Human-centred computer architecture: redesigning the mobile datastore and sharing interface

This dissertation develops a material perspective on Information & Communication Technologies and combines this perspective with a Research through Design approach to interrogate current and develop new mobile sharing interfaces and datastores. through this approach I open up a line of inquiry that connects a material perspective of information with everyday sharing and communication practices as well as with the mobile and cloud architectures that increasingly mediate such practices. With this perspective, I uncover a shifting emphasis of how data is stored on mobile devices and how this data is made available to apps through sharing interfaces that prevent apps from obtaining a proper handle of data to support fundamentally human acts of sharing such as giving. I take these insights to articulate a much wider research agenda to implicate, beyond the sharing interface, the app model and mobile datastore, data exchange protocols, and the Cloud. I formalise the approach I take to bring technically and socially complex, multi-dimensional and changing ideas into correspondence and to openly document this process. I consider the history of the File abstraction and the fundamental grammars of action this abstraction supports (e.g. move, copy, & delete) and the mediating role this abstraction – and its graphical representation – plays in binding together the concerns of system architects, programmers, and users. Finding inspiration in the 30 year history of the file, I look beyond the Desktop to contemporary realms of computing on the mobile and in the Cloud to develop implications for reinvigorated file abstractions, representations, and grammars of actions. First and foremost, these need to have a social perspective on files. To develop and hone such a social perspective, and challenge the assumption that mobile phones are telephones – implying interaction at a distance – I give an interwoven account of the theoretical and practical work I undertook to derive and design a grammar of action – showing – tailored to co-present and co-located interactions. By documenting the process of developing prototypes that explore this design space, and returning to the material perspective I developed earlier, I explore how the grammars of show and gift are incongruent with the specific ways in which information is passed through the mobile’s sharing interface. This insight led me to prototype a mobile datastore – My Stuff – and design new file abstractions that foreground the social nature of the stuff we store and share on our mobiles. I study how that stuff is handled and shared in the Cloud by developing, documenting, and interrogating a cloud service to facilitate sharing, and implement grammars of actions to support and better align with human communication and sharing acts. I conclude with an outlook on the powerful generative metaphor of casting mobile media files as digital possessions to support and develop human-centred computer architecture that give people better awareness and control over the stuff that matters to them

Declarative Setup-free Web Application Prototyping Combining Local and Cloud Datastores

The trend of “open data” coupled with the recentsadvancement in web development technologies and thesproliferation of JavaScript frameworks has helped popularizesprogramming of interactive web applications. Still, some of thescommon features of today’s web applications that access datasfrom own data stores or from web services require a complexssetup or a significant amount of programming knowledge, andsthus make it hard for developers to quickly prototype applicationssand iterate on solutions. Therefore, we propose Endev,sa declarative framework for prototyping applications that usescloud data storage or web service data. By not needing to writesany JavaScript code or set up any servers, Endev provides a lowslearning threshold. We show that Endev is perceived useful andseasy to use through a study with 15 developers.QC 20161124</p

The building and application of a semantic platform for an e-research society

This thesis reviews the area of e-Research (the use of electronic infrastructure to support research) and considers how the insight gained from the development of social networking sites in the early 21st century might assist researchers in using this infrastructure. In particular it examines the myExperiment project, a website for e-Research that allows users to upload, share and annotate work flows and associated files, using a social networking framework. This Virtual Organisation (VO) supports many of the attributes required to allow a community of users to come together to build an e-Research society. The main focus of the thesis is how the emerging society that is developing out of my-Experiment could use Semantic Web technologies to provide users with a significantly richer representation of their research and research processes to better support reproducible research. One of the initial major contributions was building an ontology for myExperiment. Through this it became possible to build an API for generating and delivering this richer representation and an interface for querying it. Having this richer representation it has been possible to follow Linked Data principles to link up with other projects that have this type of representation. Doing this has allowed additional data to be provided to the user and has begun to set in context the data produced by myExperiment. The way that the myExperiment project has gone about this task and consideration of how changes may affect existing users, is another major contribution of this thesis. Adding a semantic representation to an emergent e-Research society like myExperiment,has given it the potential to provide additional applications. In particular the capability to support Research Objects, an encapsulation of a scientist's research or research process to support reproducibility. The insight gained by adding a semantic representation to myExperiment, has allowed this thesis to contribute towards the design of the architecture for these Research Objects that use similar Semantic Web technologies. The myExperiment ontology has been designed such that it can be aligned with other ontologies. Scientific Discourse, the collaborative argumentation of different claims and hypotheses, with the support of evidence from experiments, to construct, confirm or disprove theories requires the capability to represent experiments carried out in silico. This thesis discusses how, as part of the HCLS Scientific Discourse subtask group, the myExperiment ontology has begun to be aligned with other scientific discourse ontologies to provide this capability. It also compares this alignment of ontologies with the architecture for Research Objects. This thesis has also examines how myExperiment's Linked Data and that of other projects can be used in the design of novel interfaces. As a theoretical exercise, it considers how this Linked Data might be used to support a Question-Answering system, that would allow users to query myExperiment's data in a more efficient and user-friendly way. It concludes by reviewing all the steps undertaken to provide a semantic platform for an emergent e-Research society to facilitate the sharing of research and its processes to support reproducible research. It assesses their contribution to enhancing the features provided by myExperiment, as well as e-Research as a whole. It considers how the contributions provided by this thesis could be extended to produce additional tools that will allow researchers to make greater use of the rich data that is now available, in a way that enhances their research process rather than significantly changing it or adding extra workload