CultureLabs: Cultural heritage and digital technology at the service of social innovation

Studies and practice in the cultural field have long acknowledged the importance of participatory approaches for engaging visitors of cultural institutions, however, it is only recently that we are talking about steps to connecting institutional heritage with civic initiatives that can aid social cohesion and community empowerment. In dialogue with ongoing practices in this context, CultureLabs aims to develop novel methodologies and digital tools that can facilitate the organisation and wider deployment of participatory projects around cultural her - itage, focusing on the social inclusion of disadvantaged groups, and particularly of migrant communities. As a first step in this process, the CultureLabs team has conducted a series of interviews and surveys with the aim to identify and analyse the organisational needs and lessons learnt by different actors from the cultural, social, educational and public administration fields as well as the needs and viewpoints of different migrant communities. These needs have guided the design of an innovative online platform which seeks to offer a number of services for supporting more efficient and participatory governance of cultural heritage on one hand and for enabling inclusive and creative interactions with digital cultural heritage on the other. The CultureLabs platform will allow multiple and diverse stakeholders to discover and combine differ - ent resources and elements of best practices, the "ingredients", in order to form new "recipes" for social innovation according to their own needs and objectives

Coordinating the Web of Services for a Smart Home

Domotics, concerned with the realization of intelligent home environments, is a novel field which can highly benefit from solutions inspired by service-oriented principles to enhance the convenience and security of modern home residents. In this work, we present an architecture for a smart home, starting from the lower device interconnectivity level up to the higher application layers that undertake the load of complex functionalities and provide a number of services to end-users. We claim that in order for smart homes to exhibit a genuinely intelligent behavior, the ability to compute compositions of individual devices automatically and dynamically is paramount. To this end, we incorporate into the architecture a composition component that employs artificial intelligence domain-independent planning to generate compositions at runtime, in a constantly evolving environment. We have implemented a fully working prototype that realizes such an architecture, and have evaluated it both in terms of performance as well as from the end-user point of view. The results of the evaluation show that the service-oriented architectural design and the support for dynamic compositions is quite efficient from the technical point of view, and that the system succeeds in satisfying the expectations and objectives of the users.

Automated runtime repair of business processes

Concurrent business processes frequently suffer from mutual interference, especially in highly distributed service environments, where resources are shared among different stakeholders. Interference may be caused by supposedly stable case-related data, which are modified externally during process execution and may result in undesirable business outcomes. One way to address this problem is through the specification of dependency scopes, that cover critical parts of the process, and intervention processes, which are triggered at runtime to repair the inconsistencies. However, for complex processes, the manual specification of the appropriate intervention processes at design time can be particularly time-consuming and error-prone, while it is difficult to ensure that all important intervention cases are taken into account. To overcome this limitation, we propose an approach for automating the generation of intervention processes at runtime, by using domain-independent AI planning techniques. This way, intervention processes are composed on the fly, taking into account the characteristics of the business process in execution, the available compensation activities, and the properties that have to be fulfilled to recover from the erroneous situation. A prototype has been implemented and evaluated on a real case study of a business process from the Dutch e-Government. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved