Getting the message across : ten principles for web animation

The growing use of animation in Web pages testifies to the increasing ease with which such multimedia components can be created. This trend indicates a commitment to animation that is often unmatched by the skill of the implementers. The present paper details a set of ten commandments for web animation, intending to sensitise budding animators to key aspects that may impair the communicational effectiveness of their animation. These guidelines are drawn from an extensive literature survey coloured by personal experience of using Web animation packages. Our ten principles are further elucidated by a Web-based on-line tutorial

Application collaboration in ubiquitous computing environments

With the emergence of mobile and ubiquitous computing environments, there is a requirement to enable collaborative applications between components of these environments. As many of these applications (e.g. MP3 players) have been designed to operate in isolation, making them work together is often complicated by two, different aspects: firstly, a lack of protocols to enable the systems to bind to each other for interaction and, secondly, semantic and ontological differences in the meta-data describing the data to be shared. An abstraction termed a Self-Managed Cell has previously been proposed as an architectural pattern for building autonomous systems, that can represent entities ranging from individual devices to entire environments, and have described mechanisms that enable such cells to establish peer-to-peer bindings facilitating interaction at the system and management level. Semantic and ontological differences in the meta-data describing information to be shared between peers and application level aspects of interaction still exist, and prevent successful, autonomous application collaboration. Typical approaches to application collaboration, particularly in the database world, require the presence of a third-party administrator to manage ontological differences; such an approach is incompatible with interactive, autonomous systems. This dissertation presents a novel approach to automatic collection mapping suitable for deployment in autonomous, interacting systems. The approach facilitates the collaboration of SMC application-level data collections by identifying areas of conflict and using meta-data values associated with those collections to establish commonality. Music sharing and traditional “book” library catalogue matching applications, exploiting this mapping mechanism, have been developed to facilitate the sharing of data between peers. Protocols and abstractions are used to establish commonality and collaboration between the systems, and the mapping mechanism is used to enhance interoperability at the application level

Self-managed cells and their federation

Future e-Health systems will consist of low-power, on-body wireless sensors attached to mobile users that interact with a ubiquitous computing environment. This kind of system needs to be able to configure itself with little or no user input; more importantly, it is required to adapt autonomously to changes such as user movement, device failure, the addition or loss of services, and proximity to other such systems. This extended abstract describes the basic architecture of a Self-Managed Cell (SMC) to address these requirements, and discusses various forms of federation between/among SMCs. This structure is motivated by a typical e-Health scenario

Policy-based management for body-sensor networks

Accepted versio

Towards supporting interactions between self-managed cells

Accepted versio

Dynamic ontology mapping for interacting autonomous systems

With the emergence of mobile and ubiquitous computing environments, there is a requirement to enable collaborative applications between these environments. As many of these applications have been designed to operate in isolation, making them work together is often complicated by the semantic and ontological differences in the meta-data describing the data to be shared. Typical approaches to overcoming ontological differences require the presence of a third party administrator, an approach incompatible with autonomous systems. This paper presents an approach to automatic ontology mapping suitable for deployment in autonomous, interacting systems for a class of collaborative application. The approach facilitates the collaboration of application-level data collections by identifying areas of ontological conflict and using meta-data values associated with those collections to establish commonality. A music sharing application has been developed to facilitate the sharing of music between peers

Public awareness of marine environmental issues in the UK

This paper presents the results of a survey of public awareness of marine environmental issues within the context of the UK's National Maritime Museum. It was found that public interest in marine environmental issues is significant, but that gaps exist in terms of issue-specific awareness and that the availability of independent information on marine issues is limited. It is concluded that there are significant opportunities to develop the Museum's role in raising public awareness of marine environmental issues that build on its current activities and that of the Museum's partners.Marine environment Public understanding National Maritime Museum

AMUSE: autonomic management of ubiquitous e-health systems

Future e-Health systems will consist of low-power on-body wireless sensors attached to mobile users that interact with a ubiquitous computing environment. This kind of system needs to be able to configure itself with little or no user input, but more importantly, it is required to adapt autonomously to changes such as user movement, device failure, and the addition or loss of services. We propose the Self-Managed Cell architecture for such systems, and outline how the architecture supports an e-Health application in which on-body sensors are used to monitor a patient living in their home