A Semantic Framework for Priority-based Service Matching in Pervasive Environments

The increasing popularity of personal wireless devices has raised new demands for the efficient discovery of heterogeneous devices and services in pervasive environments. The existing approaches such as Jini [1], UPnP [8], etc., describe services at a syntactic level and the matching mechanisms in these approaches are limited to syntactic comparisons based on attributes or interfaces. In order to overcome the limitations in these approaches, there has been an increased interest in the use of semantic description and matching techniques to support effective service discovery. This paper proposes a semantic matching approach which facilitates the discovery of device-based services in a pervasive environment; the approach provides a ranking facility that orders services according to their suitability and also considers priorities placed on individual requirements in a request during the matching process. The evaluation studies have shown that the matcher results correlate reasonably well with human judgement

The OCarePlatform : a context-aware system to support independent living

Background: Currently, healthcare services, such as institutional care facilities, are burdened with an increasing number of elderly people and individuals with chronic illnesses and a decreasing number of competent caregivers. Objectives: To relieve the burden on healthcare services, independent living at home could be facilitated, by offering individuals and their (in)formal caregivers support in their daily care and needs. With the rise of pervasive healthcare, new information technology solutions can assist elderly people ("residents") and their caregivers to allow residents to live independently for as long as possible. Methods: To this end, the OCarePlatform system was designed. This semantic, data-driven and cloud based back-end system facilitates independent living by offering information and knowledge-based services to the resident and his/her (in)formal caregivers. Data and context information are gathered to realize context-aware and personalized services and to support residents in meeting their daily needs. This body of data, originating from heterogeneous data and information sources, is sent to personalized services, where is fused, thus creating an overview of the resident's current situation. Results: The architecture of the OCarePlatform is proposed, which is based on a service-oriented approach, together with its different components and their interactions. The implementation details are presented, together with a running example. A scalability and performance study of the OCarePlatform was performed. The results indicate that the OCarePlatform is able to support a realistic working environment and respond to a trigger in less than 5 seconds. The system is highly dependent on the allocated memory. Conclusion: The data-driven character of the OCarePlatform facilitates easy plug-in of new functionality, enabling the design of personalized, context-aware services. The OCarePlatform leads to better support for elderly people and individuals with chronic illnesses, who live independently. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved

An Autonomous Engine for Services Configuration and Deployment.

The runtime management of the infrastructure providing service-based systems is a complex task, up to the point where manual operation struggles to be cost effective. As the functionality is provided by a set of dynamically composed distributed services, in order to achieve a management objective multiple operations have to be applied over the distributed elements of the managed infrastructure. Moreover, the manager must cope with the highly heterogeneous characteristics and management interfaces of the runtime resources. With this in mind, this paper proposes to support the configuration and deployment of services with an automated closed control loop. The automation is enabled by the definition of a generic information model, which captures all the information relevant to the management of the services with the same abstractions, describing the runtime elements, service dependencies, and business objectives. On top of that, a technique based on satisfiability is described which automatically diagnoses the state of the managed environment and obtains the required changes for correcting it (e.g., installation, service binding, update, or configuration). The results from a set of case studies extracted from the banking domain are provided to validate the feasibility of this propos

Heterogeneous Access: Survey and Design Considerations

As voice, multimedia, and data services are converging to IP, there is a need for a new networking architecture to support future innovations and applications. Users are consuming Internet services from multiple devices that have multiple network interfaces such as Wi-Fi, LTE, Bluetooth, and possibly wired LAN. Such diverse network connectivity can be used to increase both reliability and performance by running applications over multiple links, sequentially for seamless user experience, or in parallel for bandwidth and performance enhancements. The existing networking stack, however, offers almost no support for intelligently exploiting such network, device, and location diversity. In this work, we survey recently proposed protocols and architectures that enable heterogeneous networking support. Upon evaluation, we abstract common design patterns and propose a unified networking architecture that makes better use of a heterogeneous dynamic environment, both in terms of networks and devices. The architecture enables mobile nodes to make intelligent decisions about how and when to use each or a combination of networks, based on access policies. With this new architecture, we envision a shift from current applications, which support a single network, location, and device at a time to applications that can support multiple networks, multiple locations, and multiple devices

A SCORM Thin Client Architecture for e-learning Systems based on Web Services

In this paper we propose an architecture of e-learning systems characterized by the use of Web services and a suitable middleware component. These technical infrastructures allow us to extend the system with new services as well as to integrate and reuse heterogeneous software e-learning components. Moreover, they let us better support the "anytime and anywhere " learning paradigm. As a matter of fact, the proposal provides an implementation of the run-time environment suggested in the sharable content object reference model (SCORM) to trace learning processes, which is also suitable for mobile learning

MLEA: a solution for users of android in UTP Virtual

This paper describes a design of an educational platform for a mobile learning architecture, which is a state of the art topic in distance education. The product will allow users to interact in an efficient, flexible, and transparent fashion with a web-based education environment, in this case Module Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment (Moodle), using Android mobile devices. In order to provide a strong and lasting architecture, the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) methodology is used given that it allows easy software re-utilization as well as integration of heterogeneous services. The architecture is based on web services implemented with Representational State Transfer (REST), as it has been demonstrated to be lighter and less consuming than other protocols, for devices with limited resources such as mobile devices. Web services provide the communication means between the server side and the client side of the architecture, whereas agents are used to deliver the services itself. The authors propose the development of an environment that facilitates the integration of various educational resources to support m-learning. An important aspect of the proposal is the offering of a tool to provide customized alerts for students and teachers, enabling them to remain updated about activities taking place in the coursesThis paper describes a design of an educational platform for a mobile learning architecture, which is a state of the art topic in distance education. The product will allow users to interact in an efficient, flexible, and transparent fashion with a web-based education environment, in this case Module Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment (Moodle), using Android mobile devices. In order to provide a strong and lasting architecture, the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) methodology is used given that it allows easy software re-utilization as well as integration of heterogeneous services. The architecture is based on web services implemented with Representational State Transfer (REST), as it has been demonstrated to be lighter and less consuming than other protocols, for devices with limited resources such as mobile devices. Web services provide the communication means between the server side and the client side of the architecture, whereas agents are used to deliver the services itself. The authors propose the development of an environment that facilitates the integration of various educational resources to support m-learning. An important aspect of the proposal is the offering of a tool to provide customized alerts for students and teachers, enabling them to remain updated about activities taking place in the course