bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Mediation and Ontology-Based Framework for Interoperability
Authors: Stoimenov Leonid
Published: May 2011

Research in information systems interoperability is motivated by the ever-increasing heterogeneity of the computer world. New generations of applications, such as geographic information systems (GISs), have much more demands in comparison to possibilities of legacy information systems and traditional database technology. The popularity of GIS in governmental and municipality institutions induce increasing amounts of available information (Stoimenov, Ðordevic-Kajan, & Stojanovic, 2000). In a local community environment (city services, local offices, local telecom, public utilities, water and power supply services, etc.), different information systems deal with huge amounts of available information, where most data in databases are geo-referenced. GIS applications often have to process geo-data obtained from various geo-information communities. Also, information that exists in different spatial database may be useful for many other GIS applications. Numerous legacy systems should be coupled with GIS systems, which present additional difficulties in developing end-user applications.
Similarity Retrieval and Cluster Analysis Using R* Trees
Authors: Pi Jiaxiong , Shi Yong , Chen Zhengxin
Published: May 2011

Data mining is aimed at the extraction of interesting (i.e., nontrivial, implicit, previously unknown, and potentially useful) patterns or knowledge from huge amounts of data. In order to make data mining manageable, data mining has to be database centered. Yet, data mining goes beyond the traditional realm of database techniques; in particular, reasoning methods developed from machine learning techniques and other fields in artificial intelligence (AI) have made important contributions in data mining. Data mining thus offers an excellent opportunity to explore the interesting fundamental issue of the relationship between data and knowledge retrieval and inference and reasoning. Decades ago, researchers made an important remark stating that since knowledge retrieval must respect the semantics of the representation language, knowledge retrieval is a limited form of inference operating on the stored facts (Frisch & Allen, 1982). The inverse side of this statement has also been explored, which views inference as an extension of retrieval. For example, Chen (1996) described a computer model that is able to generate suggestions through document structure mapping based on the notion of reasoning as extended knowledge retrieval; the model was implemented using a relational approach. However, although the issue of foundations of data mining has attracted much attention among data mining researchers (ICDM, 2004), little work has been done on the important relationship between retrieval and inference (or mining). A possible reason of lacking such kind of research is the difficulty of identifying an appropriate common ground that can be used to examine both data retrieval and data mining.
Outlying Subspace Detection for High-Dimensional Data
Authors: Zhang Ji , Gao Qigang , Wang Hai
Published: May 2011

Knowledge discovery in databases, commonly referred to as data mining, has attracted enormous research efforts from different domains such as databases, statistics, artificial intelligence, data visualization, and so forth in the past decade. Most of the research work in data mining such as clustering, association rules mining, and classification focus on discovering large patterns from databases (Ramaswamy, Rastogi, & Shim, 2000). Yet, it is also important to explore the small patterns in databases that carry valuable information about the interesting abnormalities. Outlier detection is a research problem in small-pattern mining in databases. It aims at finding a specific number of objects that are considerably dissimilar, exceptional, and inconsistent with respect to the majority records in an input database. Numerous research work in outlier detection has been proposed such as the distribution-based methods (Barnett & Lewis, 1994; Hawkins, 1980), the distance-based methods (Angiulli & Pizzuti, 2002; Knorr & Ng, 1998, 1999; Ramaswamy et al.; Wang, Zhang, & Wang, 2005), the density-based methods (Breuning, Kriegel, Ng, & Sander, 2000; Jin, Tung, & Han, 2001; Tang, Chen, Fu, & Cheung, 2002), and the clustering-based methods (Agrawal, Gehrke, Gunopulos, & Raghavan, 1998; Ester, Kriegel, Sander, & Xu, 1996; Hinneburg & Keim, 1998; Ng & Han, 1994; Sheikholeslami, Chatterjee, & Zhang, 1999; J. Zhang, Hsu, & Lee, 2005; T. Zhang, Ramakrishnan, & Livny, 1996).
Learning Classifiers from Distributed Data Sources
Authors: Caragea Doina , Honavar Vasant
Published: May 2011

Recent development of high throughput data acquisition technologies in a number of domains (e.g., biological sciences, atmospheric sciences, space sciences, commerce) together with advances in digital storage, computing, and communications technologies have resulted in the proliferation of a multitude of physically distributed data repositories created and maintained by autonomous entities (e.g., scientists, organizations). The resulting increasingly data-rich domains offer unprecedented opportunities in computer assisted data-driven knowledge acquisition in a number of applications, including, in particular, data-driven scientific discovery, data-driven decision-making in business and commerce, monitoring and control of complex systems, and security informatics.
Index and Materialized View Selection in Data Warehouses
Authors: Aouiche Kamel , Darmont Jérôme
Published: May 2011

Database management systems (DBMSs) require an administrator whose principal tasks are data management, both at the logical and physical levels, as well as performance optimization. With the wide development of databases and data warehouses, minimizing the administration function is crucial. This function includes the selection of suitable physical structures to improve system performance. View materialization and indexing are presumably some of the most effective optimization techniques adopted in relational implementations of data warehouses. Materialized views are physical structures that improve data access time by precomputing intermediary results. Therefore, end-user queries can be efficiently processed through data stored in views and do not need to access the original data. Indexes are also physical structures that allow direct data access. They avoid sequential scans and thereby reduce query response time. Nevertheless, these solutions require additional storage space and entail maintenance overhead. The issue is then to select an appropriate configuration of materialized views and indexes that minimizes both query response time and maintenance cost given a limited storage space. This problem is NP hard (Gupta & Mumick, 2005).
Self-Tuning Database Management Systems
Authors: Nunes Camilo Porto , de Souza Baptista Cláudio , Sampaio Marcus Costa
Published: May 2011

Computing systems have become more complex and there is a plethora of systems in heterogeneous and autonomous platforms, from mainframes to mobile devices, which need to interoperate and lack effective management. This complexity has demanded huge investments to enable these systems to work properly. It is necessary to invest on software acquisition and installation: management, administration, and update. These costs compound the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), which tends to increase exponentially according to the software complexity. Information Technology (IT) focuses mainly on providing information services in order to achieve simplicity, agility, large access to information, and competitivity. Database Management Systems (DBMS) are part of the IT infrastructure in large, medium, and even small enterprises.
A Novel Crash Recovery Scheme for Distributed Real-Time Databases
Authors: Xiao Yingyuan
Published: May 2011

Recently, the demand for real-time data services has been increasing (Aslinger & Son, 2005). Many applications such as online stock trading, agile manufacturing, traffic control, target tracking, network management, and so forth, require the support of a distributed real-time database system (DRTDBS). Typically, these applications need predictable response time, and they often have to process various kinds of queries in a timely fashion. A DRTDBS is defined as a distributed database system within which transactions and data have timing characteristics or explicit timing constraints and system correctness that depend not only on the logic results but also on the time at which the logic results are produced. Similar to conventional real-time systems, transactions in DRTDBSs are usually associated with timing constraints. On the other hand, a DRTDBS must maintain databases for useful information, support the manipulation of the databases, and process transactions. Timing constraints of transactions in a DRTDBS are typically specified in the form of deadlines that require a transaction to be completed by a specified time. For soft realtime transactions, failure to meet a deadline can cause the results to lose their value, and for firm or hard real-time transactions, a result produced too late may be useless or harmful. DRTDBSs often process both temporal data that lose validity after their period of validity and persistent data that remain valid regardless of time. In order to meet the timing constraints of transactions and data, DRTDBSs usually adopt main memory database (MMDB) as their ground support. In an MMDB, “working copy” of a database is placed in the main memory, and a “secondary copy” of the database on disks serves as backup. Data I/O can be eliminated during a transaction execution by adopting an MMDB so that a substantial performance improvement can be achieved. We define a DRTDBS integrating MMDB as a distributed real-time main memory database system (DRTMMDBS).
A Query-Strategy-Focused Taxonomy of P2P IR Techniques
Authors: Cuzzocrea Alfredo
Published: May 2011

During the last years, there was a growing interest in peer-to-peer (P2P) systems, mainly because they fit a wide number of real-life ICT applications. Digital libraries are only a significant instance of P2P systems, but it is very easy to foresee how large the impact of P2P systems on innovative and emerging ICT scenarios, such as e-government and e-procurement, will be during the next years. P2P networks are natively built on top of a very large repository of data objects (e.g., files) that is intrinsically distributed, fragmented, and partitioned among participant peers. P2P users are usually interested in (a) retrieving data objects containing information of interest, like video and audio files, and (b) sharing information with other (participant) users or peers. From the information retrieval (IR) perspective, P2P users (a) typically submit short, loose queries by means of keywords derived from natural-language-style questions (e.g., “find all the music files containing Mozart’s compositions” is posed through the keywords compositions and Mozart), and (b), due to resource-sharing purposes, are usually interested in retrieving as a result a set of data objects rather than only one. Based on such set of items, well-founded IR methodologies like ranking can be successfully applied to improve system query capabilities, thus achieving performance better than that of more traditional database-like query schemes. Furthermore, the above-described P2P IR mechanism is self-alimenting as intermediate results can be then reused to share new information, or to set and specialize new search and query activities. In other words, from the database perspective, P2P users typically adopt a semistructured (data) model for querying data objects rather than a structured (data) model. On the other hand, efficiently accessing data in P2P systems, which is an aspect directly related to the above issues, is a relevant and still incompletely solved open research challenge.
The Role of Rhetoric in Localization and Offshoring
Authors: St. Amant Kirk
Published: May 2011

Globalization is increasingly integrating the world’s economies and societies. Now, products created in one nation are often marketed to a range of international consumers. Similarly, the rapid diffusion of online media has facilitated cross-border interactions on social and professional levels. Differing cultural expectations, however, can cause miscommunications within this discourse paradigm. Localization – customizing a communiqué to meet cultural expectations – has thus become an important aspect of today’s global economy. This essay examines localization in offshoring practices that could affect database creation and maintenance.
Innovative Access and Query Schemes for Mobile Databases and Data Warehouses
Authors: Cuzzocrea Alfredo
Published: May 2011

Thanks to the explosion of the wireless technology, mobile environments are becoming the leading software platforms for extracting knowledge and interacting with enterprise information systems. Data and services availability at all times is the major benefit coming from such deployment scenario, but new research challenges pose serious limitations concerning data engineering issues. In fact, although if one can suppose that re-writing and re-adapting data structures, algorithms, and data reliability/dependability schemes is the natural way to support efficient data management on mobile environments, new issues and old limitations arise, particularly for what concerns with data availability and consistency in wireless network environments.
Natural Language Parsing
Authors: Brattico Pauli , Maatta Mikko
Published: May 2011

Automatic natural language processing captures a lion’s share of the attention in open information management. In one way or another, many applications have to deal with natural language input. In this chapter the authors investigate the problem of natural language parsing from the perspective of biolinguistics. They argue that the human mind succeeds in the parsing task without the help of languagespecific rules of parsing and language-specific rules of grammar. Instead, there is a universal parser incorporating a universal grammar. The main argument comes from language acquisition: Children cannot learn language specific parsing rules by rule induction due to the complexity of unconstrained inductive learning. They suggest that the universal parser presents a manageable solution to the problem of automatic natural language processing when compared with parsers tinkered for specific purposes. A model for a completely language independent parser is presented, taking a recent minimalist theory as a starting point.
PUM
Authors: Bagchi Susmit
Published: May 2011

Due to the advancement of hardware technologies and mobile communication systems, the mobile devices are transforming into multimedia devices capable of consuming multimedia data. The mobile multimedia devices having the 3G/4G mobile communication interfaces have created the ubiquitous multimedia applications paradigm. The ubiquitous multimedia advocates that adaptable media contents should be available to users any time and any where. These ubiquitous multimedia applications have promising business potentials. The ubiquitous multimedia applications create an infrastructure for multimedia information management, where contents can be managed with interconnection and collaboration between users. The Personalized Ubiquitous Multimedia (PUM) is a subset of ubiquitous multimedia applications, where users can create, store, share and re-use the personalized heterogeneous media contents using mobile multimedia devices. Hence, PUM is an example of interconnected and collaborative multimedia content management system. This chapter illustrates the evolution of Computer-Phone and the concept of PUM. An integrated architecture is described aiming to deploy the PUM applications. The integrated architecture is composed of Mobile Agent Systems (MAS) and a specialized Mobile Distributed File System. A set of advantages of the integrated architecture is described.
Personalisation in Highly Dynamic Grid Services Environments
Authors: Jembere Edgar , Adigun Matthew O. , Xulu Sibusiso S.
Published: May 2011

Human Computer Interaction (HCI) challenges in highly dynamic computing environments can be solved by tailoring the access and use of services to user preferences. In this era of emerging standards for open and collaborative computing environments, the major challenge that is being addressed in this chapter is how personalisation information can be managed in order to support cross-service personalisation. The authors’ investigation of state of the art work in personalisation and context-aware computing found that user preferences are assumed to be static across different context descriptions whilst in reality some user preferences are transient and vary with changes in context. Further more, the assumed preference models do not give an intuitive interpretation of a preference and lack user expressiveness. This chapter presents a user preference model for dynamic computing environments, based on an intuitive quantitative preference measure and a strict partial order preference representation, to address these issues. The authors present an approach for mining context-based user preferences and its evaluation in a synthetic m-commerce environment. This chapter also shows how the data needed for mining context-based preferences is gathered and managed in a Grid infrastructure for mobile devices.
Information Management
Authors: Losavio Michael , Elmaghraby Adel , Keeling Deborah
Published: May 2011

The global interconnected information space offers unprecedented ways of accessing and analyzing information. New infringements of the rights of individuals to privacy, personality and personal autonomy may be a consequence presenting possible legal and ethical issues for developers and users ofopen information systems. Awareness of these issues will assist the use, engineering and regulation of open information systems with minimal infringement of those rights. We examine, National, international and transnational jurisdictional issues affecting open information management, privacy and personal autonomy, and intellectual property concerns Consideration of these issues will minimize risks of problems developing from the implementation and use of open information systems.
Grounding Organizations in the Minds of the Agents
Authors: Castelfranchi Cristiano
Published: May 2011

This chapter presents organizations as a macro-micro notion and device; they presuppose autonomous proactive entities (agents) playing the organizational roles. Agents may have their own powers, goals, relationships (of dependence, trust, etc.). This opens important issues to be discussed: Does cooperation require mentally shared plans? Which is the relationship between individual powers and role powers; personal dependencies and role dependencies; personal goals and assigned goals; personal beliefs and what we have to assume when playing our role; individual actions and organizational actions? What about possible conflicts, deviations, power abuse, given the agents’ autonomy? MultiAgentSystems discipline should both aim at scientifically modeling human organizations, and at designing effective artificial organizations. Our claim is that for both those aims, one should model a high (risky) degree of flexibility, exploiting autonomy and pro-activity, intelligence and decentralized knowledge of roleplayers, allowing for functional violations of requests and even of rules.
Modelling Interactions via Commitments and Expectations
Authors: Torroni Paolo , Yolum Pinar , Singh Munindar P. , Alberti Marco , Chesani Federico , Gavanelli Marco , Lamma Evelina , Mello Paola
Published: May 2011

Organizational models often rely on two assumptions: openness and heterogeneity. This is, for instance, the case with organizations consisting of individuals whose behaviour is unpredictable, whose internal structure is unknown, and who do not necessarily share common goals, desires, or intentions. This fact has motivated the adoption of social-based approaches to modelling interaction in organizational models. The idea of social semantics is to abstract away from the agent internals and provide a social meaning to agent message exchanges. In this chapter, we present and discuss two declarative, social semantic approaches for modelling interaction. The first one takes a state-oriented perspective, and models interaction in terms of commitments. The second one adopts a rule-oriented perspective, and models interaction in terms of logical formulae expressing expectations about agent interaction. We use a simple interaction protocol taken from the e-commerce domain to present the functioning and features of the commitment- and expectation-based approaches, and to discuss various forms of reasoning and verification that they accommodate, and how organizational modelling can benefit from them.
Managing Learning throughout CKM Change
Authors: Al-Shammari Minwir
Published: May 2011

The previous chapter focuses on creating value-added products and/or services to customers..As the management of a CKM change is a journey, not a destination, this chapter is concerned with learning and adapting throughout the life of CKM change. It focuses on the accumulated knowledge and experience in implementing CKM, wherein end product learning is back channeled into the early planning stages of CKM. The aim of this CKM value chain phase is to sustain CKM performance.
Digital Rights Management for Streaming Media
Authors: Brahmbhatt Deepali , Stamp Mark
Published: May 2011

This chapter presents a digital rights management (DRM) system designed for streaming media. A brief, general introduction to DRM is also provided, along with a discussion of the some specific issues that arise in the context of streaming media. The DRM system proposed here has been implemented and some details related to the implementation are discussed.
Overview of OMA Digital Rights Management
Authors: Joan Mercè Serra , Greevenbosch Bert , Becker Anja , Fuchs Harald
Published: May 2011

This chapter gives an overview of the Open Mobile AllianceTM Digital Rights Management (OMA DRM) standard, which allows for the secure distribution and usage of protected digital content. Additionally, the DRM Profile of the OMA Mobile Broadcast Services standard, which is an extension of the OMA DRM standard to support mobile broadcast applications, is discussed. This chapter also introduces the associated OMA Secure Removable Media (OMA SRM) and OMA Secure Content Exchange (OMA SCE) standards, which increase the portability of DRM-protected content and offer a better user experience. The aim of this chapter is to give the reader insight in the above mentioned standards, their technical background, and possible usage scenarios.
Discovering the Core Security Requirements of DRM Systems by Means of Objective Trees
Authors: Jonker Hugo , Mauw Sjouke
Published: May 2011

The use of Digital Rights Management (DRM) systems involves several stakeholders, such as the content provider, the license provider, and the user, each having their own incentives to use the system. Proper use of the system implies that these incentives can only be met if certain security requirements are fulfilled. Much attention in literature has been devoted to specific security aspects of DRM systems. The contributions of this chapter consist of deriving a systematic overview of core security requirements for DRM systems. This chapter conducts a stakeholder analysis, gives an objective tree for each relevant stakeholder, and develops a simple, generic conceptual model to arrive at the set of core security requirements.
Pervasive Video Surveillance Systems Over TCP/IP Networks
Authors: Badia L. , Erta A. , Malesci U.
Published: May 2011

Traditional analog video surveillance systems technology has recently become inadequate to face the massive demand of security systems consisting of hundreds and sometimes thousands of cameras often deployed in hostile environments miles away from the control room. During the last few years, the rapid growth of the digital technology has produced sophisticated cameras which can directly record highdefinition digital videos. The packetized video stream can be straightforwardly conveyed to the control room, relaying on common IP network infrastructures. This solution result is extremely flexible as the network infrastructure can be built over a wide variety of heterogeneous network technologies from the traditional Ethernet-based Local Area Networks (LANs) to the recently proposed Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs). However, the widespread adoption of IP-based solutions for video surveillance poses serious problems in terms of required bandwidth, processing power, network security, and system dependability. In this chapter, we first investigate the advantages of the IP-based video surveillance systems over the traditional analog ones. Then, we describe the technical challenges and the open research issues which still lack an ultimate solution which permits to completely abandon the traditional analog technology. Finally, we propose and verify, by means of a case study, a methodology to address the design of video surveillance systems in real deployment.
P2PTunes
Authors: Venkataramu Ramya , Stamp Mark
Published: May 2011

Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology is used to control access to copyrighted digital content. Apple employs a DRM system known as Fairplay in its iTunes online music store. Users communicate with the centralized iTunes server to download, purchase, play, and preview digital content. The iTunes music store has the potential disadvantage of a bandwidth bottleneck at the centralized server. Furthermore, this bandwidth bottleneck problem will escalate with increasing popularity of online music and other digital media, such as video. In this chapter, we analyze the Fairplay DRM system. We then consider a modified architecture that can be employed over existing peer-to-peer (P2P) networks. Our new system, P2PTunes, is designed to provide the benefits of a decentralized P2P network while providing DRM content protection that is at least as strong as that found in Fairplay.
Secret Sharing with k-Dimensional Access Structure
Authors: Wang Guojun , Wu Yirong , Min Geyong , Shi Ronghua
Published: May 2011

Secret sharing aims at distributing and sharing a secret among a group of participants efficiently. In this chapter, we propose a plane-based access structure for secret sharing. Specifically, if any two among a set of three participants in a graph contain an edge, these participants constitute a prohibited structure which is not able to recover the master key. Otherwise, the set of three participants constitute an access structure which can recover the master key. Subsequently, we extend the plane-based scheme and propose a generic k-dimensional secret sharing scheme. Finally, we analyze the performance of the proposed scheme and reveal its advantages compared to existing schemes.
Scalable Distribution of Watermarked Media
Authors: Stenborg K-G
Published: May 2011

Media that is distributed digitally can be copied and redistributed illegally. Embedding an individual watermark in the media object for each customer will make it possible to trace pirate copies to the redistribution source. However, digital distribution methods such as broadcast and multicast are scalable and will give all customers identical copies of the media content. Distribution of individually watermarked media is more difficult to achieve. In this chapter, methods for how media with individual watermarks can be distributed scalable are presented and discussed. These methods are categorized in four groups. One group that is based on watermark embedding in the network, another group for embedding in the client, and two groups that use fragments of the media content that are unique for each customer or shared among a subgroup of customers.
Privacy and the Identity Gap in Socio-Technical Systems
Authors: Heeney Catherine
Published: May 2011

The chapter discusses the traditional expectations about privacy protection and argues that current models for the governance of data do not adequately fulfil these expectations. The traditional models of privacy protection are based on the assumption that strict anomymisation of released statistical data is the way to protect privacy and ensure public trust in the research enterprise. It will be argued that the main barriers to privacy preservation and the perpetuation of public trust are due to the capabilities of information technology on the one hand and the availability of numerous data sources on the other. Furthermore, both types of resource enable certain types of organisation to ‘read’ and categorise other people. The realities of data-processing technologies challenge the dichotomy, present in the legal framework for data-protection, between ‘personal’ and research data. This dichotomy, moreover, is not useful in the protection of informational privacy. The chapter will refer to several examples of uses of data in what are in effect ‘socio-technical systems’, which arguably challenge accepted methods of privacy protection in this area.
Explaining Participation in Online Communities
Authors: Brandtzæg Petter Bae , Heim Jan
Published: May 2011

The last few years have seen a substantial growth in online communities such as MySpace and Facebook. In order to survive and increase in size, online community systems must enhance social interaction and participation. This chapter analyzes participation in new online communities, using a combination of the socio-technical perspective and the human-computer interaction perspective. In 2007, both qualitative and quantitative data was collected from questionnaires from five sample groups in Norway—four popular online communities and one national sample of Internet users. The results show that online communities attract like-minded people, but vary in terms of different user types. Most visitors have a clear social purpose, but the level of participation differs with respect to user types and community characteristics. Participation in terms of user-generated content (UGC) differs greatly, depending on the medium used. Most users do not contribute audio-visual UGC, and text is still the main UGC. Possible future research and socio-technical design implications are discussed.
Developing Innovative Practice in Service Industries
Authors: Coakes Elayne W. , Smith Peter , Alwis Dee
Published: May 2011

This chapter presents the argument that service innovation is promoted by supporting divergent interpretations, enlarging the scope of employee and organizational skills and competencies, making interactions and knowledge sharing between people easy, and by encouraging close ties with customers. The chapter further argues that service organizations that utilize sociotechnical mechanisms for knowledge sharing through the use of a successful community of innovation (which we term a CoInv), and that build into their innovative capacities a strong relationship with their customers and suppliers, are very likely to innovate successfully. The argument is demonstrated through a qualitative case study where data analysis was deductive from multiple data sources. The chapter also demonstrates the power and efficacy of channeling activities through community innovation lenses. We argue that identifying innovation champions and comprehensively supporting them will potentially trigger more successful innovations thus improving service competitiveness in the market place.
A Framework for Using Analytics to Make Decisions
Authors: Bracewell Paul J.
Published: May 2011

Analytics provides evidence for objective corporate decision-making. Lack of understanding of analytical techniques can create confusion amongst decision-makers. Confusion generates mistrust which leads to the exclusion of analytics from the decision-making process. Confusion is avoided by ensuring that results are justified. This requires that the analytical process is auditable. Aligning technological design and deployment with human roles creates the necessary framework for auditability. This is achieved with four analytical technology components: data manipulation, statistical and quantitative analysis, creation, and export of exploratory and predictive models, and delivery of output. These components correspond with key stages and phases of collaboration in the analytical process. Describing the interaction and alignment leads to a proposed framework for the socio-technical development of analytical software and process which considers both user and non-user needs. This framework can be expanded to other domains where technology and users of technology must collaborate with non-users who dictate acceptance.
Applied Pragmatism and Interaction Design
Authors: Mørch Anders I.
Published: May 2011

This chapter presents a translational approach to socio-technical design, as a new approach to the theorybased design of user interfaces, supported by a multi-stage process. A survey of the early work on theorybased design in HCI identifies the strengths and limitations of this approach. This new approach extends HCI with a socio-cultural perspective, and adopts creative practices from the fields of architecture and furniture design. The process consists of three stages: selection, appropriation, and translation that “map” elements from the socio-cultural domain to the HCI domain. Two interactive systems are used to illustrate the process, informed by ideas of American pragmatism. The chapter ends by discussing the strengths and limitations of the translational approach, and points out directions for further work.
A Scale of Affective Satisfaction in Online Learning Communities
Authors: Holland Janet L.
Published: May 2011

This chapter deals with research on the development and use of an assessment instrument for measuring affective satisfaction in online learning. The research used a One-Way Repeated Measures Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) design, and the measure was students’ perceived affective community satisfaction. An increasing mean score trend combined with positive qualitative feedback provided indicators of an overall growth in students’ perceived affective community satisfaction worthy of further investigation. Data was collected at the college level, although it has important implications for online socio-technical design at all education levels.
Seekbio
Authors: Jouis Christophe , Roux-Rouquié Magali , Ganascia Jean-Gabriel
Published: May 2011

Identical molecules could play different roles depending of the relations they may have with different partners embedded in different processes, at different time and/or localization. To address such intricate networks that account for the complexity of living systems, systems biology is an emerging field that aims at understanding such dynamic interactions from the knowledge of their components and the relations between these components. Among main issues in system biology, knowledge on entities spatial relations is of importance to assess the topology of biological networks. In this perspective, mining data and texts could afford specific clues. To address this issue we examine the use of contextual exploration method to develop extraction rules that can retrieve information on relations between biological entities in scientific literature. We propose the system Seekbio that could be plugged at Pubmed output as an interface between results of PubMed query and articles selection following spatial relationships requests.
Characterization of Service Orientation and the Adaptive Complex Enterprise
Authors: Ramanathan Jay , Ramnath Rajiv
Published: May 2011

We begin with a characterization of service challenges and a conceptualization of a complex service enterprise as a collection of organizations and sub-organizations. Each organization is in turn in an internal cycle of adaptation characterized by BioS - Business value achieved through an Information infrastructure enabled Operations to deliver on Service Strategy. The overview of this conceptualization is illustrated in the 2 Figures. The car manufacturing enterprise is used to quickly introduce and illustrate important concepts such as agility, innovation, resilience, effectiveness, sense and respond, vertical and horizontal alignment. In addition we characterize influences on a complex Business-IT system: Service delivery challenges due to Routine and non-Routine services , Multiple stakeholders , Chaos due to change, variation, and service layers , Vertical BioS alignment as well as horizontal customer-provider alignment , Trends and the Strategic role of IT , Changing the business versus running the business , and Underlying Enterprise Architectures (EA) and Related Methods We conclude with the Scope and parts of the Adaptive Complex Enterprise (ACE) framework.
Co-Engineering IT Services for Lean Operations
Authors: Ramanathan Jay , Ramnath Rajiv
Published: May 2011

The ACE structure is not only used to create BioS goals and work products, but also to perform the analysis needed to prioritize improvement projects and their tasks. We next show how the structure is used to define tasks and priorities to deploy in the context of existing enterprise systems and emerging technologies to reduce the time to install new PCs from seventeen days to one day. The related goals are met by quantifying the Interactions between global Lean and local Autonomic goals to achieve continuous improvement. Finally, we show here how a complex system ‘improves’ operationally through enhancements in a Role set that includes both Agents in the physical world and in the Electronic world. for related approaches to this also see Brittenham et al 2007a. We use the PC (personal computer) Build and Install service to illustrate methods for the improvement of underlying Interactions within a typical complex organization. This application was selected because it has the complex characteristics, yet it is representative and straightforward to understand. The techniques are widely applicable for the improvement of IT services and Primary services.
Modeling Process-Driven SOAs
Authors: Tran Huy , Holmes Ta’id , Zdun Uwe , Dustdar Schahram
Published: May 2011

This chapter introduces a view-based, model-driven approach for process-driven, service-oriented architectures. A typical business process consists of numerous tangled concerns, such as the process control flow, service invocations, fault handling, transactions, and so on. Our view-based approach separates these concerns into a number of tailored perspectives at different abstraction levels. On the one hand, the separation of process concerns helps reducing the complexity of process development by breaking a business process into appropriate architectural views. On the other hand, the separation of levels of abstraction offers appropriately adapted views to stakeholders, and therefore, helps quickly re-act to changes at the business level and at the technical level as well. Our approach is realized as a model-driven tool-chain for business process development.
Business Process Intelligence
Authors: Castellanos M. , Alves de Medeiros A.K. , Mendling J. , Weber B. , Weijters A.J.M.M.
Published: May 2011

Business Process Intelligence (BPI) is an emerging area that is getting increasingly popular for enterprises. The need to improve business process efficiency, to react quickly to changes and to meet compliance is among the main drivers for BPI. BPI refers to the application of Business Intelligence techniques to business processes and comprises a large range of application areas spanning from process monitoring and analysis to process discovery, conformance checking, prediction and optimization. This chapter provides an introductory overview of BPI and its application areas and delivers an understanding of how to apply BPI in one’s own setting. In particular, it shows how process mining techniques such as process discovery and conformance checking can be used to support process modeling and process redesign. In addition, it illustrates how processes can be improved and optimized over time using analytics for explanation, prediction, optimization and what-if-analysis. Throughout the chapter, a strong emphasis is given to describe tools that use these techniques to support BPI. Finally, major challenges for applying BPI in practice and future trends are discussed.
Measurement and Maturity of Business Processes
Authors: Sanchez Laura , Delgado Andrea , Ruiz Francisco , Garcia Felix , Piattini Mario
Published: May 2011

The underlying premise of process management is that the quality of products and services is largely determined by the quality of the processes used to develop, deliver and support them. A concept which has been closely related to process quality over the last few years is the maturity of the process and it is important to highlight the current proposal of Business Process Maturity Model (BPMM), which is based on the principles, architecture and practices of CMM and CMMI for Software and describes the essential practices for the development, preparation, deployment, operations and support of product and service offers from determining customer needs. When maturity models are in place, it is important not to forget the important role that measurement can play, being essential in organizations which intend to reach a high level in the maturity in their processes. This is demonstrated by observing the degree of importance that measurement activities have in maturity models. This chapter tackles the Business Process Maturity Model and the role that business measurement plays in the context of this model. In addition, a set of representative business process measures aligned with the characteristics of BPMM are introduced which can guide organizations to support the measurement of their business processes depending on their maturity.
Context-Aware Adaptation in an Ecology of Applications
Authors: Preuveneers Davy , Victor Koen , Vanrompay Yves , Rigole Peter , Pinheiro Manuele Kirsch
Published: May 2011

In recent years, many researchers have studied context-awareness to support non-intrusive adaptability of context-aware applications. Context-aware applications benefit from emerging technology that connects everyday objects and provides opportunities to collect and use context information from various sources. Context-awareness helps to adapt continuously to new situations and to turn a static computing environment into a dynamic ecology of smart and proactive applications. In this chapter, we present our framework that manages and uses context information to adapt applications and the content they provide. We show how application adaptation can be handled at the composition level, by reconfiguring, redeploying and rewiring components, e.g. to fall back into reduced functionality mode when redeploying an application on a handheld. The key features of our context-aware adaptation framework notonly include local adaptations of context-aware applications and content, but also the addressing of context in large scale networks and the contextaware redeployment of running applications in a distributed setting. We discuss how adaptation is handled along various levels of abstraction (user, content, application, middleware, network) and illustrate the flexibility of context-aware content and application adaptation by means of a realistic use case scenario.
Kindergarten
Authors: Lofeudo Nahuel , Fortier Andrés , Rossi Gustavo
Published: May 2011

Mobile context-aware applications have specific needs regarding data communications and position sensing, that current standard hardware is still not able to fulfill. Current mechanisms are inadequate for applications that need constant communications because of their high power needs and low precision when used to measure the physical indoor position of a mobile device. For this reason the authors have created a new, flexible and inexpensive technology that aims to solve both the needs of communication and position estimation on mobile platforms. This new network type uses recently developed technology to minimize power consumption, leading to a longer battery life and maximizing the precision of the position sensing of the device. Finally, on top of their hardware platform they have devised a software layer, named Kindergarten, which allows high-level languages to interact with the underlying hardware.
Establishing Communities of Practice for Effective and Sustainable Professional Development for Blended Learning
Authors: Thompson Terrie Lynn , Kanuka Heather
Published: May 2011

The growing need for professional development to help university instructors with the adoption of online teaching is being propelled from several directions. But innovative professional development initiatives, intended to help university instructors better leverage technology, particularly through blended approaches, are not without tensions. The objective of this research study was to delve into these tensions. Directors in several North American professional development centres were interviewed in order to explore how their programs supported the integration of technology into teaching. Findings suggest that there is a tension between what professional development centres are doing and what they would like to do regarding: (1) deeper integration of technology into their own teaching practices as a centre, including blended approaches; and (2) how to nurture communities of practice, comprised of university instructors focused on teaching-related issues in higher education, such as adoption of blended learning strategies. Four themes emerged: uncertainty about how best to leverage technology and blended learning, questions regarding a professional development centre’s role in cultivating communities, the importance of being strategic, and desire for scalability. The chapter concludes with policy implications and recommendations for future development of effective and sustainable professional development practices.
Case Studies of ICT-Enhanced Blended Learning and Implications for Professional Development
Authors: Wilson Gail
Published: May 2011

This chapter draws on a collective case study of six faculty members working in ICT-enhanced blended learning environments at a large regional university in Australia. The chapter identifies seven dimensions of the blended learning environments created by each teacher, with a particular focus on four of these dimensions – the teacher, the online, the resource-based learning and the institutional support dimension. The research showed how individual faculty members worked to blend their courses through their overall approaches to course planning, their focus on combining the strengths of both the face-toface and the online learning environments, and their eagerness to shift their pedagogical approaches to accommodate the best features of both the face-to-face and the online environments. The chapter makes recommendations for professional development for teachers that is effective in preparing them for creating and working in blended learning environments and suggests areas for future research in the area of blended learning.