Development of collaborative editing applications through semantic publish-subscribe platforms

Cloud computing revolutionized the way resources (i.e. services and data) are accessed and used. Among the many changes in data processing and service provision paradigms, Software as a Service (SaaS) and collaborative editing are two of the most significant. This paper presents an approach based on semantic publish/subscribe paradigm to the development of collaborative editing applications. The main aim of this research work consists in exploiting emerging technologies (i.e. semantic web data representation formalisms, publish-subscribe platforms) in order to (1) overcome limitations coming from the traditional paradigm of single-author workflows, (2) enhance the editing capabilities of the users, (3) ease the development and maintainment of applications and (4) provide a shared high- level abstraction of the documents that fosters information-level interoperability and reusability. The proposed approach is then validated through an ad-hoc vector graphics application, SCEd (Semantic Collaborative Editor) built upon a SPARQL Event Processing Architecture derived from the Smart-M3 semantic publish-subscribe platform

Developing front-end Web 2.0 technologies to access services, content and things in the future Internet

The future Internet is expected to be composed of a mesh of interoperable web services accessible from all over the web. This approach has not yet caught on since global user?service interaction is still an open issue. This paper states one vision with regard to next-generation front-end Web 2.0 technology that will enable integrated access to services, contents and things in the future Internet. In this paper, we illustrate how front-ends that wrap traditional services and resources can be tailored to the needs of end users, converting end users into prosumers (creators and consumers of service-based applications). To do this, we propose an architecture that end users without programming skills can use to create front-ends, consult catalogues of resources tailored to their needs, easily integrate and coordinate front-ends and create composite applications to orchestrate services in their back-end. The paper includes a case study illustrating that current user-centred web development tools are at a very early stage of evolution. We provide statistical data on how the proposed architecture improves these tools. This paper is based on research conducted by the Service Front End (SFE) Open Alliance initiative

Ubiquitous Semantic Applications

As Semantic Web technology evolves many open areas emerge, which attract more research focus. In addition to quickly expanding Linked Open Data (LOD) cloud, various embeddable metadata formats (e.g. RDFa, microdata) are becoming more common. Corporations are already using existing Web of Data to create new technologies that were not possible before. Watson by IBM an artificial intelligence computer system capable of answering questions posed in natural language can be a great example. On the other hand, ubiquitous devices that have a large number of sensors and integrated devices are becoming increasingly powerful and fully featured computing platforms in our pockets and homes. For many people smartphones and tablet computers have already replaced traditional computers as their window to the Internet and to the Web. Hence, the management and presentation of information that is useful to a user is a main requirement for today’s smartphones. And it is becoming extremely important to provide access to the emerging Web of Data from the ubiquitous devices. In this thesis we investigate how ubiquitous devices can interact with the Semantic Web. We discovered that there are five different approaches for bringing the Semantic Web to ubiquitous devices. We have outlined and discussed in detail existing challenges in implementing this approaches in section 1.2. We have described a conceptual framework for ubiquitous semantic applications in chapter 4. We distinguish three client approaches for accessing semantic data using ubiquitous devices depending on how much of the semantic data processing is performed on the device itself (thin, hybrid and fat clients). These are discussed in chapter 5 along with the solution to every related challenge. Two provider approaches (fat and hybrid) can be distinguished for exposing data from ubiquitous devices on the Semantic Web. These are discussed in chapter 6 along with the solution to every related challenge. We conclude our work with a discussion on each of the contributions of the thesis and propose future work for each of the discussed approach in chapter 7

Mapping web personal learning environments

A recent trend in web development is to build platforms which are carefully designed to host a plurality of software components (sometimes called widgets or plugins) which can be organized or combined (mashed-up) at user's convenience to create personalized environments. The same holds true for the web development of educational applications. The degree of personalization can depend on the role of users such as in traditional virtual learning environment, where the components are chosen by a teacher in the context of a course. Or, it can be more opened as in a so-called personalized learning environment (PLE). It now exists a wide array of available web platforms exhibiting different functionalities but all built on the same concept of aggregating components together to support different tasks and scenarios. There is now an overlap between the development of PLE and the more generic developments in web 2.0 applications such as social network sites. This article shows that 6 more or less independent dimensions allow to map the functionalities of these platforms: the screen dimensionmaps the visual integration, the data dimension maps the portability of data, the temporal dimension maps the coupling between participants, the social dimension maps the grouping of users, the activity dimension maps the structuring of end users–interactions with the environment, and the runtime dimensionmaps the flexibility in accessing the system from different end points. Finally these dimensions are used to compare 6 familiar Web platforms which could potentially be used in the construction of a PLE

Lostrego: a distributed stream-based infrastructure for the real-time gathering and analysis of heterogeneous educational data

The quick technological evolution of the last decades has also reached learning environments, where the use of networked computing devices such as laptops, smartphones, tablets, IoT devices, servers, etc. is continuously growing. In particular, those computerized learning environments have the potential to track the activity of teachers and students in them, which enables the development of innovative applications that enrich the learning process by analyzing the collected data. The majority of related work in this field has been centered on batch gathering and analysis of the data. However, in order to integrate more reactive applications, there is a need for an infrastructure that enables the real-time collection and analysis of data in learning environments. Such an infrastructure should be scalable and flexible enough to cope with heterogeneous data coming from different types of learning settings. This paper presents Lostrego, a stream-based, modular, scalable and flexible distributed infrastructure that allows the gathering and analysis of educational data from heterogeneous data sources in a real-time fashion. Lostrego applications are composed by interconnected services that can be reused in different courses. The results of the evaluation of Lostrego in two editions of a computer programming course with 233 students and 384,702 gathered events are also reported.This work was partially funded by: the Spanish Competitiveness and Economy Ministry through projects “RESET UC3M: Reformulando Ecosistemas Escalables Educativos” (TIN 2014 53199 C3 1 R) and “Hermes Smartdriver. Conducción eficiente y procesamiento semántico de la información” (TIN2013 46801 C4 2 R); and by the Community of Madrid through its regional project “eMadrid” (S2013/ICE 2715)

IoT Middleware Platforms for Smart Energy Systems: An Empirical Expert Survey

Middleware platforms are key technology in any Internet of Things (IoT) system, considering their role in managing the intermediary communications between devices and applications. In the energy sector, it has been shown that IoT devices enable the integration of all network assets to one large distributed system. This comes with significant benefits, such as improving energy efficiency, boosting the generation of renewable energy, reducing maintenance costs and increasing comfort. Various existing IoT middlware solutions encounter several problems that limit their performance, such as vendor locks. Hence, this paper presents a literature review and an expert survey on IoT middleware platforms in energy systems, in order to provide a set of tools and functionalities to be supported by any future efficient, flexible and interoperable IoT middleware considering the market needs. The analysis of the results shows that experts currently use the IoT middleware mainly to deploy services such as visualization, monitoring and benchmarking of energy consumption, and energy optimization is considered as a future application to target. Likewise, non-functional requirements, such as security and privacy, play vital roles in the IoT platforms’ performances

Supporting public availability and accessibility with Elvin: experiences and reflections.

We provide a retrospective account of how a generic event notification service called Elvin and a suite of simple client applications: CoffeeBiff, Tickertape and Tickerchat, came to be used within our organisation to support awareness and interaction. After overviewing Elvin and its clients, we outline various experiences from data collated across two studies where Elvin and its clients have been used to augment the workaday world to support interaction, to make digital actions visible, to make physical actions available beyond the location of action, and to support content and socially based information filtering. We suggest there are both functional and technical reasons for why Elvin works for enabling awareness and interaction. Functionally, it provides a way to produce, gather and redistribute information from everyday activities (via Elvin) and to give that information a perceptible form (via the various clients) that can be publicly available and accessible as a resource for awareness. The integration of lightweight chat facilities with these information sources enables awareness to easily flow into interaction, starting to re-connect bodies to actions, and starting to approximate the easy flow of interaction that happens when we are co-located. Technically, the conceptual simplicity of the Elvin notification, the wide availability of its APIs, and the generic functionality of its clients, especially Tickertape, have made the use of the service appealing to developers and users for a wide range of uses

An integrated approach to preparing, publishing, presenting and preserving theses

[Abstract]: This paper describes progress on a project funded by the Australian government to create Free software; the Integrated Content Environment for research and scholarship (ICE-RS). ICE-RS is a multi-faceted project which will add value to finished theses by making them available in both HTML and PDF, as well as providing a mechanism for packaging multimedia theses. The project will also concentrate on providing services for thesis production, with version control, automated backup and collaboration services. The paper begins with the established content management system that is the basis for the project, ICE-RS , originally developed to create courseware packages. ICE includes distributed, version controlled collaboration, using word processing software and works on multiple platforms, with standard document formats. We survey other approaches to content authoring and publishing for ETDs. We showcase exploratory work on integration of the thesis writing process with Institutional Repository software including publishing theses in both PDF and HTML with preservation and descriptive metadata. The presentation will include demonstrations of thesis production at all stages of development from proposal to completion. In a more speculative vein, we will discuss opportunities for institutions to provide new levels of support for candidates via automated thesis “dashboard” progress reports, supervisor and examiner annotation and comment and support for copyright considerations as early as possible in the process

Understanding Federation: An Analytical Framework for the Interoperability of Social Networking Sites

Although social networking has become a remarkable feature in the Web, full interoperability has not arrived. This work explores the main 5 paradigms of interoperability across social networking sites, corresponding to the layers in which we an find interoperability. Building on those, a novel analytical framework for SNS interoperability is introduced. Seven representative interoperability SNS technologies are compared using the proposed framework. The analysis exposes an overwhelming disparity and fragmentation in the solutions for tackling the same problems. Although there are a few solutions where consensus is reached and are widely adopted (e.g. in object IDs), there are multiple central issues that are still far from being widely standarized (e.g. in profile representation). In addition, several areas have been identified where there is clear room for improvement, such as privacy controls or data synchronization