Participatory modelling for stakeholder involvement in the development of flood risk management intervention options

Advancing stakeholder participation beyond consultation offers a range of benefits for local flood risk management, particularly as responsibilities are increasingly devolved to local levels. This paper details the design and implementation of a participatory approach to identify intervention options for managing local flood risk. Within this approach, Bayesian networks were used to generate a conceptual model of the local flood risk system, with a particular focus on how different interventions might achieve each of nine participant objectives. The model was co-constructed by flood risk experts and local stakeholders. The study employs a novel evaluative framework, examining both the process and its outcomes (short-term substantive and longer-term social benefits). It concludes that participatory modelling techniques can facilitate the identification of intervention options by a wide range of stakeholders, and prioritise a subset for further investigation. They can help support a broader move towards active stakeholder participation in local flood risk management

UsiXML: A User Interface Description Language Supporting Multiple Levels of Independence

USer Interface eXtensible Markup Language (USIXML) consists of a User Interface Description Language (UIDL) allowing designers to apply a multi-directional development of user interfaces at multiple levels on independ-ence, and not only device independence. In this development paradigm, a user interface can be specified and produced at and from different, and possibly mul-tiple, levels of abstraction while maintaining the mappings between these levels if required. Thus, the development process can be initiated from any level of abstraction and proceed towards obtaining one or many final user interfaces for various contexts of use at other levels of abstraction. In this way, the model-to-model transformation which is the cornerstone of Model-Driven Architecture (MDA) can be supported in multiple configurations, based on composition of three basic transformation types: abstraction, reification, and translatio

Normative Management of Web Service Level Agreements

Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are used in ServiceOriented Computing to define the obligations of the parties involved in a transaction. SLAs define these obligations, including for instance the expected service levels to be delivered by the provider, and the payment expected from the client. The obligations of the parties must be made explicit prior to the transaction, and a mechanism should be available to control the interaction, in order to ensure that the obligations are met. We outline a norm-oriented multiagent system (NoMAS) architecture that is combined with the service-oriented architecture in order to support the definition, management, and control of SLAs between the service clients and service providers.Anglai

Automated evaluation of web usability and accessibility by guideline review

A novel approach is presented for automatically evaluating of the usability and accessibility (U&A) of web sites by performing a static analysis of their HTML code against U&A guidelines. The approach relies on separating guidelines evaluation logic from the evaluation engine. Due to this separation, the whole evaluation process can be divided into two main phases: specifying formal guidelines and web page evaluation. In the first phase, the formal structure of a guideline is expressed in terms of Guideline Definition Language (GDL). In the second phase, the web page is parsed to identify its contents and structure and link them to relevant guidelines to be evaluated on the page parsed. This approach enables the simultaneous evaluation of multiple guidelines selected on demand from different sources. It also optimises evaluation by automatically identifying common sub-structures among structured guidelines. It also supports the expression, by evaluators with different usability practises, of alternative evaluation strategies

Multi‐Dimensional Context‐Aware Adaptation for Web Applications

This tutorial presents the state-of-the-art of adaptation for web interfaces concerning multi-dimensionality and context-awareness. The specific goals include the presentation of: (i) fundamental concepts, as motivations, definitions and relevant context information; (ii) adaptation techniques for web applications, as methods, models, strategies and technologies; (iii) adaptable and adaptive web applications in scientific and commercial aspects