7,832 research outputs found
Program your city: Designing an urban integrated open data API
Cities accumulate and distribute vast sets of digital information. Many decision-making and planning processes in councils, local governments and organisations are based on both real-time and historical data. Until recently, only a small, carefully selected subset of this information has been released to the public â usually for specific purposes (e.g. train timetables, release of planning application through websites to name just a few). This situation is however changing rapidly. Regulatory frameworks, such as the Freedom of Information Legislation in the US, the UK, the European Union and many other countries guarantee public access to data held by the state. One of the results of this legislation and changing attitudes towards open data has been the widespread release of public information as part of recent Government 2.0 initiatives. This includes the creation of public data catalogues such as data.gov.au (U.S.), data.gov.uk (U.K.), data.gov.au (Australia) at federal government levels, and datasf.org (San Francisco) and data.london.gov.uk (London) at municipal levels. The release of this data has opened up the possibility of a wide range of future applications and services which are now the subject of intensified research efforts. Previous research endeavours have explored the creation of specialised tools to aid decision-making by urban citizens, councils and other stakeholders (Calabrese, Kloeckl & Ratti, 2008; Paulos, Honicky & Hooker, 2009). While these initiatives represent an important step towards open data, they too often result in mere collections of data repositories. Proprietary database formats and the lack of an open application programming interface (API) limit the full potential achievable by allowing these data sets to be cross-queried. Our research, presented in this paper, looks beyond the pure release of data. It is concerned with three essential questions: First, how can data from different sources be integrated into a consistent framework and made accessible? Second, how can ordinary citizens be supported in easily composing data from different sources in order to address their specific problems? Third, what are interfaces that make it easy for citizens to interact with data in an urban environment? How can data be accessed and collected
Quality-constrained routing in publish/subscribe systems
Routing in publish/subscribe (pub/sub) features a communication model where messages are not given explicit destination addresses, but destinations are determined by matching the subscription declared by subscribers. For a dynamic computing environment with applications that have quality demands, this is not sufficient. Routing decision should, in such environments, not only depend on the subscription predicate, but should also take the quality-constraints of applications and characteristics of network paths into account. We identified three abstraction levels of these quality constraints: functional, middleware and network. The main contribution of the paper is the concept of the integration of these constraints into the pub/sub routing. This is done by extending the syntax of pub/sub system and applying four generic, proposed by us, guidelines. The added values of quality-constrained routing concept are: message delivery satisfying quality demands of applications, improvement of system scalability and more optimise use of the network resources. We discuss the use case that shows the practical value of our concept
Development and Deployment of VoiceXML-Based Banking Applications
In recent times, the financial sector has become one of the most vibrant sectors of the Nigerian economy with about twenty five banks after the bank consolidation / merger
exercise. This sector presents huge business investments in the area of Information and Communication Technology (ICT). It is also plausible to say that the sector today is the
largest body of ICT services and products users.
It is no gainsaying the fact that so many Nigerians now carry mobile phones across the different parts of the country.
However, applications that provide voice access to real-time banking transactions from anywhere, anytime via telephone are still at their very low stage of adoption across the Nigerian banking and financial sector.
A versatile speech-enabled mobile banking application has been developed using VXML, PHP, Apache and MySQL. The developed application provides real-time access to
banking services, thus improving corporate bottom-line and Quality of Service (QoS) for customer satisfaction
Efficient Opportunistic Sensing using Mobile Collaborative Platform MOSDEN
Mobile devices are rapidly becoming the primary computing device in people's
lives. Application delivery platforms like Google Play, Apple App Store have
transformed mobile phones into intelligent computing devices by the means of
applications that can be downloaded and installed instantly. Many of these
applications take advantage of the plethora of sensors installed on the mobile
device to deliver enhanced user experience. The sensors on the smartphone
provide the opportunity to develop innovative mobile opportunistic sensing
applications in many sectors including healthcare, environmental monitoring and
transportation. In this paper, we present a collaborative mobile sensing
framework namely Mobile Sensor Data EngiNe (MOSDEN) that can operate on
smartphones capturing and sharing sensed data between multiple distributed
applications and users. MOSDEN follows a component-based design philosophy
promoting reuse for easy and quick opportunistic sensing application
deployments. MOSDEN separates the application-specific processing from the
sensing, storing and sharing. MOSDEN is scalable and requires minimal
development effort from the application developer. We have implemented our
framework on Android-based mobile platforms and evaluate its performance to
validate the feasibility and efficiency of MOSDEN to operate collaboratively in
mobile opportunistic sensing applications. Experimental outcomes and lessons
learnt conclude the paper
A Voice-Enabled Framework for Recommender and Adaptation Systems in E-Learning
With the proliferation of learning resources on the Web, finding suitable content (using telephone) has
become a rigorous task for voice-based online learners to achieve better performance. The problem
with Finding Content Suitability (FCS) with voice E-Learning applications is more complex when the
sight-impaired learner is involved. Existing voice-enabled applications in the domain of E-Learning
lack the attributes of adaptive and reusable learning objects to be able to address the FCS problem.
This study provides a Voice-enabled Framework for Recommender and Adaptation (VeFRA) Systems in
E-learning and an implementation of a system based on the framework with dual user interfaces â voice
and Web. A usability study was carried out in a visually impaired and non-visually impaired school
using the International Standard Organizationâs (ISO) 9241-11 specification to determine the level
of effectiveness, efficiency and user satisfaction. The result of the usability evaluation reveals that the
prototype application developed for the school has âGood Usabilityâ rating of 4.13 out of 5 scale. This
shows that the application will not only complement existing mobile and Web-based learning systems,
but will be of immense benefit to users, based on the systemâs capacity for taking autonomous decisions
that are capable of adapting to the needs of both visually impaired and non-visually impaired learners
Let's mix it up: interviews exploring the practical and technical challenges of interactive mixing in games
Game audio has come a long way since the simple electronic beeps of the early 1970s, when significant technical constraints governed the scope of creative possibilities. Recent years have witnessed technological advancements on an unprecedented scale; no sooner is one technology introduced than it is superseded by another, boasting a range of new refinements and enhanced performance
MOSDEN: A Scalable Mobile Collaborative Platform for Opportunistic Sensing Applications
Mobile smartphones along with embedded sensors have become an efficient
enabler for various mobile applications including opportunistic sensing. The
hi-tech advances in smartphones are opening up a world of possibilities. This
paper proposes a mobile collaborative platform called MOSDEN that enables and
supports opportunistic sensing at run time. MOSDEN captures and shares sensor
data across multiple apps, smartphones and users. MOSDEN supports the emerging
trend of separating sensors from application-specific processing, storing and
sharing. MOSDEN promotes reuse and re-purposing of sensor data hence reducing
the efforts in developing novel opportunistic sensing applications. MOSDEN has
been implemented on Android-based smartphones and tablets. Experimental
evaluations validate the scalability and energy efficiency of MOSDEN and its
suitability towards real world applications. The results of evaluation and
lessons learned are presented and discussed in this paper.Comment: Accepted to be published in Transactions on Collaborative Computing,
2014. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1310.405
New venture internationalisation and the cluster life cycle: insights from Irelandâs indigenous software industry
The internationalization of new and small firms has been a long-standing concern of researchers in international business (Coviello and McAuley, 1999; Ruzzier et al., 2006). This topic has been re-invigorated over the last decade by the burgeoning literature on so-called âborn globalsâ (BG) or âinternational new venturesâ (INV) â businesses that confound the expectations of traditional theory by being active internationally at, or soon after, inception (Aspelund et al., 2007; Bell, 1995; Rialp et al., 2005). Until quite recently, this literature had not really considered how the home regional environment of a new venture might influence its internationalization behaviour. However, a handful of recent studies have shown that being founded in a geographic industry âclusterâ can positively influence the likelihood of a new venture internationalizing (e.g., Fernhaber et al., 2008; Libaers and Meyer, 2011). This chapter seeks to build on these recent contributions by further probing the relationship between clusters and new venture internationalization. Specifically, taking inspiration from recent work in the thematic research stream on clusters (which spans the fields of economic geography, regional studies and industrial dynamics), the chapter explores how the emergence and internationalization of new ventures might be affected by the âcluster life cycleâ context within which they are founded. This issue is examined through a revelatory longitudinal case study of Irelandâs indigenous software cluster. The study investigates the origins and internationalization behaviour of âleadingâ Irish software ventures but, in contrast to many existing studies, it seeks to understand these firms within the context of the Irish software clusterâs emergence and evolution through a number of âlife-cycleâ stages
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