Supporting Device Discovery and Spontaneous Interaction with Spatial References

The RELATE interaction model is designed to support spontaneous interaction of mobile users with devices and services in their environment. The model is based on spatial references that capture the spatial relationship of a user’s device with other co-located devices. Spatial references are obtained by relative position sensing and integrated in the mobile user interface to spatially visualize the arrangement of discovered devices, and to provide direct access for interaction across devices. In this paper we discuss two prototype systems demonstrating the utility of the model in collaborative and mobile settings, and present a study on usability of spatial list and map representations for device selection

Task Modeling by the Keywords Extracted from Manual Pages

A task modeling method using keywords related to the functions of commands for intelligent user interfaces is proposed. A task model is a description of functions and operations of the computer. The task model is described as the name of a task in our method. We define the name of a task as the minimal set of common keywords which definitely distinguish the task. For the name of a task, keywords indicating the concepts of each command are needed. Since the order of the number of the keywords is that of the number of the commands, it is much easier to implement this method than a procedural knowledge based one. We also propose a method to extract the keywords automatically from the manual pages, the on-line reference manuals for UNIX. Since almost every command is associated with manual pages, the task names can be easily updated when a new command is added to the system. To show the effectiveness of the task names and the keywords extracted from the manual pages, we direct our attention to users' command histories. We show the effectiveness of these keywords by showing the relationship between the tasks in the history and the task names through statistical analysis

The NASA Astrophysics Data System: The Search Engine and its User Interface

The ADS Abstract and Article Services provide access to the astronomical literature through the World Wide Web (WWW). The forms based user interface provides access to sophisticated searching capabilities that allow our users to find references in the fields of Astronomy, Physics/Geophysics, and astronomical Instrumentation and Engineering. The returned information includes links to other on-line information sources, creating an extensive astronomical digital library. Other interfaces to the ADS databases provide direct access to the ADS data to allow developers of other data systems to integrate our data into their system. The search engine is a custom-built software system that is specifically tailored to search astronomical references. It includes an extensive synonym list that contains discipline specific knowledge about search term equivalences. Search request logs show the usage pattern of the various search system capabilities. Access logs show the world-wide distribution of ADS users. The ADS can be accessed at http://adswww.harvard.eduComment: 23 pages, 18 figures, 11 table

Historical collaborative geocoding

The latest developments in digital have provided large data sets that can increasingly easily be accessed and used. These data sets often contain indirect localisation information, such as historical addresses. Historical geocoding is the process of transforming the indirect localisation information to direct localisation that can be placed on a map, which enables spatial analysis and cross-referencing. Many efficient geocoders exist for current addresses, but they do not deal with the temporal aspect and are based on a strict hierarchy (..., city, street, house number) that is hard or impossible to use with historical data. Indeed historical data are full of uncertainties (temporal aspect, semantic aspect, spatial precision, confidence in historical source, ...) that can not be resolved, as there is no way to go back in time to check. We propose an open source, open data, extensible solution for geocoding that is based on the building of gazetteers composed of geohistorical objects extracted from historical topographical maps. Once the gazetteers are available, geocoding an historical address is a matter of finding the geohistorical object in the gazetteers that is the best match to the historical address. The matching criteriae are customisable and include several dimensions (fuzzy semantic, fuzzy temporal, scale, spatial precision ...). As the goal is to facilitate historical work, we also propose web-based user interfaces that help geocode (one address or batch mode) and display over current or historical topographical maps, so that they can be checked and collaboratively edited. The system is tested on Paris city for the 19-20th centuries, shows high returns rate and is fast enough to be used interactively.Comment: WORKING PAPE

Report on the XBase Project

This project addressed the conceptual fundamentals of data storage, investigating techniques for provision of highly generic storage facilities that can be tailored to produce various individually customised storage infrastructures, compliant to the needs of particular applications. This requires the separation of mechanism and policy wherever possible. Aspirations include: actors, whether users or individual processes, should be able to bind to, update and manipulate data and programs transparently with respect to their respective locations; programs should be expressed independently of the storage and network technology involved in their execution; storage facilities should be structure-neutral so that actors can impose multiple interpretations over information, simultaneously and safely; information should not be discarded so that arbitrary historical views are supported; raw stored information should be open to all; where security restrictions on its use are required this should be achieved using cryptographic techniques. The key advances of the research were: 1) the identification of a candidate set of minimal storage system building blocks, which are sufficiently simple to avoid encapsulating policy where it cannot be customised by applications, and composable to build highly flexible storage architectures 2) insight into the nature of append-only storage components, and the issues arising from their application to common storage use-cases

An object-oriented approach to application generation

The TUBA system consists of a set of integrated tools for the generation of business-oriented applications. Tools and applications have a modular structure, represented by class objects. The article describes the architecture of the environments for file processing, screen handling and report writing

Distributed storage manager system for synchronized and scalable AV services across networks

This article has been made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund - Copyright @ 2011 Hindawi Publishing CorporationThis paper provides an innovative solution, namely, the distributed storage manager that opens a new path for highly interactive and personalized services. The distributed storage manager provides an enhancement to the MHP storage management functionality acting as a value added middleware distributed across the network. The distributed storage manager system provides multiple protocol support for initializing and downloading both streamed and file-based content and provides optimum control mechanisms to organize the storing and retrieval of content that are remained accessible to other multiple heterogeneous devices