Mashing up Visual Languages and Web Mash-ups

Research on web mashups and visual languages share an interest in human-centered computing. Both research communities are concerned with supporting programming by everyday, technically inexpert users. Visual programming environments have been a focus for both communities, and we believe that there is much to be gained by further discussion between these research communities. In this paper we explore some connections between web mashups and visual languages, and try to identify what each might be able to learn from the other. Our goal is to establish a framework for a dialog between the communities, and to promote the exchange of ideas and our respective understandings of humancentered computing.published or submitted for publicationis peer reviewe

Serial Austen. Mashingups with Zombies.

Jane Austen sells. She sells in all possible ways, her novels have been adapted for the cinema and the stage, they have been rewritten as comics and graphic novels. Jane austen is a cultural icon. The interest in her life is so strong that many biographies have been written in order to recover new facts and details. The places where she has lived and the places depicted in her novels have become tourist sites for literary pilgrims. Austen is a cross-over phenomenon, with regency costume balls recreated in her name and an endless proliferation of her works in all media. My essay will investigate Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2009), a mash-up novel which has become a real cultural phenomenon of the last decade and will demonstrate how it can be considered a serial narrative. If as Henry Jenkins asserts, seriality implies the unfolding of a story over time through a process of “chunking” (that is creating meaningful parts of the same story) and of “dispersal” (that is breaking the story into more parts and in more genres and media), mash-ups seems to do this.  Austen’s story remains as a “story hook” which pushes the reader to come back to different products for a continuation of the same story. So, if on the one hand, seriality occurs within the same text, the story-telling of Austen’s stories across genres and media is part of a seriality process

Situational Enterprise Services

The ability to rapidly find potential business partners as well as rapidly set up a collaborative business process is desirable in the face of market turbulence. Collaborative business processes are increasingly dependent on the integration of business information systems. Traditional linking of business processes has a large ad hoc character. Implementing situational enterprise services in an appropriate way will deliver the business more flexibility, adaptability and agility. Service-oriented architectures (SOA) are rapidly becoming the dominant computing paradigm. It is now being embraced by organizations everywhere as the key to business agility. Web 2.0 technologies such as AJAX on the other hand provide good user interactions for successful service discovery, selection, adaptation, invocation and service construction. They also balance automatic integration of services and human interactions, disconnecting content from presentation in the delivery of the service. Another Web technology, such as semantic Web, makes automatic service discovery, mediation and composition possible. Integrating SOA, Web 2.0 Technologies and Semantic Web into a service-oriented virtual enterprise connects business processes in a much more horizontal fashion. To be able run these services consistently across the enterprise, an enterprise infrastructure that provides enterprise architecture and security foundation is necessary. The world is constantly changing. So does the business environment. An agile enterprise needs to be able to quickly and cost-effectively change how it does business and who it does business with. Knowing, adapting to diffident situations is an important aspect of today’s business environment. The changes in an operating environment can happen implicitly and explicitly. The changes can be caused by different factors in the application domain. Changes can also happen for the purpose of organizing information in a better way. Changes can be further made according to the users' needs such as incorporating additional functionalities. Handling and managing diffident situations of service-oriented enterprises are important aspects of business environment. In the chapter, we will investigate how to apply new Web technologies to develop, deploy and executing enterprise services

MusA: Using Indoor Positioning and Navigation to Enhance Cultural Experiences in a museum

In recent years there has been a growing interest into the use of multimedia mobile guides in museum environments. Mobile devices have the capabilities to detect the user context and to provide pieces of information suitable to help visitors discovering and following the logical and emotional connections that develop during the visit. In this scenario, location based services (LBS) currently represent an asset, and the choice of the technology to determine users' position, combined with the definition of methods that can effectively convey information, become key issues in the design process. In this work, we present MusA (Museum Assistant), a general framework for the development of multimedia interactive guides for mobile devices. Its main feature is a vision-based indoor positioning system that allows the provision of several LBS, from way-finding to the contextualized communication of cultural contents, aimed at providing a meaningful exploration of exhibits according to visitors' personal interest and curiosity. Starting from the thorough description of the system architecture, the article presents the implementation of two mobile guides, developed to respectively address adults and children, and discusses the evaluation of the user experience and the visitors' appreciation of these application

The mass collaboration of digital information : an ethical examination of YouTube and intellectual property rights.

Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2010.The Internet has been lauded as an open and free platform from which one is able to engage with, and share large amounts of information (Stallman, 1997). As one witnesses the shift from analogue media to digitalism, so too is it possible to note a change in cultural practices of media consumers. Users of the media can now be viewed as “prosumers”, producing as well as consuming media products (Marshall, 2004). Digital media users have been given the ability to engineer their own unique media experiences, especially within the realms of the Internet. However, this process has seemingly led to mass copyright infringement as Internet users appropriate various movies, music, television programmes, photographs and animations in order to create such an experience. The art of digital mashing in particular, has been deemed an explicit exploitation of intellectual property rights as it re-cuts, re-mixes and re-broadcasts popular media in a number of alternative ways. YouTube especially has been at the forefront of the copyright furore surrounding digital mash-ups because it allows online users the facility to post and share these video clips freely with other online users. While YouTube claims that they do not promote the illegal use of copyrighted material, they simultaneously acknowledge that they do not actively patrol that which is posted on their website. As such, copyright infringement appears seemingly rife as users share their own versions of popular media through the art of digital mashing. This dissertation however, explores the concept that the creation of mash-ups is not undermining intellectual property rights, but instead produces a new avenue from which culture can emerge. It highlights how Internet users are utilising the culture which surrounds them in an attempt to navigate the new social structures of the online, subsequently arguing that mash-ups are an important element of defining a new postmodern culture, and that the traditional copyright laws of analogue need to be modified in order to secure the development of new and emerging societal structures

Enterprise 2.0: Collaboration and Knowledge Emergence as a Business Web Strategy Enabler

The Web is becoming in many respects a powerful tool for supporting business strategy as companies are quickly becoming more and more reliant on new Web-based technologies to capitalize on new business opportunities. However, this introduces additional managerial problems and risks that have to be taken into consideration, if they are not to be left behind. In this chapter we explore the Web’s present and future potential in relation to information sharing, knowledge management, innovation management, and the automation of cross-organizational business transactions. The suggested approach will provide entrepreneurs, managers, and IT leaders with guidance on how to adopt the latest Web 2.0-based technologies in their everyday work with a view to setting up a business Web strategy. Specifically, Enterprise 2.0 is presented as a key enabler for businesses to expand their ecosystems and partnerships. Enterprise 2.0 also acts as a catalyst for improving innovation processes and knowledge work

The Exploitation of Data from Remote and Human Sensors for Environment Monitoring in the SMAT Project

In this paper, we outline the functionalities of a system that integrates and controls a fleet of Unmanned Aircraft Vehicles (UAVs). UAVs have a set of payload sensors employed for territorial surveillance, whose outputs are stored in the system and analysed by the data exploitation functions at different levels. In particular, we detail the second level data exploitation function whose aim is to improve the sensors data interpretation in the post-mission activities. It is concerned with the mosaicking of the aerial images and the cartography enrichment by human sensors—the social media users. We also describe the software architecture for the development of a mash-up (the integration of information and functionalities coming from the Web) and the possibility of using human sensors in the monitoring of the territory, a field in which, traditionally, the involved sensors were only the hardware ones.JRC.H.6-Digital Earth and Reference Dat

A Usability Evaluation Framework for

Currently, more than two billions people access the Web for various purposes. The majority are people without programming or modelling background. Part of these people (called end-users) also likes to create their own Web applications to meet their daily needs. Mashup Makers are tools to create such end-user’s Web applications. As such, Mashup Makers could become the dominant environment for end-user development of Web applications. Existing Mashup Makers promise that creating a Web Mashup is very easy and just a matter of a few mouse clicks. However, there is no evidence that this is indeed the case. On the contrary, research has already revealed usability problems with Mashup Makers. Therefore, this thesis concentrates on the usability of Mashup Makers as development environments for Web applications for end-users. Usability is a key issue for the success of software artifacts, and especially if the artifacts are intended for non-technical users. Therefore, we target the achievement of a consolidated approach, model, and framework for the evaluation of the usability of Mashup Makers for end-users. Such a framework will not only allow evaluating the usability of existing Mashup Makers, but it will also provide key issues concerning usability (ie usability impact factors) that developers of Mashup Makers and of other future end-user development tools can take into consideration when developing new tools