Designing multiplayer games to facilitate emergent social behaviours online

This paper discusses an exploratory case study of the design of games that facilitate spontaneous social interaction and group behaviours among distributed individuals, based largely on symbolic presence 'state' changes. We present the principles guiding the design of our game environment: presence as a symbolic phenomenon, the importance of good visualization and the potential for spontaneous self-organization among groups of people. Our game environment, comprising a family of multiplayer 'bumper-car' style games, is described, followed by a discussion of lessons learned from observing users of the environment. Finally, we reconsider and extend our design principles in light of our observations

Towards a re-engineering method for web services architectures

Recent developments in Web technologies – in particular through the Web services framework – have greatly enhanced the flexible and interoperable implementation of service-oriented software architectures. Many older Web-based and other distributed software systems will be re-engineered to a Web services-oriented platform. Using an advanced e-learning system as our case study, we investigate central aspects of a re-engineering approach for the Web services platform. Since our aim is to provide components of the legacy system also as services in the new platform, re-engineering to suit the new development paradigm is as important as re-engineering to suit the new architectural requirements

A review of GIS-based information sharing systems

GIS-based information sharing systems have been implemented in many of England and Wales' Crime and Disorder Reduction Partnerships (CDRPs). The information sharing role of these systems is seen as being vital to help in the review of crime, disorder and misuse of drugs; to sustain strategic objectives, to monitor interventions and initiatives; and support action plans for service delivery. This evaluation into these systems aimed to identify the lessons learned from existing systems, identify how these systems can be best used to support the business functions of CDRPs, identify common weaknesses across the systems, and produce guidelines on how these systems should be further developed. At present there are in excess of 20 major systems distributed across England and Wales. This evaluation considered a representative sample of ten systems. To date, little documented evidence has been collected by the systems that demonstrate the direct impact they are having in reducing crime and disorder, and the misuse of drugs. All point to how they are contributing to more effective partnership working, but all systems must be encouraged to record how they are contributing to improving community safety. Demonstrating this impact will help them to assure their future role in their CDRPs. By reviewing the systems wholly, several key ingredients were identified that were evident in contributing to the effectiveness of these systems. These included the need for an effective partnership business model within which the system operates, and the generation of good quality multi-agency intelligence products from the system. In helping to determine the future development of GIS-based information sharing systems, four key community safety partnership business service functions have been identified that these systems can most effectively support. These functions support the performance review requirements of CDRPs, operate a problem solving scanning and analysis role, and offer an interface with the public. By following these business service functions as a template will provide for a more effective application of these systems nationally

On the acquisition and representation of procedural knowledge

Historically knowledge acquisition has proven to be one of the greatest barriers to the development of intelligent systems. Current practice generally requires lengthy interactions between the expert whose knowledge is to be captured and the knowledge engineer whose responsibility is to acquire and represent knowledge in a useful form. Although much research has been devoted to the development of methodologies and computer software to aid in the capture and representation of some of some types of knowledge, little attention has been devoted to procedural knowledge. NASA personnel frequently perform tasks that are primarily procedural in nature. Previous work is reviewed in the field of knowledge acquisition and then focus on knowledge acquisition for procedural tasks with special attention devoted to the Navy's VISTA tool. The design and development is described of a system for the acquisition and representation of procedural knowledge-TARGET (Task Analysis and Rule Generation Tool). TARGET is intended as a tool that permits experts to visually describe procedural tasks and as a common medium for knowledge refinement by the expert and knowledge engineer. The system is designed to represent the acquired knowledge in the form of production rules. Systems such as TARGET have the potential to profoundly reduce the time, difficulties, and costs of developing knowledge-based systems for the performance of procedural tasks

PCG: A prototype incremental compilation facility for the SAGA environment, appendix F

A programming environment supports the activity of developing and maintaining software. New environments provide language-oriented tools such as syntax-directed editors, whose usefulness is enhanced because they embody language-specific knowledge. When syntactic and semantic analysis occur early in the cycle of program production, that is, during editing, the use of a standard compiler is inefficient, for it must re-analyze the program before generating code. Likewise, it is inefficient to recompile an entire file, when the editor can determine that only portions of it need updating. The pcg, or Pascal code generation, facility described here generates code directly from the syntax trees produced by the SAGA syntax directed Pascal editor. By preserving the intermediate code used in the previous compilation, it can limit recompilation to the routines actually modified by editing

JWalk: a tool for lazy, systematic testing of java classes by design introspection and user interaction

Popular software testing tools, such as JUnit, allow frequent retesting of modified code; yet the manually created test scripts are often seriously incomplete. A unit-testing tool called JWalk has therefore been developed to address the need for systematic unit testing within the context of agile methods. The tool operates directly on the compiled code for Java classes and uses a new lazy method for inducing the changing design of a class on the fly. This is achieved partly through introspection, using Java’s reflection capability, and partly through interaction with the user, constructing and saving test oracles on the fly. Predictive rules reduce the number of oracle values that must be confirmed by the tester. Without human intervention, JWalk performs bounded exhaustive exploration of the class’s method protocols and may be directed to explore the space of algebraic constructions, or the intended design state-space of the tested class. With some human interaction, JWalk performs up to the equivalent of fully automated state-based testing, from a specification that was acquired incrementally

Electronic Study Books and learning style

Attention has been drawn to the concepts of Electronic Books and Electronic Study Books. Several publications have discussed some main ideas (paradigms) for both concepts. For the Electronic Study Book as a learning environment, it is essential to consider individual modes of learning, usually termed 'learning styles'. It is argued that Electronic Study Books should be adaptable in accordance with personal learning styles. Some options will be presented to link 'styles' and 'books'. One such option is a Style Initiating Module which we are currently investigating