982 research outputs found
Accessible user interface support for multi-device ubiquitous applications: architectural modifiability considerations
The market for personal computing devices is rapidly expanding from PC, to mobile, home entertainment systems, and even the automotive industry. When developing software targeting such ubiquitous devices, the balance between development costs and market coverage has turned out to be a challenging issue. With the rise of Web technology and the Internet of things, ubiquitous applications have become a reality. Nonetheless, the diversity of presentation and interaction modalities still drastically limit the number of targetable devices and the accessibility toward end users. This paper presents webinos, a multi-device application middleware platform founded on the Future Internet infrastructure. Hereto, the platform's architectural modifiability considerations are described and evaluated as a generic enabler for supporting applications, which are executed in ubiquitous computing environments
Research Articles in Simplified HTML: a Web-first format for HTML-based scholarly articles
Purpose. This paper introduces the Research Articles in Simplified HTML (or RASH), which is a Web-first format for writing HTML-based scholarly papers; it is accompanied by the RASH Framework, a set of tools for interacting with RASH-based articles. The paper also presents an evaluation that involved authors and reviewers of RASH articles submitted to the SAVE-SD 2015 and SAVE-SD 2016 workshops.
Design. RASH has been developed aiming to: be easy to learn and use; share scholarly documents (and embedded semantic annotations) through the Web; support its adoption within the existing publishing workflow.
Findings. The evaluation study confirmed that RASH is ready to be adopted in workshops, conferences, and journals and can be quickly learnt by researchers who are familiar with HTML.
Research Limitations. The evaluation study also highlighted some issues in the adoption of RASH, and in general of HTML formats, especially by less technically savvy users. Moreover, additional tools are needed, e.g., for enabling additional conversions from/to existing formats such as OpenXML.
Practical Implications. RASH (and its Framework) is another step towards enabling the definition of formal representations of the meaning of the content of an article, facilitating its automatic discovery, enabling its linking to semantically related articles, providing access to data within the article in actionable form, and allowing integration of data between papers.
Social Implications. RASH addresses the intrinsic needs related to the various users of a scholarly article: researchers (focussing on its content), readers (experiencing new ways for browsing it), citizen scientists (reusing available data formally defined within it through semantic annotations), publishers (using the advantages of new technologies as envisioned by the Semantic Publishing movement).
Value. RASH helps authors to focus on the organisation of their texts, supports them in the task of semantically enriching the content of articles, and leaves all the issues about validation, visualisation, conversion, and semantic data extraction to the various tools developed within its Framework
A lightweight Web GUI specification and realisation system and its impact on accessibility
Developments like XFORMS are supposed to
encourage the web programmer to concentrate on the
specification of the functionality of the web GUI rather
than its appearance on screen. Instead of having the
document delivery system make the same realisation
choices for every user it could be better to give the
user some control in order to fully exploit this degree
of choice. This would be particularly important for
disabled users. This work shows how a functional
specification of a GUI may be rendered in different
ways to different users by using personal preferences
residing in a user's profile. This extends previous work
on profile-based web document delivery. Because the
GUI parts of pages are rendered according to their
own personal preferences, the web pages become more
accessible to disabled users with very much reduced
effort from the author of the pages. The technique does
not require a specific or modified browser and can be
easily implemented using a combination of common
technologies
SMIL State: an architecture and implementation for adaptive time-based web applications
In this paper we examine adaptive time-based web applications (or presentations). These are interactive presentations where time dictates which parts of the application are presented (providing the major structuring paradigm), and that require interactivity and other dynamic adaptation. We investigate the current technologies available to create such presentations and their shortcomings, and suggest a mechanism for addressing these shortcomings. This mechanism, SMIL State, can be used to add user-defined state to declarative time-based languages such as SMIL or SVG animation, thereby enabling the author to create control flows that are difficult to realize within the temporal containment model of the host languages. In addition, SMIL State can be used as a bridging mechanism between languages, enabling easy integration of external components into the web application. Finally, SMIL State enables richer expressions for content control. This paper defines SMIL State in terms of an introductory example, followed by a detailed specification of the State model. Next, the implementation of this model is discussed. We conclude with a set of potential use cases, including dynamic content adaptation and delayed insertion of custom content such as advertisements. Ā© 2009 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC
Web and Semantic Web Query Languages
A number of techniques have been developed to facilitate
powerful data retrieval on the Web and Semantic Web. Three categories
of Web query languages can be distinguished, according to the format
of the data they can retrieve: XML, RDF and Topic Maps. This article
introduces the spectrum of languages falling into these categories
and summarises their salient aspects. The languages are introduced using
common sample data and query types. Key aspects of the query
languages considered are stressed in a conclusion
Survey over Existing Query and Transformation Languages
A widely acknowledged obstacle for realizing the vision of the Semantic Web is the inability
of many current Semantic Web approaches to cope with data available in such diverging
representation formalisms as XML, RDF, or Topic Maps. A common query language is the first
step to allow transparent access to data in any of these formats. To further the understanding
of the requirements and approaches proposed for query languages in the conventional as well
as the Semantic Web, this report surveys a large number of query languages for accessing
XML, RDF, or Topic Maps. This is the first systematic survey to consider query languages from
all these areas. From the detailed survey of these query languages, a common classification
scheme is derived that is useful for understanding and differentiating languages within and
among all three areas
Search engine UIs: remote usability testing with blind persons
This paper describes a remote usability testing which was the final phase of a research project aimed at improving usability of web search tools for blind users who interact via screen reader and voice synthesizer. The testing aimed to evaluate a new implementation of Google user interfaces - according to a set of criteria previously proposed specifically for search engine user interfaces - for the simple search and the result exploration. To prepare the environment for the remote testing we needed to re-implement the original Google interfaces, using Google APIs, PERL programming and XSLT transformations. The results of the testing highlight how Google interfaces, although accessible, may be further improved in order to simplify the interaction for the sightless. In this article, first an overview of the project is introduced; then we discuss the design and implementation of the UIs. Finally, we describe in detail the usability testing which involved 12 totally blind persons
Mapping Large Scale Research Metadata to Linked Data: A Performance Comparison of HBase, CSV and XML
OpenAIRE, the Open Access Infrastructure for Research in Europe, comprises a
database of all EC FP7 and H2020 funded research projects, including metadata
of their results (publications and datasets). These data are stored in an HBase
NoSQL database, post-processed, and exposed as HTML for human consumption, and
as XML through a web service interface. As an intermediate format to facilitate
statistical computations, CSV is generated internally. To interlink the
OpenAIRE data with related data on the Web, we aim at exporting them as Linked
Open Data (LOD). The LOD export is required to integrate into the overall data
processing workflow, where derived data are regenerated from the base data
every day. We thus faced the challenge of identifying the best-performing
conversion approach.We evaluated the performances of creating LOD by a
MapReduce job on top of HBase, by mapping the intermediate CSV files, and by
mapping the XML output.Comment: Accepted in 0th Metadata and Semantics Research Conferenc
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