MusA: Using Indoor Positioning and Navigation to Enhance Cultural Experiences in a museum

In recent years there has been a growing interest into the use of multimedia mobile guides in museum environments. Mobile devices have the capabilities to detect the user context and to provide pieces of information suitable to help visitors discovering and following the logical and emotional connections that develop during the visit. In this scenario, location based services (LBS) currently represent an asset, and the choice of the technology to determine users' position, combined with the definition of methods that can effectively convey information, become key issues in the design process. In this work, we present MusA (Museum Assistant), a general framework for the development of multimedia interactive guides for mobile devices. Its main feature is a vision-based indoor positioning system that allows the provision of several LBS, from way-finding to the contextualized communication of cultural contents, aimed at providing a meaningful exploration of exhibits according to visitors' personal interest and curiosity. Starting from the thorough description of the system architecture, the article presents the implementation of two mobile guides, developed to respectively address adults and children, and discusses the evaluation of the user experience and the visitors' appreciation of these application

Taming the cloud: Safety, certification and compliance for software services - Keynote at the Workshop on Engineering Service-Oriented Applications (WESOA) 2011

The maturity of IT processes, such as software development, can be and is often certified. Current trends in the IT industry suggest that software systems in the future will be very different from their counterparts today, with an increasing adoption of the Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) design pattern and the deployment of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) on Cloud infrastructures. In this talk we discuss some issues surrounding engineering Software Services for Cloud infrastructures and highlight the need for enhanced control, service-level agreement and compliance mechanisms for Software Services. Cloud Infrastructures and Service Mash-ups

Unlocking the potential of public sector information with Semantic Web technology

Governments often hold very rich data and whilst much of this information is published and available for re-use by others, it is often trapped by poor data structures, locked up in legacy data formats or in fragmented databases. One of the great benefits that Semantic Web (SW) technology offers is facilitating the large scale integration and sharing of distributed data sources. At the heart of information policy in the UK, the Office of Public Sector Information (OPSI) is the part of the UK government charged with enabling the greater re-use of public sector information. This paper describes the actions, findings, and lessons learnt from a pilot study, involving several parts of government and the public sector. The aim was to show to government how they can adopt SW technology for the dissemination, sharing and use of its data

Web 2.0: Capabilities, Business Value and Strategic Practice

Web 2.0 is the adoption of open technologies and architectural frameworks to facilitate participative computing. Web 2.0 has the potential to deliver rich peer-to-peer interactions among users, enable collaborative value creation across business partners and create dynamic new services and business models. With the emergence of new information technology it is necessary for organizations to redefine and reassess the new technology and its business value. Extant research does not provide managers guidance on how they can utilize their web 2.0 presence to add value creating activities for the organization. In this research we develop a conceptual foundation for the value propositions enabled by web 2.0 technologies. We provide taxonomy of features, capabilities and organizational value added activities. We develop a model of Web 2.0 capabilities and the nature of value adding services they can provide

Web Service Discovery – Reality Check 2.0

In practice the ability to find the right Web service decides between a functionality being implemented anew and at least the possibility of executing it via a service. This report evaluates existing public portals for Web service discovery with respect to their characteristics and their acceptance by developers. For this, we distinguish different possible settings and use cases and evaluate how these are supported in practice. Only few of the publicly available Web service registries are growing in size and importance, with the use case best supported being the pre-programming phase of evaluation of the service landscape. <br

Evaluation of the Technology Agnostic Service Creation Approach

The current computing and communication services provide convenience and functionality. The creation of these services is however not an easy task. Service development is still mainly technical oriented, where service creation tools are meant for serving and assisting the professional developers. In other words, service creation is not seen as a task for end-users. In our research, we wish to enable service creation for the end-users. This is achieved by introducing the technology agnostic approach into the process. In this paper, we present the conceptual architecture as the proposed solution. Prototype tools were designed and implemented as proof of concept. An evaluation event was held to obtain user feedback on the approach and the prototype tools. This paper presents and discusses the outcome of the evaluation