An investigation of web-based hypermedia design support: methods and tools

Since the Internet networking was first established, the World Wide Web (or WWW) provides a new opportunity to deliver information and to communicate with others. Therefore, many organisations and industries have joined this exciting technology to take advantage of the Web. In recent years, the opportunity has arisen for other tasks to be carried out on the Web apart from delivering information. As the Web applications and documents have become larger and more complex, they have experienced many design and development problems which often lead to very high maintenance cost. To improve the quality of Websites and the structure of information, the designers need structured design methods, guidelines, and tools to assist their work. Some researchers have proposed hypermedia design methods and guidelines, which contain development cycle with formal design techniques to assist the construction of Web page designs. To overcome the design and development problems, this research is carried out by surveying currently available design methods. It shows the ways to apply these methods for developing structured Web sites. The results of this research led to identifying the design stages involved in developing Web sites using hypermedia methods. It also presents a CASE tool to provide a development environment for producing Web pages based on hypermedia design stages. This encourages Web designers to apply structured hypermedia design methods to improve the quality of design and to reduce the maintenance cost. The thesis is relevant for end-users, Web designers from organisations, institutes, and institutes for those who want to apply structured hypermedia design methods for producing their Web documents

Developing Systems with NDT and NDT-Tool

The rising interest for developing systems in web environments has produced that the research community poses the necessity of offering methodological proposals in order to give a suitable reference when a web system is produced. In the last years, several methodological proposals have appeared: OOHDM (Object Oriented Hypermedia Design Method, UWE (UML Based Web Engineering), OOH (Object-Oriented Hypermedia Method), WSDM (Web Site Design Method) or WebML (Web Modelling Language) are only some examples. However, there is not a standard and world wide accepted methodology. Each methodology proposes its own techniques and models. This fact has produced that some studies have been made in order to compare them. These comparatives studies show that there are some gaps in web engineering. This paper presents these gaps and introduces NDT (Navigational Development Techniques). NDT is an approach which offers a different development process that starts with requirements treatment and allows to get design models using a systematic process. It tries to solve some of these gaps detected in web engineering. In order to introduce how NDT confronts these gaps, the paper presents NDT development process, a global vision of its objectives and its tool case, NDT-Tool. Also, this paper enumerated some real projects developed by NDT and NDT-Tool in real companies

STS Case Study Development Support

The Shuttle Case Study Collection (SCSC) has been developed using lessons learned documented by NASA engineers, analysts, and contractors. The SCSC provides educators with a new tool to teach real-world engineering processes with the goal of providing unique educational materials that enhance critical thinking, decision-making and problem-solving skills. During this third phase of the project, responsibilities included: the revision of the Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) source code to ensure all pages follow World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards, and the addition and edition of website content, including text, documents, and images. Basic HTML knowledge was required, as was basic knowledge of photo editing software, and training to learn how to use NASA's Content Management System for website design. The outcome of this project was its release to the public

The rhizome underneath: Promoting the disruption of established practice and the innovation of online teaching, by improving the design of globally disseminated online professional development artefacts.

This thesis exemplifies, through the exploration of a specific case study, how the design of an online professional development resource is capable of penetrating, disrupting, and fostering innovation in online teaching practices within a wide range of existing professional education networks. Following its release in 2009, the ‘Learning to Teach Online’ (LTTO) project spread rapidly around the world via conduits such as Twitter, Facebook, blogs, institutional links and word of mouth — throughout K-12, vocational, higher education and private consultancies across 146 countries and territories. This thesis investigates how the design of LTTO facilitated its discovery, dissemination and integration in a range of educational contexts. There was a large volume of data collected from Web 2.0 activity surrounding LTTO. Using data visualisation techniques, patterns and hidden relationships between individuals sharing and using the resources were revealed, that provided insight into previously invisible relationships between individuals within vastly different established professional networks all over the world. The concept of the rhizome is at the core of this thesis, inspired by the observation of the growing patterns of connection between seemingly disparate educational communities globally, in a manner that was neither precisely controlled nor predictable. Key outcomes include a detailed analysis of the design of an online professional development resource that was effective across a range of disciplines and education sectors; the determination of an effective method of researching the spread and use of similar initiatives; and observations and strategies that can help others to improve the design process for future online professional development resources

Visual communication in urban planning and urban design

This report documents the current status of visual communication in urban design and planning. Visual communication is examined through discussion of standalone and network media, specifically concentrating on visualisation on the World Wide Web(WWW).Firstly, we examine the use of Solid and Geometric Modelling for visualising urban planning and urban design. This report documents and compares examples of the use of Virtual Reality Modelling Language (VRML) and proprietary WWW based Virtual Reality modelling software. Examples include the modelling of Bath and Glasgow using both VRML 1.0 and 2.0. A review is carried out on the use of Virtual Worldsand their role in visualising urban form within multi-user environments. The use of Virtual Worlds is developed into a case study of the possibilities and limitations of Virtual Internet Design Arenas (ViDAs), an initiative undertaken at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, University College London. The use of Virtual Worlds and their development towards ViDAs is seen as one of the most important developments in visual communication for urban planning and urban design since the development plan.Secondly, photorealistic media in the process of communicating plans is examined.The process of creating photorealistic media is documented, examples of the Virtual Streetscape and Wired Whitehall Virtual Urban Interface System are provided. The conclusion is drawn that although the use of photo-realistic media on the WWW provides a way to visually communicate planning information, its use is limited. The merging of photorealistic media and solid geometric modelling is reviewed in the creation of Augmented Reality. Augmented Reality is seen to provide an important step forward in the ability to quickly and easily visualise urban planning and urban design information.Thirdly, the role of visual communication of planning data through GIS is examined interms of desktop, three dimensional and Internet based GIS systems. The evolution to Internet GIS is seen as a critical component in the development of virtual cities which will allow urban planners and urban designers to visualise and model the complexity of the built environment in networked virtual reality.Finally a viewpoint is put forward of the Virtual City, linking Internet GIS with photorealistic multi-user Virtual Worlds. At present there are constraints on how far virtual cities can be developed, but a view is provided on how these networked virtual worlds are developing to aid visual communication in urban planning and urban design

Greysmoke

This project allowed me to explore two of my greatest areas of interest and creative expression: writing and web design. While a World Wide Web presence is not a necessary for the use of hypertext, I believe that the web will be a major conduit for the written word in the years to come. It’s not my intention or desire to replace print and paper, but rather to explore the new tools and avenues available for the creative writer. In creating this piece, I tried to use the most fundamental tools available. The story itself I had already outlined and partly handwritten in notebooks. When developing the hypertext for the web, I used the text editor, Composer, that was part of the web browser I use, Netscape 4.5. This was all free, since I am both student and staff at the University. In addition, I rewrote some of the code using my own knowledge of HTML, in this case 4.0. For designing some of the graphics, I used Microsoft Paint, which is a part of our Windows 95 system on our home Dell 486 PC. For others, I used the one piece of software that purchased, PaintShop Pro 5. At $70, it was bargain, since it contains many of the features in Photoshop 5, which costs @$300. For Now, the novella is available at the library on cd-rom and on the special collections website; and at the English department on cd-rom, with a copy of Netscape 4.5 on the disk as well. (That may make it accessible for the next few years.) I also plan to keep it on any future website that I have – or whatever comes next. Any of my work will always be accessible by doing a search on my name

Steganography For Embedding Data In Digital Image

The growth of the World Wide Web (WWW) has enabled the personal computer to be used as a general communications tool. As in the case of other forms of communication there is a wish for security and privacy. With literally millions of images moving on the Internet each year, it is safe to say that digital image Steganography is of real concern to many in the IT security field. Digital images could be used for a number of different types of security fear. In the business world, the sending of a harmless looking bitmap file could actually hide the latest company secrets. Steganography (literally, covered writing) is concealing of a secret message within another seemingly innocuous message, or carrier. Digital carriers include email, audio, and images. Steganography, like cryptography, is a means of providing secrecy. Steganography does so by hiding the very existence of the communication, while cryptography does so by scrambling a message so it cannot be understood. A cryptography message can be intercepted by an eavesdropper, but the eavesdropper may not even know the existence of a steganographic message. This thesis discusses the issues regarding Steganography and its application to multimedia security and communication, addressing both theoretical and practical aspects, and tackling both design and attack problems. In the fundamental part, we identify a few key elements of Steganography through a layered structure. Data hiding is concerned to be as a communication problem where the embedded data is the signal to be transmitted. The tradeoff for two major categories of embedding data using spatial domain and frequency domain will be discussed. In addition, we have found that unevenly distributed embedding capacity brings difficulty in data hiding. We propose a complete solution to this problem, addressing considerations for choosing constant or variable embedding rate and enhancing the performance for each case. In the design part, we present new data hiding algorithms for binary images, grayscale and color images, covering such applications as annotation, fingerprinting, and ownership protection

A generic architecture for interactive intelligent tutoring systems

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University, 07/06/2001.This research is focused on developing a generic intelligent architecture for an interactive tutoring system. A review of the literature in the areas of instructional theories, cognitive and social views of learning, intelligent tutoring systems development methodologies, and knowledge representation methods was conducted. As a result, a generic ITS development architecture (GeNisa) has been proposed, which combines the features of knowledge base systems (KBS) with object-oriented methodology. The GeNisa architecture consists of the following components: a tutorial events communication module, which encapsulates the interactive processes and other independent computations between different components; a software design toolkit; and an autonomous knowledge acquisition from a probabilistic knowledge base. A graphical application development environment includes tools to support application development, and learning environments and which use a case scenario as a basis for instruction. The generic architecture is designed to support client-side execution in a Web browser environment, and further testing will show that it can disseminate applications over the World Wide Web. Such an architecture can be adapted to different teaching styles and domains, and reusing instructional materials automatically can reduce the effort of the courseware developer (hence cost and time) in authoring new materials. GeNisa was implemented using Java scripts, and subsequently evaluated at various commercial and academic organisations. Parameters chosen for the evaluation include quality of courseware, relevancy of case scenarios, portability to other platforms, ease of use, content, user-friendliness, screen display, clarity, topic interest, and overall satisfaction with GeNisa. In general, the evaluation focused on the novel characteristics and performances of the GeNisa architecture in comparison with other ITS and the results obtained are discussed and analysed. On the basis of the experience gained during the literature research and GeNisa development and evaluation. a generic methodology for ITS development is proposed as well as the requirements for the further development of ITS tools. Finally, conclusions are drawn and areas for further research are identified

Clinical software development for the Web: lessons learned from the BOADICEA project.

BACKGROUND: In the past 20 years, society has witnessed the following landmark scientific advances: (i) the sequencing of the human genome, (ii) the distribution of software by the open source movement, and (iii) the invention of the World Wide Web. Together, these advances have provided a new impetus for clinical software development: developers now translate the products of human genomic research into clinical software tools; they use open-source programs to build them; and they use the Web to deliver them. Whilst this open-source component-based approach has undoubtedly made clinical software development easier, clinical software projects are still hampered by problems that traditionally accompany the software process. This study describes the development of the BOADICEA Web Application, a computer program used by clinical geneticists to assess risks to patients with a family history of breast and ovarian cancer. The key challenge of the BOADICEA Web Application project was to deliver a program that was safe, secure and easy for healthcare professionals to use. We focus on the software process, problems faced, and lessons learned. Our key objectives are: (i) to highlight key clinical software development issues; (ii) to demonstrate how software engineering tools and techniques can facilitate clinical software development for the benefit of individuals who lack software engineering expertise; and (iii) to provide a clinical software development case report that can be used as a basis for discussion at the start of future projects. RESULTS: We developed the BOADICEA Web Application using an evolutionary software process. Our approach to Web implementation was conservative and we used conventional software engineering tools and techniques. The principal software development activities were: requirements, design, implementation, testing, documentation and maintenance. The BOADICEA Web Application has now been widely adopted by clinical geneticists and researchers. BOADICEA Web Application version 1 was released for general use in November 2007. By May 2010, we had > 1200 registered users based in the UK, USA, Canada, South America, Europe, Africa, Middle East, SE Asia, Australia and New Zealand. CONCLUSIONS: We found that an evolutionary software process was effective when we developed the BOADICEA Web Application. The key clinical software development issues identified during the BOADICEA Web Application project were: software reliability, Web security, clinical data protection and user feedback.RIGHTS : This article is licensed under the BioMed Central licence at http://www.biomedcentral.com/about/license which is similar to the 'Creative Commons Attribution Licence'. In brief you may : copy, distribute, and display the work; make derivative works; or make commercial use of the work - under the following conditions: the original author must be given credit; for any reuse or distribution, it must be made clear to others what the license terms of this work are