195,873 research outputs found
Supporting End-User Development through a New Composition Model: An Empirical Study
End-user development (EUD) is much hyped, and its impact has outstripped even the most optimistic forecasts. Even so, the vision of end users programming their own solutions
has not yet materialized. This will continue to be so unless we in both industry and the research community set ourselves the ambitious challenge of devising end to end an end-user application development model for developing a new age of EUD tools. We have embarked on this venture, and this paper presents the main insights and outcomes of our research and development efforts as part of a number of successful EU research projects. Our proposal not only aims to reshape software engineering to meet the needs of EUD but also to refashion its components as solution building blocks instead of programs and software developments. This
way, end users will really be empowered to build solutions based on artefacts akin to their expertise and understanding of ideal solution
Middleware Technologies for Cloud of Things - a survey
The next wave of communication and applications rely on the new services
provided by Internet of Things which is becoming an important aspect in human
and machines future. The IoT services are a key solution for providing smart
environments in homes, buildings and cities. In the era of a massive number of
connected things and objects with a high grow rate, several challenges have
been raised such as management, aggregation and storage for big produced data.
In order to tackle some of these issues, cloud computing emerged to IoT as
Cloud of Things (CoT) which provides virtually unlimited cloud services to
enhance the large scale IoT platforms. There are several factors to be
considered in design and implementation of a CoT platform. One of the most
important and challenging problems is the heterogeneity of different objects.
This problem can be addressed by deploying suitable "Middleware". Middleware
sits between things and applications that make a reliable platform for
communication among things with different interfaces, operating systems, and
architectures. The main aim of this paper is to study the middleware
technologies for CoT. Toward this end, we first present the main features and
characteristics of middlewares. Next we study different architecture styles and
service domains. Then we presents several middlewares that are suitable for CoT
based platforms and lastly a list of current challenges and issues in design of
CoT based middlewares is discussed.Comment: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352864817301268,
Digital Communications and Networks, Elsevier (2017
Middleware Technologies for Cloud of Things - a survey
The next wave of communication and applications rely on the new services
provided by Internet of Things which is becoming an important aspect in human
and machines future. The IoT services are a key solution for providing smart
environments in homes, buildings and cities. In the era of a massive number of
connected things and objects with a high grow rate, several challenges have
been raised such as management, aggregation and storage for big produced data.
In order to tackle some of these issues, cloud computing emerged to IoT as
Cloud of Things (CoT) which provides virtually unlimited cloud services to
enhance the large scale IoT platforms. There are several factors to be
considered in design and implementation of a CoT platform. One of the most
important and challenging problems is the heterogeneity of different objects.
This problem can be addressed by deploying suitable "Middleware". Middleware
sits between things and applications that make a reliable platform for
communication among things with different interfaces, operating systems, and
architectures. The main aim of this paper is to study the middleware
technologies for CoT. Toward this end, we first present the main features and
characteristics of middlewares. Next we study different architecture styles and
service domains. Then we presents several middlewares that are suitable for CoT
based platforms and lastly a list of current challenges and issues in design of
CoT based middlewares is discussed.Comment: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352864817301268,
Digital Communications and Networks, Elsevier (2017
Past, present and future of information and knowledge sharing in the construction industry: Towards semantic service-based e-construction
The paper reviews product data technology initiatives in the construction sector and provides a synthesis of related ICT industry needs. A comparison between (a) the data centric characteristics of Product Data Technology (PDT) and (b) ontology with a focus on semantics, is given, highlighting the pros and cons of each approach. The paper advocates the migration from data-centric application integration to ontology-based business process support, and proposes inter-enterprise collaboration architectures and frameworks based on semantic services, underpinned by ontology-based knowledge structures. The paper discusses the main reasons behind the low industry take up of product data technology, and proposes a preliminary roadmap for the wide industry diffusion of the proposed approach. In this respect, the paper stresses the value of adopting alliance-based modes of operation
Digital Ecosystems: Ecosystem-Oriented Architectures
We view Digital Ecosystems to be the digital counterparts of biological
ecosystems. Here, we are concerned with the creation of these Digital
Ecosystems, exploiting the self-organising properties of biological ecosystems
to evolve high-level software applications. Therefore, we created the Digital
Ecosystem, a novel optimisation technique inspired by biological ecosystems,
where the optimisation works at two levels: a first optimisation, migration of
agents which are distributed in a decentralised peer-to-peer network, operating
continuously in time; this process feeds a second optimisation based on
evolutionary computing that operates locally on single peers and is aimed at
finding solutions to satisfy locally relevant constraints. The Digital
Ecosystem was then measured experimentally through simulations, with measures
originating from theoretical ecology, evaluating its likeness to biological
ecosystems. This included its responsiveness to requests for applications from
the user base, as a measure of the ecological succession (ecosystem maturity).
Overall, we have advanced the understanding of Digital Ecosystems, creating
Ecosystem-Oriented Architectures where the word ecosystem is more than just a
metaphor.Comment: 39 pages, 26 figures, journa
Developing front-end Web 2.0 technologies to access services, content and things in the future Internet
The future Internet is expected to be composed of a mesh of interoperable web services accessible from all over the web. This approach has not yet caught on since global user?service interaction is still an open issue. This paper states one vision with regard to next-generation front-end Web 2.0 technology that will enable integrated access to services, contents and things in the future Internet. In this paper, we illustrate how front-ends that wrap traditional services and resources can be tailored to the needs of end users, converting end users into prosumers (creators and consumers of service-based applications). To do this, we propose an architecture that end users without programming skills can use to create front-ends, consult catalogues of resources tailored to their needs, easily integrate and coordinate front-ends and create composite applications to orchestrate services in their back-end. The paper includes a case study illustrating that current user-centred web development tools are at a very early stage of evolution. We provide statistical data on how the proposed architecture improves these tools. This paper is based on research conducted by the Service Front End (SFE) Open Alliance initiative
Forum Session at the First International Conference on Service Oriented Computing (ICSOC03)
The First International Conference on Service Oriented Computing (ICSOC) was held in Trento, December 15-18, 2003. The focus of the conference ---Service Oriented Computing (SOC)--- is the new emerging paradigm for distributed computing and e-business processing that has evolved from object-oriented and component computing to enable building agile networks of collaborating business applications distributed within and across organizational boundaries. Of the 181 papers submitted to the ICSOC conference, 10 were selected for the forum session which took place on December the 16th, 2003. The papers were chosen based on their technical quality, originality, relevance to SOC and for their nature of being best suited for a poster presentation or a demonstration. This technical report contains the 10 papers presented during the forum session at the ICSOC conference. In particular, the last two papers in the report ere submitted as industrial papers
Model Based Development of Quality-Aware Software Services
Modelling languages and development frameworks give support for functional and structural description of software architectures. But quality-aware applications require languages which allow expressing QoS as a first-class concept during architecture design and service composition, and to extend existing tools and infrastructures adding support for modelling, evaluating, managing and monitoring QoS aspects. In addition to its functional behaviour and internal structure, the developer of each service must consider the fulfilment of its quality requirements. If the service is flexible, the output quality depends both on input quality and available resources (e.g., amounts of CPU execution time and memory). From the software engineering point of view, modelling of quality-aware requirements and architectures require modelling support for the description of quality concepts, support for the analysis of quality properties (e.g. model checking and consistencies of quality constraints, assembly of quality), tool support for the transition from quality requirements to quality-aware architectures, and from quality-aware architecture to service run-time infrastructures. Quality management in run-time service infrastructures must give support for handling quality concepts dynamically. QoS-aware modeling frameworks and QoS-aware runtime management infrastructures require a common evolution to get their integration
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