Leveraging the Service Bus Paradigm for Computer-mediated Social Communication Interoperability

International audienceComputer-mediated communication can be defined as any form of human communication achieved through computer technology. From its beginnings, it has been shaping the way humans interact with each other, and it has influenced many areas of society. There exist a plethora of communication services enabling computer-mediated social communication (e.g., Skype, Facebook Messenger, Telegram, WhatsApp, Twitter, Slack, etc.). Based on personal preferences, users may prefer a communication service rather than another. As a result, users sharing same interests may not be able to interact since they are using incompatible technologies. To tackle this interoperability barrier, we propose the Social Communication Bus, a middleware solution targeted to enable the interaction between heterogeneous communication services. More precisely, the contribution of this paper is threefold: (i), we propose a survey of the various forms of computer-mediated social communication, and we make an analogy with the computing communication paradigms; (ii), we revisit the eXtensible Service Bus (XSB) that supports interoperability across computing interaction paradigms to provide a solution for computer-mediated social communication interoperability; and (iii), we present Social-MQ, an implementation of the Social Communication Bus that has been integrated into the AppCivist platform for participatory democracy

Leveraging and Fusing Civil and Military Sensors to support Disaster Relief Operations in Smart Environments

Natural disasters occur unpredictably and can range in severity from something locally manageable to large scale events that require external intervention. In particular, when large scale disasters occur, they can cause widespread damage and overwhelm the ability of local governments and authorities to respond. In such situations, Civil-Military Cooperation (CIMIC) is essential for a rapid and robust Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief (HADR) operation. These type of operations bring to bear the Command and Control (C2) and Logistics capabilities of the military to rapidly deploy assets to help with the disaster relief activities. Smart Cities and Smart Environments, embedded with IoT, introduce multiple sensing modalities that typically provide wide coverage over the deployed area. Given that the military does not own or control these assets, they are sometimes referred to as gray assets, which are not as trustworthy as blue assets, owned by the military. However, leveraging these gray assets can significantly improve the ability for the military to quickly obtain Situational Awareness (SA) about the disaster and optimize the planning of rescue operations and allocation of resources to achieve the best possible effects. Fusing the information from the civilian IoT sensors with the custom military sensors could help validate and improve trust in the information from the gray assets. The focus of this paper is to further examine this challenge of achieving Civil-Military cooperation for HADR operations by leveraging and fusing information from gray and blue assets

Social Middleware for Civic Engagement

International audienceCivic engagement refers to any collective action towards the identification and solving of public issues. Current civic technologies are traditional Web-or mobile-based platforms that make difficult, or just impossible, the participation of citizens via different communication technologies. Moreover, connected objects sensing physical-world data can nourish participatory processes by providing physical evidence to citizens; however, leveraging these data is not direct and still a time-consuming process for civic technologies developers. This paper introduces the concept of social middleware for civic engagement. Social middleware allows citizens to engage in participatory processes-supported by civic technologies-via their favorite communication tools, and to interact not only with other citizens but also with relevant connected objects and software platforms. The mission of social middleware goes beyond the connection of all these heterogeneous entities. It aims at easing the implementation of distributed applications oriented toward civic engagement by featuring dedicated built-in services

A Reference Software Architecture for Social Robots

Social Robotics poses tough challenges to software designers who are required to take care of difficult architectural drivers like acceptability, trust of robots as well as to guarantee that robots establish a personalised interaction with their users. Moreover, in this context recurrent software design issues such as ensuring interoperability, improving reusability and customizability of software components also arise. Designing and implementing social robotic software architectures is a time-intensive activity requiring multi-disciplinary expertise: this makes difficult to rapidly develop, customise, and personalise robotic solutions. These challenges may be mitigated at design time by choosing certain architectural styles, implementing specific architectural patterns and using particular technologies. Leveraging on our experience in the MARIO project, in this paper we propose a series of principles that social robots may benefit from. These principles lay also the foundations for the design of a reference software architecture for Social Robots. The ultimate goal of this work is to establish a common ground based on a reference software architecture to allow to easily reuse robotic software components in order to rapidly develop, implement, and personalise Social Robots

Towards a business analytics capability for the circular economy

Digital technologies are growing in importance for accelerating firms’ circular economy transition. However, so far, the focus has primarily been on the technical aspects of implementing these technologies with limited research on the organizational resources and capabilities required for successfully leveraging digital technologies for circular economy. To address this gap, this paper explores the business analytics resources firms should develop and how these should be orchestrated towards a firm-wide capability. The paper proposes a conceptual model highlighting eight business analytics resources that, in combination, build a business analytics capability for the circular economy and how this relates to firms’ circular economy implementation, resource orchestration capability, and competitive performance. The model is based on the results of a thematic analysis of 15 semi-structured expert interviews with key positions in industry. Our approach is informed by and further develops, the theory of the resource-based view and the resource orchestration view. Based on the results, we develop a deeper understanding of the importance of taking a holistic approach to business analytics when leveraging data and analytics towards a more efficient and effective digital-enabled circular economy, the smart circular economy.publishedVersio

Towards a Service-Oriented Enterprise: The Design of a Cloud Business Integration Platform in a Medium-Sized Manufacturing Enterprise

This case study research followed the two-year transition of a medium-sized manufacturing firm towards a service-oriented enterprise. A service-oriented enterprise is an emerging architecture of the firm that leverages the paradigm of services computing to integrate the capabilities of the firm with the complementary competencies of business partners to offer customers with value-added products and services. Design science research in information systems was employed to pursue the primary design of a cloud business integration platform to enable the secondary design of multi-enterprise business processes to enable the dynamic and effective integration of business partner capabilities with those of the enterprise. The results from the study received industry acclaim for the designed solutions innovativeness and business results in the case study environment. The research makes contributions to the IT practitioner and scholarly knowledge base by providing insight into key constructs associated with service-oriented design and deployment of a cloud enterprise architecture and cloud intermediation model to achieve business results. The study demonstrated how an outside-in service-oriented architecture adoption pattern and cloud computing model enabled a medium-sized manufacturing enterprise to focus on a comprehensive approach to business partner integration and collaboration. The cloud integration platform has enabled a range of secondary designs that leveraged business services to orchestrate inter-enterprise business processes for choreography into service systems and networks for the purposes of value creation. The study results demonstrated enhanced levels of business process agility enabled by the cloud platform leading to secondary designs of transactional, differentiated, innovative, and improvisational business processes. The study provides a foundation for future scholarly research on the role of cloud integration platforms in enterprise computing and the increased importance of service-oriented secondary designs to exploit cloud platforms for sustained business performance

Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse

Reintermediation

Jon M. Garon, Reintermediation, 2 Int. J. of Private Law 227 (2009). The digital revolution has interrupted traditional supply chains and wholesaler relationships with manufacturers and retailers, companies are developing new methodologies to create supplier loyalty critical to control of market share. This article documents the leading strategies being utilised by companies to reassert their relevance in the value proposition for their clients and the consequences of these new business models on intellectual property law, privacy rules and influences on judicial contract interpretation. In Philip Evans and Thomas Wurster\u27s bestselling book, Blown to Bits (Harvard Business Press, 1999), the authors postulated that the inverse relationship between the richness and reach of content was eliminated by the extremely low transaction costs associated with providing consumers highly rich content through digital media. Successful companies have employed reintermediation, the use of proprietary sales channels and exclusive intellectual property-protected techniques to establish brand loyalty, enforce brand exclusivity and command market-share

Building the Hyperconnected Society- Internet of Things Research and Innovation Value Chains, Ecosystems and Markets

This book aims to provide a broad overview of various topics of Internet of Things (IoT), ranging from research, innovation and development priorities to enabling technologies, nanoelectronics, cyber-physical systems, architecture, interoperability and industrial applications. All this is happening in a global context, building towards intelligent, interconnected decision making as an essential driver for new growth and co-competition across a wider set of markets. It is intended to be a standalone book in a series that covers the Internet of Things activities of the IERC – Internet of Things European Research Cluster from research to technological innovation, validation and deployment.The book builds on the ideas put forward by the European Research Cluster on the Internet of Things Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda, and presents global views and state of the art results on the challenges facing the research, innovation, development and deployment of IoT in future years. The concept of IoT could disrupt consumer and industrial product markets generating new revenues and serving as a growth driver for semiconductor, networking equipment, and service provider end-markets globally. This will create new application and product end-markets, change the value chain of companies that creates the IoT technology and deploy it in various end sectors, while impacting the business models of semiconductor, software, device, communication and service provider stakeholders. The proliferation of intelligent devices at the edge of the network with the introduction of embedded software and app-driven hardware into manufactured devices, and the ability, through embedded software/hardware developments, to monetize those device functions and features by offering novel solutions, could generate completely new types of revenue streams. Intelligent and IoT devices leverage software, software licensing, entitlement management, and Internet connectivity in ways that address many of the societal challenges that we will face in the next decade