Callimachus DL: using semantics to enhance search and etrieval in a digital library.

Proceedings of: First World Summit on the Knowledge Society, (WSKS 2008), Athens, Greece, September 24-26, 2008Among the challenges of classifying, locating and accessing knowledge in Digital Libraries tackling with the huge amount of resources the Web provides, improving Digital Libraries by means of different strategies, particularly, using semantics remains a promising and interesting approach. In this paper, we present CallimachusDL, a semantics-based Digital Library which provides faceted search, enhanced access possibilities and a proof-of-concept implementation.Publicad

An Analysis of Scripting Languages for Research in Applied Computing

There are several scripting languages that exist today. However, some are used more frequently and popular than others. This is due to certain characteristics and features that they possess. Particularly in applied computing fields like software engineering, bioinformatics and computational biology, scripting languages are gaining popularity. This paper presents a comparative study of ten popular scripting languages that are used in the above mentioned fields/area. For making comparison, we have identified the factors against which these languages are evaluated. Accordingly, based on selected criteria we determine their suitability in the fields of software engineering, bioinformatics and computational biology research. This will serve as a guide to researchers to choose the appropriate scripting language in the various fields

The usefulness of Usability and User Experience evaluation methods on an e-Learning platform development from a developer's perspective: A case study

The development of a web platform is a complex and interdisciplinary task, where people with different roles such as project manager, designer or developer participate. Different usability and User Experience evaluation methods can be used in each stage of the development life cycle, but not all of them have the same influence in the software development and in the final product or system. This article presents the study of the impact of these methods applied in the context of an e-Learning platform development. The results show that the impact has been strong from a developer's perspective. Developer team members considered that usability and User Experience evaluation allowed them mainly to identify design mistakes, improve the platform's usability and understand the end users and their needs in a better way. Interviews with potential users, clickmaps and scrollmaps were rated as the most useful methods. Finally, these methods were considered unanimously very useful in the context of the entire software development, only comparable to SCRUM meetings and overcoming the rest of involved factors

Framework for the declarative implementation of native mobile applications

The development of connected mobile applications for a broad audience is a complex task because of the existing device diversity. In order to soothe this situation, device-independent approaches are aimed at implementing platform-independent applications, hiding the differences among the diverse families and models of mobile devices. Most of the existing approaches are based on the imperative definition of applications, which are either compiled to a native application, or executed in a Web browser. The client and server sides of applications are implemented separately, using different mechanisms for data synchronisation. In this study, the authors propose device-independent mobile application generation (DIMAG), a framework for defining native device-independent client-server applications based on the declarative specification of application workflow, state and data synchronisation, user interface and data queries. The authors have designed DIMAG considering the dynamic addition of new types of devices, and facilitating the generation of applications for new target platforms. DIMAG has been implemented taking advantage of existing standard

The dynamics of Internet publishing on the computer book industry

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, System Design and Management Program; and, (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Civil and Environmental Engineering, 2006.Includes bibliographical references (p. 61-64).The Internet has been a disruptive force for many industries, but perhaps none more so than in the publishing business. While many segments of the publishing industry have made attempts to use the Internet to augment or replace existing revenue sources, none has done as little with the Internet as book publishers. This thesis will examine the computer book niche of the publishing business, review various Internet publishing models that have been employed to date, and outline opportunities and challenges that computer book publishers should consider to stay viable in the Internet age. An analysis of various Internet publishing business models will be covered along with a discussion of how Internet publishing can facilitate better methods and processes for developing content.by Robbie Allen.S.M

Uma abordagem para a integração dinâmica de serviços web em portais

Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Centro Tecnológico. Programa de Pós-Graduação em Engenharia Elétrica.O desenvolvimento de aplicações baseadas no paradigma de Arquiteturas Orientadas a Serviços (ou SOA) vem tendo um grande e rápido crescimento nos últimos tempos como uma forma de reduzir custos e o tempo de desenvolvimento de software. Do ponto de vista de implementação, a tecnologia dos serviços web vem sendo a mais amplamente utilizada e adotada pelas principais empresas para seus sistemas de software. Serviços web provêem uma interface de invocação bem de?nida, mas apenas para outras aplicações. Para usuários, faz-se necessário o desenvolvimento de uma interface de usuário para cada serviço. Paralelamente a isto, cada vez mais as empresas utilizam portais como ambiente de interação usuário-aplicações, permitindo inclusive personalizações de acesso e visualização. Todavia, com as tecnologias atualmente disponíveis, o desenvolvimento e implantação de interfaces de usuário para serviços web em portais requerem por parte do programador grande conhecimento de uma série de tecnologias de informação, além de ser um processo relativamente lento e custoso. Esta dissertação propõe uma abordagem que automatiza esse processo. Ela permite que se gere dentro de um portal, de forma automática e dinâmica, a interface de usuário para um serviço baseado em seu descritor. Através desta, usuários podem fazer invocações ao serviço de forma dinâmica. Com vistas a analisar e avaliar a proposta, um componente genérico de portal foi implementado. The development of applications based on the Service-Oriented Architecture (or SOA) paradigm is growing greatly and fastly nowadays as a way to reduce costs and time of software development. From the implementation point of view, the web services technology is clearly the most used and adopted one by the main companies for theis software systems. Web services have well defined invocation interfaces, but only for other applications. For end-users, it is rather necessary to develop a user interface for each service. Alongside this, portals have been more and more used by companies for user-applications interaction, also allowing personalization of access and visualization. However, using the current technologies, the development and deployment of user interfaces for web services in portals requires, from the programmer side, great knowledge of a good number of associated information technologies, besides being a relatively slow and costly process. This dissertation proposes an approach that automates this process. It allows the automatic and dynamic generation of the web service#s user interface in a portal, based on the service descriptor. Through this interface, users can invoke services dynamically. In order to assess and to evaluate the proposal, a generic portal component has been implemented

Information search and similarity based on Web 2.0 and semantic technologies

The World Wide Web provides a huge amount of information described in natural language at the current society’s disposal. Web search engines were born from the necessity of finding a particular piece of that information. Their ease of use and their utility have turned these engines into one of the most used web tools at a daily basis. To make a query, users just have to introduce a set of words - keywords - in natural language and the engine answers with a list of ordered resources which contain those words. The order is given by ranking algorithms. These algorithms use basically two types of features: dynamic and static factors. The dynamic factor has into account the query; that is, those documents which contain the keywords used to describe the query are more relevant for that query. The hyperlinks structure among documents is an example of a static factor of most current algorithms. For example, if most documents link to a particular document, this document may have more relevance than others because it is more popular. Even though currently there is a wide consensus on the good results that the majority of web search engines provides, these tools still suffer from some limitations, basically 1) the loneliness of the searching activity itself; and 2) the simple recovery process, based mainly on offering the documents that contains the exact terms used to describe the query. Considering the first problem, there is no doubt in the lonely and time-consuming process of searching relevant information in the World Wide Web. There are thousands of users out there that repeat previously executed queries, spending time in taking decisions of which documents are relevant or not; decisions that may have been taken previously and that may be do the job for similar or identical queries for other users. Considering the second problem, the textual nature of the current Web makes the reasoning capability of web search engines quite restricted; queries and web resources are described in natural language that, in some cases, can lead to ambiguity or other semantic-related difficulties. Computers do not know text; however, if semantics is incorporated to the text, meaning and sense is incorporated too. This way, queries and web resources will not be mere sets of terms, but lists of well-defined concepts. This thesis proposes a semantic layer, known as Itaca, which joins simplicity and effectiveness in order to endow with semantics both the resources stored in the World Wide Web and the queries used by users to find those resources. This is achieved through collaborative annotations and relevance feedback made by the users themselves, which describe both the queries and the web resources by means of Wikipedia concepts. Itaca extends the functional capabilities of current web search engines, providing a new ranking algorithm without dispensing traditional ranking models. Experiments show that this new architecture offers more precision in the final results obtained, keeping the simplicity and usability of the web search engines existing so far. Its particular design as a layer makes feasible its inclusion to current engines in a simple way.Internet pone a disposición de la sociedad una enorme cantidad de información descrita en lenguaje natural. Los buscadores web nacieron de la necesidad de encontrar un fragmento de información entre tanto volumen de datos. Su facilidad de manejo y su utilidad los han convertido en herramientas de uso diario entre la población. Para realizar una consulta, el usuario sólo tiene que introducir varias palabras clave en lenguaje natural y el buscador responde con una lista de recursos que contienen dichas palabras, ordenados en base a algoritmos de ranking. Estos algoritmos usan dos tipos de factores básicos: factores dinámicos y estáticos. El factor dinámico tiene en cuenta la consulta en sí; es decir, aquellos documentos donde estén las palabras utilizadas para describir la consulta serán más relevantes para dicha consulta. La estructura de hiperenlaces en los documentos electrónicos es un ejemplo de factor estático. Por ejemplo, si muchos documentos enlazan a otro documento, éste último documento podrá ser más relevante que otros. Si bien es cierto que actualmente hay consenso entre los buenos resultados de estos buscadores, todavía adolecen de ciertos problemas, destacando 1) la soledad en la que un usuario realiza una consulta; y 2) el modelo simple de recuperación, basado en ver si un documento contiene o no las palabras exactas usadas para describir la consulta. Con respecto al primer problema, no hay duda de que navegar en busca de cierta información relevante es una práctica solitaria y que consume mucho tiempo. Hay miles de usuarios ahí fuera que repiten sin saberlo una misma consulta, y las decisiones que toman muchos de ellos, descartando la información irrelevante y quedándose con la que realmente es útil, podrían servir de guía para otros muchos. Con respecto al segundo, el carácter textual de la Web actual hace que la capacidad de razonamiento en los buscadores se vea limitada, pues las consultas y los recursos están descritos en lenguaje natural que en ocasiones da origen a la ambigüedad. Los equipos informáticos no comprenden el texto que se incluye. Si se incorpora semántica al lenguaje, se incorpora significado, de forma que las consultas y los recursos electrónicos no son meros conjuntos de términos, sino una lista de conceptos claramente diferenciados. La presente tesis desarrolla una capa semántica, Itaca, que dota de significado tanto a los recursos almacenados en la Web como a las consultas que pueden formular los usuarios para encontrar dichos recursos. Todo ello se consigue a través de anotaciones colaborativas y de relevancia realizadas por los propios usuarios, que describen tanto consultas como recursos electrónicos mediante conceptos extraídos de Wikipedia. Itaca extiende las características funcionales de los buscadores web actuales, aportando un nuevo modelo de ranking sin tener que prescindir de los modelos actualmente en uso. Los experimentos demuestran que aporta una mayor precisión en los resultados finales, manteniendo la simplicidad y usabilidad de los buscadores que se conocen hasta ahora. Su particular diseño, a modo de capa, hace que su incorporación a buscadores ya existentes sea posible y sencilla.Programa Oficial de Posgrado en Ingeniería TelemáticaPresidente: Asunción Gómez Pérez.- Secretario: Mario Muñoz Organero.- Vocal: Anselmo Peñas Padill