Coupling BIM and game engine technologies for construction knowledge enhancement

Interactions and collaboration between parties in construction projects are often characterised by misunderstandings and poor information exchange. Game engine technologies, when employed with building information modelling (BIM), can help address these shortcomings. Quite often, the visualisation capabilities of BIM models are not explored fully partly because of their limited interactive capability. While game engines are powerful in visualisation and interactions in the gaming industry, the literature suggests a lack of understanding of the applicability of the same in construction. This study investigates the potential of the use of game engines in construction practice which culminated in a framework that can guide the implementation of the same in enhancing interactive building walkthroughs

The evolution of learning object repository technologies: Portals for On-line Objects for Learning

Learning objects are the digital files that are used to construct e-learning experiences, and repositories provide mechanisms to encourage their discovery, exchange, and reuse. Portals for On-line Objects in Learning (POOL) is a consortium project of the TeleLearning NCE to build a learning object repository scalable to the national level. Funded in part by the CANARIE Learning Program, POOL efforts have resulted in the development of two focal technologies: POOL, POND and SPLASH, a distributed architecture for a peer-to-peer network of learning object repositories; and CanCore, a practical metadata protocol for cataloguing learning objects. The authors conjecture that the technology of learning objects and repositories is in an early phase of development and that significant evolution can be expected as user communities form, protocols emerge for the functional linking of these structures, and the underlying technology becomes less visible

Towards the realisation of an integratated decision support environment for organisational decision making

Traditional decision support systems are based on the paradigm of a single decision maker working at a stand‐alone computer or terminal who has a specific decision to make with a specific goal in mind. Organizational decision support systems aim to support decision makers at all levels of an organization (from executive, middle management managers to operators), who have a variety of decisions to make, with different priorities, often in a distributed and dynamic environment. Such systems need to be designed and developed with extra functionality to meet the challenges such as collaborative working. This paper proposes an Integrated Decision Support Environment (IDSE) for organizational decision making. The IDSE distinguishes itself from traditional decision support systems in that it can flexibly configure and re‐configure its functions to support various decision applications. IDSE is an open software platform which allows its users to define their own decision processes and choose their own exiting decision tools to be integrated into the platform. The IDSE is designed and developed based on distributed client/server networking, with a multi‐tier integration framework for consistent information exchange and sharing, seamless process co‐ordination and synchronisation, and quick access to packaged and legacy systems. The prototype of the IDSE demonstrates good performance in agile response to fast changing decision situations

Digital libraries for the preservation of research methods and associated artifacts

New digital artifacts are emerging in data-intensive science. For example, scientific workflows are executable descriptions of scientific procedures that define the sequence of computational steps in an automated data analysis, supporting reproducible research and the sharing and replication of best-practice and know-how through reuse. Workflows are specified at design time and interpreted through their execution in a variety of situations, environments, and domains. Hence it is essential to preserve both their static and dynamic aspects, along with the research context in which they are used. To achieve this, we propose the use of multidimensional digital objects (Research Objects) that aggregate the resources used and/or produced in scientific investigations, including workflow models, provenance of their executions, and links to the relevant associated resources, along with the provision of technological support for their preservation and efficient retrieval and reuse. In this direction, we specified a software architecture for the design and implementation of a Research Object preservation system, and realized this architecture with a set of services and clients, drawing together practices in digital libraries, preservation systems, workflow management, social networking and Semantic Web technologies. In this paper, we describe the backbone system of this realization, a digital library system built on top of dLibra

A Model-Driven Framework for Enabling Flexible and Robust Mobile Data Collection Applications

In the light of the ubiquitous digital transformation, smart mobile technology has become a salient factor for enabling large-scale data collection scenarios. Structured instruments (e.g., questionnaires) are frequently used to collect data in various application domains, like healthcare, psychology, and social sciences. In current practice, instruments are usually distributed and filled out in a paper-based fashion (e.g., paper-and-pencil questionnaires). The widespread use of smart mobile devices, like smartphones or tablets, offers promising perspectives for the controlled collection of accurate data in high quality. The design, implementation and deployment of mobile data collection applications, however, is a challenging endeavor. First, various mobile operating systems need to be properly supported, taking their short release cycles into account. Second, domain-specific peculiarities need to be flexibly aligned with mobile application development. Third, domain-specific usability guidelines need to be obeyed. Altogether, these challenges turn both programming and maintaining of mobile data collection applications into a costly, time-consuming, and error-prone endeavor. The Ph.D. thesis at hand presents an advanced framework that shall enable domain experts to transform paper-based instruments to mobile data collection applications. The latter, in turn, can then be deployed to and executed on heterogeneous smart mobile devices. In particular, the framework shall empower domain experts (i.e., end-users) to flexibly design and create robust mobile data collection applications on their own; i.e., without need to involve IT experts or mobile application developers. As major benefit, the framework enables the development of sophisticated mobile data collection applications by orders of magnitude faster compared to current approaches, and relieves domain experts from manual tasks like, for example, digitizing and analyzing the collected data

A study of the security implications involved with the use of executable World Wide Web content

Malicious executable code is nothing new. While many consider that the concept of malicious code began in the 1980s when the first PC viruses began to emerge, the concept does in fact date back even earlier. Throughout the history of malicious code, methods of hostile code delivery have mirrored prevailing patterns of code distribution. In the 1980s, file infecting and boot sector viruses were common, mirroring the fact that during this time, executable code was commonly transferred via floppy disks. Since the 1990s email has been a major vector for malicious code attacks. Again, this mirrors the fact that during this period of time email has been a common means of sharing code and documents. This thesis examines another model of executable code distribution. It considers the security risks involved with the use of executable code embedded or attached to World Wide Web pages. In particular, two technologies are examined. Sun Microsystems\u27 Java Programming Language and Microsoft\u27s ActiveX Control Architecture are both technologies that can be used to connect executable program code to World Wide Web pages. This thesis examines the architectures on which these technologies are based, as well as the security and trust models that they implement. In doing so, this thesis aims to assess the level of risk posed by such technologies and to highlight similar risks that might occur with similar future technologies. ()

Executable formal specifications of complex distributed systems with CoreASM

Formal specifications play a crucial role in the design of reliable complex software systems. Executable formal specifications allow the designer to attain early validation and verification of design using static analysis techniques and accurate simulation of the runtime behavior of the system-to-be. With increasing complexity of software-intensive computer-based systems and the challenges of validation and verification of abstract software models prior to coding, the need for interactive software tools supporting executable formal specifications is even more evident. In this paper, we discuss how CoreASM, an environment for writing and running executable specifications according to the ASM method, provides flexibility and manages the complexity by using an innovative extensible language architecture