On Constructing Persistent Identifiers with Persistent Resolution Targets

Persistent Identifiers (PID) are the foundation referencing digital assets in scientific publications, books, and digital repositories. In its realization, PIDs contain metadata and resolving targets in form of URLs that point to data sets located on the network. In contrast to PIDs, the target URLs are typically changing over time; thus, PIDs need continuous maintenance -- an effort that is increasing tremendously with the advancement of e-Science and the advent of the Internet-of-Things (IoT). Nowadays, billions of sensors and data sets are subject of PID assignment. This paper presents a new approach of embedding location independent targets into PIDs that allows the creation of maintenance-free PIDs using content-centric network technology and overlay networks. For proving the validity of the presented approach, the Handle PID System is used in conjunction with Magnet Link access information encoding, state-of-the-art decentralized data distribution with BitTorrent, and Named Data Networking (NDN) as location-independent data access technology for networks. Contrasting existing approaches, no green-field implementation of PID or major modifications of the Handle System is required to enable location-independent data dissemination with maintenance-free PIDs.Comment: Published IEEE paper of the FedCSIS 2016 (SoFAST-WS'16) conference, 11.-14. September 2016, Gdansk, Poland. Also available online: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7733372

An Exploratory Study of COVID-19 Misinformation on Twitter

During the COVID-19 pandemic, social media has become a home ground for misinformation. To tackle this infodemic, scientific oversight, as well as a better understanding by practitioners in crisis management, is needed. We have conducted an exploratory study into the propagation, authors and content of misinformation on Twitter around the topic of COVID-19 in order to gain early insights. We have collected all tweets mentioned in the verdicts of fact-checked claims related to COVID-19 by over 92 professional fact-checking organisations between January and mid-July 2020 and share this corpus with the community. This resulted in 1 500 tweets relating to 1 274 false and 276 partially false claims, respectively. Exploratory analysis of author accounts revealed that the verified twitter handle(including Organisation/celebrity) are also involved in either creating (new tweets) or spreading (retweet) the misinformation. Additionally, we found that false claims propagate faster than partially false claims. Compare to a background corpus of COVID-19 tweets, tweets with misinformation are more often concerned with discrediting other information on social media. Authors use less tentative language and appear to be more driven by concerns of potential harm to others. Our results enable us to suggest gaps in the current scientific coverage of the topic as well as propose actions for authorities and social media users to counter misinformation.Comment: 20 pages, nine figures, four tables. Submitted for peer review, revision

Context-Dependent Testing of Applications for Mobile Devices

Applications propel the versatility of mobile devices. Apps enable the realization of new ideas and greatly contribute to the proliferation of mobile computing. Unfortunately, software quality of apps often is low. This at least partly can be attributed to problems with testing them. However, it is not a lack of techniques or tools that make app testing cumbersome. Rather, frequent context changes have to be dealt with. Mobile devices most notably move: network parameters such as latency and usable bandwidth change, along with data read from sensors such as GPS coordinates. Additionally, usage patterns vary. To address context changes in testing, we propose a novel concept. It is based on identifying blocks of code between which context changes are possible. It helps to greatly reduce complexity. Besides introducing our concept, we present a use case, show its application and benefits, and discuss challenges

Assessing Requirements for Decision Support Systems in Humanitarian Operations

Efficient and effective decision making in the chaotic environment of humanitarian relief distribution (HRD) is a challenging task. Decision makers, in such situations, are required to concentrate on numerous attributes classified by three decision factors: objectives, variables, and constraints. Recent HRD literature mainly focuses on optimizing procedures while neglecting the quantification of influential requirements (factors) for information systems to provide decision-making support. This article addresses this gap by accumulating those affecting attributes from the literature. It investigates their practical implications in HRD by measuring the preferences of a Delphi panel of 23 experts. The results quantify the importance of each attribute – along with the newly added ones by the experts – in the proposed process model for HRD in a large-scale sudden onset. Our work provides future researchers not only with a comprehensive set of practically feasible decision-making factors in HRD but also with an understanding of their influences or correlations

Comprehensive Analysis of Innovative Cross-Platform App Development Frameworks

Mobile apps are increasingly realized by using a cross-platform development framework. Using such frameworks, code is written once but the app can be deployed to multiple platforms. Despite progress in research on cross-platform techniques, results (i.e. apps) are not always satisfactory. They are subject to tedious tailoring and the development effort tends to be notable. In these cases, either pure web apps (realized through web browsers) or native apps (realized for each platform separately) are chosen. Recent activities have led to new approaches. In this paper, we have a closer look at three of these, namely React Native, the Ionic Framework, and Fuse. We present a comprehensive analysis of the three approaches. Our work is based on a real-world use case, which allows us to provide generalizable advice. Our findings suggest that there is no clear winner; the frameworks incorporate notable ideas and general progress in the field can be asserted

Muggl: The Muenster Generator of Glass-box Test Cases

Testing is a task that requires much effort, yet it is essential for developing software. Automated test case generation (TCG) promises to relieve humans of manual work. We introduce Muggl (the Muenster generator of glass-box test cases), which is developed at our institute. Muggl generates test cases for Java bytecode. It symbolically executes code and uses constraint solving techniques. While papers on Muggl have already been published, no comprehensive introduction of the tool exist. This working paper fills this gap

Conceptualizing and Designing a Resilience Information Portal

Cities need to cater for the challenges they face. They must endure, respond to, and adapt to short-term shocks and long-term stresses. This ability is now commonly referred to as resilience. Communication and collaboration are vital aspects of a city\u27s effort of becoming (more) resilient. In particular, cities ought to engage their citizens, who ultimately are those that make it resilient - and who benefit from their city\u27s resilience. In this paper we present work from a large-scale research project with a considerably practical focus. We have employed IT artefacts to conceptualize and design what we call a Resilience Information Portal. This portal is meant to be the unifier of communication and collaboration efforts of a city. Our proposal takes into account that the basic technological artefacts already exist and are relatively simple, but that the actual problem is complex and requires the integration of various IT systems

Achieving Business Practicability of Model-Driven Cross-Platform Apps

Due to the incompatibility of mobile device platforms such as Android and iOS, apps have to be developed separately for each target platform. Cross-platform development approaches based on Web technology have significantly improved over the last years. However, since they do not lead to native apps, these frameworks are not feasible for all kinds of business apps. Moreover, the way apps are developed is cumbersome. Advanced cross-platform approaches such as MD2, which is based on model-driven development (MDSD) techniques, are a much more powerful yet less mature choice. We discuss business implications of MDSD for apps and introduce MD2 as our proposed solution to fulfill typical requirements. Moreover, we highlight a business-oriented enhancement that further increases MD2's business practicability. We generalize our findings and sketch the path towards more versatile MDSD of apps