Program your city: Designing an urban integrated open data API

Cities accumulate and distribute vast sets of digital information. Many decision-making and planning processes in councils, local governments and organisations are based on both real-time and historical data. Until recently, only a small, carefully selected subset of this information has been released to the public – usually for specific purposes (e.g. train timetables, release of planning application through websites to name just a few). This situation is however changing rapidly. Regulatory frameworks, such as the Freedom of Information Legislation in the US, the UK, the European Union and many other countries guarantee public access to data held by the state. One of the results of this legislation and changing attitudes towards open data has been the widespread release of public information as part of recent Government 2.0 initiatives. This includes the creation of public data catalogues such as data.gov.au (U.S.), data.gov.uk (U.K.), data.gov.au (Australia) at federal government levels, and datasf.org (San Francisco) and data.london.gov.uk (London) at municipal levels. The release of this data has opened up the possibility of a wide range of future applications and services which are now the subject of intensified research efforts. Previous research endeavours have explored the creation of specialised tools to aid decision-making by urban citizens, councils and other stakeholders (Calabrese, Kloeckl & Ratti, 2008; Paulos, Honicky & Hooker, 2009). While these initiatives represent an important step towards open data, they too often result in mere collections of data repositories. Proprietary database formats and the lack of an open application programming interface (API) limit the full potential achievable by allowing these data sets to be cross-queried. Our research, presented in this paper, looks beyond the pure release of data. It is concerned with three essential questions: First, how can data from different sources be integrated into a consistent framework and made accessible? Second, how can ordinary citizens be supported in easily composing data from different sources in order to address their specific problems? Third, what are interfaces that make it easy for citizens to interact with data in an urban environment? How can data be accessed and collected

An Effective End-User Development Approach Through Domain-Specific Mashups for Research Impact Evaluation

Over the last decade, there has been growing interest in the assessment of the performance of researchers, research groups, universities and even countries. The assessment of productivity is an instrument to select and promote personnel, assign research grants and measure the results of research projects. One particular assessment approach is bibliometrics i.e., the quantitative analysis of scientific publications through citation and content analysis. However, there is little consensus today on how research evaluation should be performed, and it is commonly acknowledged that the quantitative metrics available today are largely unsatisfactory. A number of different scientific data sources available on the Web (e.g., DBLP, Google Scholar) that are used for such analysis purposes. Taking data from these diverse sources, performing the analysis and visualizing results in different ways is not a trivial and straight forward task. Moreover, people involved in such evaluation processes are not always IT experts and hence not capable to crawl data sources, merge them and compute the needed evaluation procedures. The recent emergence of mashup tools has refueled research on end-user development, i.e., on enabling end-users without programming skills to produce their own applications. We believe that the heart of the problem is that it is impractical to design tools that are generic enough to cover a wide range of application domains, powerful enough to enable the specification of non-trivial logic, and simple enough to be actually accessible to non-programmers. This thesis presents a novel approach for an effective end-user development, specifically for non-programmers. That is, we introduce a domain-specific approach to mashups that "speaks the language of users"., i.e., that is aware of the terminology, concepts, rules, and conventions (the domain) the user is comfortable with.Comment: This PhD dissertation consists of 206 page

Collaborative online communities for increased MILSATCOM performance

The Department of Defense and, subsequently, the U.S. Navy have embraced a strategy of exerting influence through information dominance versus amassing a large presence. This philosophy, called Net-centric Warfare, uses sensor and network technology to leverage naval platforms towards realizing effects previously achievable only by a larger force. In adapting this strategy, the U.S. Navy has realized many benefits, but has also increased its reliance on the technologies implementing Net-centric Warfare. One such technology is the U.S. Navy's future Military SATCOM terminal, the Navy Multiband Terminal, which will provide critical off-ship bandwidth required for these leveraging effects. The Navy plans to sustain the NMT system using the same methods as previous systems. When considering Operational Availability, these legacy methods do not adequately address attributes affecting system performance, creating a risk the NMT system will not perform as needed to successfully execute Net-centric Warfare. This risk can be managed by transitioning away from traditional methods to those utilizing online collaborative technologies. These technologies, coined 'Web 2.0," center around member participation to foster communities. Much like the philosophy of Net-centric warfare, these communities leverage the experience of individuals to the benefit of the entire community.http://archive.org/details/collaborativeonl109454523Assistant Program Manager author (civilian).Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited

Coordinating Service Compositions : Model and Infrastructure for Collaborative Creation of Electronic Documents

Electronic documents frequently include contributions from different human and non-human sources. The Web, for instance, offers ever-changing content and services which can perform activities during document creation. This thesis introduces a solution for collaborative document creation which maps contributions of human and non-human participants to software services. The joint flexible composition and coordination of these services leads to a novel understanding of dynamic Web-based documents

Unlocking the potential of public sector information with Semantic Web technology

Governments often hold very rich data and whilst much of this information is published and available for re-use by others, it is often trapped by poor data structures, locked up in legacy data formats or in fragmented databases. One of the great benefits that Semantic Web (SW) technology offers is facilitating the large scale integration and sharing of distributed data sources. At the heart of information policy in the UK, the Office of Public Sector Information (OPSI) is the part of the UK government charged with enabling the greater re-use of public sector information. This paper describes the actions, findings, and lessons learnt from a pilot study, involving several parts of government and the public sector. The aim was to show to government how they can adopt SW technology for the dissemination, sharing and use of its data

Enhancement of the usability of SOA services for novice users

Recently, the automation of service integration has provided a significant advantage in delivering services to novice users. This art of integrating various services is known as Service Composition and its main purpose is to simplify the development process for web applications and facilitates reuse of services. It is one of the paradigms that enables services to end-users (i.e.service provisioning) through the outsourcing of web contents and it requires users to share and reuse services in more collaborative ways. Most service composers are effective at enabling integration of web contents, but they do not enable universal access across different groups of users. This is because, the currently existing content aggregators require complex interactions in order to create web applications (e.g., Web Service Business Process Execution Language (WS-BPEL)) as a result not all users are able to use such web tools. This trend demands changes in the web tools that end-users use to gain and share information, hence this research uses Mashups as a service composition technique to allow novice users to integrate publicly available Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) services, where there is a minimal active web application development. Mashups being the platforms that integrate disparate web Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to create user defined web applications; presents a great opportunity for service provisioning. However, their usability for novice users remains invalidated since Mashup tools are not easy to use they require basic programming skills which makes the process of designing and creating Mashups difficult. This is because Mashup tools access heterogeneous web contents using public web APIs and the process of integrating them become complex since web APIs are tailored by different vendors. Moreover, the design of Mashup editors is unnecessary complex; as a result, users do not know where to start when creating Mashups. This research address the gap between Mashup tools and usability by the designing and implementing a semantically enriched Mashup tool to discover, annotate and compose APIs to improve the utilization of SOA services by novice users. The researchers conducted an analysis of the already existing Mashup tools to identify challenges and weaknesses experienced by novice Mashup users. The findings from the requirement analysis formulated the system usability requirements that informed the design and implementation of the proposed Mashup tool. The proposed architecture addressed three layers: composition, annotation and discovery. The researchers developed a simple Mashup tool referred to as soa-Services Provisioner (SerPro) that allowed novice users to create web application flexibly. Its usability and effectiveness was validated. The proposed Mashup tool enhanced the usability of SOA services, since data analysis and results showed that it was usable to novice users by scoring a System Usability Scale (SUS) score of 72.08. Furthermore, this research discusses the research limitations and future work for further improvements

Web 2.0 and its impact on knowledge and business organizations

Today, information overload and the lack of systems that enable locating employees with the right knowledge or skills are common challenges that large organisations face. This makes knowledge workers to re-invent the wheel and have problems to retrieve information from both internal and external resources. In addition, information is dynamically changing and ownership of data is moving from corporations to the individuals. However, there is a set of web based tools that may cause a major progress in the way people collaborate and share their knowledge. This article aims to analyse the impact of ‘Web 2.0’ on organisational knowledge strategies. A comprehensive literature review was done to present the academic background followed by a review of current ‘Web 2.0’ technologies and assessment of their strengths and weaknesses. As the framework of this study is oriented to business applications, the characteristics of the involved segments and tools were reviewed from an organisational point of view. Moreover, the ‘Enterprise 2.0’ paradigm does not only imply tools but also changes the way people collaborate, the way the work is done (processes) and finally impacts on other technologies. Finally, gaps in the literature in this area are outlined

Information and communication technologies for knowledge management processes in the public sector in Kenya : a case study of the State Department of Infrastructure

Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) are considered facilitators of knowledge management processes in organizations. This study investigated ICTs for knowledge management processes at the State Department of Infrastructure in Kenya. The study’s objectives were to: establish the level of knowledge management awareness, find out knowledge management processes, identify types of ICTs used for knowledge management processes, and identify challenges experienced by State Department of Infrastructure in the use of ICTs for knowledge management processes. The study findings were determined after applying a qualitative research approach and a case study research design. A purposive sampling technique was used to select 21 participants who were heads of sections at the State Department of Infrastructure in Kenya. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews, analyzed and interpreted thematically according to the objectives of the study. Findings of the study revealed that most participants were aware of the meanings of the concepts of knowledge and knowledge management, types of knowledge and importance of knowledge management in the department. Knowledge management processes in the State Department of Infrastructure entail knowledge creation, codification, retention, sharing and storage. ICTs mostly used for knowledge management processes in the department include: emails, mobile phones, desktop computers, computer servers, and flash disks. The department is faced with the challenges of lack of knowledge management strategies, policies and adequate staff awareness on the use of ICTs for knowledge management processes. In conclusion, the State Department of Infrastructure has a functional ICT infrastructure. However, the department is not using ICTs provided by this study’s Web 2.0 driven SECI model for knowledge management processes such as blogs, wikis, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. The study therefore proposes that the State Department of Infrastructure should increase its use of Web 2.0 technologies, collaborative content systems and e-learning technologies. The department should also digitize its records; automate its library services; set up intranet, and adopt a centralized knowledge-based system. Further, Public Service Commission of Kenya should formulate a knowledge management strategy and policy to guide on the use of ICTs for knowledge management processes. This strategy and policy can then be cascaded to public sector organizations such as the State Department of Infrastructure.Information ScienceM.A. (Information Science

A component- and connector-based approach for end-user composite web applications development

Enabling real end-user development is the next logical stage in the evolution of Internet-wide service-based applications. Successful composite applications rely on heavyweight service orchestration technologies that raise the bar far above end-user skills. This weakness can be attributed to the fact that the composition model does not satisfy end-user needs rather than to the actual infrastructure technologies. In our opinion, the best way to overcome this weakness is to offer end-to-end composition from the user interface to service invocation, plus an understandable abstraction of building blocks and a visual composition technique empowering end users to develop their own applications. In this paper, we present a visual framework for end users, called FAST, which fulfils this objective. FAST implements a novel composition model designed to empower non-programmer end users to create and share their own self-service composite applications in a fully visual fashion. We projected the development environment implementing this model as part of the European FP7 FAST Project, which was used to validate the rationale behind our approach