Role-Based Enterprise Mashups with State Sharing, Preservation and Restoration Support for Multi-Instance Executions

Veebimaastikul suurt populaarsust kogunud tavatarbijatele suunatud vidinapõhised veebi-rakendused on loonud soodsa pinnase üldotstarbeliste mashup’ite loomise raamistike ning tööriistade tekkeks. Need tööriistad on eelkõige suunatud tava-Interneti kasutajatele, et luua lihtsaid mashup-tüüpi rakendusi. Samal ajal oleks vidinapõhistest veebirakendustest kasu ka ärirakendustena. Peamiseks takistuseks ärirakenduste loomisel veebipõhiste raken-dustena on keerulisest äriloogikast tulenevad keerukad nõuded ning protsessid. Antud magistritöö uurib, kuidas teostada veebividinatel põhinevate mashup-tüüpi ärirakenduste arendamist nii, et säiluks mashup’ite loomisega seotud peamised eelised, lihtsus ja kiirus. Käesolev magistritöö pakub välja laienduse olemasolevale mashup-tüüpi raamistikule, et toetada mashup’i dekompositsiooni rollipõhisteks vaadeteks. Selleks jagatakse mashup väiksemateks vidinate komplektideks, tagades igale kasutajarollile komplekt just temale vajaminevatest vidinatest. Kuigi igal kasutajarollil võib olla erinev vaade kogu ärirakendusest, tagab käesolevas magistritöös pakutud lahendus suhtluse nende erinevate vaadete vahel. See on vajalik tagamaks mashup’i eksemplari ühtsust kõikide mashup’i vaadete vahel, olenemata sellest, millistest vidinatest antud kasutaja vaade koosneb. Lisaks pakub käesolev magistritöö välja lahenduse toetamaks mitut eksemplari samast vidinapõhisest ärirakendusest ning toetamaks ärirakenduse oleku salvestamist ning taastamist. Kuna ärirakendused on suunatud lahendamaks kasutajate igapäevaseid ülesandeid, on vajalik, et kasutaja saaks valida olemasolevate mashup’i eksemplaride hulgast või alustada uut eksemplari. Lisaks on vajalik, et kasutaja saaks igal ajahetkel rakenduse kasutamise lõpetada selliselt, et hiljem rakenduse kasutamist jätkates oleks tagatud sama rakenduse olek, millest kasutamine katkestati. Väljapakutud lahenduse toimimist testitakse näidisrakendusega, mis realiseerib krediidihalduse protsessi.Recent hype on consumer web mashups has resulted in many general-purpose mashup frameworks and tools. These tools aim at simplifying the creation of mashups targeted to mainstream Internet users. At the same time, mashups are also used for solving specific business-related tasks. Such mashups are called enterprise mashups and more sophisticated frameworks and tools have been developed to support their creation. However, similarly to traditional web application development tools, the complexity of these frameworks is hindering the main benefits associated with mashup development – agility and simplicity. This thesis aims at extending a general-purpose mashup framework to support develop-ment of enterprise mashups while still preserving the simplicity and agility of develop-ment. More specifically, this thesis describes a solution for role-based decomposition of mashups for multi-instance executions with state sharing, preservation and restoration. In this thesis, a general-purpose mashup framework is extended with the concept of roles to support multi-user interaction and decomposing complex enterprise mashups with rich interactions into role-based views. In the context of this thesis, a view is defined as a subset of widgets a mashup is made of. Hence, through views an effective mechanism is provided for decomposing enterprise mashups to mashups as simple as general-purpose mashups. Additionally, this thesis proposes a generic solution for multi-instance mashup executions. In this thesis, each workflow instance is associated with an instance of a mashup. Since situational applications target at solving users day-to-day tasks, it is necessary to support multiple instances of a mashup. Furthermore, support for multiple mashup instances leverages users’ ability to participate in multiple workflow instances and to initialize new ones. Such mashup instances are in this thesis also referred to as mashup sessions. Finally, a solution is proposed for supporting mashup state sharing, preservation and restoration. Sharing states with other users is the key mechanism for facilitating interaction and collaboration between multiple users. State preservation and restoration are needed to allow a user to stop using the mashup and to resume to the same state at a later time. The proposed solution is also validated through a proof of concept application

A framework for understanding and predicting the take up and use of social networking tools in a collaborative envionment

Online collaborative environments, such as social networking environments, enable users to work together to create, modify, and share media collaboratively. However, as users can be autonomous in their actions the ability to create and form a shared understanding of the people, purpose, and process of the collaborative effort can be complex. This complexity is compounded by the natural implicit social and collaborative structure of these environments, a structure that can be modified by users dynamically and asynchronously. Some have tried to make this implicitness explicit through data mining, and allocation of user roles. However such methods can fail to adapt to the changing nature of an environment's structure relating to habits of users and their social connectedness. As a result, existing methods generally provide only a snapshot of the environment at a point in time. In addition, existing methods focus on whole user bases and the underlying social context of the environment. This makes them unsuitable for situations where the context of collaboration can change rapidly, for example the tools and widgets available for collaborative action and the users available for collaborative interactions. There is a pre-existing model for understanding the dynamic structure of these environments called the “Group Socialisation Model". This model has been used to understand how social group roles form and change over time as they go through a life cycle. This model also contains a concept of characteristic behaviours or descriptors of behaviour that an individual can use to make judgement about another individual and to create an understanding of a role or social norm that may or may not be explicit. Although studies have used components of this model to provide a means of role identification or role composition within online collaborative environments, they have not managed to provide a higher level method or framework that can replicate the entire life cycle continuously over time within these environments. Using the constructive research methodology this thesis presents a research construct in the form of a framework for replicating the social group role life cycle within online collaborative environments. The framework uses an artificial neural network with a unique capability of taking snapshots of its network structure. In conjunction with fuzzy logic inference, collaborative role signatures composed of characteristic behaviours can then be determined. In this work, three characteristic behaviours were identified from the literature for characterisation of stereotypical online behaviour to be used within a role signature: these were publisher, annotator, and lurker. The use of the framework was demonstrated on three case studies. Two of the case studies were custom built mobile applications specifically for this study, and one was the Walk 2.0 website from a National Health and Medical Research Council project. All three case studies allowed for collaborative actions where users could interact with each other to create an dynamic and diverse environment. For the use of these case studies, ethics was approved by the Western Sydney University Human Research Ethic Committee and consistent strategies for recruitment were carried out. The framework was thereby demonstrated to be capable of successfully determining role signatures composed of the above characteristic behaviours, for a range of contexts and individual users. Also, comparison of participant usage of case studies was carried out and it was established that the role signatures determined by the framework matched usage. In addition, the top contributors within the case studies were analysed to demonstrate the framework's capability of handling the dynamic and continual changing structure of an online collaborative environment. The major contribution of this thesis is a framework construct developed to propose and demonstrate a new framework approach to successfully automate and carry out the social group role model life cycle within online collaborative environments. This is a significant component of foundational work towards providing designers of online collaborative environments with the capacity of understanding the various implicit roles and their characteristic behaviours for individual users. Such a capability could enable more specific individual personalisation or resource allocation, which could in turn improve the suitability of environments developed for collaboration online

Gamification as a Service: Conceptualization of a Generic Enterprise Gamification Platform

Gamification is a novel method to improve engagement, motivation, or participation in non-game contexts using game mechanics. To a large extent, gamification is a psychological- and design-oriented discipline, i.e., a lot of effort has to be spent already in the design phase of a gamification project. Subsequently, the design is implemented in information systems such as portals or enterprise resource planning applications. These systems act as mediators to transport a gameful design to its users. However, the efforts for the subsequent development and integration process are often underestimated. In fact, most conceptual gamification designs are never implemented due to the high development costs that arise from building the gamification solution from scratch, imprecise design or technical requirements, and communication conflicts between different stakeholders in the project. This thesis addresses these problems by systematically defining the phases and stakeholders of the overall gamification process. Furthermore, the thesis rigorously defines the conceptual requirements of gamification based on a broad literature review. The identified conceptual requirements are mapped to a domain-specific language, called the Gamification Modeling Language. Moreover, this thesis analyzes 29 existing gamification solutions that aim to decrease the implementation efforts of gamification. However, using the different language elements, it is shown that none of the existing solutions suffices all requirements. Therefore, a generic and reusable platform as runtime environment for gamification is proposed which fulfills all presented functional and non-functional requirements. As another benefit, it is shown how the Gamification Modeling Language can be automatically compiled into code for the gamification runtime environment and, thus, further reduces development efforts. Based on the developed artifacts and five real gamified applications from industry, it is shown that the efforts for the implementation of the gamification can be significantly reduced from several months or weeks to a few days. Since the technology is designed as a reusable service, future projects benefit continuously with regards to time and efforts

Service Composition for IP Smart Object using Realtime Web Protocols: Concept and Research Challenges

The Internet of Things (IoT) refers to a world-wide network of interconnected physical things using standardized communication protocols. Recent development of Internet Protocol (IP) stacks for resource-constrained devices unveils a possibility for the future IoT based on the stable and scalable IP technology much like today's Internet of computers. One important question remains: how can data and events (denoted as services) introduced by a variety of IP networked things be exchanged and aggregated e ciently in various application domains. Because the true value of IoT lies in the interaction of several services from physical things, answers to this question are essential to support a rapid creation of new IoT smart and ubiquitous applications. The problem is known as service composition. This article explains the practicability of the future full-IP IoT with realtime Web protocols to formally state the problem of service composition for IP smart objects, provides literature review, and discusses its research challenges

Engineering context-aware systems and applications: a survey

Context-awareness is an essential component of systems developed in areas like Intelligent Environments, Pervasive & Ubiquitous Computing and Ambient Intelligence. In these emerging fields, there is a need for computerized systems to have a higher understanding of the situations in which to provide services or functionalities, to adapt accordingly. The literature shows that researchers modify existing engineering methods in order to better fit the needs of context-aware computing. These efforts are typically disconnected from each other and generally focus on solving specific development issues. We encourage the creation of a more holistic and unified engineering process that is tailored for the demands of these systems. For this purpose, we study the state-of-the-art in the development of context-aware systems, focusing on: A) Methodologies for developing context-aware systems, analyzing the reasons behind their lack of adoption and features that the community wish they can use; B) Context aware system engineering challenges and techniques applied during the most common development stages; C) Context aware systems conceptualization

Engineering context-aware systems and applications:A survey

Context-awareness is an essential component of systems developed in areas like Intelligent Environments, Pervasive & Ubiquitous Computing and Ambient Intelligence. In these emerging fields, there is a need for computerized systems to have a higher understanding of the situations in which to provide services or functionalities, to adapt accordingly. The literature shows that researchers modify existing engineering methods in order to better fit the needs of context-aware computing. These efforts are typically disconnected from each other and generally focus on solving specific development issues. We encourage the creation of a more holistic and unified engineering process that is tailored for the demands of these systems. For this purpose, we study the state-of-the-art in the development of context-aware systems, focusing on: (A) Methodologies for developing context-aware systems, analyzing the reasons behind their lack of adoption and features that the community wish they can use; (B) Context-aware system engineering challenges and techniques applied during the most common development stages; (C) Context-aware systems conceptualization

Future bathroom: A study of user-centred design principles affecting usability, safety and satisfaction in bathrooms for people living with disabilities

Research and development work relating to assistive technology 2010-11 (Department of Health) Presented to Parliament pursuant to Section 22 of the Chronically Sick and Disabled Persons Act 197

A Global Data Ecosystem for Agriculture and Food

Agriculture would benefit hugely from a common data ecosystem. Produced and used by diverse stakeholders, from smallholders to multinational conglomerates, a shared global data space would help build the infrastructures that will propel the industry forward. In light of growing concern that there was no single entity that could make the industry-wide change needed to acquire and manage the necessary data, this paper was commissioned by Syngenta with GODAN’s assistance to catalyse consensus around what form a global data ecosystem might take, how it could bring value to key players, what cultural changes might be needed to make it a reality and finally what technology might be needed to support it. This paper looks at the challenges and principles that must be addressed in in building a global data ecosystem for agriculture. These begin with building incentives and trust: amongst both data providers and consumers: in sharing, opening and using data. Key to achieving this will be developing a broad awareness of, and making efforts to improve, data quality, provenance, timeliness and accessibility. We set out the key global standards and data publishing principles that can be followed in supporting this, including the ‘Five stars of open data’ and the ‘FAIR principles’ and offer several recommendations for stakeholders in the industry to follow