Intelligent m-government services : a mobile-based emergency response system

University of Technology, Sydney. Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology.Recent advances in Internet technologies and services have allowed governments to deal with their citizens in a new way, through mobile platforms. The use of mobile technologies assists people by providing access to information anytime and anywhere. The demand for better, more efficient and more effective government services will put serious pressure on the government with regard to m-Government. m-Government is the next inevitable direction of the evolution of e-Government. In an emergency response system, mobile technology can be used to link citizens, businesses and non-profit organisations. For example, in an emergency situation such as the 9/11 terrorist attack, mobile technology can be used to enhance productivity, connectivity and response and facilitate rapid access to information anytime and anywhere. This was the impetus of this research into emergency response systems based on mobile technology. A mobile-based emergency response system (MERS) is as one of the important new services of m-Government. It aims to support people (mobile users) in emergency situations through their mobile phones by giving them access to essential advice and information. It also provides information to the government to reduce risks. The main goal of this study is to make use of mobile technology to assist in information dissemination and decision making in response to disasters anytime and anywhere. Design research methodology is employed to address the primary research question: How can m-Government be used for dealing with emergency response systems? This research presents an MERS framework that has five main components-register, monitoring, analysis, decision support and warning-aiming to provide a new function and service to m-Government. The proposed framework would also offer a new opportunity for interaction among government, citizens, responders and other nongovernment agencies in emergency situations. According to this MERS framework, relevant information system techniques (algorithms and approaches) were developed to support the most important applications for the MERS. These applications are ontology-based information extraction (OBIE) and aggregation and an ontology-supported case-based reasoning (OS-CBR) approach for the MERS. OBIE has four main functions: to collect unstructured information from short message service (SMS) emergency text messages; to conduct information extraction (IE) and aggregation including lexical analysis, name entity recognition, merging structure, normalisation and duplication; to calculate the similarity of SMS text messages; and to generate query and results presentation. The OS-CBR approach consists of four main functions: data acquisition, knowledge base, case-based reasoning (CBR) component, and knowledge presentation. More important, a MERS prototype system has been designed and developed in this study. Experiments conducted to evaluate the major algorithm, approach and prototype system show that MERS, as an implementation of the IE algorithm and OS-CBR approach, is an effective means of classification in terms of precision, recall, F-measure and overall accuracy

A business planning framework for WiMAX applications

Mobile networking refers to wireless technologies which provide communications between devices. Applications for mobile networking have a broad scope as they can be applied to many situations in either industrial or commercial sectors. The challenge for firms is to better match market-induced variability to the organizational issues and systems necessary for technological innovation. This chapter develops a business planning framework for mobile networking applications. This framework recognises the fluidity of the situation when trying to anticipate and model emerging wireless applications. The business planning framework outlined in this chapter is a generic model which can be used by companies to assess the business case for applications utilizing mobile networking technologies

MAGDA: A Mobile Agent based Grid Architecture

Mobile agents mean both a technology and a programming paradigm. They allow for a flexible approach which can alleviate a number of issues present in distributed and Grid-based systems, by means of features such as migration, cloning, messaging and other provided mechanisms. In this paper we describe an architecture (MAGDA – Mobile Agent based Grid Architecture) we have designed and we are currently developing to support programming and execution of mobile agent based application upon Grid systems

Multimedia delivery in the future internet

The term “Networked Media” implies that all kinds of media including text, image, 3D graphics, audio and video are produced, distributed, shared, managed and consumed on-line through various networks, like the Internet, Fiber, WiFi, WiMAX, GPRS, 3G and so on, in a convergent manner [1]. This white paper is the contribution of the Media Delivery Platform (MDP) cluster and aims to cover the Networked challenges of the Networked Media in the transition to the Future of the Internet. Internet has evolved and changed the way we work and live. End users of the Internet have been confronted with a bewildering range of media, services and applications and of technological innovations concerning media formats, wireless networks, terminal types and capabilities. And there is little evidence that the pace of this innovation is slowing. Today, over one billion of users access the Internet on regular basis, more than 100 million users have downloaded at least one (multi)media file and over 47 millions of them do so regularly, searching in more than 160 Exabytes1 of content. In the near future these numbers are expected to exponentially rise. It is expected that the Internet content will be increased by at least a factor of 6, rising to more than 990 Exabytes before 2012, fuelled mainly by the users themselves. Moreover, it is envisaged that in a near- to mid-term future, the Internet will provide the means to share and distribute (new) multimedia content and services with superior quality and striking flexibility, in a trusted and personalized way, improving citizens’ quality of life, working conditions, edutainment and safety. In this evolving environment, new transport protocols, new multimedia encoding schemes, cross-layer inthe network adaptation, machine-to-machine communication (including RFIDs), rich 3D content as well as community networks and the use of peer-to-peer (P2P) overlays are expected to generate new models of interaction and cooperation, and be able to support enhanced perceived quality-of-experience (PQoE) and innovative applications “on the move”, like virtual collaboration environments, personalised services/ media, virtual sport groups, on-line gaming, edutainment. In this context, the interaction with content combined with interactive/multimedia search capabilities across distributed repositories, opportunistic P2P networks and the dynamic adaptation to the characteristics of diverse mobile terminals are expected to contribute towards such a vision. Based on work that has taken place in a number of EC co-funded projects, in Framework Program 6 (FP6) and Framework Program 7 (FP7), a group of experts and technology visionaries have voluntarily contributed in this white paper aiming to describe the status, the state-of-the art, the challenges and the way ahead in the area of Content Aware media delivery platforms