Web GIS for Eelgrass Research

Eelgrass is vital to coastal and marine health. Recognizing and understanding the significance of eelgrass die-offs in San Juan County is essential to identifying potential causes. Eelgrass beds provide habitats for many commercial costal fish and represent immense economic and ecological value. This document details a Web GIS application developed to help monitor the environmental condition of eelgrass and perform data management and spatial analysis in the San Juan Islands with the collaboration of scholars from the University of Redlands. A File Geodatabase was built to store the client’s data and then a web GIS application was developed using the ArcGIS API for JavaScript. The application was customized to enable the client to add new sampling sites, types of measurements, sampling values, view and query records, and visualize data using Esri’s Heat Map Renderer from the JavaScript API

Personalizing the web: A tool for empowering end-users to customize the web through browser-side modification

167 p.Web applications delegate to the browser the final rendering of their pages. Thispermits browser-based transcoding (a.k.a. Web Augmentation) that can be ultimately singularized for eachbrowser installation. This creates an opportunity for Web consumers to customize their Web experiences.This vision requires provisioning adequate tooling that makes Web Augmentation affordable to laymen.We consider this a special class of End-User Development, integrating Web Augmentation paradigms.The dominant paradigm in End-User Development is scripting languages through visual languages.This thesis advocates for a Google Chrome browser extension for Web Augmentation. This is carried outthrough WebMakeup, a visual DSL programming tool for end-users to customize their own websites.WebMakeup removes, moves and adds web nodes from different web pages in order to avoid tabswitching, scrolling, the number of clicks and cutting and pasting. Moreover, Web Augmentationextensions has difficulties in finding web elements after a website updating. As a consequence, browserextensions give up working and users might stop using these extensions. This is why two differentlocators have been implemented with the aim of improving web locator robustness

Personalizing the web: A tool for empowering end-users to customize the web through browser-side modification

167 p.Web applications delegate to the browser the final rendering of their pages. Thispermits browser-based transcoding (a.k.a. Web Augmentation) that can be ultimately singularized for eachbrowser installation. This creates an opportunity for Web consumers to customize their Web experiences.This vision requires provisioning adequate tooling that makes Web Augmentation affordable to laymen.We consider this a special class of End-User Development, integrating Web Augmentation paradigms.The dominant paradigm in End-User Development is scripting languages through visual languages.This thesis advocates for a Google Chrome browser extension for Web Augmentation. This is carried outthrough WebMakeup, a visual DSL programming tool for end-users to customize their own websites.WebMakeup removes, moves and adds web nodes from different web pages in order to avoid tabswitching, scrolling, the number of clicks and cutting and pasting. Moreover, Web Augmentationextensions has difficulties in finding web elements after a website updating. As a consequence, browserextensions give up working and users might stop using these extensions. This is why two differentlocators have been implemented with the aim of improving web locator robustness

A Model-Driven Approach for Mobile Business Intelligence

The concept of Mobile Business Intelligence is nowadays gaining prominence in business markets. With the emergence and evolution of mobile technologies such as smartphones and tablets, the users gain the opportunity to analyze the corporate information, anywhere and anytime, based on charts, tables and dashboards. However, there is also the question of how to provide the freedom to the user to build its own analytical components. This work will address the problem of developing a hybrid mobile solution towards the Business Intelligence domain, offering monitoring services and simultaneously addressing the problem of user empowerment, with easy configuration and semi-automatic generation of analytical widgets. To provide such capacity to the user, the proposed solution is based on the design of a Domain Specific Modeling Language, aligned with the Model-Driven Development approach and inspired by the Product Lines principles. The last part of this work is dedicated to evaluate the language usability based on an empirical test, executed by a set of subjects with different backgrounds of specialization. In this sense, we define two groups: end users and domain experts. The goal is to determine the extent to which the prototype can be used to empower the end users. As support for the analysis we have extracted a set of measures, alongside with the final appreciation from the domain experts group, composed by people currently working on Business Intelligence

Ontology and Knowledge Base of Brittle Deformation Microstructures for the San Andreas Fault Observatory at Depth (SAFOD) Core Samples

The quest to answer fundamental questions and solve complex problems is a principal tenet of Earth science. The pursuit of scientific knowledge has generated profuse research, resulting in a plethora of information-rich resources. This phenomenon offers great potential for scientific discovery. However, a deficiency in information connectivity and processing standards has become evident. This deficiency has resulted in a demand for tools to facilitate and process this upsurge in information. This ontology project is an answer to the demand for information processing tools. The primary purpose of this domain-specific ontology and knowledge base is to organize, connect, and correlate research data related to brittle deformation microstructures. This semantically enabled ontology may be queried to return not only asserted information, but inferred knowledge that may not be evident. In addition, its standardized development in OWL-DL (Web Ontology Language-Description Logic) allows the potential for sharing and reuse among other geologic science communities

Development of the production module of an IoT cloud platform for precision livestock farming

Project Work report presented as partial requirement for obtaining the Master’s degree in Information Management, with a specialization in Knowledge Management and Business IntelligenceThe agricultural livestock production sub-sector is characterized by its many geographically dispersed production points. Records are usually collected in handwritten forms that are then transposed to separate Excel sheets by technical assistants. These documents are used to evaluate "one-shot" results at the end of the animal production batches and are filed together with the other documents in the batch. Most of the collected data is usually not organized in a way that allows easy historical analysis and qualitative assessment of economic and technical results. Farmcontrol, the provider of an IoT solution for livestock farm monitoring wanted to somehow respond to current difficulties and add meaningful context to the enormous stream of sensor data that are generated. Its goal was to present relevant real-time insights to livestock producers while helping organize everyday farm tasks and benchmark results. To tackle this challenge Farmcontrol developed a new module for its cloud software that promoted the current work project

Using WormBase: A Genome Biology Resource for Caenorhabditis elegans and Related Nematodes

WormBase (www.wormbase.org) provides the nematode research community with a centralized database for information pertaining to nematode genes and genomes. As more nematode genome sequences are becoming available and as richer data sets are published, WormBase strives to maintain updated information, displays, and services to facilitate efficient access to and understanding of the knowledge generated by the published nematode genetics literature. This chapter aims to provide an explanation of how to use basic features of WormBase, new features, and some commonly used tools and data queries. Explanations of the curated data and step-by-step instructions of how to access the data via the WormBase website and available data mining tools are provided

Designing graphical interface programming languages for the end user

This thesis sets out to answer three simple questions: What tools are available for novice programmers to program GUIs? Are those tools fulfilling their role? Can anything be done to make better tools? Despite being simple questions, the answers are not so easily constructed. In answering the first question, it was necessary to examine the range of tools available and decide upon criteria which could be used to identify tools aimed specifically at the novice programmer (there being no currently agreed criteria for their identification). Having identified these tools, it was then necessary to construct a framework within which they could be sensibly compared. The answering of the second question required an investigation of what were the successful features of current tools and which features were less successful. Success or failure of given features was determined by research in both programming language design and studies of programmer satisfaction. Having discovered what should be retained and discarded from current systems, the answering of the third question required the construction of new systems through blending elements from visual languages, program editors and fourth generation languages. These final prototypes illustrate a new way of thinking about and constructing the next generation of GUI programming languages for the novice

Aspects of cohesion in web site translation: a translator's perspective

This dissertation investigates the nature of cohesion on a web site and the implications for the web site translator. It approaches the subject from the perspective of the freelance translator. Cohesion traditionally refers to the network of grammatical and lexical items in a text that combine to link different parts of a text and give structure to the text. It is one of the most challenging aspects of translation as each language has its own unique manner in which it employs cohesive devices in the creation of a cohesive text. A web site can be described as a multi-modal and multi-linear instrument of communication where language, image and audio content combine to create cohesion. Hypertext, the defining feature of the World Wide Web has led to a change in the way in which content is accessed, in reading patterns and in the general ordering of information on a web page and web site. Three key areas are identified as being fundamental to web site cohesion, Online Search, Navigation and Page Content, which reflect changing user interaction with the web site as text. Information is now available to the user much in the way that people think, that is, by association rather than in linear sequence. As such, the web site presents a new challenge to the translator in terms of identifying and addressing items that are capable of functioning cohesively on a web site. Traditional models of cohesion are examined and found to be inadequate for the analysis of web site cohesion. A definition of web-specific cohesion is proposed and a model is created for the analysis of aspects of cohesion that are relevant to the translated web site. The model is applied to the English-language content of a corpus of German source-language web sites. The findings are discussed, implications examined, the changing role of the freelance translator in web site translation outlined and topics for further research suggested

Topic driven testing

Modern interactive applications offer so many interaction opportunities that automated exploration and testing becomes practically impossible without some domain specific guidance towards relevant functionality. In this dissertation, we present a novel fundamental graphical user interface testing method called topic-driven testing. We mine the semantic meaning of interactive elements, guide testing, and identify core functionality of applications. The semantic interpretation is close to human understanding and allows us to learn specifications and transfer knowledge across multiple applications independent of the underlying device, platform, programming language, or technology stack—to the best of our knowledge a unique feature of our technique. Our tool ATTABOY is able to take an existing Web application test suite say from Amazon, execute it on ebay, and thus guide testing to relevant core functionality. Tested on different application domains such as eCommerce, news pages, mail clients, it can trans- fer on average sixty percent of the tested application behavior to new apps—without any human intervention. On top of that, topic-driven testing can go with even more vague instructions of how-to descriptions or use-case descriptions. Given an instruction, say “add item to shopping cart”, it tests the specified behavior in an application–both in a browser as well as in mobile apps. It thus improves state-of-the-art UI testing frame- works, creates change resilient UI tests, and lays the foundation for learning, transfer- ring, and enforcing common application behavior. The prototype is up to five times faster than existing random testing frameworks and tests functions that are hard to cover by non-trained approaches.Moderne interaktive Anwendungen bieten so viele Interaktionsmöglichkeiten, dass eine vollständige automatische Exploration und das Testen aller Szenarien praktisch unmöglich ist. Stattdessen muss die Testprozedur auf relevante Kernfunktionalität ausgerichtet werden. Diese Arbeit stellt ein neues fundamentales Testprinzip genannt thematisches Testen vor, das beliebige Anwendungen u ̈ber die graphische Oberfläche testet. Wir untersuchen die semantische Bedeutung von interagierbaren Elementen um die Kernfunktionenen von Anwendungen zu identifizieren und entsprechende Tests zu erzeugen. Statt typischen starren Testinstruktionen orientiert sich diese Art von Tests an menschlichen Anwendungsfällen in natürlicher Sprache. Dies erlaubt es, Software Spezifikationen zu erlernen und Wissen von einer Anwendung auf andere zu übertragen unabhängig von der Anwendungsart, der Programmiersprache, dem Testgerät oder der -Plattform. Nach unserem Kenntnisstand ist unser Ansatz der Erste dieser Art. Wir präsentieren ATTABOY, ein Programm, das eine existierende Testsammlung für eine Webanwendung (z.B. für Amazon) nimmt und in einer beliebigen anderen Anwendung (sagen wir ebay) ausführt. Dadurch werden Tests für Kernfunktionen generiert. Bei der ersten Ausführung auf Anwendungen aus den Domänen Online Shopping, Nachrichtenseiten und eMail, erzeugt der Prototyp sechzig Prozent der Tests automatisch. Ohne zusätzlichen manuellen Aufwand. Darüber hinaus interpretiert themen- getriebenes Testen auch vage Anweisungen beispielsweise von How-to Anleitungen oder Anwendungsbeschreibungen. Eine Anweisung wie "Fügen Sie das Produkt in den Warenkorb hinzu" testet das entsprechende Verhalten in der Anwendung. Sowohl im Browser, als auch in einer mobilen Anwendung. Die erzeugten Tests sind robuster und effektiver als vergleichbar erzeugte Tests. Der Prototyp testet die Zielfunktionalität fünf mal schneller und testet dabei Funktionen die durch nicht spezialisierte Ansätze kaum zu erreichen sind