On using generic profiles and views for dynamic web services adaptation

International audienceThe emergence of mobile technologies allows users to be connected to services anytime, anywhere and anyhow. However, this mobility requires new constraints on the execution of the services and their presentations to users. Hence, these ones must be selected and adapted according to not only the user's profile but also his context. In this paper, we present a new context-aware adaptation architecture based on Web Services, named CA-WIS. Our proposal aims users to interact with web services that correspond to their needs and their contexts

Contribution to Quality of Life: A New Outcome Variable for Mobile Data Service

The rapid spread of technological innovations like mobile data services (MDS) has made mobile computing a fact of everyday life for many people. Therefore, we need to understand the contribution of mobile computing to overall quality of life (QoL). Employing the satisfaction hierarchy model and bottom-up spillover theory, this study proposes a theoretical model in the context of MDS that connects user satisfaction (a traditional outcome variable of IT) with contribution to QoL (a new outcome variable for mobile computing) in a range of life domains. The validity of the proposed model and outcome variable was tested through three empirical studies conducted in Korea. User satisfaction with MDS was found to affect the contribution of MDS to QoL in eleven life domains, and these contributions in turn influenced the overall contribution of MDS to QoL. The paper ends with a discussion of the study\u27s implications and limitations

Revisión sistemática sobre las aplicaciones en E-turismo en el periodo 2004 - 2014

La investigación tiene como propósito presentar una revisión sistemática del uso de las Tecnologías de la Información (TI) en el sector del turismo, publicados en la literatura científica entre los años 2004 y 2014 se pretende construir un marco conceptual que permita explicar qué es el e-Turismo y sus características más importantes, planear la revisión sistemática, estableciendo las preguntas de investigación, el alcance de la revisión y los criterios a considerar para la selección y clasificación de los documentos, buscar los documentos en las bases de datos seleccionadas utilizando para ello una ecuación de búsqueda depurada, seleccionar los documentos a ser analizados a través de una evaluación de calidad de los mismos, realizar el análisis de los documentos seleccionados y presentar una síntesis de los resultados obtenidos, se encontró que para los años 2004 a 2014 se ha venido incrementando la investigación del desarrollo e implementación de tecnologías de la información como apoyo a los diferentes sectores que componen el turismo, a saber: Hospitalidad, Guías Turísticas y Transporte; en especial el uso de aplicaciones web y la geolocalización (GPS), este trabajo logra sentar las bases para futuras investigaciones donde sea necesario determinar qué tipo de relación existe entre las diferentes aplicaciones que se utilizan para apoyar los servicios en el e-Turismo; así como a nivel general, establecer un marco de referencia para un modelo de e-Inclusión asociado con otras disciplinas, como por ejemplo, el e-Gobierno, e-Salud, entre otros. El campo del turismo es uno de los dominios donde se observan más avances a nivel tecnológico, a lo largo de los años se han desarrollado todo tipo de aplicaciones que buscan soportar toda la cadena de valor del turismo, desde los prestadores de servicios, como los hoteles y las aerolíneas, los intermediadores como las agencias de turismo, así como los usuarios finales, los turistas

A Software Product Line Approach to Ontology-based Recommendations in E-Tourism Systems

This study tackles two concerns of developers of Tourism Information Systems (TIS). First is the need for more dependable recommendation services due to the intangible nature of the tourism product where it is impossible for customers to physically evaluate the services on offer prior to practical experience. Second is the need to manage dynamic user requirements in tourism due to the advent of new technologies such as the semantic web and mobile computing such that etourism systems (TIS) can evolve proactively with emerging user needs at minimal time and development cost without performance tradeoffs. However, TIS have very predictable characteristics and are functionally identical in most cases with minimal variations which make them attractive for software product line development. The Software Product Line Engineering (SPLE) paradigm enables the strategic and systematic reuse of common core assets in the development of a family of software products that share some degree of commonality in order to realise a significant improvement in the cost and time of development. Hence, this thesis introduces a novel and systematic approach, called Product Line for Ontology-based Tourism Recommendation (PLONTOREC), a special approach focusing on the creation of variants of TIS products within a product line. PLONTOREC tackles the aforementioned problems in an engineering-like way by hybridizing concepts from ontology engineering and software product line engineering. The approach is a systematic process model consisting of product line management, ontology engineering, domain engineering, and application engineering. The unique feature of PLONTOREC is that it allows common TIS product requirements to be defined, commonalities and differences of content in TIS product variants to be planned and limited in advance using a conceptual model, and variant TIS products to be created according to a construction specification. We demonstrated the novelty in this approach using a case study of product line development of e-tourism systems for three countries in the West-African Region of Africa

A secure architecture enabling end-user privacy in the context of commercial wide-area location-enhanced web services

Mobile location-based services have raised privacy concerns amongst mobile phone users who may need to supply their identity and location information to untrustworthy third parties in order to access these applications. Widespread acceptance of such services may therefore depend on how privacy sensitive information will be handled in order to restore users’ confidence in what could become the “killer app” of 3G networks. The work reported in this thesis is part of a larger project to provide a secure architecture to enable the delivery of location-based services over the Internet. The security of transactions and in particular the privacy of the information transmitted has been the focus of our research. In order to protect mobile users’ identities, we have designed and implemented a proxy-based middleware called the Orient Platform together with its Orient Protocol, capable of translating their real identity into pseudonyms. In order to protect users’ privacy in terms of location information, we have designed and implemented a Location Blurring algorithm that intentionally downgrades the quality of location information to be used by location-based services. The algorithm takes into account a blurring factor set by the mobile user at her convenience and blurs her location by preventing real-time tracking by unauthorized entities. While it penalizes continuous location tracking, it returns accurate and reliable information in response to sporadic location queries. Finally, in order to protect the transactions and provide end-to-end security between all the entities involved, we have designed and implemented a Public Key Infrastructure based on a Security Mediator (SEM) architecture. The cryptographic algorithms used are identitybased, which makes digital certificate retrieval, path validation and revocation redundant in our environment. In particular we have designed and implemented a cryptographic scheme based on Hess’ work [108], which represents, to our knowledge, the first identity-based signature scheme in the SEM setting. A special private key generation process has also been developed in order to enable entities to use a single private key in conjunction with multiple pseudonyms, which significantly simplifies key management. We believe our approach satisfies the security requirements of mobile users and can help restore their confidence in location-based services

An Autonomic Cross-Platform Operating Environment for On-Demand Internet Computing

The Internet has evolved into a global and ubiquitous communication medium interconnecting powerful application servers, diverse desktop computers and mobile notebooks. Along with recent developments in computer technology, such as the convergence of computing and communication devices, the way how people use computers and the Internet has changed people´s working habits and has led to new application scenarios. On the one hand, pervasive computing, ubiquitous computing and nomadic computing become more and more important since different computing devices like PDAs and notebooks may be used concurrently and alternately, e.g. while the user is on the move. On the other hand, the ubiquitous availability and pervasive interconnection of computing systems have fostered various trends towards the dynamic utilization and spontaneous collaboration of available remote computing resources, which are addressed by approaches like utility computing, grid computing, cloud computing and public computing. From a general point of view, the common objective of this development is the use of Internet applications on demand, i.e. applications that are not installed in advance by a platform administrator but are dynamically deployed and run as they are requested by the application user. The heterogeneous and unmanaged nature of the Internet represents a major challenge for the on demand use of custom Internet applications across heterogeneous hardware platforms, operating systems and network environments. Promising remedies are autonomic computing systems that are supposed to maintain themselves without particular user or application intervention. In this thesis, an Autonomic Cross-Platform Operating Environment (ACOE) is presented that supports On Demand Internet Computing (ODIC), such as dynamic application composition and ad hoc execution migration. The approach is based on an integration middleware called crossware that does not replace existing middleware but operates as a self-managing mediator between diverse application requirements and heterogeneous platform configurations. A Java implementation of the Crossware Development Kit (XDK) is presented, followed by the description of the On Demand Internet Computing System (ODIX). The feasibility of the approach is shown by the implementation of an Internet Application Workbench, an Internet Application Factory and an Internet Peer Federation. They illustrate the use of ODIX to support local, remote and distributed ODIC, respectively. Finally, the suitability of the approach is discussed with respect to the support of ODIC