Advanced software development workstation project ACCESS user's guide

ACCESS is a knowledge based software information system designed to assist the user in modifying retrieved software to satisfy user specifications. A user's guide is presented for the knowledge engineer who wishes to create for ACCESS a knowledge base consisting of representations of objects in some software system. This knowledge is accessible to an end user who wishes to use the catalogued software objects to create a new application program or an input stream for an existing system. The application specific portion of an ACCESS knowledge base consists of a taxonomy of object classes, as well as instances of these classes. All objects in the knowledge base are stored in an associative memory. ACCESS provides a standard interface for the end user to browse and modify objects. In addition, the interface can be customized by the addition of application specific data entry forms and by specification of display order for the taxonomy and object attributes. These customization options are described

Locating Agents in RFID Architectures

The use of software agents can create an “intelligent” interface between users’ preferences and the back‐end systems. Agents are now able to interact and communicate with each other, forming a virtual community and feeding back the user with suggestions. Innovative systems related to Asset Tracking, Inventory and Shelving architectures are more often involving advanced communication techniques (e.g., RFID); these systems are responsible for user authentication and objects verification. RFID systems could have jamming situations where many objects are moving at the same time and in the same direction. Moreover, other disadvantages have also been observed, such as hindering further implementations, privacy and security issues problems, in addition to the system’s disruptive behavior in case of crowd checkouts (e.g., Supermarket and Airports). Addressing these disadvantages, this paper proposes a possible integration between a Multi‐Agent framework and an RFID‐based application (back‐end). This integration would allow objects (such as passports or goods) with RFID tags to better check‐out through airports or supermarket gates that contain RFID‐readers

Beyond the Tutorial: Complex Content Models in Fedora 3

4th International Conference on Open RepositoriesThis presentation was part of the session : Fedora User Group PresentationsDate: 2009-05-21 08:30 AM – 10:00 AMThe University of Wisconsin Digital Collections Center recently began a pilot project to create a digital collection of learning objects stored in a Fedora 3.1 repository. This pilot project is the proof-of-concept of many ideas and discussions, extending back for over five years, concerning the problem of storing, searching, and retrieving heterogeneous objects and object types, linked together in complex relations, in a way that is loosely coupled with front-end user display applications. During the course of this presentation, we will describe the issues we've confronted implementing increasingly rich digital collections over the past decade (including some real-life examples of complex digital objects), models we have developed with to resolve many of those issues, and how we have started implementing those models in Fedora 3.1, using the new Content Model functionality

Waltz - An exploratory visualization tool for volume data, using multiform abstract displays

Although, visualization is now widely used, misinterpretations still occur. There are three primary solutions intended to aid a user interpret data correctly. These are: displaying the data in different forms (Multiform visualization); simplifying (or abstracting) the structure of the viewed information; and linking objects and views together (allowing corresponding objects to be jointly manipulated and interrogated). These well-known visualization techniques, provide an emphasis towards the visualization display. We believe however that current visualization systems do not effectively utilise the display, for example, often placing it at the end of a long visualization process. Our visualization system, based on an adapted visualization model, allows a display method to be used throughout the visualization process, in which the user operates a 'Display (correlate) and Refine' visualization cycle. This display integration provides a useful exploration environment, where objects and Views may be directly manipulated; a set of 'portions of interest' can be selected to generate a specialized dataset. This may subsequently be further displayed, manipulated and filtered

Using video objects and relevance feedback in video retrieval

Video retrieval is mostly based on using text from dialogue and this remains the most signi¯cant component, despite progress in other aspects. One problem with this is when a searcher wants to locate video based on what is appearing in the video rather than what is being spoken about. Alternatives such as automatically-detected features and image-based keyframe matching can be used, though these still need further improvement in quality. One other modality for video retrieval is based on segmenting objects from video and allowing end users to use these as part of querying. This uses similarity between query objects and objects from video, and in theory allows retrieval based on what is actually appearing on-screen. The main hurdles to greater use of this are the overhead of object segmentation on large amounts of video and the issue of whether we can actually achieve effective object-based retrieval. We describe a system to support object-based video retrieval where a user selects example video objects as part of the query. During a search a user builds up a set of these which are matched against objects previously segmented from a video library. This match is based on MPEG-7 Dominant Colour, Shape Compaction and Texture Browsing descriptors. We use a user-driven semi-automated segmentation process to segment the video archive which is very accurate and is faster than conventional video annotation

Sketching space

In this paper, we present a sketch modelling system which we call Stilton. The program resembles a desktop VRML browser, allowing a user to navigate a three-dimensional model in a perspective projection, or panoramic photographs, which the program maps onto the scene as a `floor' and `walls'. We place an imaginary two-dimensional drawing plane in front of the user, and any geometric information that user sketches onto this plane may be reconstructed to form solid objects through an optimization process. We show how the system can be used to reconstruct geometry from panoramic images, or to add new objects to an existing model. While panoramic imaging can greatly assist with some aspects of site familiarization and qualitative assessment of a site, without the addition of some foreground geometry they offer only limited utility in a design context. Therefore, we suggest that the system may be of use in `just-in-time' CAD recovery of complex environments, such as shop floors, or construction sites, by recovering objects through sketched overlays, where other methods such as automatic line-retrieval may be impossible. The result of using the system in this manner is the `sketching of space' - sketching out a volume around the user - and once the geometry has been recovered, the designer is free to quickly sketch design ideas into the newly constructed context, or analyze the space around them. Although end-user trials have not, as yet, been undertaken we believe that this implementation may afford a user-interface that is both accessible and robust, and that the rapid growth of pen-computing devices will further stimulate activity in this area

Interaction objects in the MADE multimedia environment

In order to support flexible interaction in interactive multimedia systems, we have defined general interaction objects that allow dynamic and transparent coupling of user interaction to media objects and other types of objects. The interaction objects are programmable in that they may use scripting languages for defining their behavior. This mechanism can be used to glue existing application capabilities together to form new end-user functionality

IoT end-user applications provisioning in the cloud: State of the art

© 2016 IEEE. Internet of Things (IoT) is expected to enable a myriad of end-user applications by interconnecting physical objects. Cloud computing is a promising paradigm for provisioning IoT end-user applications in a cost-efficient manner. IoT end-user applications are provisioned in cloud settings using PaaS and offered as SaaS. This paper focuses on the PaaS aspects of IoT end-user applications provisioning. It critically reviews the state of the art. The critical review discusses the PaaS on the whole spectrum of IoT verticals and also the PaaS dealing with specific IoT verticals

Uvis: A Formula-Based End-User Tool for Data Visualization

© 2013 IEEE. Existing approaches to data visualization are one of these two: accessible to end-user developers but limited in customizability, or inaccessible and expressive. For instance, commercial charting tools are easy to use, but support only predefined visualizations, while programmatic visualization tools support custom visualizations, but require advanced programming skills. We show that it is possible to combine the learnability of charting tools and the expressiveness of visualization tools. Uvis is an interactive visualization and user interface design tool that targets end-user developers with skills comparable to spreadsheet formulas. With Uvis, designers drag and drop visual objects, set visual properties to formulas, and see the result immediately. The formulas are declarative and similar to spreadsheet formulas. The formulas compute the property values and can refer to data from database, visual objects, and end-user input. To substantiate our claim, we compared Uvis with popular visualization tools. Further, we conducted usability studies that test the ability of designers to customize visualizations with our approach. Our results show that end-user developers can learn the basics of Uvis relatively fast