions by simulation of the actual context evolving over time. The understanding gained in HyperAudio is then considered in the perspective of the developments that followed that first experience: our findings seem still valid despite the passed time

A Simple Web Platform Solution for M-Learning

Nowadays the role of educational platforms is more than obvious, thanks to websites and modern platforms like Microsoft SharePoint designed for e-learning. We consider that the next generation of learning platforms will be m-learning platforms. These kind of platforms offer first of all mobility for the potential users of PDAs, pocket PCs, smart phones and other modern mobile devices, discovered and developed in last years. One of the most important aspect of these manners of e-learning is the display mode. Classic systems like personal computers have a bigger screen, modern portable devices have a few inches screens and the problem is to adapt the structure of websites and platforms for pocket PC screens and in the same time to develop the capability to produce same experience and usefulness to all users.Platform, M-learning, Discussion Forum, Search Engine, JavaScript, IIS, Port Forwarding

AdSplit: Separating smartphone advertising from applications

A wide variety of smartphone applications today rely on third-party advertising services, which provide libraries that are linked into the hosting application. This situation is undesirable for both the application author and the advertiser. Advertising libraries require additional permissions, resulting in additional permission requests to users. Likewise, a malicious application could simulate the behavior of the advertising library, forging the user's interaction and effectively stealing money from the advertiser. This paper describes AdSplit, where we extended Android to allow an application and its advertising to run as separate processes, under separate user-ids, eliminating the need for applications to request permissions on behalf of their advertising libraries. We also leverage mechanisms from Quire to allow the remote server to validate the authenticity of client-side behavior. In this paper, we quantify the degree of permission bloat caused by advertising, with a study of thousands of downloaded apps. AdSplit automatically recompiles apps to extract their ad services, and we measure minimal runtime overhead. We also observe that most ad libraries just embed an HTML widget within and describe how AdSplit can be designed with this in mind to avoid any need for ads to have native code