Un enfoque orientado a usuarios finales para el desarrollo de aplicaciones de aumentación web móvil

La información existente en la Web podría utilizarse para resolver una amplia gama de problemas de diferentes dominios, pero dicha información no siempre se encuentra reunida en un mismo contexto y resulta difícil encontrar una manera de relacionarla para satisfacer necesidades que, a veces, son requeridas por una minoría de usuarios. Los sitios Web son diseñados para un único usuario, sino más bien enfocados en un conjunto de ellos con características similares y para llevar a cabo tareas específicas, que pueden diferir de las que un usuario particular necesita. Aquí es donde la Aumentación Web se presenta como un medio para lograr la adaptación de los recursos Web existentes de acuerdo con los requisitos del usuario, tanto en contenido como en comportamiento, estructura y/o forma. Por su parte, la tendencia hacia el uso activo de los dispositivos móviles ha hecho posible que la Web sea concebida no sólo como un espacio de información, sino también como una plataforma omnipresente donde sus usuarios realizan todo tipo de tareas. Sin embargo, pese a su uso, muchas aplicaciones Web aún no tienen una contraparte móvil que haga uso de sus características, e incluso algunas ni siquiera responden a un diseño Web responsive. La información del contexto permite mejorar la experiencia del usuario. Por ejemplo, permite filtrar y solo presentar aquella información que coincide con la posición del usuario, la presión sonora en el ambiente o un rango horario determinado. La Aumentación Web Móvil puede ayudar a agregar incorporar características, y mediante técnicas de Desarrollo por Usuarios Finales es posible convertir a las personas que poseen tal necesidad, en los autores de su propia solución de aumentación. Aunque algunos enfoques existen para aumentar aplicaciones Web, incluso con características móviles, los mismos son dirigidos y limitados a personas con –al menos– conocimiento en programación. También existe un gran número de herramientas de autoría que permiten la creación de aplicaciones móviles desde entornos de escritorio, nativos o móviles, pero ninguna de ellas genera aplicaciones Web puras; ejecutables en un navegador Web móvil convencional y sin depender de algún componente nativo para su ejecución. En esta obra se presenta un nuevo enfoque para permitir que los usuarios finales mejoren sus sitios Web preferidos con características móviles. El proceso de autoría es asistido por formularios, y un paso final que combina live programming y composición mediante widgets visuales. El enfoque fue evaluado mediante el uso de una herramienta de soporte, por 21 usuarios finales, y sus resultados demuestran que el enfoque es viable y prometedor, puesto que los usuarios finales fueron capaces de completar, en promedio, el 84% de los requerimientos del experimento.Tesis digirida por los Dres. Gustavo Rossi y Sergio Firmenich.Facultad de Informátic

A Web-based Model-driven Platform for Web Augmentation

The emergence of Web personalization allowed introducing improvements to an application that runs as a black box just considering those perceivable behaviors by the end-user. In spite of which mechanisms (personalization, customization, etc.) that a particular application supports; it is not realistic to state that any application, being idealized by few people (e.g., its owners), covers every single user´s needs. In this sense, users may have unsatisfied requirements. Nowadays available Web augmentations are making full use of server-side capabilities for meeting requirements. We present a Web Augmentation modeling approach contemplating a client-server application that hides the back-end complexity to users. In this work we present a Web CASE tool to model server-side behavior for Web augmentation. This tool provides a full web-based experience for designing and running Web augmentations that requires client and server-side components.Fil: Urbieta, Mario Matías. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - La Plata; Argentina. Universidad Nacional de La Plata. Facultad de Informática; ArgentinaFil: Mahl, Franco. Universidad Nacional de La Plata. Facultad de Informática; ArgentinaFil: Rossi, Gustavo Héctor. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - La Plata; Argentina. Universidad Nacional de La Plata. Facultad de Informática; ArgentinaFil: Bosetti, Gabriela Alejandra. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - La Plata; Argentina. Universidad Nacional de La Plata. Facultad de Informática; Argentina15th International Conference on Web Information Systems and TechnologiesVienaAustriaInstituto de Sistemas y Tecnologías de Información, Control y ComunicaciónUniversidad Técnica de Vien

Web objects ambient: an integrated platform supporting new kinds of personal web experiences

The Personal Web arose to empower end users with the ability to drive and integrate the Web by themselves, according to their own interests. This is usually achieved through Web Augmentation, Mashups or Personal Information Managers (PIM), but despite the diversity of approaches, there are still scenarios that require to be solved through the combination of their features, which implies the end user knowing diverse tools and being able to coordinate them. This paper presents WOA, a platform conceived under the foundations of the Personal Web for supporting the harvesting and materialization of information objects from existing Web content, and their enhancement through the addition of specialized behaviour. This makes it possible to conceive multiple Web information objects coexisting in a same space of information and offering the end user with different modes of interaction, therefore, with multiple kinds of personal Web experiences.Laboratorio de Investigación y Formación en Informática Avanzad

Engaging end-user driven recommender systems: personalization through web augmentation

In the past decades recommender systems have become a powerful tool to improve personalization on the Web. Yet, many popular websites lack such functionality, its implementation usually requires certain technical skills, and, above all, its introduction is beyond the scope and control of end-users. To alleviate these problems, this paper presents a novel tool to empower end-users without programming skills, without any involvement of website providers, to embed personalized recommendations of items into arbitrary websites on client-side. For this we have developed a generic meta-model to capture recommender system configuration parameters in general as well as in a web augmentation context. Thereupon, we have implemented a wizard in the form of an easy-to-use browser plug-in, allowing the generation of so-called user scripts, which are executed in the browser to engage collaborative filtering functionality from a provided external rest service. We discuss functionality and limitations of the approach, and in a study with end-users we assess the usability and show its suitability for combining recommender systems with web augmentation techniques, aiming to empower end-users to implement controllable recommender applications for a more personalized browsing experience.Fil: Wischenbart, Martin. Johannes Kepler University Linz; AustriaFil: Firmenich, Sergio Damian. Universidad Nacional de La Plata. Facultad de Informática. Laboratorio de Investigación y Formación en Informática Avanzada; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - La Plata; ArgentinaFil: Rossi, Gustavo Héctor. Universidad Nacional de La Plata. Facultad de Informática; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - La Plata; ArgentinaFil: Bosetti, Gabriela Alejandra. Universidad Nacional de La Plata. Facultad de Informática; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - La Plata; ArgentinaFil: Kapsammer, Elisabeth. Johannes Kepler University Linz; Austri

Crowdsourcing Mobile Web Applications

Building Mobile Web or Hypermedia Applications is usually difficult since there is a myriad of issues to take into account. Moreover adding support for personalized or context-aware behaviors goes far beyond the possibilities of many kinds of organizations that intend to build this kind of software (museums, city halls, etc). In this article we present a novel approach to delegate part of the effort in building mobile Web software to developers outside those organizations or even to final users. We show that this approach is feasible, light and practical and present a set of experiments we developed to verify our claims.Publicado en Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNCS, vol. 8295).Facultad de InformáticaLaboratorio de Investigación y Formación en Informática Avanzad

Crowdsourcing Mobile Web Applications

Building Mobile Web or Hypermedia Applications is usually difficult since there is a myriad of issues to take into account. Moreover adding support for personalized or context-aware behaviors goes far beyond the possibilities of many kinds of organizations that intend to build this kind of software (museums, city halls, etc). In this article we present a novel approach to delegate part of the effort in building mobile Web software to developers outside those organizations or even to final users. We show that this approach is feasible, light and practical and present a set of experiments we developed to verify our claims.Publicado en Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNCS, vol. 8295).Facultad de InformáticaLaboratorio de Investigación y Formación en Informática Avanzad

Logikós: Augmenting the Web with Multi-criteria Decision Support

There are activities that on-line customers daily perform, which involve a multi-criteria decision challenge. Choosing a destination for traveling, buying a book to read, or buying a mobile phone are some examples. Customers analyze and compare alternatives considering a set of shared characteristics, and under certain criteria. E-commerce web-sites frequently present the information of products without special support to compare them by one or many properties. Moreover support for decision making is limited to sorting, filtering, and side-by-side comparison tables. Consequently, customers may have the feeling that the merchants interests influence their choices, which are no longer grounded on the rational arguments they would like to put in practice. Moreover, the alternatives of interest for the customer are frequently scattered across various shops, with no support to collect and compare them in a consistent and customized manner. In this article, we propose empowering users with multi-criteria decision making support on any website, and across different websites. We also present Logik ́os, a toolbox supporting multi-criteria decision making depending on the presentation layer of any Web page.Laboratorio de Investigación y Formación en Informática Avanzad

Flexible Distribution of Existing Web Interfaces: An Architecture Involving Developers and End-Users

This paper presents a novel approach towards the opportunistic and lightweight distribution of existent Web User Interfaces. We describe an architecture that allows end-users to collect UI objects into a distributed UI-Component-oriented PIM, accessible from different user’s devices. Once in the PIM, the collected UI components are wrapped with different DUI-based behaviours that may be triggered by the user, as PIM’s objects plug-ins. We present an overview of the architecture; some default DUI-based behaviours are introduced and illustrated through examples. Besides, we show how the architecture supports the development of new DUI-based behaviours.Trabajo publicado en Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNCS, vol. 9881)Laboratorio de Investigación y Formación en Informática Avanzad

End-user software engineering for the personal web

In this work we present an approach for creating Personal Web applications by reusing existing content that can be extracted even from third-party Web sites. Our approach starts with the harvesting of content from diverse Web sites, by DOM manipulation. Users without programming skills are empowered with tools for transforming DOM elements into meaningful classes of objects that can be reused to build other domain-specific applications, such as mashups, Web augmentations, PIM systems, etc.Laboratorio de Investigación y Formación en Informática Avanzad

Supporting Mobile Web Augmentation by End Users

This article presents MoWA Authoring, an End User Development platform supporting the improvement of existing –usually third party– Web applications with mobile features. This enhancement is carried out by the addition of specific behaviours, mostly dependent on context values. The tool assists the user in the construction of applications by easily selecting the components that fit his needs. A series of forms allows selecting sensors, context values of interest and digital counterparts to define an augmentation layer. The latter is composed of augmentation units, called augmenters, which are configurable through widgets that can be placed over the presentation layer of any Web application.Trabajo publicado en Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNCS, vol. 10360)Laboratorio de Investigación y Formación en Informática Avanzad