Web collaboration for software engineering

Tese de mestrado integrado. Engenharia Informática e Computação. Faculdade de Engenharia. Universidade do Porto. 200

Review of Web Mapping: Eras, Trends and Directions

Web mapping and the use of geospatial information online have evolved rapidly over the past few decades. Almost everyone in the world uses mapping information, whether or not one realizes it. Almost every mobile phone now has location services and every event and object on the earth has a location. The use of this geospatial location data has expanded rapidly, thanks to the development of the Internet. Huge volumes of geospatial data are available and daily being captured online, and are used in web applications and maps for viewing, analysis, modeling and simulation. This paper reviews the developments of web mapping from the first static online map images to the current highly interactive, multi-sourced web mapping services that have been increasingly moved to cloud computing platforms. The whole environment of web mapping captures the integration and interaction between three components found online, namely, geospatial information, people and functionality. In this paper, the trends and interactions among these components are identified and reviewed in relation to the technology developments. The review then concludes by exploring some of the opportunities and directions

Web GIS in practice VI: a demo playlist of geo-mashups for public health neogeographers

'Mashup' was originally used to describe the mixing together of musical tracks to create a new piece of music. The term now refers to Web sites or services that weave data from different sources into a new data source or service. Using a musical metaphor that builds on the origin of the word 'mashup', this paper presents a demonstration "playlist" of four geo-mashup vignettes that make use of a range of Web 2.0, Semantic Web, and 3-D Internet methods, with outputs/end-user interfaces spanning the flat Web (two-dimensional – 2-D maps), a three-dimensional – 3-D mirror world (Google Earth) and a 3-D virtual world (Second Life ®). The four geo-mashup "songs" in this "playlist" are: 'Web 2.0 and GIS (Geographic Information Systems) for infectious disease surveillance', 'Web 2.0 and GIS for molecular epidemiology', 'Semantic Web for GIS mashup', and 'From Yahoo! Pipes to 3-D, avatar-inhabited geo-mashups'. It is hoped that this showcase of examples and ideas, and the pointers we are providing to the many online tools that are freely available today for creating, sharing and reusing geo-mashups with minimal or no coding, will ultimately spark the imagination of many public health practitioners and stimulate them to start exploring the use of these methods and tools in their day-to-day practice. The paper also discusses how today's Web is rapidly evolving into a much more intensely immersive, mixed-reality and ubiquitous socio-experiential Metaverse that is heavily interconnected through various kinds of user-created mashups

Mobile learning and content creation for location-based learning applications

Using mobile devices to enable new ways of learning has been a big area of interest in research for quite some time. Mobile devices have the opportunity to foster free movement and enable structured context-aware learning activities regardless of time and location restrictions. The increased amount of mobile devices and advances in mobile technologies has made creating these new learning applications a reality. This thesis discusses the possibilities mobile learning offers to the field of education and the type of actions that must be taken in order to support the adoption of m-learning. Mobile learning is discussed by first looking at the history of technology enhanced education and the special affordances that mobile devices have to offer. In order to create applications that can provide meaningful learning experiences and go beyond the novelty factor of using mobile devices, supportive pedagogies must be developed and integrated into tools that can be used in designing learning content for these applications. The main concepts and pedagogies for mobile learning are discussed by looking at some example applications and previous research. The main challenge for adopting m-learning in practice is to develop generic and easy to use tools for the educators to author the learning content to be used. This thesis focuses especially on content creation for location-based mobile learning applications and presents some examples of existing solutions. As a result from the constructive part of this thesis this kind of tool was also developed as a part of the Seek'N'Share platform for location-based mobile learning

A Web-Based Collaborative Multimedia Presentation Document System

With the distributed and rapidly increasing volume of data and expeditious development of modern web browsers, web browsers have become a possible legitimate vehicle for remote interactive multimedia presentation and collaboration, especially for geographically dispersed teams. To our knowledge, although there are a large number of applications developed for these purposes, there are some drawbacks in prior work including the lack of interactive controls of presentation flows, general-purpose collaboration support on multimedia, and efficient and precise replay of presentations. To fill the research gaps in prior work, in this dissertation, we propose a web-based multimedia collaborative presentation document system, which models a presentation as media resources together with a stream of media events, attached to associated media objects. It represents presentation flows and collaboration actions in events, implements temporal and spatial scheduling on multimedia objects, and supports real-time interactive control of the predefined schedules. As all events are represented by simple messages with an object-prioritized approach, our platform can also support fine-grained precise replay of presentations. Hundreds of kilobytes could be enough to store the events in a collaborative presentation session for accurate replays, compared with hundreds of megabytes in screen recording tools with a pixel-based replay mechanism

Metadata Games: Improving Access to Humanities Artifacts

Our team received Level II Start Up funding to create a pilot of Metadata Games (MG), a software system that uses computer games to collect information about artifacts in libraries and archives as they strive to go digital. Games are useful in that they can entice those who might not visit archives to explore humanities content while contributing to vital records, and they create much more metadata than typical staff can do alone in the same timeframe. The system is open-source and is easily customized to meet each institution’s needs. The full project employs new techniques to make the system smarter and more trustworthy. We will also create new game components. MG can be used to enhance knowledge about artifacts in particular disciplines and fields, or with interdisciplinary collections. MG has the potential to unearth new knowledge that could radically enhance scholarship in the humanities, expanding what records we can encounter in our quest to understand the human experience

Developing Fitness Group Class Recommendations Web-Application for UNC Campus Recreation

UNC Chapel-Hill has great amount of gym facility and fitness group class services which are free to all students. However, students do have trouble in choosing the most suitable fitness group class due to many options and lacking in knowledge. For example, students who are new to fitness aren’t very familiar with it. They are lacking in information about what kind of activity the class is doing as well as the best suitable class for them. Some classes are targeted to Intermediate fitness enthusiasts and may not be suitable for beginners, while some classes are entry-level courses for beginners and experienced fitness lovers may find them boring. So it is definitely helpful if the website has detailed description of the class info, including the teacher, targeted people and brief information about the activity. For certain students, they love some teacher who have their unique teaching methods.Master of Science in Information Scienc

Towards a service-oriented architecture for a mobile assistive system with real-time environmental sensing

Dalian Key Lab. of Smart Medical and Healthcare, Computer Science Department, Dalian University, China,With the growing aging population, age-related diseases have increased considerably over the years. In response to these, ambient assistive living (AAL) systems are being developed and are continually evolving to enrich and support independent living. While most researchers investigate robust activity recognition (AR) techniques, this paper focuses on some of the architectural challenges of the AAL systems. This work proposes a system architecture that fuses varying software design patterns and integrates readily available hardware devices to create wireless sensor networks for real-time applications. The system architecture brings together the service-oriented architecture (SOA), semantic web technologies, and other methods to address some of the shortcomings of the preceding system implementations using off-the-shelf and open source components. In order to validate the proposed architecture, a prototype is developed and tested positively to recognize basic user activities in real time. The system provides a base that can be further extended in many areas of AAL systems, including composite AR