Enhancing integrated environmental modelling by designing resource-oriented interfaces

Integrated environmental modelling is gaining momentum for addressing grand scientific challenges such as monitoring the environment for change detection and forecasting environmental conditions along with the consequences for society. Such challenges can only be addressed by a multi-disciplinary approach, in which socio-economic, geospatial, and environmental information becomes inter-connected. However, existing solutions cannot be seamlessly integrated and current interaction paradigms prevent mainstream usage of the existing technology. In particular, it is still difficult to access and join harmonized data and processing algorithms that are provided by different environmental information infrastructures. In this paper we take a novel approach for integrated environmental modelling based on the notion of inter-linked resources on the Web. We present design practices for creating resource-oriented interfaces, driven by an interaction protocol built on the combination of valid linkages to enhance resource integration, accompanied by associated recommendations for implementation. The suggested resource-oriented approach provides a solution to the problems identified above, but still requires intense prototyping and experimentation. We discuss the central open issues and present a roadmap for future research

Web services approach for ambient assisted living in mobile environments

Web services appeared as a promising technology for Web environments independent of technologies, services, and applications. First, a performance comparison study between the two most used Web service architectures, SOAP and REST, is presented, considering messages exchange between clients and a server. Based on this study, the REST architecture was chosen to deploy the system because it gets better results compared to SOAP architecture. Currently, there are some issues related with this approach that should be studied. For instance, if massive quantities of data are sent to databases it can influence significantly the performance of the whole system. The Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMPQ) appears as a promising solution to address this problem. Then, in order to evaluate the performance of this approach, this work presents a performance evaluation and a comparison study of RESTful Web services and the AMQP Protocol considering exchanging messages between clients and a server. The study is based on the averaged exchanged messages for a certain period of time. It was observed and concluded that, for large quantities of messages exchange, the best results comes from the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol. Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) was addressed in this work because it is a similar protocol to AMQP but it can be used by mobile devices with a processing capacity smallest unlike the AMQP that needs greater processing capacity. These studies are performed in the context of Ambient Assisted Living environments, since the work was applied to this topic in order to experiment the effectiveness and evaluate the performance of these protocols in this scenario

A system supporting analysis of prototyping in Fab Lab education

Abstract. Digital Fabrication Laboratory (Fab Lab) is an educational workshop that is open and easily accessible for personal fabrication. This workshop is equipped with tools for various aspects of technological materialization. In Fab Labs, makers and educators struggle to have proper documentation of their design process. Means for quick documentation are essential for supporting users’ iterative prototyping, as well as analysis and reflection on design activities. This thesis aims to provide a solution to the lack of proper tools for documentation and reflection on design stages in the Fab Lab educational context. To this aim, different interconnected systems for supporting analysis of prototyping in the Fab Lab are developed. These include a mobile-enabled client-server architecture and a web-based administrative dashboard for supporting managing and analysis of annotated visual data of prototype designs in Fab Lab. Concerning the supporting analysis, the focus is to establish an easy to use documentation tool, which comprises of a mobile application and a web administrator for better Fab Lab educational experience. This thesis demonstrates the theoretical part of the lo-fi design, evaluation, implementation of Restful Web Services and implementation of the mobile-enabled system for properly documenting prototyping stages and an admin control panel. A usability testing was conducted for the developed mobile application and the web application. The purpose was to understand users’ feedback on the usability of the prototypes and the features in the applications that users find useful or the features that are required to be added or improved. The majority of the participants find the application useful

Enhancement of the usability of SOA services for novice users

Recently, the automation of service integration has provided a significant advantage in delivering services to novice users. This art of integrating various services is known as Service Composition and its main purpose is to simplify the development process for web applications and facilitates reuse of services. It is one of the paradigms that enables services to end-users (i.e.service provisioning) through the outsourcing of web contents and it requires users to share and reuse services in more collaborative ways. Most service composers are effective at enabling integration of web contents, but they do not enable universal access across different groups of users. This is because, the currently existing content aggregators require complex interactions in order to create web applications (e.g., Web Service Business Process Execution Language (WS-BPEL)) as a result not all users are able to use such web tools. This trend demands changes in the web tools that end-users use to gain and share information, hence this research uses Mashups as a service composition technique to allow novice users to integrate publicly available Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) services, where there is a minimal active web application development. Mashups being the platforms that integrate disparate web Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to create user defined web applications; presents a great opportunity for service provisioning. However, their usability for novice users remains invalidated since Mashup tools are not easy to use they require basic programming skills which makes the process of designing and creating Mashups difficult. This is because Mashup tools access heterogeneous web contents using public web APIs and the process of integrating them become complex since web APIs are tailored by different vendors. Moreover, the design of Mashup editors is unnecessary complex; as a result, users do not know where to start when creating Mashups. This research address the gap between Mashup tools and usability by the designing and implementing a semantically enriched Mashup tool to discover, annotate and compose APIs to improve the utilization of SOA services by novice users. The researchers conducted an analysis of the already existing Mashup tools to identify challenges and weaknesses experienced by novice Mashup users. The findings from the requirement analysis formulated the system usability requirements that informed the design and implementation of the proposed Mashup tool. The proposed architecture addressed three layers: composition, annotation and discovery. The researchers developed a simple Mashup tool referred to as soa-Services Provisioner (SerPro) that allowed novice users to create web application flexibly. Its usability and effectiveness was validated. The proposed Mashup tool enhanced the usability of SOA services, since data analysis and results showed that it was usable to novice users by scoring a System Usability Scale (SUS) score of 72.08. Furthermore, this research discusses the research limitations and future work for further improvements

Semantic Web Technologies Meet BIM for Accessing and Understanding Cultural Heritage

Within the EU funded project INCEPTION – Inclusive Cultural Heritage in Europe through 3D semantic modelling, the key-targeted achievement is the development of a specific cloud based platform, in order to accomplish the main objectives of accessing, understanding and strengthening European Cultural Heritage by means of enriched 3D models. The whole INCEPTION project is based on the close connection between state-of-the-art architectural modeling technologies (BIM, Building Information Modeling) and the latest cutting-edge web technologies. The platform is grounded on semantic web technologies and makes extensive use of WebGL and RESTful APIs, in order to enrich heritage 3D models by using Semantic Web standards. The INCEPTION platform will be a space for interchange of information and for the dialogue among professionals, students, scholars, curators, non-expert users, etc. Furthermore, the Semantic Web structure interlinks the platform with external Cultural Heritage available linked data and makes it gradually enhanced by specific flexible data structures provided as project specific ontologies. The paper will describe solutions based on the match between BIM, Cloud and Semantic Web

On the Effectiveness of an IOT - FOG - CLOUD Architecture for a real-world application

Fog Computing is an emerging computing paradigm that shifts certain processing closer to the Edge of a network, generally within one network hop, where latency is minimized, and results can be obtained the quickest. However, not a lot of research has been done on the effectiveness of Fog in real-world applications. The aim of this research is to show the effectiveness of the Fog Computing paradigm as the middle layer in a 3-tier architecture between the Internet of Things (IoT) and the Cloud. Two applications were developed: one utilizing Fog in a 3-tier architecture and another application using IoT and Cloud with no Fog. A quantitative and qualitative analysis followed the application development, with studies focused on application response time and walkthroughs for AWS Greengrass and Amazon Machine Learning. Furthermore, the application itself demonstrates an architecture which is of both business and research value, providing a real-life coffee shop use-case and utilizing a newly available Fog offering from Amazon known as Greengrass. At the Cloud level, the newly available Amazon Machine Learning API was used to perform predictive analytics on the data provided by the IoT devices. Results suggest that Fog-enabled applications have a much lower range of response times as well as lower response times overall. These results suggest Fog-enabled solutions are suitable for applications which require network stability and reliably lower latency