Framework for ubiquitous and voice enabled web applicattions development.

RESUMEN La cantidad de dispositivos con capacidad de conexión a Internet crece rápidamente. En la actualidad se dispone de teléfonos móviles basados en tecnología WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) o I-Mode, Agendas Digitales Personales, Kioskos Internet, teléfonos convencionales basados en acceso a la Web por medio de la voz, dispositivos basados en televisión interactiva, electrodomésticos, entre otros. Desarrollar una versión de una aplicación web para cada uno de los dispositivos con conectividad a la Web resulta inviable. Por otra parte, desarrollar aplicaciones web que puedan ser visualizados en forma apropiada y aprovechando al máximo las capacidades del dispositivo se constituye en una tarea compleja. En esta tesis se propone un framework, entendido como un marco de trabajo genérico, que sirva como guía para el desarrollo de portales web pervasivos que puedan ser accedidos desde múltiples dispositivos, evitando el desarrollo de un portal por cada uno y teniendo en cuenta las grandes variaciones pueden existir en sus capacidades. Adicionalmente se ha planteado un modelo de agrupamiento de dispositivos, que permita definir una serie de grupos, así como las características asociadas a los mismos, en forma tal que puedan generarse posteriormente los formatos asociados a estos grupos de dispositivos y no a elementos individuales y se ha propuesto y validado una arquitectura de referencia para el desarrollo de aplicaciones pervasivas, que no genere dependencia de tecnologías de servidor, y que permita incorporar la solución de agrupamiento planteada previamente. ____________________________________________________________________________________________________The purpose of the Ubiquitous or Pervasive Computing - an emergent paradigm of personalized computation- is to obtain device interoperability under different conditions. The devices were designed for different purposes by different companies or from different technological generations. The ever increasing market of web enabled devices has brought up diverse challenges related to the difficulty of visualizing content in a unified form to diverse clients, while at the same time taking into account the great differences in the capacities of these devices. It is not feasible to develop a separate application for each of these devices, simply because the number of different devices is too high and still growing. In the analysis of existing proposals dealing with the modelling of ubiquitous web applications, the link that exists between the logical and conceptual modelling and the physical modelling of the applications is not clear enough, and the way in which the context aspects related to web access from these devices cannot be specified. On the other hand, the available commercial products are supplier-specific. Every future platform change would a costly and painstaking process In this thesis we present a proposal of a framework for the development of web applications that can be accessed from different types of devices, such as PCs, PDAs, mobile phones based on diverse technologies (like WAP and I-Mode) and conventional telephones that access the web through voice gateways and voice portals. The proposed framework serves as a guide for the development of this type of applications and it can be deployed to different server configurations and software development technologies. In order to obtain this objective, a description of diverse theoretical elements related to dynamic generation of information that can be acceded by devices has been made, as well as a description of involved technologies whose hardware, software and connectivity characteristics vary remarkably. The theoretical study was carried out in parallel with tests based on the different technologies used. A multilingual-ubiquitous traffic information portal was used to test the theory in an operational environment

Snap2Diverse: Coordinating Information Visualizations and Virtual Environments

The field of Information Visualization is concerned with improving with how users perceive, understand, and interact with visual representations of data sets. Immersive Virtual Environments (VEs) excel at providing researchers and designers a greater comprehension of the spatial features and relations of their data, models, and scenes. This project addresses the intersection of these two fields where information is visualized in a virtual environment. Specifically we are interested in visualizing abstract information in relation to spatial information in the context of a virtual environment. We describe a set of design issues for this type of integrated visualization and demonstrate a coordinated, multiple-views system supporting 2D and 3D visualization tasks such as overview, navigation, details-on-demand, and brushing-and-linking selection. Software architecture issues are discussed with details of our implementation applied to the domain of chemical information and visualization. Lastly, we subject our system to an informal usability evaluation and identify usability issues with interaction and navigation that may guide future work in these situations

Usability of Nomadic User Interfaces

Abstract. During the last decade, a number of research activities have been performed to enable user interfaces and the underlying user activities to be migrated from one device to another. We call this “Nomadic User Interfaces”. The primary goal of these research activities has been to develop the technologies to enable this. However, not much is known about the usability aspects of Nomadic User Interfaces. In this paper we present the results of three different user tests that we conducted to investigate the usefulness and the usability issues of several prototype Nomadic User Interface systems that we developed

Description-driven Adaptation of Media Resources

The current multimedia landscape is characterized by a significant diversity in terms of available media formats, network technologies, and device properties. This heterogeneity has resulted in a number of new challenges, such as providing universal access to multimedia content. A solution for this diversity is the use of scalable bit streams, as well as the deployment of a complementary system that is capable of adapting scalable bit streams to the constraints imposed by a particular usage environment (e.g., the limited screen resolution of a mobile device). This dissertation investigates the use of an XML-driven (Extensible Markup Language) framework for the format-independent adaptation of scalable bit streams. Using this approach, the structure of a bit stream is first translated into an XML description. In a next step, the resulting XML description is transformed to reflect a desired adaptation of the bit stream. Finally, the transformed XML description is used to create an adapted bit stream that is suited for playback in the targeted usage environment. The main contribution of this dissertation is BFlavor, a new tool for exposing the syntax of binary media resources as an XML description. Its development was inspired by two other technologies, i.e. MPEG-21 BSDL (Bitstream Syntax Description Language) and XFlavor (Formal Language for Audio-Visual Object Representation, extended with XML features). Although created from a different point of view, both languages offer solutions for translating the syntax of a media resource into an XML representation for further processing. BFlavor (BSDL+XFlavor) harmonizes the two technologies by combining their strengths and eliminating their weaknesses. The expressive power and performance of a BFlavor-based content adaptation chain, compared to tool chains entirely based on either BSDL or XFlavor, were investigated by several experiments. One series of experiments targeted the exploitation of multi-layered temporal scalability in H.264/AVC, paying particular attention to the use of sub-sequences and hierarchical coding patterns, as well as to the use of metadata messages to communicate the bit stream structure to the adaptation logic. BFlavor was the only tool to offer an elegant and practical solution for XML-driven adaptation of H.264/AVC bit streams in the temporal domain

WSAmacd handbook 2012-13 PDF edition

The story, syllabus and course information handbook for the MA in Communication Design at Winchester School of Art. www.facebook.com/WSAmac

Developing a user interface for a cross-platform web application

The purpose of this master thesis project was to investigate and analyse the main design and development approaches to creating a user interface of a cross-platform web application that is optimised for usage on both mobile and non-mobile devices. The additional goals were to analyse the main challenges in implementing such a user interface and find out whether it is feasible to achieve a consistent user experience both on mobile and desktop devices. The theoretical part of this paper analyses the main development approaches and design considerations for creating a user interface that works on mobile and non-mobile devices. For the practical part, a prototype user interface for a cross-platform book cataloguing web application has been built, tested on a number of mobile and non-mobile devices and evaluated in terms of performance and user experience. Also ideas for its further development are presented. As the result of this project, a semi-functional web application prototype has been built using Backbone.js and user interface has been created in HTML5 with CSS3. The application allows the user to organise his/her books and planned reads, leave reviews and view reviews from other readers. The application did not have all the functioning features and it still needs further work before actual usage. The biggest challenges were content planning, designing reusable UI components, finding a suitable framework for the application implementation and inconsistent CSS support across browsers. By planning the navigation and content early, testing the user interface on real devices, following the mobile first approach and progressively enhancing to a device’s capabilities, it is possible to create a consistent user experience across mobile and non-mobile devices in lightweight web applications

An Engineering Method for Adaptive, Context-aware Web Applications

Users of Web-based software encounter growing complexity of the software resulting from the increasing amount of information and service offering. As a consequence, the likelihood that users employ the software in a manner compatible with the provider's interest decreases. Depending on the purpose of the Web application, a provider's goal can be to guide and influence user choices in information and service selection, or to assure user productivity. An approach at addressing these goals is to adapt the software's behavior during operation to the context in which it is being used. The term context-awareness originates in mobile computing, where research projects have studied context recognition and adaptation in specific scenarios. Context-awareness is now being studied in a variety of systems, including Web applications. However, how to account for context in a Web Engineering process is not yet established, nor is a generic means of using context in a Web software architecture. This dissertation addresses the question of how context-awareness can be applied in a general-purpose, systematic process for Web application development: that is, in a Web Engineering process. A model for representing an application's context factors in ontologies is presented. A general-purpose methodology for Web Engineering is extended to account for context, by putting in relation context ontologies with elements of the application domain. The application model is extended with adaptation specifications, defining at which places in the application adaptation to context is to occur, and according to what strategy. Application and context models are system interpretable, in order to support automatic adaptation of a system's behavior during its operation, that is, consequently to user requests. Requirements for a corresponding Web software architecture for context are established first at the conceptual level, then specifically in a content-based architecture based on an XML stack. The CATWALK software framework, an implementation of an architecture enabling adaptation to context is described. The framework provides mechanisms for interpreting application and context models to generate an adaptive application, meaning to generate responses to user requests, where the generation process makes decisions based on context information. For this purpose, the framework contains default implementations for context recognition and adaptation mechanisms. The approach presented supports a model-based development of Web applications which adapt to context. The CATWALK framework is an mplementation for model interpretation in a run-time system and thus simplifies the development of Web applications which adapt to context. As the framework is component-based and follows a strict separation of concerns, the default mechanisms can be extended or replaced, allowing to reduce the amount of custom code required to implement specific context-aware Web applications or to study alternative context inference or adaptation strategies. The use of the framework is illustrated in a case study, in which models are defined for a prototypical application, and this application is generated by the framework. The purpose of the case study is to illustrate effects of adaptation to context, based on context description and adaptation specifications in the application model