Supporting End-User Development through a New Composition Model: An Empirical Study

End-user development (EUD) is much hyped, and its impact has outstripped even the most optimistic forecasts. Even so, the vision of end users programming their own solutions has not yet materialized. This will continue to be so unless we in both industry and the research community set ourselves the ambitious challenge of devising end to end an end-user application development model for developing a new age of EUD tools. We have embarked on this venture, and this paper presents the main insights and outcomes of our research and development efforts as part of a number of successful EU research projects. Our proposal not only aims to reshape software engineering to meet the needs of EUD but also to refashion its components as solution building blocks instead of programs and software developments. This way, end users will really be empowered to build solutions based on artefacts akin to their expertise and understanding of ideal solution

Creixement tumoral i metabolisme de l'hoste: dues cares d'una mateixa moneda

L'etiologia del càncer es basa fonamentalment en l'aparició d'un dany genètic en una cèl·lula que ocasiona una expressió anormal de determinats gens, els productes dels quals canvien dramàticament el fenotip cel·lular. Com a conseqüència d 'aquest fet, les cèl·lules transformades adquireixen tota una sèrie de característiques bioquímiques que els donen un gran avantatge en la seva competició per substrats i factors tròfics amb les cèl·lules normals. El creixement tumoral indueix en l'hoste tot un seguit de canvis metabòlics que es tradueix en un profund desequilibri energètic com a conseqüència de l'elevat grau d'ineficiència metabòlica generat per la massa tumoral en creixement. El conjunt d 'alteracions porta al pacient a una profunda caquèxia caracteritzada per una massiva pèrdua de pes i desgast muscular que sovint acaba amb la mort abans que el tumor hagi arribat a adquirir el màxim grau de malignitat. En els darrers anys s'ha pogut comprovar que gran part de les adaptacions metabòliques generades en resposta a l'estímul invasiu són conseqüència de l'acció de compostos alliberats per les pròpies cèl·lules del sistema immunitari de l 'animal o individu portador del tumor. Per tot això, la futura recerca en el tractament del càncer ha d'ésser dirigida, d 'una banda, a un millor coneixement del sistema bioquímic hoste-tumor i, d'una altra, al desenvolupament de nous fàrmacs antitumorals que tinguin en compte no només l'anihilació del tumor, sinó també la resposta metabòlica de l'hoste, responsable, en molts casos, de l'aparició del síndrome caquèctic i, conseqüentment, de la mort del pacient

Enabling Semantics-Aware Collaborative Tagging and Social Search in an Open Interoperable Tagosphere

To make the most of a global network effect and to search and filter the Long Tail, a collaborative tagging approach to social search should be based on the global activity of tagging, rating and filtering. We take a further step towards this objective by proposing a shared conceptualization of both the activity of tagging and the organization of the tagosphere in which tagging takes place. We also put forward the necessary data standards to interoperate at both data format and semantic levels. We highlight how this conceptualization makes provision for attaching identity and meaning to tags and tag categorization through a Wikipedia-based collaborative framework. Used together, these concepts are a useful and agile means of unambiguously defining terms used during tagging, and of clarifying any vague search terms. This improves search results in terms of recall and precision, and represents an innovative means of semantics-aware collaborative filtering and content ranking

Tackling Interoperability in Composite Applications from an Enterprise Mash-up Perspective

The idea of a global mesh of enterprise composite applications is being impeded by the delay of next-generation interoperable mash-up platforms, providing intuitive human-guided resource interaction, reuse and composition. In this paper we revisit current mash-up platforms and analyze their major shortcomings with regard to the development of real composite applications. Then, we elaborate on a novel reference architecture for a mash-up platform called EzWeb/FAST. EzWeb/FAST facilitates the establishment of a user-centered mesh of interoperable resources that can be composed flexibly and easily to create and execute composite applications based on complex mashupable gadgets. The release of EzWeb/FAST will help enterprises to realize how SOA front-end innovations could make them more productive, responsive and, ultimately, more competitiv

A component- and connector-based approach for end-user composite web applications development

Enabling real end-user development is the next logical stage in the evolution of Internet-wide service-based applications. Successful composite applications rely on heavyweight service orchestration technologies that raise the bar far above end-user skills. This weakness can be attributed to the fact that the composition model does not satisfy end-user needs rather than to the actual infrastructure technologies. In our opinion, the best way to overcome this weakness is to offer end-to-end composition from the user interface to service invocation, plus an understandable abstraction of building blocks and a visual composition technique empowering end users to develop their own applications. In this paper, we present a visual framework for end users, called FAST, which fulfils this objective. FAST implements a novel composition model designed to empower non-programmer end users to create and share their own self-service composite applications in a fully visual fashion. We projected the development environment implementing this model as part of the European FP7 FAST Project, which was used to validate the rationale behind our approach

Automated end user-centred adaptation of web components through automated description logic-based reasoning

Context: This paper addresses one of the major end-user development (EUD) challenges, namely, how to pack today?s EUD support tools with composable elements. This would give end users better access to more components which they can use to build a solution tailored to their own needs. The success of later end-user software engineering (EUSE) activities largely depends on how many components each tool has and how adaptable components are to multiple problem domains. Objective: A system for automatically adapting heterogeneous components to a common development environment would offer a sizeable saving of time and resources within the EUD support tool construction process. This paper presents an automated adaptation system for transforming EUD components to a standard format. Method: This system is based on the use of description logic. Based on a generic UML2 data model, this description logic is able to check whether an end-user component can be transformed to this modeling language through subsumption or as an instance of the UML2 model. Besides it automatically finds a consistent, non-ambiguous and finite set of XSLT mappings to automatically prepare data in order to leverage the component as part of a tool that conforms to the target UML2 component model. Results: The proposed system has been successfully applied to components from four prominent EUD tools. These components were automatically converted to a standard format. In order to validate the proposed system, rich internet applications (RIA) used as an operational support system for operators at a large services company were developed using automatically adapted standard format components. These RIAs would be impossible to develop using each EUD tool separately. Conclusion: The positive results of applying our system for automatically adapting components from current tool catalogues are indicative of the system?s effectiveness. Use of this system could foster the growth of web EUD component catalogues, leveraging a vast ecosystem of user-centred SaaS to further current EUSE trends

Instructional and Technological Design of E-Learning Courses

Diseño de un modelo tecnológico e instruccional para impartir cursos e-learning

End-User Development Success Factors and their Application to Composite Web Development Environments

The Future Internet is expected to be composed of a mesh of interoperable Web services accessed from all over the Web. This approach has not yet caught on since global user-service interaction is still an open issue. Successful composite applications rely on heavyweight service orchestration technologies that raise the bar far above end-user skills. The weakness lies in the abstraction of the underlying service front-end architecture rather than the infrastructure technologies themselves. In our opinion, the best approach is to offer end-to-end composition from user interface to service invocation, as well as an understandable abstraction of both building blocks and a visual composition technique. In this paper we formalize our vision with regard to the next-generation front-end Web technology that will enable integrated access to services, contents and things in the Future Internet. We present a novel reference architecture designed to empower non-technical end users to create and share their own self-service composite applications. A tool implementing this architecture has been developed as part of the European FP7 FAST Project and EzWeb Project, allowing us to validate the rationale behind our approach

Web-centred end-user component modelling

This paper formally defines a web component model enabling end-user programmers to build component-based rich internet applications (RIAs) that are tailored to meet their particular needs. It is the product of a series of previously published papers. The formal definition in description logic verifies that the model is consistent and subsumes currently existing models. We demonstrate experimentally that it is more effective than the others. Current tools propose very disparate web component models, which are based on the appropriate invocation of service backends, overlooking user needs in order to exploit these services and resources in a friendly manner. We have proposed a web model based on a detailed study of existing tools, their pros and cons, limitations and key success factors that have enabled other web end-user development (WEUD) solutions to help end-user programmers to build software to support their needs. In this paper we have verified that the proposed model subsumes and is instantiated by the models of the other existing tools that we analysed, coming a step closer to the standardization of end-user centred RIAs and development environments. We have implemented a development tool, called EzWeb, to produce RIAs that implement the proposed model. This tool enables users to develop their application following the model’s component structure based on end-user programming success factors. We report a statistical experiment in which users develop increasingly complex web software using the EzWeb tool generating RIAs that conform to the proposed component model, and other WEUD tools generating RIAs that conform to other models. This experiment confirms the applicability of the proposed model and demonstrates that more enduser programmers (EUPs) (users concerned with programming primarily for personal rather public use) successfully develop web solutions for complex problems using the EzWeb tool that implements the model, which is more efficient than existing tools that implement other models