IAMS framework: a new framework for acceptable user experiences for integrating physical and virtual identity access management systems

The modern world is populated with so many virtual and physical Identity Access Management Systems (IAMSs) that individuals are required to maintain numerous passwords and login credentials. The tedious task of remembering multiple login credentials can be minimised through the utilisation of an innovative approach of single sign-in mechanisms. During recent times, several systems have been developed to provide physical and virtual identity management systems; however, most have not been very successful. Many of the available systems do not provide the feature of virtual access on mobile devices via the internet; this proves to be a limiting factor in the usage of the systems. Physical spaces, such as offices and government entities, are also favourable places for the deployment of interoperable physical and virtual identity management systems, although this area has only been explored to a minimal level. Alongside increasing the level of awareness for the need to deploy interoperable physical and virtual identity management systems, this paper addresses the immediate need to establish clear standards and guidelines for successful integration of the two medium

Visualisation of semantic architectural information within a game engine environment

Because of the importance of graphics and information within the domain of architecture, engineering and construction (AEC), an appropriate combination of visualisation technology and information management technology is of utter importance in the development of appropriately supporting design and construction applications. We therefore started an investigation of two of the newest developments in these domains, namely game engine technology and semantic web technology. This paper documents part of this research, containing a review and comparison of the most prominent game engines and documenting our architectural semantic web. A short test-case illustrates how both can be combined to enhance information visualisation for architectural design and construction

A Product Oriented Modelling Concept: Holons for systems synchronisation and interoperability

Nowadays, enterprises are confronted to growing needs for traceability, product genealogy and product life cycle management. To meet those needs, the enterprise and applications in the enterprise environment have to manage flows of information that relate to flows of material and that are managed in shop floor level. Nevertheless, throughout product lifecycle coordination needs to be established between reality in the physical world (physical view) and the virtual world handled by manufacturing information systems (informational view). This paper presents the "Holon" modelling concept as a means for the synchronisation of both physical view and informational views. Afterwards, we show how the concept of holon can play a major role in ensuring interoperability in the enterprise context

Managing evolution and change in web-based teaching and learning environments

The state of the art in information technology and educational technologies is evolving constantly. Courses taught are subject to constant change from organisational and subject-specific reasons. Evolution and change affect educators and developers of computer-based teaching and learning environments alike – both often being unprepared to respond effectively. A large number of educational systems are designed and developed without change and evolution in mind. We will present our approach to the design and maintenance of these systems in rapidly evolving environments and illustrate the consequences of evolution and change for these systems and for the educators and developers responsible for their implementation and deployment. We discuss various factors of change, illustrated by a Web-based virtual course, with the objective of raising an awareness of this issue of evolution and change in computer-supported teaching and learning environments. This discussion leads towards the establishment of a development and management framework for teaching and learning systems

Protocol and Architecture to Bring Things into Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) concept proposes that everyday objects are globally accessible from the Internet and integrate into new services having a remarkable impact on our society. Opposite to Internet world, things usually belong to resource-challenged environmentswhere energy, data throughput, and computing resources are scarce. Building upon existing standards in the field such as IEEE1451 and ZigBee and rooted in context semantics, this paper proposes CTP (Communication Things Protocol) as a protocol specification to allow interoperability among things with different communication standards as well as simplicity and functionality to build IoT systems. Also, this paper proposes the use of the IoT gateway as a fundamental component in IoT architectures to provide seamless connectivity and interoperability among things and connect two different worlds to build the IoT: the Things world and the Internet world. Both CTP and IoT gateway constitute a middleware content-centric architecture presented as the mechanism to achieve a balance between the intrinsic limitations of things in the physical world and what is required fromthem in the virtual world. Said middleware content-centric architecture is implemented within the frame of two European projects targeting smart environments and proving said CTP’s objectives in real scenarios

Towards Communicating Agents and Avatars in Virtual Worlds

We report about ongoing research in a virtual reality environment where visitors can interact with agents that help them to obtain information, to perform certain transactions and to collaborate with them in order to get some tasks done. In addition, in a multi-user version of the system visitors can chat with each other. Our environment is a laboratory for research and for experiments with users interacting with agents in multimodal ways, referring to visualized information and making use of knowledge possessed by domain agents, but also by agents that represent other visitors of this environment. We discuss standards that are under development for designing such environments. Our environment models a local theatre in our hometown. We discuss our attempts to let this environment evolve into a theatre community where we do not only have goal-directed visitors buying tickets, but also visitors that that are not yet sure whether they want to buy or just want information or visitors who just want to look around, talk with others, etc. It is shown that we need a multi-user and multi-agent environment to realize our goals and that we need to have a unifying framework in order to be able to introduce and maintain different agents and user avatars with different abilities, including intellectual, interaction and animation abilities

Defining Virtual Worlds: Main Features and Regulatory Challenges

This issue paper pursues three goals. First, it aims to identify a definition of virtual worlds that is shared among stakeholders. There are many possible ways to define virtual worlds and the metaverse that differ sensibly depending on the sector, the use case at hand, or the sensibility of those employing the terms. The European Commission (EC)’s call for evidence for a non-legislative initiative on virtual worlds (April 2023)1 has made things even more complicated. While it employs the term ‘metaverse’ abundantly in its advertising campaign (website, social media, and so on), it uses only ‘virtual words’ in the text of the call itself. Clarifying the boundaries of the two notions is thus necessary, to both making sure we all debate over the same subject matter, and for policy makers to target policy intervention at the appropriate issues. This part concludes by providing a definition of virtual worlds. Second, on the basis of the definitions settled in the first part, this paper identifies the main characteristics of virtual worlds, and highlights a set of challenging features that are relevant for the debate. And third, based on the identified challenging features, the paper raises a set of questions aimed at identifying possible regulatory gaps or topics that might require attention by policy makers