Mashing up Visual Languages and Web Mash-ups

Research on web mashups and visual languages share an interest in human-centered computing. Both research communities are concerned with supporting programming by everyday, technically inexpert users. Visual programming environments have been a focus for both communities, and we believe that there is much to be gained by further discussion between these research communities. In this paper we explore some connections between web mashups and visual languages, and try to identify what each might be able to learn from the other. Our goal is to establish a framework for a dialog between the communities, and to promote the exchange of ideas and our respective understandings of humancentered computing.published or submitted for publicationis peer reviewe

Mash-ups of Information Services for Promoting Higher Education Institution in Hanoi, Vietnam

Currently, today is the Information Era, with the typical symbol - Internet Technology. Any people can become the users of the Internet at any time. Internet is everywhere. The users can use internet to search, find or collect any information that they need. Nowadays, for sure that, any one of us heard about Web 2.0 technologies as well as applications. The development from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 was considered like "break through step" of the information technology. Web 2.0 is really more efficient information sharing, collaboration and business processes. And, Mash- up is one of the outcomes of Web 2.0 paradigm that has been widely accepted and used for users over the world. The role and effect of mash-ups in modern life is obvious. At the moment, although mash - ups are mainly used for less fundamental tasks, such as customized queries and map based visualizations. But, compared to a few years ago, mash-ups' development and application are becoming popular and increasing day by day with higher demands. In the future, it has the potential to be used for more fundamental, complex and sophisticated tasks. Finding, searching, collecting as well as using information in the Internet is one of problems about technology of Vietnam in general, and Hanoi in particular, where are the developing countries and be focused on the agriculture fields. Catch and combine two above events, the developers want to create "Mash - ups of Promoting Information Services Institution for Higher Education in HaNoi, Vietnam" as Final Year Project. For this project, the users just need Internet route to access. And after this, they can find out, search, collect and compare all important and necessary information about universities in Hanoi, Vietnam. This way will useful for users, because of it will minimize the effort, time as well as money of the finders. Besides, it is also easy to understand and using

Mash-ups of Information Services for Promoting Higher Education Institution in Hanoi, Vietnam

Currently, today is the Information Era, with the typical symbol - Internet Technology. Any people can become the users of the Internet at any time. Internet is everywhere. The users can use internet to search, find or collect any information that they need. Nowadays, for sure that, any one of us heard about Web 2.0 technologies as well as applications. The development from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 was considered like "break through step" of the information technology. Web 2.0 is really more efficient information sharing, collaboration and business processes. And, Mash- up is one of the outcomes of Web 2.0 paradigm that has been widely accepted and used for users over the world. The role and effect of mash-ups in modern life is obvious. At the moment, although mash - ups are mainly used for less fundamental tasks, such as customized queries and map based visualizations. But, compared to a few years ago, mash-ups' development and application are becoming popular and increasing day by day with higher demands. In the future, it has the potential to be used for more fundamental, complex and sophisticated tasks. Finding, searching, collecting as well as using information in the Internet is one of problems about technology of Vietnam in general, and Hanoi in particular, where are the developing countries and be focused on the agriculture fields. Catch and combine two above events, the developers want to create "Mash - ups of Promoting Information Services Institution for Higher Education in HaNoi, Vietnam" as Final Year Project. For this project, the users just need Internet route to access. And after this, they can find out, search, collect and compare all important and necessary information about universities in Hanoi, Vietnam. This way will useful for users, because of it will minimize the effort, time as well as money of the finders. Besides, it is also easy to understand and using

Services as Materials: Using Mashups for Research

Using existing services as development and research materials can greatly reduce development burdens. However, using mashups and existing services has consequences that go beyond the technical realm. We present our ongoing experience with developing and promoting a mobile mash-up implemented in the mobile web browser: Spotisquare. Spotisquare is a mash-up of the location-based service foursquare and music streaming service Spotify. We discuss advantages and tradeoffs of using existing services and the mobile mash-up process, including interaction model choices, as well as validity and representational issues

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

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

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

Designing for change: mash-up personal learning environments

Institutions for formal education and most work places are equipped today with at least some kind of tools that bring together people and content artefacts in learning activities to support them in constructing and processing information and knowledge. For almost half a century, science and practice have been discussing models on how to bring personalisation through digital means to these environments. Learning environments and their construction as well as maintenance makes up the most crucial part of the learning process and the desired learning outcomes and theories should take this into account. Instruction itself as the predominant paradigm has to step down. The learning environment is an (if not 'the�) important outcome of a learning process, not just a stage to perform a 'learning play'. For these good reasons, we therefore consider instructional design theories to be flawed. In this article we first clarify key concepts and assumptions for personalised learning environments. Afterwards, we summarise our critique on the contemporary models for personalised adaptive learning. Subsequently, we propose our alternative, i.e. the concept of a mash-up personal learning environment that provides adaptation mechanisms for learning environment construction and maintenance. The web application mash-up solution allows learners to reuse existing (web-based) tools plus services. Our alternative, LISL is a design language model for creating, managing, maintaining, and learning about learning environment design; it is complemented by a proof of concept, the MUPPLE platform. We demonstrate this approach with a prototypical implementation and a – we think – comprehensible example. Finally, we round up the article with a discussion on possible extensions of this new model and open problems

Mixing the reactive with the personal: Opportunities for end-user programming in personal information management

The transition of personal information management (PIM) tools off the desktop to the Web presents an opportunity to augment these tools with capabilities provided by the wealth of real-time information readily available. In this chapter, we describe a personal information assistance engine that lets end-users delegate to it various simple context- and activity-reactive tasks and reminders. Our system, Atomate, treats RSS/ATOM feeds from social networking and life-tracking sites as sensor streams, integrating information from such feeds into a simple unified RDF world model representing people, places and things and their time-varying states and activities. Combined with other information sources on the web, including the user's online calendar, web-based e-mail client, news feeds and messaging services, Atomate can be made to automatically carry out a variety of simple tasks for the user, ranging from context-aware filtering and messaging, to sharing and social coordination actions. Atomate's open architecture and world model easily accommodate new information sources and actions via the addition of feeds and web services. To make routine use of the system easy for non-programmers, Atomate provides a constrained-input natural language interface (CNLI) for behavior specification, and a direct-manipulation interface for inspecting and updating its world model

The MUPPLE competence continuum

The idea of Personal Learning Environments (PLEs) seems to polarise the educational sphere into supporters and opponents. Both groups relate their enthusiasm or criticism to underlying competences motivated by or needed for building up, running, and maintaining a PLE. Within the following article, results of a qualitative study with multiple cases will be presented to shed light onto which competence and which of its building blocks are involved in running a (mash-up) PLE. Data about the involved skills, abilities, habits, attitudes and knowledge will be presented in a raster of the five dimensions 'plan', 'reflect', 'monitor', 'act', and 'interact' against the three stages 'start', 'trigger', and 'outcome'. The findings indicate that there is a continuum ranging from the ones needed right ahead to the ones ultimately sought