SEKE 2012 Proceedings - Knowledge Systems Institute

students of UFPE and the environment of execution is the
university infrastructure and free tools, the execution of the
project is free of costs.
Variables: In this study, the independent variables are the
SMs model and the documentation required. We considered
the dependent variables the feasibility of application
implementation using the model, the benefits, difficulties and
challenges of implementation. These variables will be
measured by document analysis as well as promoted
discussions. Finally, we consider control variable the
comparison with previous project using SM model, the
Futweet, that was implemented by a similar team in a similar
context.
C. Operation
The operation was performed according to the planning.
The project development was conducted as follows:
Requirements: Application goal is to help people not
familiarized with one city or one city area, such as tourists,
business people or citizens, to gather information about places
nearby him. Using a smartphone or a traditional web browser,
the application allows user to see nearby places (registered on
google places or foursquare services) and to browse useful
information about it, such as: wikipedia and google search
information, photos from Flickr and real time comments from
twitter, from or about the place.
To provide this information, the application flows must be
in this sequence:
(i) User (in a computer or cell phone) opens the application,
which automatically detects his location, searches for nearby
places and shows these places in a map;
(ii) User selects one place in the map and gets the name,
some initial information and a link for “more information”;
(iii) User selects “more information” option and is
redirected to a page containing the additional information
related above: textual information, photos and comments by
other people.
Architecture: To satisfy these requirements, the project
team selected some initial APIs to provide needed information:
Google Maps for map visualization; Foursquare and/or Google
Places for places search, Wikipedia and/or Google Search for
textual information, Flickr for photos, and Twitter for realtime
comments.
According to SMs model, the application architecture is
illustrated in Figure 1.
In the figure, each service is considered as a SM, and SMs
with similar functionalities are grouped inside the same circle.
The application is named WhatHere, and is mainly the “glue
SM”, which includes the application business rules. Clients are
separated: Mobile and Web.
Each SM was described according to the previously
mentioned tuple: , and
Figure 2 shows the specification of WhatHere social machine.
Due to its relevance, Analysis and Interpretation will be
made in the next section.
Figure 1: Application Architecture
IV. DEVELOPMENT ANALYSIS AND INTERPRETATION
According to the planning and in order to reject the null
hypothesis and satisfy the alternative hypothesis, we analyzed
qualitatively the application design, code and documentation,
involving the subjects, the professors and some guests
specialists in web API’s, Cloud Computing and Software
Atchitecture. First, the guests analyzed application design and
performed a detailed code review. Then, documentation was
analyzed and several discussions were performed between the
subjects, professors and guests.
Figure 2: Internal SM definition
The application was designed and implemented in full
compliance with its requirements and with the SMs model,
which rejects the null hypothesis H 0 ’: it is not possible to
design and implement the application according to Social
Machines model, which validates the alternative hypothesis H 1.
In addition, the subjects reported several benefits from
applying this approach, mainly: (i) good system modularity
and maintainability, because of separation of application rules
and the services used; (ii) facilitation of the abstraction and use
of external services and API’s, centralized in the wrapper
interface, instead of merged in application logic; (iii) reuse of
SMs; due to the fact that the SMs are accessed by well defined
requests/responses, they can be reused by several applications,
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