Ambientes virtuais baseados na WEB : alguns aspectos fundamentais /

Orientador: André Luiz BattaiolaInclui apęndiceDissertaçăo (mestrado) - Universidade Federal do Paraná, Setor de Cięncias Exatas, Programa de Pós-Graduaçăo em Informática. Defesa: Curitiba, 2007Inclui bibliografi

Social and Semantic Contexts in Tourist Mobile Applications

The ongoing growth of the World Wide Web along with the increase possibility of access information through a variety of devices in mobility, has defi nitely changed the way users acquire, create, and personalize information, pushing innovative strategies for annotating and organizing it. In this scenario, Social Annotation Systems have quickly gained a huge popularity, introducing millions of metadata on di fferent Web resources following a bottom-up approach, generating free and democratic mechanisms of classi cation, namely folksonomies. Moving away from hierarchical classi cation schemas, folksonomies represent also a meaningful mean for identifying similarities among users, resources and tags. At any rate, they suff er from several limitations, such as the lack of specialized tools devoted to manage, modify, customize and visualize them as well as the lack of an explicit semantic, making di fficult for users to bene fit from them eff ectively. Despite appealing promises of Semantic Web technologies, which were intended to explicitly formalize the knowledge within a particular domain in a top-down manner, in order to perform intelligent integration and reasoning on it, they are still far from reach their objectives, due to di fficulties in knowledge acquisition and annotation bottleneck. The main contribution of this dissertation consists in modeling a novel conceptual framework that exploits both social and semantic contextual dimensions, focusing on the domain of tourism and cultural heritage. The primary aim of our assessment is to evaluate the overall user satisfaction and the perceived quality in use thanks to two concrete case studies. Firstly, we concentrate our attention on contextual information and navigation, and on authoring tool; secondly, we provide a semantic mapping of tags of the system folksonomy, contrasted and compared to the expert users' classi cation, allowing a bridge between social and semantic knowledge according to its constantly mutual growth. The performed user evaluations analyses results are promising, reporting a high level of agreement on the perceived quality in use of both the applications and of the speci c analyzed features, demonstrating that a social-semantic contextual model improves the general users' satisfactio

jGL and its Applications as a Web3D Platform

This paper proposes a new platform for 3D graphics on the Internet (and recently also for Web3D). To develop 3D graphics programs on the Internet is not very easy, because there are no high-quality tools like OpenGL. For this purpose, we have developed a 3D graphics library, called jGL, by using pure Java since the end of 1996. At that time, we ignored some functions, such as texture mapping, because these functions were too complex to be realized on low-cost machines, even on the fastest machine three years ago. jGL is a general-purpose 3D graphics library, and its application-programming interface is defined in a manner quite similar to that of OpenGL. Today, the hardware is better, but the network bottleneck is still the same as before, so we almost re-wrote all the code to enhance its capabilities and performance and minimized its code size to make it more suitable for running on the Internet. Moreover, VRML is a standard 3D graphics file format and very popular. To display or pla..