bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
A Data Mining Approach to Advance Knowledge in Public Government
Authors: Annoni Paola , Ferrari Pieralda , Salini Silvia
Published: May 2010

Data mining is the process of ‘mining’ into large quantity of data to get useful information. It comprises a broad set of techniques originated within different applicative fields to solve various types of issues. In this chapter the data mining approach is proposed for the characterization of family consumptions in Italy. Italian expenditures are a complex system. Every year the Italian National Bureau of Statistics (ISTAT) carries out a survey on the expenditure behaviour of Italian families. The survey regards household expenditures on durable and daily goods and on various services. Here the goal is twofold: firstly it describes the most important characteristics of family behaviour with respect to expenditures on goods and usage of different services; secondly possible relationships among these behaviours are highlighted and explained by social-demographical features of families. To this purpose, a series of statistical techniques are used in sequence and different potentialities of selected methods for addressing these kinds of issues are pinpointed. This study recommends that, further investigation is needed to properly focalize on service usage for the characterization, for example, of the nature of investigated services (private or public) and, most of all, about their supply and effectiveness across the national territory. Still this study may be considered an example of operational and concrete approach of managing of large data-sets in the social-economical science, from the definition of goals to the evaluation of results.
Electronic Payment Systems in Developing Countries for Improved Governance System
Authors: Rahman Hakikur
Published: May 2010

Payment system is an age-old system of transfer of properties. It has taken different forms of transactions depending on demand, usage, acceptability, tradition, methods, technology and availability. Payment systems varied from commodity transfers, physical financial transactions (traditional payment systems) to virtual payment transactions (electronic payment systems). Electronic payment systems have also taken various forms in varying environments and societies. This chapter provides a general overview on various electronic payment systems, focusing developing countries and tried to relate electronic payment systems as an enabler of financial empowerment. In this context, this chapter reiterated that by raising economic activities via electronic means, as a component of e-commerce, could enhance the electronic governance system of a country. It has also put forward available issues, challenges, methods and tools needed to implement electronic payment systems, especially focusing to developing countries.
Ontology-Based Management of e-Government Knowledge
Authors: Charalabidis Yannis , Metaxiotis Kostas
Published: May 2010

In an effort to follow the new public administration roadmap but also invest in the sharing of knowledge, governmental organizations appear in a crossroad: a lot of knowledge has been created, organized and even digitized but still it cannot be considered available anywhere, anytime, for any citizen, business or other organization. The more scientists and managers study the issue, the more they realize that it is a question of “crossing the desert” than “jumping over the gap”. Making governmental knowledge available to its final beneficiaries requires the design, development and deployment of a Federated Knowledge Registry, as the platform to cater for the formal description, composition and publishing of the governmental services canvas. Such a system will manage traditional or web services, together with the relevant electronic documents and the process descriptions, in an integrated schema. Touching upon all knowledge management processes from knowledge capture, knowledge sharing, to knowledge creation, the chapter goes beyond the methodology and tools used for developing such a system for the Greek Government, to the integration and the diffusion of eGovernment knowledge with the help of formal ontology definitions - capturing the core elements of the domain together with their main relationships.
Knowledge Sharing and Sociality
Authors: Lauring Jakob , Bjerregaard Toke
Published: May 2010

This chapter deals with the role of language use and knowledge sharing in the context of international subsidiaries. The chapter analyzes the role of language use for the control and sharing of knowledge in a multicultural organizational setting using findings from an ethnographic field study in a subsidiary. Whilst previous research has addressed how objective, static cultural differences impede communication and knowledge sharing, the perspective of the chapter is on the actual use of language in knowledge sharing. The empirical study thus shows how language use shapes the flow of knowledge in an international subsidiary. The findings describe the use of language differences for controlling knowledge flows and highlight how this affects the execution of long-term corporate strategies of international development. The chapter argues that the management of language use should not be viewed as an outpost of cross-cultural management but as an integral element of the effective management of international operations. This perspective is supported by research in other disciplines covering the use of language and the social dimensions of knowledge communication such as social anthropology.
Organizational Learning During Changes in Estonian Organization
Authors: Alas Ruth
Published: May 2010

This chapter analyzes organizational changes and organizational learning in Estonian companies. During the last decades, Estonia has transformed from being an authoritarian, centralised, totalitarian, socialist state to a democratic country with a free market economy and different attitudes and values. Empirical study in Estonian organizations indicates connections between the institutionalization stage at the societal level and types of changes and organizational learning within organizations. The author proposes the model connecting changes and learning in organizations during societal transience, which could help managers of international companies to plan and implement changes in subsidiaries locating in countries in transition.
The Multicultural Organization
Authors: Imafidon Tongo Constantine
Published: May 2010

This chapter avers that over the past years, monolithic organizations, as opposed to multicultural organizations, have been created by many top business executives in order to attain their corporate visions and missions. One particular feature of the monolithic organization is that its leaders psychologically impose the culture of the organization on their subjects (employees). Their expectation is that a business organization should be able to satisfy the diverse needs of its various stakeholders (customers, suppliers, shareholders, etc.), when a unique set of covert and overt behaviour is revered by a homogenous workforce. Oftentimes, the imposed “organizational culture” is nothing but a mere derivative or microcosm of the wider societal culture in which the organization is domiciled. This was conceivable in yesteryears, given the fact that most organizations only operated within their domestic business enclaves. However, with globalization and the increasing need for organizations to develop businesses and
Learning Organizations or Organizations for Learning? How Small Firms can Learn from Planned and Random Technical Problem-Solving
Authors: Storto Corrado lo
Published: May 2010

This chapter reports the findings of an empirical study whose purpose is to identify the attributes of the organization infrastructure that support organizational learning in small manufacturing firms through the creation of procedural knowledge. The study is based on the following assumptions: a) organizations are cognitive systems that process information and knowledge; b) knowledge is a by-product of technical problem solving; c) innovation occurs as a stream of random or planned problem solving; d) many attributes of the organization infrastructure that foster innovation also foster knowledge generation during technical problem solving. Findings show that three dimensions of the organization infrastructure have an influence on learning: openness, innovativeness, and leadership. These attributes identify two typologies of organization infrastructures that differently affect the generation of procedural knowledge and learning. In particular, it was found that the organization infrastructure has a moderating effect on the relationship between some context factors (environment diversity, problem complexity, context ambiguity, and uncertainty) and the amount of procedural knowledge generated during technical problem solving. Implications for technical education are also discussed.
The Role of Organizational Environmental, and Human Factors in E-Learning Diffusion
Authors: Gwebu Kholekile L. , Wang Jing
Published: May 2010

Improvements in technology have led to innovations in training such as Electronic Learning (E-learning). E-learning aims to help organizations in their training initiatives by simplifying the training process and cutting cost. It also attempts to help employees in their learning processes by making learning readily accessible. Unfortunately, the diffusion of this innovation has not been as successful as was initially predicted. In this article we explore the drivers behind the diffusion of e-learning. Apart from the factors investigated by previous research, we believe that one more dimension—human factors—should be taken into account when evaluating the diffusion of a training innovation, since learners are, to a large extent, the central issue of training. In the case of e-learning we believe that motivation plays a key role in the diffusion of e-learning.
Evolution of Business Process Notation
Authors: Paiano Roberto , Guido Anna Lisa , Pandurino Andrea
Published: May 2010

The analysis of the business processes, realized through visits and interviews to the employees, must necessarily aim to provide for visibility to a large range of operation of the whole process knowledge; this misses very often to the company: each operator sees only the part of the process that tightly competes with it and only an analysis realized by an external team (or that succeeds in abstracting from the specific problems of every actor of the business process) can gather the process in its entirety.
Web Information System Design Methodologies Overview
Authors: Paiano Roberto , Guido Anna Lisa , Pandurino Andrea
Published: May 2010

In this chapter, the main methodologies of Web application design established into the international scientific panorama are presented. Each of these methodologies is characterized for its capability to suitably structure the informative contents and to define a navigational structure. These features allow the user an easy and intuitive navigation through the Web site contents, avoiding cognitive errors.
The Design Vision
Authors: Paiano Roberto , Guido Anna Lisa , Pandurino Andrea
Published: May 2010

From the considerations made in the previous chapters, it emerges that the design of the complex Web information system must consider in a separate way two most important aspects of Web application: on one hand, the definition of the business processes, and on the other hand, to identify an optimal way to define what information is remarkable and how to present this information to the final user.
Web Application Process-Oriented Design for External Users
Authors: Paiano Roberto , Guido Anna Lisa , Pandurino Andrea
Published: May 2010

There are several problems to face in the definition of the methodology of design object of this chapter. In regards to the internal users of the company that mainly use the information system through the company intranet, the principal problems to face is adjusting to a design of the business processes made up by the business experts to a design oriented to the specific demands of the IT experts without changing the underlying representation that is the BPMN™ (OMG, 2006) representation of the business processes.
Technological Choices
Authors: Paiano Roberto , Guido Anna Lisa , Pandurino Andrea
Published: May 2010

Referring back to how much was described in the preceding chapters, we introduce in this chapter the technological choices made up in order to address the requirements to realize a tool of support to the designer applying the proposed methodologies, and that it allows to export, according to the selected design choices, using the ontological language OWL (W3C, 2004), the realized design., We also want to provide in this chapter a technological scouting related to the choices made up for realizing the code generator.
Challenges on Modeling Hybrid XML-Relational Databases
Authors: Moro Mirella M. , Lim Lipyeow , Chang Yuan-Chi
Published: May 2010

It is well known that XML has been widely adopted for its flexible and self-describing nature. However, relational data will continue to co-exist with XML for several different reasons one of which is the high cost of transferring everything to XML. In this context, data designers face the problem of modeling both relational and XML data within an integrated environment. This chapter highlights important questions on hybrid XML-relational database design and discusses use cases, requirements, and deficiencies in existing design methodologies especially in the light of data and schema evolution. The authors’ analysis results in several design guidelines and a series of challenges to be addressed by future research.
XSLT
Authors: Groppe Sven , Groppe Jinghua , Reinke Christoph , Hoeller Nils , Linnemann Volker
Published: May 2010

The widespread usage of XML in the last few years has resulted in the development of a number of XML query languages like XSLT or the later developed XQuery language. Today, there are many products like databases in the area of XML processing that support either XSLT or XQuery, but not both of them. This may prevent users from employing their favourite XML query language. In this chapter, the authors show that both languages have comparable expression power and present a scheme for translating XQuery to XSLT and vice versa. This translation scheme enables a user to employ either XSLT or XQuery for each product which supports one of these languages. They also summarize in this chapter both current and future trends and research issues and also consider those that might emerge in the common area of XSLT and XQuery and which are particular to XSLT.
Native XML Programming
Authors: Poulard Philippe
Published: May 2010

XML engines are usually designed to solve a single class of problems: transformations of XML structures, validations of XML instances, Web publishing, and so forth. As the relevant operations or declarations are described with XML vocabularies, their respective engines have to face similar issues such as unmarshalling, and at runtime data handling. In order to address such issues, the author proposes an innovative and reliable XPath-based framework, active tags, that unifies XML technologies in a coherent system where various XML languages can cooperate. In this chapter’s approach, the authors focus on its type system that enhances the XML Data Model, specifically by allowing XPath expressions to be applied on non-XML objects, and on the ability of the engine to mix declarative languages with imperative constructs. This valuable feature is illustrated with the Active Schema Language, which allows the building of dynamic-content models.
Issues in Personalized Access to Multi-Version XML Documents
Authors: Grandi Fabio , Mandreoli Federica , Martoglia Riccardo
Published: May 2010

In several application fields including legal and medical domains, XML documents are “versioned” along different dimensions of interest, whose nature depends on the application needs such as time, space and security. Specifically, temporal and Semantic versioning is particularly demanding in a broad range of application domains where temporal versioning can be used to maintain histories of the underlying resources along various time dimensions, and Semantic versioning can then be used to model limited applicability of resources to individual cases or contexts. The selection and reconstruction of the version(s) of interest for a user means the retrieval of those fragments of documents that match both the implicit and explicit user needs, which can be formalized as what we call personalization queries. In this chapter, the authors focus on the design and implementation issues of a personalization query processor. They consider different design options and, among them, they introduce an in-depth study of a native solution by showing, also through experimental evaluation, how some of the best performing technological solutions available today for XML data management can be successfully extended and optimally combined in order to support personalization queries.
XML Benchmarking
Authors: Mlynkova Irena
Published: May 2010

Since XML technologies have become a standard for data representation, numerous methods for processing XML data emerge every day. Consequently, it is necessary to compare the newly proposed methods with the existing ones, as well as analyze the effect of a particular method when applied to various types of data. In this chapter, the auhtors provide an overview of existing approaches to XML benchmarking from the perspective of various applications and show that to date the problem has been highly marginalized. Therefore, in the second part of the chapter they discuss persisting open issues and their possible solutions.
New Media, Communities, and Social Practice
Authors: Akoumianakis Demosthenes
Published: May 2010

This chapter aims to provide an introductory tutorial to the key topics and themes suggested in the chapter’s title and further developed by authors in the four main parts of this volume. It was considered important to provide this introductory account for two main reasons. First, it serves the purpose of sketching the boundaries of the volume by establishing an early focus on the concepts being addressed and highlighting the volume’s orientation. This is expected to help the reader clarify the difference between this edited collection of chapters and other relevant literature. Secondly, the tutorial will hopefully unfold the rationale behind the structure of the volume into parts as well as the contributions selected in each part.
The 'Social Experience Factory' and the Fabrics of Collaboration in Virtual Communities of Practice
Authors: Akoumianakis Demosthenes
Published: May 2010

This chapter proposes and discusses the “social” experience factory (SEF). The SEF provides a general model and architecture supporting information-based product assembly by cross-organization communities of practice using interactive toolkits and practice-specific technologies. In terms of engineering ground, the SEF builds on two prevalent research tracks, namely experience-based and reuse-oriented proposals for the management of virtual assets and automated software assembly as conceived and facilitated by recent advances on software factories. Our account of the SEF focuses on functions facilitating electronic squads (i.e., cross-organization virtual community management) and workflows (i.e., practice management) which collectively define the scope of collaboration using the SEF. Further technical details on operational aspects of the SEF as deployed in the tourism sector to facilitate vacation package assembly are presented in Chapter XXI in this volume.
Socializing in the Online Gaming Community
Authors: Hua Chen Vivian Hsueh , Lirn Duh Henry Been
Published: May 2010

Massive Multiplayer Online Games (MMOG) allows a large number of players to cooperate, compete and interact meaningfully in the online environment. Gamers are able to form social network with fellow gamers and create a unique virtual community. Although research has discussed the importance of social interaction in MMOG, it fails to articulate how social interaction takes place in the game. The current chapter aims to depict how gamers interact and socialize with each other in a popular MMOG, World of Warcraft. Through virtual ethnography, specific interaction patterns and communication behaviors within the community are discussed. It is concluded that the types of social interaction taken place in the gaming world is influenced by the temporal and spatial factors of the game as well as the game mechanisms.
Using Activity Theory to Assess the Effectiveness of an Online Learning Community
Authors: Wyeld Theodor G. , Prasolova-Forland Ekaterina
Published: May 2010

Remote, collaborative work practices are increasingly common in a globalised society. Simulating these environments in a pedagogical setting allows students to engage in cross-cultural exchanges encountered in the profession. However, identifying the pedagogical benefits of students collaborating remotely on a single project presents numerous challenges. Activity Theory (AT) provides a means for monitoring and making sense of their activities as individuals and as a collective. AT assists in researching the personal and social construction of students’ intersubjective cognitive representations of their own learning activities. Moreover, AT makes the socially constructed cultural scripts captured in their cross-cultural exchanges analysable. Students’ reflection on these scripts and their roles in them helps them better understand the heterogeneity of the cultures encountered. In this chapter Engestrom’s (1999) simple AT triangular relationship of activity, action and operation is used to analyze and provide insights into how students cooperate with each other across different cultures in a 3D collaborative virtual environment.
Interaction, Imagination and Community Building at the Math Forum
Authors: Shumar Wesley
Published: May 2010

This chapter draws upon contemporary social theory to make an argument about the ways that teachers create personalized communities of practice at The Math Forum, an online educational resource center. The discussion of social networks and personalized community is brought into dialogue with sociologically oriented strands of math education research to suggest that the collaborative community building work that Math Forum teachers do online allows them to not only form a learning community but allows them to overcoming tensions around mathematical identity formation which are important for advancing one’s thinking as a math teacher. The chapter discusses some of the interview data conducted with math forum teachers and the importance of that information for the future of teacher professional development and the way an online community can support teacher learning.
Virtual Communities in Health and Social Care
Authors: Tsiknakis Maonolis
Published: May 2010

This chapter provides an overview and discussion of virtual communities in health and social care. The available literature indicates that a virtual community in health or social care can be defined as a group of people using telecommunications with the purposes of delivering health care and education, and/or providing support. Such communities cover a wide range of clinical specialties, technologies and stakeholders. Examples include peer-to-peer networks, virtual health care delivery and E-Science research teams. Virtual communities may empower patients and enhance coordination of care services; however, there is not sufficient systematic evidence of the effectiveness of virtual communities on clinical outcomes. When practitioners utilize virtual community tools to communicate with patients or colleagues they have to maximize sociability and usability of this mode of communication, while addressing concerns for privacy and the fear of de-humanizing practice, and the lack of clarity or relevance of current legislative frameworks. Furthermore, the authors discuss in this context ethical, legal considerations and the current status of research in this domain. Ethical challenges including the concepts of identity and deception, privacy and confidentiality and technical issues, such as sociability and usability are introduced and discussed.
Sustainable E-Learning Communities
Authors: Stary Chris
Published: May 2010

Knowledge acquisition in E-Learning environments requires both, individualization of content, and social interaction based on relevant learning items. So far few E-Learning systems support an integrated didactic and social perspective on knowledge transfer. Intelligibility Catchers (ICs) are E-Learning components designed for establishing sustainable communities of E-Learning practice. They encapsulate didactic and communication-centered concepts for effective collaborative and reflective generation and exchange of knowledge. Due to their open nature, they can be created dynamically, for any domain and on different levels of granularity. By intertwining content and communication, context can be kept for learning and exploration, even bound to specific community members.
An Efficient Unification-Based Multimodal Language Processor for Multimodal Input Fusion
Authors: Chen Fang , Sun Yong
Published: May 2010

Multimodal user interaction technology aims at building natural and intuitive interfaces allowing a user to interact with computers in a way similar to human-to-human communication, for example, through speech and gestures. As a critical component in a multimodal user interface, multimodal input fusion explores ways to effectively derive the combined semantic interpretation of user inputs through multiple modalities. Based on state–of-the-art review on multimodal input fusion approaches, this chapter presents a novel approach to multimodal input fusion based on speech and gesture; or speech and eye tracking. It can also be applied for other input modalities and extended to more than two modalities. It is the first time that a powerful combinational categorical grammar is adopted in multimodal input fusion. The effectiveness of the approach has been validated through user experiments, which indicated a low polynomial computational complexity while parsing versatile multimodal input patterns. It is very useful for mobile context. Future trends in multimodal input fusion will be discussed at the end of this chapter.
Model-Based Design for Multimodal Interaction in a VE
Authors: Coninx Karin , De Boeck Joan , Raymaekers Chris , Vanacken Lode
Published: May 2010

The creation of virtual environments is often a lengthy and expensive process. Especially defining the interaction dialog between the user and the environment is a difficult task, as the communication is often multimodal by nature. In this chapter, we elaborate on an approach which facilitates the development of this kind of user interfaces. In particular, we propose a model-based user interface design process (MBUID), in which the interface is defined by means of high level notations, rather than by writing low level programming code. The approach lifts the design to a higher level of abstraction, resulting in a shortened development cycle leaving the opportunity for creating intermediate prototypes and user evaluation, ultimately resulting in better and cheaper virtual environment interfaces.
Speech and Gaze Control for Desktop Environments
Authors: Castellina Emiliano , Corno Fulvio , Pellegrino Paolo
Published: May 2010

This chapter illustrates a multimodal system based on the integration of speech- and gaze- based inputs for interaction with a real desktop environment. In this system, multimodal interactions aim at overcoming the instrinsic limit of each input channel taken alone. The chapter introduces the main eye tracking and speech recognition technologies, and describes a multimodal system that integrates the two input channels by generating a real-time vocal grammar based on gaze-driven contextual information. The proposed approach shows how the combined used of auditive and visual clues actually permits to achieve mutual disambiguation in the interaction with a real desktop environment. As a result, the system enables the use of low cost audio-visual devices for every day tasks even when traditional pointing devices, such as a keyboard or a mouse, are unsuitable for use with a personal computer.
Multimodality and Environment Semantics
Authors: Pittarello Fabio , Cementano Augusto
Published: May 2010

Safe access to urban environments depends upon a variety of circumstances, among which the abilities of the persons and the complexity of the environment raise interesting issues about design and usability of help systems and information points. This paper proposes a methodology for designing systems able to guide users in finding and accessing the objects and services of a complex environment. The methodology is based on the identification of the user oriented features of the environment and on its mapping onto a semantically enriched 3D virtual world. The physical environment is described at different levels of granularity, functionally and geometrically. Its functional properties are referred to a scene-independent ontology, granting a level of interoperability between different environments. An implementation architecture based on Web standards is proposed for communicating information and signs related to the user location and for generating support to ease the navigation. A case study about the creation of a guided tour through the indoors and outdoors of the town of Venice through a multimodal Web browser is presented.
Designing Contextualized Interaction for Learning
Authors: Specht Marcus
Published: May 2010

In the following chapter, an overview is given over the experiences and design decisions made in the European project RAFT for enabling live distributed collaboration between learners in the field and in the classroom. Beside a context analysis for defining requirements for service needed as an underlying infrastructure user interface design decisions were essential in the project. As a flexible and powerful approach a widget based design for the user interface enable the project to build clients for a variety of hardware and devices in the learning environment ranging from mobile phones, PDAs, tablet PCs, desktop computers, to electronic whiteboard solutions. Enabling consistent and synchronized access to information streams in such a distributed learning environment can be seen one essential insight of the described research.
Speech Driven Interaction in Mobile Multimodality
Authors: Frattini Giovanni , Corvino Fabio , Gaudino Francesco , Petriccione Pierpaolo , di Carlo Vladimiro Scotto , Supino Gianluca
Published: May 2010

This chapter introduces a possible architecture for building mobile multimodal applications and our experiences in this domain. Mobile devices are becoming increasingly powerful and sophisticated and their use more and more diffused; the need for new and complex services has consequently amplified. New generation mobile applications must be able to manage convenient inputs and outputs modes to make the dialog natural, intuitive, and user centric. Simultaneous use of complementary communication channels (multimodality), such as voice, keyboard, stylus, leads to a more complicated input processing system but it’s a way to simplify the interaction. A speech driven interaction between user and service delivery systems may be the ideal solution for the development of ubiquitous and context aware applications: besides being a very instinctive and convenient way to express complex questions, speech is also the best option when eyes and hands are busy.
Providing Mobile Multimodal Social Services Using a Grid Architecture
Authors: Pierno Stefania , di Carlo Vladimiro Scotto , Magaldi Massimo , Russo Roberto , Supino Gian Luca , Romano Luigi
Published: May 2010

In this chapter, we describe a grid approach to providing multimodal context-sensitive social services to mobile users. Interaction design is a major issue for mobile information system not only in terms of input-output channels and information presentation, but also in terms of context-awareness. The proposed platform supports the development of multi-channel, multi-modal, mobile context aware applications, and it is described using an example in an emergency management scenario. The platform allows the deployment of services featuring a multimodal (synergic) UI and backed up on the server side by a distributed architecture based on a GRID approach to better afford the computing load generated by input channels processing. Since a computational GRID provides access to “resources” (typically computing related ones) we began to apply the same paradigm to the modelling and sharing of other resources as well. This concept is described using a scenario about emergencies and crisis management.
Benefits, Challenges, and Research in Multimodal Mobile GIS
Authors: Doyle Julie , Bertolotto Michela , Wilson David
Published: May 2010

The user interface is of critical importance in applications that provide mapping services. It defines the visualisation and interaction modes for carrying out a variety of mapping tasks, and ease of use is essential to successful user adoption. This is even more evident in a mobile context, where device limitations can hinder usability. In particular, interaction modes such as a pen/stylus are limited and can be quite difficult to use while mobile. Moreover, the majority of GIS interfaces are inherently complex and require significant user training, which can be a serious problem for novice users such as tourists. In this chapter, we review issues in the development of multimodal interfaces for mobile GIS, allowing for two or more modes of input, as an attempt to address interaction complexity in the context of mobile mapping applications. In particular, we review both the benefits and challenges of integrating multimodality into a GIS interface. We describe our multimodal mobile GIS CoMPASS which helps to address the problem by permitting users to interact with spatial data using a combination of speech and gesture input, effectively providing more intuitive and efficient interaction for mobile mapping applications.
Mobile Virtual Blackboard as Multimodal User Interface
Authors: Tesanovic Sladjana , Davcev Danco , Trajkovik Vladimir
Published: May 2010

Multimodal mobile virtual blackboard system is made for consultation among students and professors. It is made to improve availability and communication using mobile handheld devices. Our system enables different forms of communication: chat, VoIP, draw, file exchange. Providing greater usability on small screens of mobile devices can be done by adaptation of the features in an application according to the specific user preferences and to the current utilization of the application. In this chapter, we describe our mobile virtual table consultation system with special attention to the multimodal solution of the user interface by using XML agents and fuzzy logic. The general opinion among the participants of the consultations lead on this mobile system is positive. Participants mark this system as user friendly, which points out that our efforts in development of adaptable user interface can serve as good practice in designing interfaces for mobile devices.
Mobile Devices to Support Advanced Forms of E-Learning
Authors: D’Andrea Alessia , Ferri Fernando
Published: May 2010

This chapter describes changes that mobile devices, such as mobile phones, PDAs, iPods and smart phones improve on the learning process. The diffusion of these devices has drastically changed learning tools and the environment in which learning takes place. Learning has moved outside the classroom becoming “mobile.” Mobile learning provides both learners and teachers with the capability to collaborate and share data, knowledge, files, and messages everywhere and everytime. This allows learners and teachers to microcoordinate activities withoutlimitation of time and space.
Visualising Interactions on Mobile Multimodal Sys
Authors: Deray Kristine , Simoff Simeon
Published: May 2010

The purpose of this chapter is to set design guidelines on visual representations of interactions for mobile multimodal systems. The chapter looks at the features of interaction as process and how these features are exposed in the data. It presents a three layer framework for designing visual representations for mobile multimodal systems and a method that implements it. The method is based on an operationalisation of the source-target mapping from the contemporary theory of metaphors. Resultant design guidelines are grouped into (i) a set of high-level design requirements for visual representations of interactions on mobile multimodal systems; and (ii) a set of specific design requirements for the visual elements and displays for representing interactions on mobile multimodal systems. The second set then is considered subject to an additional requirement – the preservation of the beauty of the representation across the relevant modalities. The chapter is focused on the modality of the output. Though the chapter considers interaction data from human to human interactions, presented framework and designed guidelines are applicable towards interaction in general.
Usability Evaluation of Multimodal Interfaces
Authors: Bernhaupt Regina
Published: May 2010

In order to develop easy-to-use multimodal interfaces for mobile applications, effective usability evaluation methods (UEMs) are an essential component of the development process. Over the past decades various usability evaluation methods have been developed and implemented to improve and assure easyto- use user interfaces and systems. However, most of the so-called ‘classical’ methods exhibit shortcomings when used in the field of mobile applications, especially when addressing multimodal interaction (MMI). Hence, several ‘classical’ methods were broadened, varied, and changed to meet the demands of testing usability for multimodal interfaces and mobile applications. This chapter presents a selection of these ‘classical’ methods, and introduces some newly developed methods for testing usability in the area of multimodal interfaces. The chapter concludes with a summary on currently available methods for usability evaluation of multimodal interfaces for mobile devices.
CBM Elements II
Authors: Young Patricia A.
Published: May 2010

This chapter continues with CBM Elements and the design factors related to the anthropology of culture. Cultural communications is covered in its entirety. Cultural communications is the exchange or transmission of information. This exchange can be between human beings, other species or entities. Cultural communications serves a purpose; these purposes maybe to report, inform, persuade, warn, direct, or induce a response. However the ultimate goal is to convey meaning from the information source to destination or sender to receiver (Meadow, 2002). Cultural communications can be applied to cultures, target audiences, and other species. In terms of societies and cultures, cultural communications looks at the forms of communications or communication systems that exist. Cultural communications in relation to a target audience looks at language (nonverbal, verbal); writing; spatial, temporal, and visual cues; and semiotics (signs & symbols).
Case Study in Game Design
Authors: Young Patricia A.
Published: May 2010

The global game industry expects substantial growth in the next decades. Massive multiplayer online games (MMOG) are expected to skyrocket from the $3.8 billion reported in 2006 to $11.8 billion by 2011 (Olausson, 2007). The video game industry is expected to grow at an annual rate of 9.1%, or from a $31.6 billion in 2006 to $48.9 by 2011. Serious games are the new growth area. These games are reportedly not for entertainment purposes and are being developed by and for industries such as government, education, health, and business (Scanlon, 2007). Given these figures, the role of game design will have global implications for groups of people around the world. Therefore, design and development must meet the challenges of this technological revolution.
Conclusion
Authors: Young Patricia A.
Published: May 2010

Culture works as a design construct. It is apparent that there are many factors operating to make this happen. First, the nature of culture in design is dynamic and maintains an interactive relation with its parts. Second, the inclusion of culture must be a design decision from the onset. Third, producing culture-based ICTs means that the needs of the many and the few are considered throughout the design process. Finally, designing with culture in mind is a creative process.
Pervasive Grid and its Applications
Authors: Chang Ruay-Shiung , Chang Jih-Sheng
Published: May 2010

With the advancements of computer system and communication technologies, Grid computing can be seen as the popular technology bringing about significant revolution for the next generation distributed computing application. As regards general users, a grid middleware is complex to setup and necessitates a steep learning curve. How to access to the grid system transparently from the point of view of users turns into a critical issue then. Therefore, various challenges may arise from the incomprehensive system design as coordinating existing computing resources for the sake of achieving pervasive grid environment. The authors are going to investigate into the current research works of pervasive grid as well as analyze the most important factors and components for constructing a pervasive grid system here. Finally, in order to facilitate the efficiency in respect of teaching and research within a campus, they would like to introduce their pervasive grid platform.
Hierarchical Structured Peer-to-Peer Networks
Authors: Teo Yong Meng , March Verdi , Mihailescu Marian
Published: May 2010

Structured peer-to-peer networks are scalable overlay network infrastructures that support Internet-scale network applications. A globally consistent peer-to-peer protocol maintains the structural properties of the network with peers dynamically joining, leaving and failing in the network. In this chapter, the authors discuss hierarchical distributed hash tables (DHT) as an approach to reduce the overhead of maintaining the overlay network. In a two-level hierarchical DHT, the top-level overlay consists of groups of nodes where each group is distinguished by a unique group identifier. In each group, one or more nodes are designated as supernodes and act as gateways to nodes at the second level. Collisions of groups occur when concurrent node joins result in the creation of multiple groups with the same group identifier. This has the adverse effects of increasing the lookup path length due to a larger top-level overlay, and the overhead of overlay network maintenance. We discuss two main approaches to address the group collision problem: collision detection-and-resolution, and collision avoidance. As an example, they describe an implementation of hierarchical DHT by extending Chord as the underlying overlay graph.
Decentralized Overlay for Federation of Enterprise Clouds
Authors: Ranjan Ranjiv , Buyya Rajkumar
Published: May 2010

This chapter describes Aneka-Federation, a decentralized and distributed system that combines enterprise Clouds, overlay networking, and structured peer-to-peer techniques to create scalable wide-area networking of compute nodes for high-throughput computing. The Aneka-Federation integrates numerous small scale Aneka Enterprise Cloud services and nodes that are distributed over multiple control and enterprise domains as parts of a single coordinated resource leasing abstraction. The system is designed with the aim of making distributed enterprise Cloud resource integration and application programming flexible, efficient, and scalable. The system is engineered such that it: enables seamless integration of existing Aneka Enterprise Clouds as part of single wide-area resource leasing federation; self-organizes the system components based on a structured peer-to-peer routing methodology; and presents end-users with a distributed application composition environment that can support variety of programming and execution models. This chapter describes the design and implementation of a novel, extensible and decentralized peer-to-peer technique that helps to discover, connect and provision the services of Aneka Enterprise Clouds among the users who can use different programming models to compose their applications. Evaluations of the system with applications that are programmed using the Task and Thread execution models on top of an overlay of Aneka Enterprise Clouds have been described here.
Mixed Parallel Programming Models Using Parallel Tasks
Authors: Duemmler Joerg , Rauber Thomas , Ruenger Gudula
Published: May 2010

Parallel programming models using parallel tasks have shown to be successful for increasing scalability on medium-size homogeneous parallel systems. Several investigations have shown that these programming models can be extended to hierarchical and heterogeneous systems which will dominate in the future. In this chapter, the authors discuss parallel programming models with parallel tasks and describe these programming models in the context of other approaches for mixed task and data parallelism. They discuss compiler-based as well as library-based approaches for task programming and present extensions to the model which allow a flexible combination of parallel tasks and an optimization of the resulting communication structure.
Assembling of Parallel Programs for Large Scale Numerical Modeling
Authors: Malyshkin V.E.
Published: May 2010

The main ideas of the Assembly Technology (AT) in its application to parallel implementation of large scale realistic numerical models on a rectangular mesh are considered and demonstrated by the parallelization (fragmentation) of the Particle-In-Cell method (PIC) application to solution of the problem of energy exchange in plasma cloud. The implementation of the numerical models with the assembly technology is based on the construction of a fragmented parallel program. Assembling of a numerical simulation program under AT provides automatically different useful dynamic properties of the target program including dynamic load balance on the basis of the fragments migration from overloaded into underloaded processor elements of a multicomputer. Parallel program assembling approach also can be considered as combination and adaptation for parallel programming of the well known modular programming and domain decomposition techniques and supported by the system software for fragmented programs assembling.
On Application Behavior Extraction and Prediction to Support and Improve Process Scheduling Decisions
Authors: Dodonov Evgueni , Fernandes de Mello Rodrigo
Published: May 2010

The knowledge of application behavior allows predicting their expected workload and future operations. Such knowledge can be used to support, improve and optimize scheduling decisions by distributing data accesses and minimizing communication overheads. Different techniques can be used to obtain such knowledge, varying from simple source code analysis, sequential access pattern extraction, history-based approaches and on-line behavior extraction methods. The extracted behavior can be later classified into different groups, representing process execution states, and then used to predict future process events. This chapter describes different approaches, strategies and methods for application behavior extraction and classification, and also how this information can be used to predict new events, focusing on distributed process scheduling.