Web Information Systems and Technologies

Business Process models seek to orchestrate business functions through the development of automated task completion, which is becoming increasingly used for Service-Oriented Architectures. This had led to many advances in the methods and tools available for software and language support in process modelling and enactment. Recent development in Business Process Execution languages, such as WS-BPEL 2.0 has widened the scope of process modelling to encompass cross-enterprise and inter-enterprise processes with a wide spread of often heterogonous business processes together with a range of associated modules for enactment, governance and assurance, to name but a few, to address non-functional requirements. Hence, the task of provisioning and managing such systems far outstrips the capabilities of human operatives, with most adaptations to operational circumstances requiring the system to be taken offline reprogrammed, recompiled and redeployed. This work focuses on the application of recent developments in language support for software autonomy whilst guaranteeing autonomic software behaviour. The issues to be addressed are stated with a supporting framework and language, Neptune. This is illustrated through a representative example with a case study evaluation reported upon.

Business Process Modeling is increasingly important for the digitalization of both IT and non-IT business processes, as well as for their deployment on service-oriented architectures. A number of methodologies, languages, and software tools have been proposed to support digital business process design; nonetheless, a lot remains to be done for assessing a business process model validity with respect to an existing organizational structure or external constraints like the ones imposed by security compliance regulations. In particular, web-based business coalitions and other inter-organizational transactions pose a number of research problems. The Model Driven Architecture (MDA) provides a framework for representing processes at different levels of abstraction. In this paper, a MDA-driven notion of business process model is introduced, composed of a static domain model including the domain entities and actors, plus a platform-independent workflow model providing a specification of process activities. The paper focuses on semantics-aware representation techniques, introducing logics-based static domain models and their relationship with Description Logics and current Semantic Web metadata formats. Then, the paper discusses some issues emerging from the literature on business processes representation and presents some research directions on the evaluation of the compatibility of business and IT processes with existing organizational environments and practices. The problem of implicit knowledge and of its capture in a manner which allows it to be included in business process design is also discussed, presenting some open research issues.

With the use of electronic mail as a communicative medium, the occurrence of spam emails has increased and kept stable; and although spam can be detected by spam filtering, an element of risk of a continuously network overload remains. To add insult to injury, spammers augment novel, clever and astute techniques, which currently leads to a neck-and-neck race between protection and injury. Constantly novel approaches are necessitated to enhance spam filters through a more efficient and effective prevention. In this respect, we argue for a zoning of emails to classify a text in regions, where each region bears a meaning. Here, we use this technique for spams to identify these zones and to evaluate if an email is a spam. We introduce content zoning and prove our approach by a prototypical implementation including first results.

This paper presents a systematic approach for the automated assessment of security and business risks of web-based systems at the early design stage. The approach combines risk concepts in reliability engineering with heuristics using characteristics of software and hardware deployment design to estimate security and business risks of the system to be developed. It provides a mechanism that can help locate high-risk software components. We discuss limitations of the approach and give an illustration in an industrial engineering and business-to-business domain using a case study of a web-based material requirements planning system for a manufacturing enterprise.

This paper reports a new approach to the decentralized execution of service compositions. The motivation of our work is to provide a systematic solution for the advanced configuration of P2P service interactions when they are involved in a composition. In order to do so, we consider a service composition as a centralized workflow specification and derive corresponding cooperating process in a such way that the dependencies of the centralized specification are implemented as P2P interactions between underlying services that execute the derived processes. More precisely, we present the most important issues of deriving operation and propose corresponding solutions that run counter to naive intuition.

The European Union CoreGRID project aims at encouraging collaboration among european research institutes. One target of such project is the design of an innovative Grid Infrastructure architecture, specifically addressing two challenging aspects of such entity: scalability and security. This paper outlines the results of such activity, ideally extending the content of the official deliverable document.

Privacy has been a hot topic in research for several years. A lot of different approaches to protect privacy have been proposed recently. Among these there are several tools for negotiation of privacy contracts. In this paper we present our privacy negotiation framework called “The Privacy Advocate”. It consists of three main parts: the policy evaluation unit, the signature unit and the preferences. In addition, our framework supports an interface for negotiation strategies, so that they are independent of the framework. The preferences can be expressed with a combination of P3P and APPEL. The tests we executed using a state of the art PDA clearly indicate that our framework can be used on mobile devices. The completion of a successful negotiation usually takes about 2 sec. including message transfer via an 802.11b wireless link. This involves multiple evaluations of proposals. Each of them is done in less than 250 msec.

The query evaluation algorithms of practically all XML management systems are based on structural joins, i.e., operations which determine all occurrences of parent/child, ancestor/descendant, preceding/following etc. relationships between node sets. In this paper, we present a simple method for accelerating structural joins which is very easy to implement on different platforms. Our idea is to split the nodes into disjoint partitions and use this information to avoid unnecessary structural joins. Despite its simplicity, our proposal can considerably accelerate XPath evaluation on different XML management systems. To exemplify this, we describe two implementation options of our method - one built from the scratch and one based on a relational database - and present the results of our experiments.

Web Services are applications that expose functionality to consumers via public interfaces. Since these interfaces are defined, described and consumed using XML-based standards, Web Services outperform other middleware approaches (e.g. CORBA, RPC) in terms of platform interoperability and ease of use. Web Services support the concept of loosely coupled components, which in turn enables the development of more agile and open systems. However, this flexibility comes at the price of reduced control over the usage of the services that are exposed via the interfaces. This paper focuses on the transparent scheduling of inbound requests by introducing a proxy that prevents clients from directly accessing the provider. By manipulating the order and volume of requests sent to the provider it becomes possible to improve throughput and mean response time and to ensure consistent performance in overload situation.

We propose a new mechanism for viewing entries of the 3D Blog system that enables users to find “virtual neighbors” who may have similar interests. The 3D Blog system allows a user to interact with a 3D model, annotate any spot on the model, and publish the annotations in a blog so that the user can easily communicate with other people and share interests and idea about 3D models of interest to the user. Since each annotation is saved as a blog entry with 3D viewpoint information, i.e., the user’s viewpoint and view direction as well as 3D information on annotated points, the system can detect similar entries using similarity of the 3D viewpoint information. Users can easily and intuitively compare the similar entries using the “playback” function which renders the 3D scene in the similar entries.

This paper shows our model-driven approach for the formal construction and validation of Digital Libraries (DLs). We have defined a Domain Specific Visual Language (DSVL) called VisMODLE, which allows the description of a DL using five different viewpoints: services, behaviour, collections, structure and society. From a meta-model based description of the different viewpoints, we have generated a modelling environment for VisMODLE. We have provided the environment with a code generator that produces XUL code for the DL’s user interface and composes the application using predefined components that implement the different services. Moreover, we have also added validation and simulation capabilities to the environment. Using the behavioural models (state-machine based), we can visually animate the system. In addition, the combined behaviour of actors and services can be transformed into a Petri net for further analysis.

Whether or not ICT represents the most important vehicle to transform the society seems to be out of discussion. The point of interest diverts from how people do really feel with these services and from the way they perceive the advantages as acceptable to improve the quality of life and work. It is matter of fact that the technical innovation is characterized by a certain risk, the problem of how to implement the technology for sure and, ahead of this phase, the problem of predicting its influence on the social, working and private life in view of the high costs effort to produce. This study applies a predictive model for the acceptance to a services integrated home environment properly set-up in a special laboratory. A class of users was selected from the employees of the company which hosted the trial in order to participate at the evaluation sessions. The tasks were designed to point out the main innovative features of the services presented. The questionnaires were suitably designed and submitted to collect the end-users opinions. Statistical analysis was carried out to assess the performance by the side of the real users and to predict their intentions of use. Finally both correlation and regression studies found out how the model predictors may respectively influence the acceptance of the ICT solutions proposed.

We add collection types such as sets, bags and lists to the resource description framework (RDF).

Content Management Systems and Web Portal Frameworks are more and more widely adopted in Web development. Those kinds of software often produce Web pages whose layout is divided in sections called, in the case of Web Portals, “portlets”. Portlets can be produced by different sources and then aggregated in the same page by the portal. For Web portals, traditional Web metrics based on page visits can be inadequate for fully understanding user’s interest, due to the heterogeneity of content and the variety of sources. This paper proposes a system for evaluating the Web traffic at a deeper level than the page visit one: the level of the sections, or of the portlets. The interest of the user in the sections of the page is gauged through implicit interest indicators, such as, section visibility, mouse movements and other client-side interactions. Our system is composed of two different products: a framework that, opportunely instantiated in a Web portal, allows the production of a log, and a log analyzer. The possible uses and benefits gained by research in the fields of Web traffic analysis, portal design and usability are investigated in depth.

With the rapid development of wireless communication technology, many users are accessing the internet from mobile appliances, such as notebooks, PDAs, and cellular phones. These devices are miscellaneously limited in computing resources, like CPU speed, memory, temporary storage, power supply, installed software, and communication bandwidth. The web accesses in these mobile devices thus encounter distorted user interface, broken images, slow responses, etc. To overcome this problem, we design and implement a semantics-based web content adaptation framework to provide automatically adapted contents to miscellaneous mobile devices. RDF Semantics of client device CC/PP configurations and web page tag structures are extracted to determine the proper parameters for the format and layout of web contents. Heuristic transcoding rules in the Jena Inference System are then applied to transform the web contents for each particular device. The functionality of this framework is illustrated by its capability of adjusting the layout of the main page of a shopping portal and of adjusting the parameters of images in the page.

Online customer reviews offer valuable information for merchants and potential shoppers in e-Commerce and e-Business. However, even for a single product, the number of reviews often amounts to hundreds or thousands. Thus, summarization of multiple customer reviews is helpful to extract the important issues that merchants and customers are concerned with. Existing methods of multi-document summarization divide documents into non-overlapping clusters first and then summarize each cluster of documents individually with the assumption that each cluster discusses a single topic. When applied to summarize customer reviews, it is however difficult to determine the number of clusters a priori without the domain knowledge, and moreover, topics often overlap with each other in a collection of customer reviews. This paper proposes a summarization approach based on the topical structure of multiple customer reviews. Instead of clustering and summarization, our approach extracts topics from a collection of reviews and further ranks the topics based on their frequency. The summary is then generated according to the ranked topics. The evaluation results showed that our approach outperformed the baseline summarization systems, i.e. Copernic summarizer and clustering-summarization, in terms of users’ responsiveness.

User satisfaction has become one of the most important measures of the success or effectiveness of information systems; however, very little is known about its structure and dimensionality in the web environment. In the current study, five latent variable models were empirically tested and compared to describe the relationships among 21 observable variables concerned with web-based information systems satisfaction. Using data from a sample of 515 university students, a second-order model was retained based on statistical and theoretical criteria. At the first-order level were six highly interrelated primary factors; understandability, reliability, usefulness, access, usability, and naviga-tion. These six factors were explained by two interrelated second-order factors of web information satisfaction and web system satisfaction. Overall, the model provides a good-fit to the data and is theoretically valid, reflecting logical consistency. Implications of the current investigation for practice and research are provided.

The popularity of e-learning continues to grow as the convenience which it offers appeals to a wide spectrum of people. A significant number of e-learning applications have been developed offering tools of benefit to both tutors and students. Although online communities are popular in other areas, the establishment of these communities within e-learning has been slow. Communication and social interaction among students plays an important part of learning within the classroom and so should be incorporated into online learning environments. This paper presents guidelines for the development of e-learning systems which recognise the importance of communities and social interaction within an online learning scenario. In particular, we describe our own e-learning systems, CLEV-R and its mobile counterpart, mCLEV-R, along with details of the user trials used to evaluate them. Results indicate that these systems create an effective online learning community for students.

Various forms of knowledge can be distinguished. Low-level learning focuses on recognition and remembering facts. Higher level learning of conceptual knowledge requires the development of some form of mental structural map. Further, application of knowledge requires learners to put theories and concepts into use in authentic and novel situations. This study concerns learning at a number of levels. The context is a fully online module on copyright laws and intellectual property, designed as an introductory course for all postgraduates at a university in Hong Kong. The paper also explores whether the knowledge learnt through the web-based medium was retained after three to six months. Findings ascertained the effectiveness of the new medium, not only in delivering facts but also for assisting the learning of higher level knowledge. As expected, the performance of students declined in the delayed post-tests but not to any alarming degree. Retention of factual knowledge, however, was much lower than retention of other forms of knowledge. This perhaps suggests that the role of e-learning, just as in face-to-face classes, should focus on concepts and the applied knowledge, rather than on memorization of facts alone.

For some time now, computer games have played an important role in both children and adults’ leisure activities. While there has been much written on the negative aspects of computer games, it has also been recognised that they have potential advantages and benefits. There is no doubt that computer games can be highly engaging and incorporate features that are extremely compelling. It is these highly engaging features of computer games that have attracted the interests of educationalists. The use of games-based learning has been growing for some years now, however, within software engineering there is still a dearth of empirical evidence to support this approach. In this paper, we examine the literature on the use of computer games to teach software engineering concepts and describe a computer game we have been developing to teach these concepts.

This paper describes as a case study the first 12 months of a 2 year project developing a serious game targeted at a number of industrial sectors: aeronautical, automotive, civil construction, software and electronics. The paper presents the devised methodology to address the problems that emerged, mostly associated to the inherent barriers of managing a distributed team with equal participatory roles and responsibilities in the creative process of developing a serious game. Some of the lessons learnt are shared with the reader.

Mobility is an intrinsic property of learning encompassing spatial, temporal and developmental components. Students’ expectations on how and when they learn are creating increasingly heavier demands upon all aspects of their learning. Young people in particular have made mobile devices fundamental to their daily lives. However, educators and developers are faced with the dilemma: do you develop applications for the mobile or the wired environment? In this paper we argue that learning environments will remain combinations of wired and wireless for the foreseeable future. However, not all affordances offered by wired environments are transferable to small mobile devices. In fact, some tasks are better served by applications that are designed to be entirely mobile. The paper will present initial results and evaluations of five of learning tools with the properties mobility, flexibility and either instructor- or student-generated content.

In the context of the Bologna process, e-learning experiences are being promoted in many European universities. Recently, the Universidad Politécnica of Valencia (UPV) has implemented the Poliformat platform that is based on the Sakai environment. Last year, a pilot experience was developed to test this environment for undergraduate courses in a Computer Engineering degree. The current work describes an e-learning application of the Poliformat platform in an Operating Systems online course and how this experience has been evaluated using survey techniques that analyze online learning issues and also technical aspects related to the Poliformat platform. Globally, the experience was rather positive although some problems were detected in the evaluation process that revealed that e-learning methods and tools have to be improved.