bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Emergence of Standardisation Processes
Authors: Graham Ian , Bunduchi Raluca , Gerst Martina , Williams Robin
Published: May 2010

For RFID technology (radio frequency identification), the forms of the standardisation processes are co-evolving with the technology and are being shaped by the technology itself and by the needs of users. However, the engagement of the large majority of end-users in standards development is at best limited. Based on semi-structured interviews with key actors in the automotive industry, the chapter discusses the role that RFID standards play in shaping the adoption of RFID systems in the automotive supply chain.
The Shaping of the IEEE 802.11 Standard
Authors: Lemstra W. , Hayes V.
Published: May 2010

In this chapter the authors explore and describe the role of the innovating firm in relation to the standards making process of Wireless-Local Area Networks, and in particular the link between NCR and its corporate successors in the creation of the IEEE 802.11 standard, which is at the basis of the global success of Wi-Fi. Their focus is the leadership role assumed by NCR c.s. responsible for the initiation and creation of an open standard for Wireless-LANs.
China's Practice of Implementing a 3G Mobile Telecommunications Standard
Authors: Li Mingzhi , Reimers Kai
Published: May 2010

This chapter analyses and evaluates the Chinese government’s 3G policy of supporting the creation and implementation of the country’s indigenous TD-SCDMA standard. On the supply side, the addition of a new standard has enriched choices available on the 3G mobile telecommunications market; however, on the demand side, the government had to force operators to adopt this standard due to their lack of interest in the new standard. Building on insights gained from North’s theory on the transaction costs of politics, the authors explain this standardization process as a result of interaction between the political market and the economic market which has ultimately been driven by ideology shifts that took place on multiple levels of China’s society in recent years. They contribute to the standardization literature by demonstrating how North’s theory can be used for integrating political and economic aspects in the analysis of standardization processes.
E-Business Standardization in the Automotive Sector
Authors: Gerst Martina , Jakobs Kai
Published: May 2010

Successful cooperation between large manufacturers and their suppliers is a crucial aspect, especially in the automotive industry. Such mutually beneficial cooperation requires at least a certain level of integration and interoperation of the partners’ IT and e-business systems. This chapter looks at two approaches in order to achieve this goal: sector-specific harmonization (in the form of electronic marketplaces) and international, committee-based standardization. This chapter shows that SMEs are facing a severe disadvantage in both cases. This is, however, less pronounced in a formal standards setting, in which capabilities of the individual representatives are more important, at least at the working level.
A Comparative Study of XML Change Detection Algorithms
Authors: Cobéna Grégory , Abdessalem Talel
Published: May 2010

Change detection is an important part of version management for databases and document archives. The success of XML has recently renewed interest in change detection on trees and semi-structured data, and various algorithms have been proposed. We study different algorithms and representations of changes based on their formal definition and on experiments conducted over XML data from the Web. Our goal is to provide an evaluation of the quality of the results, the performance of the tools and, based on this, guide the users in choosing the appropriate solution for their applications.
Active XML Transactions
Authors: Biswas Debmalya , Kim Il-Gon
Published: May 2010

Active XML (AXML) provides an elegant platform to integrate the power of XML, Web services and Peer to Peer (P2P) paradigms by allowing (active) Web service calls to be embedded within XML documents. In this chapter, the authors present some interesting aspects encountered while investigating a transactional framework for AXML systems. They present an integrated locking protocol for the scenario where the structure of both data and transactions are nested. They show how to construct the undo operations dynamically, and outline an algorithm to compute a correct optimum undo order in the presence of nesting and parallelism. Finally, to overcome the inherent problem of peer disconnection, the authors propose an innovative solution based on ”chaining” the active peers for early detection and recovery from peer disconnection.
SEEC
Authors: Taha Kamal , Elmasri Ramez
Published: May 2010

With the emergence of the World Wide Web, business’ databases are increasingly being queried directly by customers. The customers may not be aware of the exact structure of the underlying data, and might have never learned a query language that enables them to issue structured queries. Some of the employees who query the databases may also not be aware of the structure of the data, but they are likely to be aware of some labels of elements containing the data. There is a need for a dual search engine that accommodates both business employees and customers. We propose in this chapter an XML search engine called SEEC, which accepts Keyword-Based queries (which can be used for answering customers’ queries) and Loosely Structured queries (which can be used for answering employees’ queries). We proposed previously a stand-alone Loosely Structured search engine called OOXSearch (Taha & Elmasri, 2007). SEEC integrates OOXSearch with a Keyword-Based search engine and uses novel search techniques. It is built on top of an XQuery search engine (Katz, 2005). SEEC was evaluated experimentally and compared with three recently proposed systems: XSEarch (Cohen & Mamou & Sagiv, 2003), Schema Free XQuery (Li & Yu & Jagadish, 2004), and XKSearch (Xu & Papakonstantinou, 2005). The results showed marked improvement.
Analysis of Service Compatibility
Authors: Pu Ken Q.
Published: May 2010

In this chapter, the authors apply type-theoretic techniques to the service description and composition verification. A flexible type system is introduced for modeling instances and mappings of semi-structured data, and is demonstrated to be effective in modeling a wide range of data services, ranging from relational database queries to web services for XML. Type-theoretic analysis and verification are then reduced to the problem of type unification. Some (in)tractability results of the unification problem and the expressiveness of their proposed type system are presented in this chapter. Finally, the auhtors construct a complete unification algorithm which runs in EXP-TIME in the worst case, but runs in polynomial time for a large family of unification problems rising from practical type analysis of service compositions.
XML Compression for Web Services on Resource-Constrained Devices
Authors: Werner Christian , Buschmann Carsten , Brandt Ylva , Fischer Stefan
Published: May 2010

Compared to other middleware approaches like CORBA or Java RMI the protocol overhead of SOAP is very high. This fact is not only disadvantageous for several performance-critical applications, but especially in environments with limited network bandwidth or resource-constrained computing devices. Although recent research work concentrated on more compact, binary representations of XML data only very few approaches account for the special characteristics of SOAP communication. In this article we will discuss the most relevant state-of-the-art technologies for compressing XML data. Furthermore, we will present a novel solution for compacting SOAP messages. In order to achieve significantly better compression rates than current approaches, our compressor utilizes structure information from an XML Schema or WSDL document. With this additional knowledge on the “grammar” of the exchanged messages, our compressor generates a single custom pushdown automaton, which can be used as a highly efficient validating parser as well as a highly efficient compressor. The main idea is to tag the transitions of the automaton with short binary identifiers that are then used to encode the path trough the automaton during parsing. Our approach leads to extremely compact data representations and is also usable in environments with very limited CPU and memory resources.
Mining Association Rules from XML Documents
Authors: Rusu Laura Irina , Rahayu Wenny , Taniar David
Published: May 2010

This chapter presents some of the existing mining techniques for extracting association rules out of XML documents in the context of rapid changes in the Web knowledge discovery area. The initiative of this study was driven by the fast emergence of XML (eXtensible Markup Language) as a standard language for representing semistructured data and as a new standard of exchanging information between different applications. The data exchanged as XML documents become richer and richer every day, so the necessity to not only store these large volumes of XML data for later use, but to mine them as well to discover interesting information has became obvious. The hidden knowledge can be used in various ways, for example, to decide on a business issue or to make predictions about future e-customer behaviour in a Web application. One type of knowledge that can be discovered in a collection of XML documents relates to association rules between parts of the document, and this chapter presents some of the top techniques for extracting them.
A Tutorial on RDF with Jena
Authors: Wong Wan-Yeung , Lau Tak-Pang , King Irwin , Lyu Michael R.
Published: May 2010

This chapter gives a tutorial on resource description framework (RDF), its XML representation, and Jena, a set of Java-based API designed and implemented to further simplify the manipulation of RDF documents. RDF is a W3C standard which provides a common framework for describing resources in the World Wide Web and other applications. Under this standard framework with the Jena, different resources can be manipulated and exchanged easily, which leads to cost reduction and better efficiency in business applications. In this tutorial, we present some basic concepts and applications of RDF and Jena. In particular, we use a television object to illustrate the usage of RDF in describing various resources being used, the XML syntax in representing the RDF, and the ways Jena manipulate various RDF documents. Furthermore, complete programming codes with detailed explanations are also presented to give readers a better understanding of Jena. References are given at the end for readers’ further investigation.
Extending Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) with Mobile and Web Services Technologies
Authors: Ghanbary Abbass , Unhelkar Bhuvan
Published: May 2010

Web Services (WS) technologies, generally built around the ubiquitous Extensible Markup Language (XML), have provided many opportunities for integrating enterprise applications. However, XML/Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), together with Web Services Definition Language (WSDL) and Universal Description Discovery and Integration (UDDI), form a comprehensive suite of WS technologies that have the potential to transcend beyond mere application integration within an organization, and to provide capabilities of integrating processes across multiple organizations. Currently, the WS paradigm is driven through parameters however; the paradigm shift that can result in true collaborative business requires us to consider the business paradigm in terms of policies-processes-standards. This chapter, based on experimental research carried out by the authors, demonstrates how the technologies of WS open up the doors to collaborative Enterprise Architecture Integration (EAI) and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) resulting in Business Integration (BI). The chapter also provide a quantitative investigation based on organization’s adaptation to mobile and Web Services technologies.
Evaluation of Two Mobile Nutrition Tracking Applications for Chronically Ill Populations with Low Literacy Skills
Authors: Siek Katie A , Connelly Kay H , Chaudry Beenish , Lambert Desiree , Welch Janet L.
Published: May 2010

In this chapter, the authors discuss two case studies that compare and contrast the use of barcode scanning, voice recording, and patient self reporting as a means to monitor the nutritional intake of a chronically ill population. In the first study, they found that participants preferred unstructured voice recordings rather than barcode scanning. Since unstructured voice recordings require costly transcription and analysis, they conducted a second case study where participants used barcode scanning or an integrated voice response system to record nutritional intake. The authors found that although the latter input method provided participants with a faster method to input food items, participants had difficulty using the system despite training.
Personal Health Records Systems Go Mobile
Authors: Olla Phillip , Tan Joseph
Published: May 2010

This chapter provides an overview of mobile personal health record (MPHR) systems. A Mobile personal health record is an eclectic application through which patients can access, manage, and share their health information from a mobile device in a private, confidential, and secure environment. Personal health records have evolved over the past three decades from a small card or booklet with immunizations recorded into fully functional mobile accessible portals, and it is the PHR evolution outside of the secure healthcare environment that is causing some concerns regarding privacy. Specifically, the chapter reviews the extant literature on critical evaluative components to be considered when assessing MPHR systems.
Patient Monitoring in Diverse Environments
Authors: Jasemian Yousef
Published: May 2010

Recording of physiological vital signs in patients’ real-life environment could be especially useful in management of chronic disorders; for example for heart failure, hypertension, diabetes, anorexia nervosa, chronic pain, or severe obesity. Thus, monitoring patients in diverse environments, by a mobile health system, is one of the major benefits of this approach, however at the same time the demands and challenges for improving safety, security and integrity increase. Top priorities for patients under recovery of health and elderly under care are the feeling of being cared securely and safely in there home and its surroundings. Solving these issues will elevate users’ compliance and trust to mobile health services. Most research activities have been focused on achieving common platform for medical records, monitoring health status of the patients in a real-time manner, improving the concept of online diagnosis, developing or enhancing telemedicine solutions, which deals with remote delivery of health care services applying telecommunications, etc.This chapter intends to explore the issues and limitations concerning application of mobile health system in diverse environments, trying to emphasize the advantages and drawbacks, data security and integrity suggesting approaches for enhancements. These issues will be explored in successive subsections by introducing two studies which were undertaken by the author.
Monitoring Hospital Patients Using Ambient Displays
Authors: Tentori Monica , Segura Daniela , Favela Jesus
Published: May 2010

Hospital work is characterized by intense mobility, a frequent switching between tasks, and the need to collaborate and coordinate activities among specialists. These working conditions impose important demands on hospital staff, whose attention becomes a limited and important resource to administer. Nurses in particular, need to constantly monitor the status of patients in order to assess their condition, assist them and/or notify physicians or specialists. Given their work load, it is not rare for them to miss important events, such as a catheter being disconnected due to the patient movement or the need to change a urine bag that has been filled. Pervasive technologies by being able to continuously monitor patients could provide awareness of the patients’ health condition. This awareness must be subtle, expressive, and unobtrusive without intruding on hospital workers’ focal activity. In this chapter the authors explore the use of ambient displays to adequately monitor patient’s health status and promptly and opportunistically notify hospital workers of those changes. To show the feasibility and applicability of ambient displays in hospitals they designed and developed two ambient displays that can be used to provide awareness patients’ health status to hospital workers. The first display takes into account the mobility experienced by nurses during their work to supervise the activities of daily living (ADL) conducted by patients. The second display is a flower vase that notifies nurses the urine output of patients and the status of their urine bag.
Towards Wearable Physiological Monitoring on a Mobile Phone
Authors: Oliver Nuria , Flores-Mangas Fernando , de Oliveira Rodrigo
Published: May 2010

In this chapter, we present our experience in using mobile phones as a platform for real-time physiological monitoring and analysis. In particular, we describe in detail the TripleBeat system, a research prototype that assists runners in achieving predefined exercise goals via musical feedback, a glanceable interface for increased personal awareness and a virtual competition. We believe that systems like TripleBeat will play an important role in assisting users towards healthier and more active lifestyles.
A Framework for Capturing Patient Consent in Pervasive Healthcare Applications
Authors: Russello Giovanni , Dong Changyu , Dualy Naranker
Published: May 2010

In this chapter, the authors describe a new framework for pervasive healthcare applications where the patient’s consent has a pivotal role. In their framework, patients are able to control the disclosure of their medical data. The patient’s consent is implicitly captured by the context in which his or her medical data is being accessed. Context is expressed in terms of workflows. The execution of a task in a workflow carries information that the system uses for providing access rights accordingly to the patient’s consent. Ultimately, the patient is in charge of withdrawing consent if necessary. Moreover, the use of workflow enables the enforcement of the need-to-kwon principle. This means that a subject is authorised to access sensitive data only when required by the actual situation.
Modeling Spatiotemporal Developments in Spatial Health Systems
Authors: Gottfried Bjorn
Published: May 2010

This chapter introduces spatial health systems, identifies fundamental properties of these systems, and details for specific applications the methods to be applied in order to show how problems are solved in this field. On the one hand, this chapter gives an overview of this area, on the other hand, it is written for those who are interested in designing spatial health systems. The result is that different spatial scales and purposes require different representations for describing the spatiotemporal change of objects, that is their spatiotemporal development, showing how fundamental purposes of spatial health systems are dealt with.
Introduction to Missing Data
Authors: Marwala Tshilidzi
Published: May 2010

In this chapter, the traditional missing data imputation issues such as missing data patterns and mechanisms are described. Attention is paid to the best models to deal with particular missing data mechanisms. A review of traditional missing data imputation methods, namely case deletion and prediction rules, is conducted. For case deletion, list-wise and pair-wise deletions are reviewed. In addition, for prediction rules, the imputation techniques such as mean substitution, hot-deck, regression and decision trees are also reviewed. Two missing data examples are studied, namely: the Sudoku puzzle and a mechanical system. The major conclusions drawn from these examples are that there is a need for an accurate model that describes inter-relationships and rules that define the data and that a good optimization method is required for a successful missing data estimation procedure.
A Hybrid Approach to Missing Data
Authors: Marwala Tshilidzi
Published: May 2010

The problem of missing data in databases has recently been dealt with through the use computational intelligence. The hybrid of auto-associative neural networks and genetic algorithms has proven to be a successful approach to missing data imputation. Similarly, two auto-associative neural networks are developed to be used in conjunction with genetic algorithm to estimate missing data, and these approaches are compared to a Bayesian auto-associative neural network and genetic algorithm approach. One technique combines three neural networks to form a hybrid auto-associative network, while the other merges principal component analysis and neural networks. The hybrid of the neural network and genetic algorithm approach proves to be the most accurate when estimating one missing value, while a hybrid of principal component and neural networks is more consistent and captures patterns in the data more efficiently.
Missing Data Estimation Using Rough Sets
Authors: Marwala Tshilidzi
Published: May 2010

A number of techniques for handling missing data have been presented and implemented. Most of these proposed techniques are unnecessarily complex and, therefore, difficult to use. This chapter investigates a hot-deck data imputation method, based on rough set computations. In this chapter, characteristic relations are introduced that describe incompletely specified decision tables and then these are used for missing data estimation. It has been shown that the basic rough set idea of lower and upper approximations for incompletely specified decision tables may be defined in a variety of different ways. Empirical results obtained using real data are given and they provide a valuable insight into the problem of missing data. Missing data are predicted with an accuracy of up to 99%.
Online Approaches to Missing Data Estimation
Authors: Marwala Tshilidzi
Published: May 2010

The use of inferential sensors is a common task for online fault detection in various control applications. A problem arises when sensors fail when the system is designed to make a decision based on the data from those sensors. Various techniques to handle missing data are discussed in this chapter. First, a novel algorithm that classifies and regresses in the presence of missing data online is presented. The algorithm was tested for using both classification and regression problems and was compared to an off-line trained method that used auto-associative networks as well as a Hybrid Genetic Algorithm (HGA) method and a Fast Simulated Annealing (FSA) technique. The results showed that the presented methods performed well for online missing data estimation. Second, an online estimation algorithm that uses an ensemble of multi-layer perceptron regressors, HGA and FSA and genetic programming is presented for missing data estimation and compared with a similar procedure that was trained off-line.
Control of Biomedical System Using Missing Data Approaches
Authors: Marwala Tshilidzi
Published: May 2010

Neural networks are used in this chapter for classifying the HIV status of individuals based on socioeconomic and demographic characteristics. The trained network is then used to create an error equation with one of the demographic variables as a missing input and the desired HIV status as one of the variables. The missing variable thus becomes a control variable. This control mechanism is proposed to assess the effect of education level on the HIV risk of individuals and, thereby, assist in understanding the extent to which the spread of HIV can be controlled by using the education level. An inverse neural network model and a missing data approximation model based on autoassociative neural network and genetic algorithm (ANNGA) are used for the control mechanism. Therefore, the ANNGA is used to obtain the missing input values (education level) for the first model and an inverse neural network model is then used to obtain the missing input values (education) for the second model. The two models are then compared and it is found that the proposed inverse neural network model outperforms the ANNGA model. The methodology thus shows that HIV spread can be controlled to some extent by modifying a demographic characteristic educational level.
3SST Model
Authors: Sabau Andreea
Published: May 2010

In order to represent spatio-temporal data, many conceptual models have been designed and a part of them have been implemented. This chapter describes an approach of the conceptual modeling of spatio-temporal data, called 3SST. Also, the spatio-temporal conceptual and relational data models obtained by following the proposed phases are presented. The 3SST data model is obtained by following three steps: the construction of an entity-relationship spatio-temporal model, the specification of the domain model and the design of a class diagram which includes the objects characteristic to a spatiotemporal application and other needed elements. The relational model of the 3SST conceptual model is the implementation of the conceptual 3SST data model on a relational database platform. Both models are characterized by generality in representing spatial, temporal and spatio-temporal data. The spatial objects can be represented as points or objects with shape and the evolution of the spatio-temporal objects can be implemented as discrete or continuous in time, on time instants or time intervals. More than that, different types of spatial, temporal, spatio-temporal and event-based queries can be performed on represented data. Therefore, the proposed 3SST relational model can be considered the core of a spatio-temporal data model.
Information Systems Development
Authors: Mattia Angela , Weistroffer Heinz Roland
Published: May 2010

Conventional wisdom has it that user participation in information systems development (ISD) is essential for systems success. Though the significance of user participation to systems success has been much discussed in the literature, results from empirical studies are inconsistent and suggest, that perhaps new avenues need to be explored. One approach may be viewing user participation as a social network that is, looking at the emergence of social structures and their technological expressions during the user participation process. In this chapter, a framework is presented that organizes user participation approaches that emerge from the different worldviews existing within organizations. This user participation approach (UPA) framework is used as the structure for the systematic arrangement of user participation approaches into a fourfold taxonomy based on extrinsic information attributed to them in the literature. In addition, a categorical analysis and social network analysis (SNA) are used to map and visualize the relationships between analyst and users, thus providing a conceptual and visual representation of the relational structures.
SEACON
Authors: Yadav Surya B.
Published: May 2010

The extent methods largely ignore the importance of integrating security requirements with business requirements and providing built-in steps for dealing with these requirements seamlessly. To address this problem, a new approach to secure network analysis and design is presented. The proposed method, called the SEACON method, provides an integrated approach to use existing principles of information systems analysis and design with the unique requirements of distributed secure network systems. We introduce several concepts including security adequacy level, process-location-security matrix, datalocation- security matrix, and secure location model to provide built-in mechanisms to capture security needs and use them seamlessly throughout the steps of analyzing and designing secure networks. This method is illustrated and compared to other secure network design methods. The SEACON method is found to be a useful and effective method.
Introduction to Games-Based Learning
Authors: Tang Stephen , Hanneghan Martin , El Rhalibi Abdennour
Published: May 2010

Games-based learning takes advantage of gaming technologies to create a fun, motivating, and interactive virtual learning environment that promotes situated experiential learning. Many researchers now believe that this approach can better motivate present day entertainment-driven learners to more thoroughly engage in learning through meaningful activities defined in the game context as opposed to those offered using more traditional didactic approaches. This chapter describes games-based learning, the related terms and scope, current approaches, embedded pedagogies and challenges for providing high-quality education in the 21st Century.
Drawing Circles in the Sand
Authors: Seeney Matt , Routledge Helen
Published: May 2010

One of the most important differentiators between Commercial Games and Serious Games is content; delivered in a way that is successfully integrated with engaging game play and achieves the desired learning outcomes by delivering skills and knowledge effectively to the end-user. This ability to integrate content effectively is the key to producing “killer” Serious Games that deliver demonstrable learning outcomes, business benefits and overall value. However, achieving this nirvana is not a trivial task. Utilising lessons learned and case studies, this chapter provides an overview of why this process can be so challenging, including the differing experiences from the perspective of three stakeholders (game designer, instructional designer/learning psychologist and subject matter expert), how to manage preconceptions and balance their priorities. The case studies will also show how different methodologies, techniques and technology have been applied to help solve this fundamental challenge of delivering a successful serious game. Advice is provided on how to facilitate this process, capture the correct requirements andcreate a design that meets and exceeds the expectations of all the stakeholders involved, including the client/customer and the end user.
Profiling Users in Educational Games
Authors: Felicia Patrick , Pitt Ian
Published: May 2010

For a long time, users’ emotions and behaviours have been considered to obstruct rather than to help the cognitive process. Educational systems have based their learning strategies almost solely at a cognitive level and the internal state of the learner has often been ignored. Even if it is now recognized that learners’ personalities and learning styles influence greatly their cognitive process (e.g. Multiple intelligences), very few systems have managed to profile users and adapt the educational content accordingly. Part of the reason for this is the difficulty to measure learning styles reliably and to establish a valid model that accounts for most of the major factors contributing to learning. Furthermore, since the introduction of formal education, it can be argued that learning has lost its playful and emotional aspect, whereby information was transmitted through story telling and play. On the other hand, video games have become a very popular medium among our digital natives. They provide a rich sensory and emotional environment in which they can experience a state of flow and are willing to stay for extended period of time. Despite of initial preconceptions on the negative effect of video games on young adults, it is now admitted that video games implicitly include many instructional design strategies (collaboration, exploration, Socratic dialogues, zone of proximal development, etc.) that could be harnessed to make formal education an experience that is more interactive and rewarding. One of the key features of video games is the ability to provide a content that matches players’ emotional needs (e.g. recognition, social bounding, self-esteem, etc.) and that provides a wide range of interaction. The authors believe that this potential can be harnessed to create an educational content that matches users’ learning styles and motivations. They propose the PLEASE model (Personality Learning styles, Emotions, Autonomy, Systematic Approach and Evaluation). This model addresses some of educational games design issues (e.g. choice of instructional strategy, type of feedback required, etc.); it categorizes and profiles users’ learning styles in the light of educational and personality theories and defines a set of practical strategies for educational games designers in order to match students’ learning styles and provide a user-centred content that is both motivating and educational. The authors explain how the Big-5 can be a more reliable alternative to measure learning styles, how emotions and personalities can be accounted in the cognitive process (e.g. information retrieval, memory retention, etc.) and also describe experiments they carried out in Cork to assess the effect of user-centred approaches in educational game design. Results are analysed and contrasted with current practices to show that unless personalities are accounted for in educational games, the educational outcomes could be different or even opposite to the one expected.
The Use of Role–Playing in Learning
Authors: Greco Marco
Published: May 2010

The use of Role-Playing is becoming prominent in Serious Games due to its positive effects on learning. In this chapter the author will provide a comprehensive definition of role-playing games, drawing inspiration from the many different definitions provided in the existing literature. Then, will propose a five-dimension taxonomy for Serious Role Playing Games, applying it to a small selection of successful Serious Games in five different domains. An overview of the literature will help the reader understand when Role-Playing should be used, and when it might be useless or detrimental. Finally, a brief analysis will be performed on the reviewed games, in order to point out the correlations among the taxonomy dimensions and the domains of application.
Telling Stories with Digital Board Games
Authors: Tikka Sanna-Mari , Kankaanranta Marja , Nousiainen Tuula , Hankala Mari
Published: May 2010

In the context of computer games, learning is an inherent feature of computer game playing. Computer games can be seen as multimodal texts that connect separate means of expression and require new kinds of literacy skills from the readers. In this chapter, the authors consider how the computer-based learning tool Talarius, which enables students to make their own digital games and play them, lends itself to literacy learning. The learning subject is a children’s novel, and thus it is narrative by its nature. In addition, the learning tool provides the potential to interweave narrative contents into the games made by it. The focus of this chapter is on the relationship between narrativity and learning in computer games, in this case, digital board games. The research question is: How do the narrative functions of the learning tool support learning in game creation and game playing?
Current Practices in Serious Game Research
Authors: Wouters Pieter , van der Spek Erik D. , van Oostendorp Herre
Published: May 2010

Despite scant empirical substantiation, serious games are in widespread use. The authors review 28 studies with empirical data from a learning outcome perspective to outline the effectiveness of serious games (compared to other learning approaches and specific game features). They conclude that serious games potentially improve the acquisition of knowledge and cognitive skills. Moreover, they seem to be promising for the acquisition of fine-grid motor skills and to accomplish attitudinal change. However, not all game features increase the effectiveness of the game. To further advance game research the chapter proposes recommendations including the alignment of learning outcome(s) and game type, the alignment of the game complexity and human cognitive processes, attention for cognitive and motivational processes, research on specific mitigating factors like gender on game effectiveness and, finally, developing new ways of assessing game effectiveness.
Building Service-Oriented Grid Applications
Authors: Liu Enjie , Zhao Xia , Clapworthy Gordon J.
Published: May 2010

At the heart of the Grid technology is the concept of resource sharing, which includes computers, storage and networks. Grid currently appears to be the most suitable technology to support this type of future development. Web Services are the key technology in Grid infrastructure. This chapter presents a case study of a Web Services design and implementation to allow medical data in differing formats to be stored in a standardised form and to expose algorithms from existing applications that manipulate these data sets as online service objects. The aim is to explain the key concerns in service design and development using a real-world application as a case study. By reading this chapter, the reader should gain an overall understanding of how a service-oriented Grid application can be designed and implemented.
Scenarios of Next Generation Grid Applications in Collaborative EnvironmentsA Business-Technical Analysis
Authors: Andronikou Vassilikil , Kyriazis Dimosthenis , Kardara Magdalini , Halkos Dimitrios , Varvarigou Theodora
Published: May 2010

The Grid has the potential to make a significant advance beyond the Internet, by turning it from a passive information medium into an active tool for creating and exploring new knowledge. Nowadays, this potential is becoming a reality and is emerging to Next Generation Grids (NGG) thanks to the far more cost-effective and universally applicable technology. Taking into consideration that Grids started delivering benefits to their adopters, this book chapter focuses on providing a business–technical presentation of two potential NGG applications, from two competitive and highly dynamic markets, including complex collaborations, which have shown rapid growth over the past decades; the supply chain management and the Cargo Transportation Logistics. The authors present a set of NGG components, the adoption of which in the aforementioned application domains addresses efficiently a set of technical issues ranging from performance to dynamic negotiation, and tackle the main trends and challenges in the corresponding business sectors.
Semantics-Based Process Support for Grid Applications
Authors: Nadarajan Gayathri , Manataki Areti , Chen-Burger Yun-Heh
Published: May 2010

The infrastructure of Grid is approaching maturity and can be used to enable the utilisation and sharing of large scale, remote data storages through distributed computational capabilities and support collaborations and co-operations between different organisations. Grid can therefore be suitably used to support the creation and running of a virtual organisation (VO). However, to assist the smooth operation of VOs, robust computational and storage facilities alone are not sufficient. There must also exist appropriate rich business infrastructure. In this chapter, the authors consider business process frameworks that utilise semantics-based business process modelling (BPM) technologies, and they illustrate the multidisciplinary nature of our approach by applying them to three different fields: Supply Chain Management, Business Intelligence and Knowledge Management, and Intelligent Video Analysis. They aim to show that these three application areas that incorporate semantics-based BPM methods could be used to support developing Grid applications, and to subsequently support VOs.
Placement and Scheduling over Grid Warehouses
Authors: de Carvalho Costal Rogério Luís , Furtado Pedro
Published: May 2010

The computational grid offers services for efficiently scheduling jobs on the grid, but for grid-enabled applications where data handling is a most relevant part, the data grid kicks in. It typically builds on the concept of files, sites and file transfers between sites. These use a data transfer service, plus a replica manager to keep track of where replicas are located. The authors consider a multi-site, grid-aware data warehouse, which is a large distributed repository sharing a schema and data concerning scientific or business domains. Differently from typical grid scenarios, the data warehouse is not simply a set of files and accesses to individual files. It is a single distributed schema and both localized and distributed computations must be managed over that schema. Given this difference, it is important to study approaches for placement and computation over the grid data warehouse and this is our contribution in this book chapter.
Trust, Virtual Teams, and Grid Technology
Authors: Giambona Genoveffa Jeni , Silburn Nicholas L.J. , Birchall David W.
Published: May 2010

This chapter focuses on the collaborative use of computing resources to support decision making in industry. Through the use of middleware for desktop grid computing, the idle CPU cycles available on existing computing resources can be harvested and used for speeding-up the execution of applications that have “non-trivial” processing requirements. This chapter focuses on the desktop grid middleware BOINC and Condor, and discusses the integration of commercial simulation software together with free-to-download grid middleware so as to offer competitive advantage to organizations that opt for this technology. It is expected that the low-intervention integration approach presented in this chapter (meaning no changes to source code required) will appeal to both simulation practitioners (as simulations can be executed faster, which in turn would mean that more replications and optimization are possible in the same amount of time) and management (as it can potentially increase the return on investment on existing resources).
The Socio-Technical Virtual Organisation
Authors: Smith Rob , Wilson Rob
Published: May 2010

Flexible and remote working is becoming more and more widespread. In particular, virtual team working is growing rapidly. Although virtual teams have attracted the attention of many researchers, until recently little investigation had been carried out specifically on what impact trust – a key element in favouring cooperation among team members – has on the performance of such teams. In the authors’ opinion Grid computing, through the collaborative nature of the technologies employed, provides an opportunity to build trust through the sharing of common resources and the enabling of rich communications.
Modelling Trust–Control Dynamics for Grid-based Communities
Authors: Burakova-Lorgnier Marina
Published: May 2010

A Virtual Organisation (VO) or Virtual Enterprise is a loosely-coupled group of collaborating organisations, acting to some extent as though they were part of a single organisation. This implies that they exhibit some properties of a conventional organisation without actually being one. In practice, this involves overcoming organisational boundaries, which tend to make collaborative working difficult. The authors of this chapter propose that this is a socio-technical problem, requiring both a technical (software) infrastructure and a sociological approach to building, deploying and operating the VOs supported by it. This joint approach can help to overcome some of the problems associated with collaborative working, ranging from poorly coordinated activity, to ineffective problem solving and decision- making. The authors describe a socio-technical approach to building and operating VOs in highly dynamic environments and present two factual scenarios from the chemical and health industries. They describe a platform supporting such VOs, which was developed as part of the EPSRC E-Science Pilot Project GOLD.
Model Architecture for a User Tailored Data Push Service in Data Grids
Authors: Bessis Nik
Published: May 2010

This chapter describes a framework to support runtime service discovery for Grid applications based on service discovery queries in both push and pull modes of query execution. The framework supports six different types of trigger conditions that may prompt service replacement during run-time of grid business application, and evaluates the relevance of a set of candidate services against service discovery queries. The chapter also describes the language used to express service discovery queries and the three types of fitness measurement used to evaluate the candidate services against these queries. Both synchronous (pull) and asynchronous (push) mechanisms for service discovery are presented and shown to be complimentary in dealing with all six service discovery trigger conditions. The chapter is illustrated through examples.
Unified Data Access/Query over Integrated Data-views for Decision Making in Geographic Information Systems
Authors: Sayar Ahmet , Fox Geoffrey C. , Pierce Marlon E.
Published: May 2010

Geographic information is critical for building disaster planning, crisis management, and early-warning systems. Decision making in geographic information systems (GIS) increasingly relies on analyses of spatial data in map-based formats. Maps are complex structures composed of layers created from distributed heterogeneous data belonging to the separate organizations. This chapter presents a distributed service architecture for managing the production of knowledge from distributed collections of observations and simulation data through integrated data-views. Integrated views are defined by a federation service (“federator”) located on top of the standard service components. Common GIS standards enable the construction of this system. However, compliance requirements for interoperability, such as XML-encoded data and domain specific data characteristics, have costs and performance overhead. The authors investigate issues of combining standard compliance with performance. Although their framework is designed for GIS, they extend the principles and requirements to general science domains and discuss how these may be applied.
J.C.R. Licklider and the Rise of Interactive and Networked Computing
Authors: Tomasello Tami K.
Published: May 2010

This chapter examines J.C.R. Licklider’s legacy as a contributor to the development of modern networked computing. In 1960 Licklider published his seminal “Man-Computer Symbiosis,” the first of three articles that attempted to redefine the human-computer interaction. Licklider outlined a vision for interactive, networked computing and, ultimately, the Internet that we experience today. Providing an overview of Licklider’s role as a visionary of the computerized communication networks of today, this chapter pays particular attention to the main ideas conveyed in “Man-Computer Symbiosis” and the influence of these ideas on academic and professional researchers during the following decades.
Mobile Social Web
Authors: Caus Thorsten , Christmann Stefan
Published: May 2010

As mobile Internet usage continues to grow, the phenomenon of accessing online communities through mobile devices draws researchers’ attention. Statistics show that close to 60 percent of all mobile Internet traffic worldwide is related to the use of mobile social networks. In this chapter, the mobile social web is defined, categories of mobile communities explained, and success factors and drawbacks discussed from the technical, social, and economic perspectives. Challenges, including low transmission rates, changes in usage patterns, search for new revenue sources, as well as the need for development of original mobile web content and applications are addressed. The technical requirements for the mobile use of online communities are identified. The chapter closes with a summary of potential economic and social prospects of the emerging mobile social web.