A middleware for creating physical mashups of things

Indexación: Scopus.Nowadays, “things” deployed in cities are crucial to gather data to support decision making systems. Unfortunately, there is a low level of reuse of “things” between smart city applications of different organizations because “things” were unknown to developers or because it was harder to reuse them than use new ones due to technical details. In this ongoing work, we propose to convert “things” into active entities capable of discovering and organizing themselves driven by the applications goals’ satisfaction. Moreover, “things” are capable of collaborating between them in order to satisfy or maintain satisfied the published goals of applications. To validate the feasibility of our proposal, we are building mashThings, an Internet of Things (IoT) platform to build smart city applications as physical mashups, where the middleware layer is augmented by a multiagent layer of broker agents representing the available “things” in the city.http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1950/paper11.pd

Future internet enablers for VGI applications

This paper presents the authors experiences with the development of mobile Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) applications in the context of the ENVIROFI project and Future Internet Public Private Partnership (FI-PPP) FP7 research programme.FI-PPP has an ambitious goal of developing a set of Generic FI Enablers (GEs) - software and hardware tools that will simplify development of thematic future internet applications. Our role in the programme was to provide requirements and assess the usability of the GEs from the point of view of the environmental usage area, In addition, we specified and developed three proof of concept implementations of environmental FI applications, and a set of specific environmental enablers (SEs) complementing the functionality offered by GEs. Rather than trying to rebuild the whole infrastructure of the Environmental Information Space (EIS), we concentrated on two aspects: (1) how to assure the existing and future EIS services and applications can be integrated and reused in FI context; and (2) how to profit from the GEs in future environmental applications.This paper concentrates on the GEs and SEs which were used in two of the ENVIROFI pilots which are representative for the emerging class of Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) use-cases: one of them is pertinent to biodiversity and another to influence of weather and airborne pollution on users’ wellbeing. In VGI applications, the EIS and SensorWeb overlap with the Social web and potentially huge amounts of information from mobile citizens needs to be assessed and fused with the observations from official sources. On the whole, the authors are confident that the FI-PPP programme will greatly influence the EIS, but the paper also warns of the shortcomings in the current GE implementations and provides recommendations for further developments

Situational Enterprise Services

The ability to rapidly find potential business partners as well as rapidly set up a collaborative business process is desirable in the face of market turbulence. Collaborative business processes are increasingly dependent on the integration of business information systems. Traditional linking of business processes has a large ad hoc character. Implementing situational enterprise services in an appropriate way will deliver the business more flexibility, adaptability and agility. Service-oriented architectures (SOA) are rapidly becoming the dominant computing paradigm. It is now being embraced by organizations everywhere as the key to business agility. Web 2.0 technologies such as AJAX on the other hand provide good user interactions for successful service discovery, selection, adaptation, invocation and service construction. They also balance automatic integration of services and human interactions, disconnecting content from presentation in the delivery of the service. Another Web technology, such as semantic Web, makes automatic service discovery, mediation and composition possible. Integrating SOA, Web 2.0 Technologies and Semantic Web into a service-oriented virtual enterprise connects business processes in a much more horizontal fashion. To be able run these services consistently across the enterprise, an enterprise infrastructure that provides enterprise architecture and security foundation is necessary. The world is constantly changing. So does the business environment. An agile enterprise needs to be able to quickly and cost-effectively change how it does business and who it does business with. Knowing, adapting to diffident situations is an important aspect of today’s business environment. The changes in an operating environment can happen implicitly and explicitly. The changes can be caused by different factors in the application domain. Changes can also happen for the purpose of organizing information in a better way. Changes can be further made according to the users' needs such as incorporating additional functionalities. Handling and managing diffident situations of service-oriented enterprises are important aspects of business environment. In the chapter, we will investigate how to apply new Web technologies to develop, deploy and executing enterprise services

Tasks Model Composition : beyond data, representing user activities

International audienceThe aim of this paper is to illustrate, by way of a few case studies, the value of model-based task analysis in interaction and design specification of Web mashups. Task analysis is recognized as one fundamental way to focus on the specific user needs and to improve the general understanding of how users may interact with a user interface to accomplish a given goal when using an interactive system. It is argued that some of current challenges to the design and development of Web mashups are commonplace when building task models. So that, in some extension, model-based task analysis can help designers of Web mashups to better understand and describe users’ tasks for combining data sources. The cases studies presented hereafter focused on tasks carried out by both developers and end-users of Web mahsups. More than simple illustrations, all cases studies are issued from real life applications

Microservices: Lightweight Service Descriptions for REST Architectural Style

Current web has a vast number of applications available that offer users a wide domain of services. Most services, however, cannot be machine processed, which limits service composition for application and mash up development. Research on Semantic Web Services contributes to the improvement of interoperability and composition of applications and services. Many approaches cover service description by following paradigms such as Web Services and REST architectural style, allowing describing any kind of service for its use by an automatic agent, but sometimes using these solutions can be a time-consuming task. This paper introduces Micro services, a lightweight service classification framework for REST architectural style. Microservices do not attempt to describe every possible service, but to provide a way to describe a set of services in a simple way. Microservice descriptions consist of a set of terms that represent service features. After describing features semantically, microservices framework allows generating detailed servicedescriptions, which allows reusing common feature descriptions across different services. A use case that adapts heterogeneous search services to produce a standard interface using microservices is describe

A Domain Specific Language for Orchestrating User Tasks Whilst Navigation Web Sites

International audienceIn this paper we claim that there are a lot of processes over Web applications that require a high level of coordination between individuals and tasks featuring procedures. We propose hereafter a Domain Specific Language (DSL) for describing the asynchronous orchestration users’ tasks including manual users’ tasks (i.e. simple instructions that tell users what to do during the navigation) and automated tasks (i.e. tasks that can be partially or completely automated by client-side scripts). The approach is illustrated by examples and a case study showing the tools, for which an empiric evaluation is presented

Hand Posture Recognition with standard webcam for Natural Interaction

This paper presents an experimental prototype designed for natural human-computer interaction in an environmental intelligence system. Using computer vision resources, it analyzes the images captured by a webcam to recognize a person’s hand movements. There is now a strong trend in interpreting these hand and body movements in general, with computer vision, which is a very attractive field of research. In this study, a mechanism for natural interaction was implemented by analyzing images captured by a webcam based on hand geometry and posture, to show its movements in our model. A camera is installed in such a manner that it can discriminate the movements a person makes using Background Subtraction. Then hands are searched for assisted by segmentation by skin color detection and a series of classifiers. Finally, the geometric characteristics of the hands are extracted to distinguish defined control action positions

Affective norms for italian words in older adults: Age differences in ratings of valence, arousal and dominance

In line with the dimensional theory of emotional space, we developed affective norms for words rated in terms of valence, arousal and dominance in a group of older adults to complete the adaptation of the Affective Norms for English Words (ANEW) for Italian and to aid research on aging. Here, as in the original Italian ANEW database, participants evaluated valence, arousal, and dominance by means of the Self-Assessment Manikin (SAM) in a paper-and-pencil procedure. We observed high split-half reliabilities within the older sample and high correlations with the affective ratings of previous research, especially for valence, suggesting that there is large agreement among older adults within and across-languages. More importantly, we found high correlations between younger and older adults, showing that our data are generalizable across different ages. However, despite this across-ages accord, we obtained age-related differences on three affective dimensions for a great number of words. In particular, older adults rated as more arousing and more unpleasant a number of words that younger adults rated as moderately unpleasant and arousing in our previous affective norms. Moreover, older participants rated negative stimuli as more arousing and positive stimuli as less arousing than younger participants, thus leading to a less-curved distribution of ratings in the valence by arousal space. We also found more extreme ratings for older adults for the relationship between dominance and arousal: older adults gave lower dominance and higher arousal ratings for words rated by younger adults with middle dominance and arousal values. Together, these results suggest that our affective norms are reliable and can be confidently used to select words matched for the affective dimensions of valence, arousal and dominance across younger and older participants for future research in aging. Figure

A Tool Support for Web Applications Adaptation Using Navigation History

Currently the Web is a platform for performing complex tasks which involve dealing with different Web applications. However users still have to face these tasks in a handcrafted way. In this paper we present a novel approach that combines concern-sensitive adaptation and navigation history to improve the user experience while performing a task. We have developed some simple though powerful tools for applying this approach to some typical tasks such as trip planning and house rental. We illustrate the paper with a simple though realistic case study and compare our work with others in the same field.Publicado en Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (vol. 6949).Laboratorio de Investigación y Formación en Informática Avanzad

The Interactive API (iAPI)

The claim of this paper is that reuse on the Web - if sensibly facilitated - can be achieved in a much more intuitive and efficient fashion than today. The idea is to invert the current perspective on reuse by moving away from programmer-oriented artifacts, such as APIs, web services and data feeds, and focusing on user-oriented artifacts, i.e., graphical user interfaces (UIs). The paper defines a new kind of API, the interactive API (iAPI), which reconciles the intuitiveness of interactive UIs with the power of programmable APIs and enables (i) programmatic access to UIs and (ii) interactive, live programming. The paper discusses use cases and implementation options and lays the foundation for UI-oriented computing as a discipline. © Springer International Publishing 2013