A news video retrieval framework for the study of implicit relevance feedback.

In this paper, we propose a framework for recording, analysing, indexing and retrieving news videos such as the BBC one o'clock news. We believe that such a framework will be useful to identify implicit indicators of relevance, a nearly untouched area in adaptive multimedia retrieval. Due to its advantages as a Web application and its up-to-date content, it can be a promising approach to motivate a broad quantity of users to interact with the system

Implementation of a User-Centric Context-Aware Playground

Since the introduction of the ubiquitous computing vision by Mark Weiser, we observed quite some research from various R&D projects as well as groups that focused on different aspects in the area of context-awareness. However, there is yet no result which we can easily apply in a real environment. The context-aware service development and deployment process seldom focused on reusability and realistic implementation issues. We believe these issues can be tackled by proposing a complete context-aware system package. In this package both developers and users will be supported. This idea is realised at our department as a context-aware playground. This paper explains the observation on current work and the shortcomings, and proposes how the context-aware playground approach can be a solution

An Adaptive User Interface Framework for eHealth Services based on UIML

New sensory technologies and smaller, more capable mobile devices open opportunities for pervasive computing in the healthcare sector. Patients as well as medical professionals are, from a information and communication technology (ICT) point of view, better equipped than ever before. Despite this, many hospitals and other healthcare service providers have yet to exploit the potential unleashed by these technologies. In this paper, we present a framework for adaptive user interfaces for home care and smart hospital services. The framework uses the current context to provide healthcare professionals or patients with simpler, more efficient user interfaces. In a home care environment, user interface adaption is needed to tailor user interfaces to patients needs and impairments. In a smart hospital, user interface adaption considers medical professionals’ preferences and priorities. In addition, by using context to make input suggestions simplifies the input and limits the scope for errors. Our frameworks uses a modelbased approach and includes the current context in the interface generation process

An investigation of web-based hypermedia design support: methods and tools

Since the Internet networking was first established, the World Wide Web (or WWW) provides a new opportunity to deliver information and to communicate with others. Therefore, many organisations and industries have joined this exciting technology to take advantage of the Web. In recent years, the opportunity has arisen for other tasks to be carried out on the Web apart from delivering information. As the Web applications and documents have become larger and more complex, they have experienced many design and development problems which often lead to very high maintenance cost. To improve the quality of Websites and the structure of information, the designers need structured design methods, guidelines, and tools to assist their work. Some researchers have proposed hypermedia design methods and guidelines, which contain development cycle with formal design techniques to assist the construction of Web page designs. To overcome the design and development problems, this research is carried out by surveying currently available design methods. It shows the ways to apply these methods for developing structured Web sites. The results of this research led to identifying the design stages involved in developing Web sites using hypermedia methods. It also presents a CASE tool to provide a development environment for producing Web pages based on hypermedia design stages. This encourages Web designers to apply structured hypermedia design methods to improve the quality of design and to reduce the maintenance cost. The thesis is relevant for end-users, Web designers from organisations, institutes, and institutes for those who want to apply structured hypermedia design methods for producing their Web documents

Intranet of the future: functional study, comparison of products and practical implementation

Future intranet: functional study, comparison of products and practical implementation 1. Introduction The project has fulfilled three goals: 1) To perform a study of the functionalities which have to be covered in a modern intranet (web 2.0, unified communication, collaboration, etc) 2) To perform a comparison of tools of the market which can be used to implement intranets (commercial and open source products) 3) To test three of these tools (Oracle WebCenter, Liferay Portal and Microsoft SharePoint) and develop a prototype with Oracle WebCenter. In addition, it includes a research about the evolution of the Intranets among the time, as well as a work to discover the current state of this kind of platforms over the entire world. In this introductory research it is also convenient to include other topics which are not strictly technical involving the use of this Intranet. To be more concrete, there is an analysis of the importance of the human role and management of the Intranet, the process of deploying a new Intranet in an organization and methods to evaluate the performance of this new system.   2. Functional study The approach taken to fulfil this goal is to develop a theoretical model describing the relationship between the Intranet and its users, and a complete set of functionalities which could be covered in the Intranet of the future. These functionalities are categorized in groups. The project describes these groups and the functionalities included on them. 3. Comparison of products The project will describe and compare several technologies which can be used to develop an Intranet that we have previously modelled. The purpose here is to discover the strong points and weaknesses of each technology if it was used to develop the Intranet we desire. After having done such a review, the project focuses on three technologies and performs an extensive evaluation of them. Finally, an extensive comparison between these three technologies is done, highlighting where they offer better solutions and performance compared to the other possibilities. 4. Practical implementation The project focuses on three technologies: Oracle WebCenter, Liferay Portal and Microsoft SharePoint. Then, a prototype which covers a set of functionalities of the modelled Intranet has been built with Oracle WebCenter

Using Rules to Adapt Applications for Business Models with High Evolutionary Rates

Nowadays, business models are in permanent evolution since the requirements belongs to a rapidly evolving world. In a context where communications all around the world travel so fast the business models need to be adapted permanently to the information the managers receive. In such world, traditional software development, needed for adapting software to changes, do not work properly since business changes need to be in exploitation in shorter times. In that situation, it is needed to go quicker from the business idea to the exploitation environment. This issue can be solved accelerating the development speed: from the expert to the customer, with no –or few, technical intervention. This paper proposes an approach to empower domain experts in developing adaptability solutions by using automated sets of production rules in a friendly way. Furthermore, a use case that implements this kind of development was used in a real problem prototype