Context-driven progressive enhancement of mobile web applications: a multicriteria decision-making approach

Personal computing has become all about mobile and embedded devices. As a result, the adoption rate of smartphones is rapidly increasing and this trend has set a need for mobile applications to be available at anytime, anywhere and on any device. Despite the obvious advantages of such immersive mobile applications, software developers are increasingly facing the challenges related to device fragmentation. Current application development solutions are insufficiently prepared for handling the enormous variety of software platforms and hardware characteristics covering the mobile eco-system. As a result, maintaining a viable balance between development costs and market coverage has turned out to be a challenging issue when developing mobile applications. This article proposes a context-aware software platform for the development and delivery of self-adaptive mobile applications over the Web. An adaptive application composition approach is introduced, capable of autonomously bypassing context-related fragmentation issues. This goal is achieved by incorporating and validating the concept of fine-grained progressive application enhancements based on a multicriteria decision-making strategy

Development of a Mobile Airline Reservation System

Current~v, many people and companies are embracing the mobile air line reservation system. Reservation systems had been implemented in many parts of the world for decades, initially from manual to computerized reservation system. Mobile, airline, bus ticketing and automated reservation systems are effectively increasing in the market. As a result of the fierce competition in the airline sector, organizations within this sector are in the process of developing systems that will improve their services to customers. Consequently, an automated seat reservation system has continued to be an open area of research. The objective of this paper is to develop a mobile airline seat reservation system that will assist the public in gaining an easier and faster way for seat reservation and providing them with more options to book a ticketfor traveling on real time. The system was developed using the Wireless Markup Language (WML) asfrontend, MySQL 4.0 database management system as back-end and PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) as the server-side scripting language. The developed system will assist the airline customers and operators in providing cost-effective system that will make possible bookings and seat reservation on real-time using a mobile phone, irrespective of location of a user

Transcoding multilingual and non-standard web content to voiceXML

Includes abstract.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 112-119).Transcoding systems redesign and reformat already existing web interfaces into other formats so that they can be available to other audiences. For example, change it into audio, sign language or other medium. The bene_t of such systems is less work on meeting the needs of di_erent audiences. This thesis describes the design and the implementation details of a transcoding system called Dinaco. Dinaco is targeted at converting HTML web pages which are created using Extensible MarkupLanguage (XML) technologies to speech interfaces. The di_erentiating feature ofDinaco is that it uses separated annotations during its transcoding process, while previous transcoding systems use HTML dependent annotations. These separated annotations enable Dinaco to pre-normalize non-standard words and to generate VoiceXML interfaces which have semantics of content. The semantics help Textto-Speech (TTS) tools to read multilingual text and to do text normalization. The results from experiments indicate that pre-normalizing non-standard words and appending semantics enable Dinaco to generate VoiceXML interfaces which are more usable than those which are generated by transcoding systems which use HTML dependent annotations. The thesis uses the design of Dinaco to demonstrate how separating annotations makes it possible to write descriptions of content which cannot be written using external HTML dependent annotations and how separating annotations makes it easy to write, maintain, re-use and share annotations

Managing evolution and change in web-based teaching and learning environments

The state of the art in information technology and educational technologies is evolving constantly. Courses taught are subject to constant change from organisational and subject-specific reasons. Evolution and change affect educators and developers of computer-based teaching and learning environments alike – both often being unprepared to respond effectively. A large number of educational systems are designed and developed without change and evolution in mind. We will present our approach to the design and maintenance of these systems in rapidly evolving environments and illustrate the consequences of evolution and change for these systems and for the educators and developers responsible for their implementation and deployment. We discuss various factors of change, illustrated by a Web-based virtual course, with the objective of raising an awareness of this issue of evolution and change in computer-supported teaching and learning environments. This discussion leads towards the establishment of a development and management framework for teaching and learning systems

Design and evaluation of M-Commerce applications.

yesRecent advances in wireless technology have increased the number of mobile device users and given pace to the rapid development and deployment of e-commerce to the mobile user. This new type of e-commerce, conducting transactions via mobile terminals, is called mobile commerce (mcommerce). Due to its inherent characteristics such as ubiquity, personalization, flexibility, and dissemination, mobile commerce promises business unprecedented market potential, greater productivity and higher profitability. With this in mind, it is perhaps not surprising that mobile commerce is growing much faster than its fixed counterpart. Unlike e-commerce, m-commerce is more personalized and there is a need for a novel approach to evaluating m-commerce applications. This paper examines the issues in designing mcommerce applications not only from a technical viewpoint but also from the end users¿ perspective

Service Orientation and the Smart Grid state and trends

The energy market is undergoing major changes, the most notable of which is the transition from a hierarchical closed system toward a more open one highly based on a “smart” information-rich infrastructure. This transition calls for new information and communication technologies infrastructures and standards to support it. In this paper, we review the current state of affairs and the actual technologies with respect to such transition. Additionally, we highlight the contact points between the needs of the future grid and the advantages brought by service-oriented architectures.