The digital parrot: Combining context-awareness and semantics to augment memory

People of all ages and backgrounds are prone to forgetting information, even about their personal experiences. Existing systems to support people in remembering such information either continuously record a person’s experiences or provide means to store and retrieve clearly defined, isolated pieces of data. We propose a new approach: combining context-awareness with semantic information. We believe this approach to be superior to the existing systems in certain types of situations. This position paper introduces this approach and our own ongoing project, the Digital Parrot

Completing Queries: Rewriting of IncompleteWeb Queries under Schema Constraints

Reactive Web systems, Web services, and Web-based publish/ subscribe systems communicate events as XML messages, and in many cases require composite event detection: it is not sufficient to react to single event messages, but events have to be considered in relation to other events that are received over time. Emphasizing language design and formal semantics, we describe the rule-based query language XChangeEQ for detecting composite events. XChangeEQ is designed to completely cover and integrate the four complementary querying dimensions: event data, event composition, temporal relationships, and event accumulation. Semantics are provided as model and fixpoint theories; while this is an established approach for rule languages, it has not been applied for event queries before

Measuring usability for application software using the quality in use integration measurement model

User interfaces of application software are designed to make user interaction as efficient and as simple as possible. Market accessibility of any application software is determined by the usability of its user interfaces. A poorly designed user interface will have little value no matter how powerful the program is. Thus, it is significantly important to measure usability during the system development lifecycle in order to avoid user disappointment. Various methods and standards that help measure usability have been developed. However, these methods define usability inconsistently, which makes software engineers hesitant in implementing these methods or standards. The Quality in Use Integrated Measurement (QUIM) model is a consolidated approach for measuring usability through 10 factors, 26 criteria, and 127 metrics. It decomposes usability into factors, criteria, and metrics, and it is a hierarchical model that helps developers with no or little background of usability metrics. Among 127 metrics of QUIM, essential efficiency (EE) is the most specific metric used to measure the usability of user interfaces through an equation. This study involves a comparative analysis between three case studies that use the QUIM model to measure usability in terms of EE for three case studies: (1) Public University Registration System, (2) Restaurant Menu Ordering System, and (3) ATM system. A comparison is made based on the percentage of EE for each element of the use cases in each use case diagram. The results obtained revealed that the user interface design for Restaurant Menu Ordering System scored the highest percentage of EE, thus proving to be the most user-friendly application software among its counterparts

Managing polyglot systems metadata with hypergraphs

A single type of data store can hardly fulfill every end-user requirements in the NoSQL world. Therefore, polyglot systems use different types of NoSQL datastores in combination. However, the heterogeneity of the data storage models makes managing the metadata a complex task in such systems, with only a handful of research carried out to address this. In this paper, we propose a hypergraph-based approach for representing the catalog of metadata in a polyglot system. Taking an existing common programming interface to NoSQL systems, we extend and formalize it as hypergraphs for managing metadata. Then, we define design constraints and query transformation rules for three representative data store types. Furthermore, we propose a simple query rewriting algorithm using the catalog itself for these data store types and provide a prototype implementation. Finally, we show the feasibility of our approach on a use case of an existing polyglot system.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

A Modular Logic Approach for Expressing Web Services in XML Applying Dynamic Rules in XML

RuleML is considered to be a markup language for the semantic web. It allows the enrichment of web ontologies by adding definitions of derived concepts and it enhances interoperability among different systems and tools by publishing rules in an XML format. Moreover the in-creasing demand for interfaces that enhance information sharing has given rise to XML doc-uments that include embedded calls to web services. In this paper we propose a variation of RuleML that is based on modular logic programming. Our approach is based in a two level architecture. In the first level a modular logic language, called M-log, is presented. This lan-guage encompasses several mechanisms for invoking web services. In the second level we ex-ploit the semantics of M-log to present a variation of RuleML with rich modeling capabilities. Formal foundations for this variation are given through direct translation to M-log semantics.Knowledge Management, XML, Modular Logic Programming, E-Services