Speakur : leveraging web components for composable applications

textThis report is a case study of applying abstraction, encapsulation, and composition techniques to web application architecture with the use of Web Components, a proposed extension to the HTML5 Document Object Model. I created Speakur, a real-time social discussion plugin for the mobile and desktop web, to show how Web Components can help realize software engineering principles and design patterns, including the composition of applications from components sourced from diverse authors and frameworks. Web authors can add a Speakur discussion to their page by inserting a simple HTML element at the desired spot to give the page a real-time discussion or feedback system. Speakur uses the Polymer framework's implementation of the draft Web Components standard to achieve the encapsulation of its internal implementation details from the containing page behind a simplified, well defined interface. Web Components are a proposed W3C standard for writing custom HTML tags that take advantage of new browser technologies like Shadow DOM, package importing, CSS Flexboxes and data-bound templates. This report reviews Web Components and related technologies and provides a case study for structuring a real-world WC applet that is embedded in a larger app or system. The major research question is whether Web Components offer a viable path towards the encapsulation and composition principles that have largely eluded web engineers thus far. In other words, are components really the future of the web? Subsidiary topics include assessing the maturity and performance of current Web Components technologies, and methods of synchronization between user interface components and local and remote data models. My analysis shows that Web Components successfully address many of the key structural and organizational problems faced by web software engineers.Electrical and Computer Engineerin

Enabling Automatic Discovery and Querying of Web APIs at Web Scale using Linked Data Standards

International audienceTo help in making sense of the ever-increasing number of data sources available on the Web, in this article we tackle the problem of enabling automatic discovery and querying of data sources at Web scale. To pursue this goal, we suggest to (1) provision rich descriptions of data sources and query services thereof, (2) leverage the power of Web search engines to discover data sources, and (3) rely on simple, well-adopted standards that come with extensive tooling. We apply these principles to the concrete case of SPARQL micro-services that aim at querying Web APIs using SPARQL. The proposed solution leverages SPARQL Service Description, SHACL, DCAT, VoID, Schema.org and Hydra to express a rich functional description that allows a software agent to decide whether a micro-service can help in carrying out a certain task. This description can be dynamically transformed into a Web page embedding rich markup data. This Web page is both a human-friendly documentation and a machine-readable description that makes it possible for humans and machines alike to discover and invoke SPARQL micro-services at Web scale, as if they were just another data source. We report on a prototype implementation that is available on-line for test purposes, and that can be effectively discovered using Google's Dataset Search engine

Social and Semantic Contexts in Tourist Mobile Applications

The ongoing growth of the World Wide Web along with the increase possibility of access information through a variety of devices in mobility, has defi nitely changed the way users acquire, create, and personalize information, pushing innovative strategies for annotating and organizing it. In this scenario, Social Annotation Systems have quickly gained a huge popularity, introducing millions of metadata on di fferent Web resources following a bottom-up approach, generating free and democratic mechanisms of classi cation, namely folksonomies. Moving away from hierarchical classi cation schemas, folksonomies represent also a meaningful mean for identifying similarities among users, resources and tags. At any rate, they suff er from several limitations, such as the lack of specialized tools devoted to manage, modify, customize and visualize them as well as the lack of an explicit semantic, making di fficult for users to bene fit from them eff ectively. Despite appealing promises of Semantic Web technologies, which were intended to explicitly formalize the knowledge within a particular domain in a top-down manner, in order to perform intelligent integration and reasoning on it, they are still far from reach their objectives, due to di fficulties in knowledge acquisition and annotation bottleneck. The main contribution of this dissertation consists in modeling a novel conceptual framework that exploits both social and semantic contextual dimensions, focusing on the domain of tourism and cultural heritage. The primary aim of our assessment is to evaluate the overall user satisfaction and the perceived quality in use thanks to two concrete case studies. Firstly, we concentrate our attention on contextual information and navigation, and on authoring tool; secondly, we provide a semantic mapping of tags of the system folksonomy, contrasted and compared to the expert users' classi cation, allowing a bridge between social and semantic knowledge according to its constantly mutual growth. The performed user evaluations analyses results are promising, reporting a high level of agreement on the perceived quality in use of both the applications and of the speci c analyzed features, demonstrating that a social-semantic contextual model improves the general users' satisfactio

Investigating Public Sector Online Communication Channel Adoption and Usage Amongst Older Adults: a UK Local Government Perspective

Since governments around the world are moving away from conventional ways of face to face communication to a more digital approach when delivering services to their citizens. Advancements in using novel information and internet technology e.g. Online Social Networks (OSN) for communications has become a fast-developing strategy in the public sector of the economy. However, research has found that not all the citizens use these online tools; thereby, causing a digital divide. A societal demographic group causing immense concern for governments, organizations and society is the ageing population. It is also this group that is not extensively investigated in e-government research. Recognising the role of older adults in the society and for e-government research, the aim of this research is to identify, explore and understand the factors that encourage older adults of 50 years old and above to continue using a particular online communication channel (Facebook versus Email) when interacting with the government. For this purpose, a conceptual framework was developed which was the Model of Online Communication Channel (MOCC) based on the Expectation Confirmation Theory (ECT), Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) and Channel Expansion Theory (CET) along with service quality and trust factors. To achieve this aim, a quantitative research approach was employed for the data collection process to test the MOCC model. The data collection process was carried out in three phases namely; the content validity, pilot phase and final phase. The data was collated using an online survey tool (SurveyMonkey) which resulted in 222 completed response for the pilot and 1014 completed response for the final data collection. Findings revealed that older adults will continue using a particular online communication channel to interact with the government if they have good knowledge and previous experience of using an online communication medium for interaction. Equally, having a strong satisfactory experience with a medium will encourage them to trust and use that particular online communication medium when interacting with the government. Most significantly, the consequences of ailments being suffered by older adults impacted on their continuance intention to use an online communication channel for interaction. Additionally, to validate and verify the results obtained from the quantitative data collated, an evaluation study was carried out using a qualitative research approach in form of telephone interview. In summary, this research study contributed to the growing research body of Information Systems (IS) knowledge on adoption and continuance usage of technology. Moreover, this research would benefit industry by informing providers of online communication channels to the government to be aware of the factors that influence older adults’ choices when interacting with the government. In so doing, the public sector providers of ICT can learn whether the provided services and products are indeed being accepted by citizens, more than it is recognised as one that is disadvantaged. The major implication of this study is that it provides information with regards to the generational difference within this age segment i.e. 50 years and above. This would help the government determine the best strategy to employ while tackling this issue. Finally, due to the limitations of time, finance and manpower research findings could not be nationally representative of the UK. They are only representative of a single group of society residing in an affluent area of the UK which is Hertfordshire

An exploratory study of social media usage and developmental outcomes by government and emerging political leaders : the Nigerian experience

Most political systems around the world, including long-standing democratic systems, have been afflicted by corruption: non-transparent decision making processes, power distribution, cynical public relations and poor consultation exercises. The consequence has been a sense of prevailing injustice; citizenship inequality and lack of transparency in Governance. The media is often seen as a medium that could address and tackle these current socio-political problems within society. However, the role Social Media could play is widely debated between two schools of thought - media and communication studies and critical political economy – the study of social relations, particularly power relations, that constitute the production, distribution, and consumption of communication resources, and this debate leads to uncertainty about the role of ICTs in empowering public participation.This research assesses the views of those in Government Ministries, Democratic Institutions, National IT agencies, and emerging citizen leaders in the form of Nigerian graduate and postgraduate students. Nigeria makes an important case study as it sits at the fulcrum of the battle between citizen freedoms and Government censorship. This research asks how Nigeria’s government institutions and agencies conceptualises ICTs and to what extent they have used the new ICT tools for political re-engineering of the polity as well as to engage citizen’s participation in democratic processes as indices to ICT use for sustainable development in Nigeria. It draws upon power theories and theories on media and technology use in political communications, as theoretical benchmarks to contextualise Nigeria’s hegemonic media institutions, to explore the transparency and accountability within government institutions/agencies together with new participatory culture Social Media use. The study tests various social theories concerning interactive media, and asks whether ,by encouraging audiences to express their opinions, interactive media can be perceived as a tool for expanding the freedom of individuals (Sen, 1999) and in particular their social or political “capability” (Srinivasan, 2007), lending credibility to the label of new ICT’s as “technologies of freedom”(Willems, 2013). This study will establish whether or not expansion of interactive media leads, on balance, to more inclusive or more democratic practices and more transparent governance or more just and efficient delivery of public goods. The study examines how these new mediated ‘public’ spaces enable different expressions of public opinion