WWW/Internet - Portal do Software Público Brasileiro
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IADIS INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE<strong>WWW</strong>/INTERNET 2010
PROCEEDINGS OF THEIADIS INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE<strong>WWW</strong>/INTERNET 2010TIMISOARA, ROMANIAOCTOBER 14-17, 2010Organised byIADISInternational Association for Development of the Information SocietyCo-Organised byiii
Copyright 2010IADIS PressAll rights reservedThis work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved, whether the whole or part of the materialis concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, re-use of illustrations, recitation,broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other way, and storage in data banks.Permission for use must always be obtained from IADIS Press. Please contact secretariat@iadis.orgEdited by Bebo White, Pedro Isaías and Diana An<strong>do</strong>neAssociate Editors: Luís Rodrigues and Patrícia BarbosaISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0iv
TABLE OF CONTENTSFOREWORDPROGRAM COMMITTEEKEYNOTE LECTURESxixvxixFULL PAPERSA FEATURE-BASED TOOLKIT FOR ELECTRONIC CONTRACT NEGOTIATIONAND RENEGOTIATIONDaniel Avila Vecchiato, Maria Beatriz Felgar de Tole<strong>do</strong>, Marcelo Fantinato andItana Maria de Souza GimenesTHE INTENDED USE OF MOBILE TOURISM SERVICESNiklas Eriksson and Peter StrandvikUBIQUITOUS COMMERCE IN TRAIL-AWARE ENVIRONMENTSCládio Martins, João Rosa, Laerte Franco and Jorge BarbosaSEQUENCING CONCEPTS FOR SUPPORTING AN E-LEARNING CLASS:AN APPROACH BASED ON ONTOLOGIES AND THE STRUCTURE OF SIGNSHerli J. de Menezes, Sean W. M. Siqueira and Leila Cristina V. de AndradeEXPANDING A KNOWLEDGE MODEL REPRESENTATION TO BUILDCULTURALLY MEANINGFUL ANALOGIES FOR WEB APPLICATIONSDouglas O. de Freitas, Marcos A. R. Silva, Johana M. R. Villena, Bruno A. Sugiyama,Gilberto Astolfi and Junia C. AnacletoA FEASIBILITY STUDY ON DISTRIBUTED COOPERATIVE OCR SYSTEMSUSING WEOCRHideaki GotoHEALTH 2.0 IN PRACTICE: A REVIEW OF GERMAN HEALTH CARE WEBPORTALSRoland Görlitz, Benjamin Seip, Asarnusch Rashid and Valentin ZachariasAN INVESTIGATION INTO THE ACCESS AND USAGE OF THE INTERNET INKENYARuth Diko Wario and Theo McDonaldSOFTWARE-BASED PROTECTION FOR CONTENT MEDIA DISTRIBUTIONMalek Barhoush and J. William Atwood31119273542495765v
HOTLINK VISUALIZER: ADDING HOTLINKS ON THE SPOT – VISUALIZINGTHE OUTCOMEGregory Triantafillidis and John GarofalakisCRITICAL FACTORS IN ELECTRONIC LIBRARY ACCEPTANCE: EMPIRICALVALIDATION OF NATIONALITY BASED UTAUT USING SEMRita Oluchi Orji, Yasemin Yardimci Cetin and Sevgi OzkanXLPATH: A XML LINKING PATH LANGUAGEPaulo Caetano da Silva, Marcelo Men<strong>do</strong>nça <strong>do</strong>s Santos and Valéria Cesário TimesONTOMO: WEB SERVICE FOR ONTOLOGY BUILDING - EVALUATION OFONTOLOGY RECOMMENDATION USING NAMED ENTITY EXTRACTIONTakahiro Kawamura, I Shin, Hiroyuki Nakagawa, Yasuyuki Tahara and Akihiko OhsugaFROM THE PROBLEM SPACE TO THE WEB SPACE: A MODEL FOR DESIGNINGLOCALIZED WEB SYSTEMSClaudia Iacob and Li ZhuA FRAMEWORK FOR DEVELOPING CONTEXT-BASED BLOG CRAWLERSRafael Ferreira, Rinal<strong>do</strong> J. Lima, Ig Ibert Bittencourt, Dimas Melo Filho, Olavo Holanda,Evandro Costa, Fred Freitas and Lídia MeloENFORCEMENT OF NORMS IN SELF-ORGANIZING VIRTUAL COMMUNITIESJuliana de Melo Bezerra and Celso Massaki HirataORGANIZATIONAL WIKIPEDIADiogo Arantes Fonseca Gonçalves da Cunha, Artur Ferreira da Silva and José Figueire<strong>do</strong>FOLKSONOMY: USING THE USERS’ FREEDOM TO ORGANIZE TODAY’S WEBINFORMATION OVERLOADRoberto Pereira, M. Cecília C. Baranauskas, Sergio Roberto P. da Silva, José Valderlei da Silvaand Filipe Roseiro CôgoCREATING DECOMPOSABLE WEB APPLICATIONS ON HIGH-RESOLUTIONTILED DISPLAY WALLSShohei Yokoyama and Hiroshi IshikawaWIKLANG – A DEFINITION ENVIRONMENT FOR MONOLINGUAL ANDBILINGUAL DICTIONARIES TO SHALLOW-TRANSFER MACHINETRANSLATIONAléssio Miranda Júnior and Laura S. GarcíaE- COMMERCE CUSTOMISED GUIDELINES VS. GENERAL HEURISTICEVALUATION: A COMPARATIVE STUDY ON EVALUATING E-COMMERCEWEBSITESGhada Aldehim, Pam Mayhew and Majed AlshamariA DESCRIPTION LANGUAGE FOR USER INTERFACE SERVICESGerald Hübsch, Christian Liebing, Josef Spillner and Alexander SchillMAKING SENSE OF THE AFFORDANCE CONCEPT IN THE 3RD HCI PARADIGMLara Schibelsky Go<strong>do</strong>y Piccolo and Maria Cecília Calani BaranauskasDEVELOPING A MODEL TO FACILITATE SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION OFWEBSITES BY NON-IT PROFESSIONALSDaniel Kappler and Paul Darbyshire738189101112120127135143151159168175183192vi
A HIERARCHICAL ARCHITECTURE FOR ON-LINE CONTROL OF PRIVATECLOUD-BASED SYSTEMSMauro Andreolini, Sara Casolari and Stefania TosiA PERFORMANCE COMPARISON OF DCCP, CTCP, AND CUBIC, USING VOIPAND CBR TRAFFIC PATTERNSPriscila Doria and Marco Aurélio SpohnDISCOURAGING ROGUE PEERS IN A MULTICAST CONTENT DISTRIBUTIONPROTOCOL FOR MANETSSidney Doria and Marco Aurélio SpohnORDINARY WEB PAGES AS A SOURCE FOR METADATA ACQUISITION FOROPEN CORPUS USER MODELINGMichal Barla and Mária BielikováQUERYCLOUD: AUTOMATICALLY LINKING RELATED DOCUMENTS VIASEARCH QUERY (TAG) CLOUDSChristoph TrattnerPREDICTING SELF DISCLOSURE ON PUBLIC BLOGSChyng-Yang Jang and Michael A. Stefanone201211219227234244SHORT PAPERSPARALLEL PROGRAMMING FOR EDUCATION AND ITS TRIAL EVALUATIONKeiichi Shiraishi, Yoshiro Imai and Yukio HoriSENSE OF COMMUNITY FEELING IN A BLENDED LEARNING ENVIRONMENT:EFFECT OF DEMOGRAPHICSHale Ilgaz and Petek AşkarTECHNOLOGICAL ARTIFACTS FOR SOCIAL INCLUSION: STRUCTURE OF THEBRAZILIAN SIGN LANGUAGE (LIBRAS), GESTURES FOR CITIZENSHIPCayley Guimarães, Diego R. Antunes, Daniela F. G. Trindade, Rafaella A. L. Silva,Sueli Fernandes, Aléssio M. Jr. and Laura Sánchez GarcíaMULTI-AGENT ARCHITECTURE FOR THE VIRTUAL HEALTH RECORDLuca Dan Serbanati and Andrei VasilateanuENHANCING FAIRNESS: A NOVEL C2C E-COMMERCE COMMUNITY MEMBERREPUTATION ALGORITHM BASED ON TRANSACTION SOCIAL NETWORKSWangsen Feng, Bei Zhang, Yunni Xia, Jiajing Li and Tao Meng(SEMI-)AUTOMATIC NEGOTIATION OF SERVICE LEVEL AGREEMENTSAnne Kümpel, Iris Braun, Josef Spillner and Alexander SchillREQUIREMENTS ORIENTED PROGRAMMING IN A WEB-SERVICEARCHITECTUREVinicius Miana Bezerra and Selma Melnikoff257262267272277282287vii
THE ROLE OF WEB-BASED COLLABORATIVE SYSTEMS IN SUPPORTINGFIRM'S CREATIVITYClaudia Dossena and Alberto FrancesconiTOWARDS A MEANINGFUL EXPLOITATION OF IMPORTANT RELATIONSHIPSAMONG COMMUNITY MEMBERS AND COLLABORATION ASSETSGeorge Gkotsis, Nikos Karacapilidis, Costas Pappis and Nikos TsirakisDO THE PERCEIVED ATTRIBUTES OF SOCIAL NETWORKS DIFFER IN TERMSOF BEING INNOVATOR OR SKEPTICAL OF PROSPECTIVE TEACHERS?Yasemin Koçak Usluel, Pınar Nuhoğlu and Bahadır YildizA PROCESS CAPABILITY MODEL FOR SERVICES IN THE BRAZILIAN PUBLICSOFTWAREMárcia R. M. Martinez, Sueli A. Varani, Edgar L. Banhesse and Clenio F. SalvianoA STRUCTURED APPROACH TO THE INTRODUCTION OF ENTERPRISE 2.0Roberto Paiano and Andrea PandurinoRAPID DEVELOPMENT OF SERVICE-BASED INTERACTIVE APPLICATIONSUSING SERVICE ANNOTATIONSMarius Feldmann, Felix Martens, Georg Berndt, Josef Spillner and Alexander SchillSMART UBIQUITOUS APPLICATION DELIVERY BASED ON USABILITY RULESDieter Blomme, Heiko Desruelle, Frank Gielen and Filip De TurckGVDSR: A DYNAMIC ROUTING STATEGY FOR VEHICULAR AD-HOCNETWORKSMichael Barros, Anderson Costa and Reinal<strong>do</strong> GomesAN OWL BASED ELECTRONIC HEALTH RECORD SUPPORTING EVIDENCEBASED MEDICINELukas Gerhold, Hilal Tekoglu, Markus Dorn and Michael BinderLANGUAGES AND WIKIPEDIA: CULTURAL EVOLUTION INCREASESSTRUCTUREJulia Kasmire and Alfredas ChmieliauskasA TOOL TO SUPPORT AUTHORING OF LEARNING DESIGNS IN THE FIELD OFSUSTAINABLE ENERGY EDUCATIONSotirios Karetsos and Dias HaralampopoulosBILINGUAL ALPHABETISATION OF DEAF CHILDREN AND PROGRESSASSESSMENT: A PROTOTYPE OF A WEB SYSTEM BASED ON A PHONICMETHODOLOGYMiranda, Aléssio; Paula, L.J.de ; García, L.S; Capovilla, F.C; Direne, A.I; Sunye, M.S.;Castilho, M.A.; Bona, L.E; Silva, F.; Macha<strong>do</strong>, D.; Duarte, J.; Bueno, J.GENERATING SECRET COVER IMAGE BY USING RANDOM ART APPROACHRaghad Jawad AhmedBILINGUAL ALPHABETISATION OF DEAF CHILDREN: REQUIREMENTS FOR ACOMMUNICATION TOOLJuliana Bueno, Laura Sánchez García and Aléssio Miranda Júnior293298303308313319323328333339345350355361viii
REFLECTION PAPERSSEMIOTICS OF BRAZILIAN E-COMMERCE SIGNSCayley Guimarães, Diego R. Antunes, Alice G. de Paula and Aléssio Miranda JrNEED FOR PROTOCOLS AND STANDARDS FOR A DECENTRALIZED WEBSEARCH PARADIGMSergio R. CoriaA RECOMMENDER SYSTEM FOR E-LEARNINGLara Cini, Matthew Montebello and Vanessa CamilleriWEB 2.0: INTRODUCTION INTO E-GOVERNMENT APPLICATIONSFrancesco De Angelis, Roberto Gagliardi, Alberto Polzonetti and Barbara ReSTUDY CASES ON THE CURRENT USE OF MICROFORMATSIasmina Ermalai and Radu Vasiu369373377382387POSTERSA WEB-BASED MULTILIGUAL DICTIONARY FOR TERMINOLOGY OFPOLYMERSTiago França Melo de Lima and Cláudio Gouvea <strong>do</strong>s SantosPROCESSING REMOTE SENSING IMAGES ON A GRID-BASED PLATFORMSilviu Panica, Marian Neagul and Dana PetcuDEVELOPMENT OF AN E-LEARNING SYSTEM TO SUPPORT SELF-LEARNINGOF NURSING SKILLSYukie Majima, Masato Soga and Yasuko MaekawaDESIGNING AN E-LEARNING SYSTEM TO SUPPORT RE-EMPLOYMENT OFPOTENTIAL NURSESYukie Majima, Yumiko Nakamura, Yasuko Maekawa, Hiroko Makino, Yukari Nakajima andMizuko HiramatsuAUTOMATIC SEMANTIC IMAGE ANNOTATION WITHIN THE DOMAIN OFSOFTWARE MODELINGMatthias Heinrich and Antje Boehm-PetersLOCATION BASED MOBILE ADVERTISINGMatthew Sammut, Matthew Montebello and Vanessa CamilleriBRAZILIAN PUBLIC SOFTWARE AND QUALITYAngela M. Alves, Giancarlo Stefanuto, Paula F. D. Castro and Marcelo PessôaTHE INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE POSITIONING IN IT GOVERNANCEClaudio Gottschalg Duque and Mauricio Rocha Lyra393397400403406409413416ix
DOCTORAL CONSORTIUMTOWARDS A DOMAIN-EXPERT CENTERED ONTOLOGY ENGINEERINGMETHODOLOGY IN THE CONTEXT OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATIONBernd Stadlhofer and Peter SalhoferWEBFDM: A WEB APPLICATION FLEXIBLE DEVELOPMENT METHODOLOGYAdelaide Bianchini421427AUTHOR INDEXx
FOREWORDThese proceedings contain the papers and posters of the IADIS International Conference<strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010, which was organised by the International Association forDevelopment of the Information Society and co-organised by "Politehnica" University ofTimisoara, Romania, 14-17 October 2010.The IADIS <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010 Conference aims to address the main issues of concernwithin <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong>. <strong>WWW</strong> and <strong>Internet</strong> had a huge development in recent years.Aspects of concern are no longer just technical anymore but other aspects have arisen. Thisconference aims to cover both technological as well as non-technological issues related tothese developmentsSubmissions were accepted under the following main tracks and topics:‣ Web 2.0 Collaborative Systems Social Networks Folksonomies Enterprise Wikis and Blogging Mashups and Web Programming Tagging and User Rating Systems Citizen Journalism‣ Semantic Web and XML Semantics Web Architectures Semantic Web Middleware Semantic Web Services Semantic Web Agents Ontologies Applications of Semantic Web Semantic Web Data Management Information Retrieval in Semantic Web‣ Applications and Uses e-Learning e-Commerce / e-Business e-Government e-Health e-Procurement e-Society Digital Libraries Web Services/SaaS Application Interoperability Web-based multimedia technologiesxi
‣ Services, Architectures and Web Development Wireless Web Mobile Web Cloud/Grid Computing Web Metrics Web Standards <strong>Internet</strong> Architectures Network Algorithms Network Architectures Network Computing Network Management Network Performance Content Delivery Technologies Protocols and Standards Traffic Models‣ Research Issues Web Science Digital Rights Management Bioinformatics Human Computer Interaction and Usability Web Security and Privacy Online Trust and Reputation Systems • Data Mining • Information Retrieval Search Engine OptimizationThe IADIS <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010 Conference had 153 submissions from more than 28countries. Each submission has been anonymously reviewed by an average of fourindependent reviewers, to ensure the final high standard of the accepted submissions. Thefinal result was the approval of 30 full papers, which means that the acceptance rate wasbelow 20%. A few more papers have been accepted as short papers, reflection papers,posters and <strong>do</strong>ctoral consortium. Best papers will be selected for publishing as extendedversions in the IADIS International Journal on <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> (IJWI) and in other selectedjournals.The conference, besides the presentation of full papers, short papers, reflection papers,posters and <strong>do</strong>ctoral consortium presentations also included two keynote presentations frominternationally distinguished researchers. We would like also to express our gratitude toProfessor Mark Frydenberg, Senior Lecturer, Bentley University, USA and Dr. MollyHolzschlag, Web Evangelist, Developer Relations, Opera <strong>Software</strong>, USA, for being ourkeynote speakers.As we all know, organising a conference requires the effort of many individuals. We wouldlike to thank all members of the Program Committee for their hard work in reviewing andselecting the papers that appear in the proceedings.xii
We are especially grateful to the authors who submitted their papers to this conference andto the presenters who provided the substance of the meetingThese Proceeding book contain a rich experience of the academic & research institutionsand the industry on diverse themes related to the <strong>Internet</strong> and Web. We <strong>do</strong> hope thatresearchers, knowledge workers and innovators both in academia and the industry will findit a valuable reference material.Last but not the least, we hope that everybody will have a good time in Timisoara and weinvite all participants for the next year’s edition of the IADIS International Conference<strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2011.Pedro Isaías, Universidade Aberta (Portuguese Open University), PortugalDiana An<strong>do</strong>ne, "Politehnica" University of Timisoara, RomaniaConference Co-ChairsBebo White, Stanford University, USAProgram ChairTimisoara, Romania14 October 2010xiii
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PROGRAM COMMITTEECONFERENCE CO-CHAIRSPedro Isaías, Universidade Aberta (Portuguese Open University), PortugalDiana An<strong>do</strong>ne, "Politehnica" University of Timisoara, RomaniaPROGRAM CHAIRBebo White, Stanford University, USACOMMITTEE MEMBERSAb<strong>do</strong>lhossein Sarrafzadeh, UNITEC New Zealand, New ZealandAdrian Stoica, University Of Patras, GreeceAlberto Barrón-Cedeño, Universidad Politécnica Valencia, SpainAlexander Kröner, Dfki, GermanyAlexander Pokahr, Pokahr, GermanyAlexander Schill, TU Dresden, GermanyAlexander Troussov, IBM Dublin Center for Advanced Studies, IrelandAlexander Wöhrer, University Of Vienna, AustriaAmali Weerasinghe, University Of Canterbury, New ZealandAna Sanz, Universidad Carlos III De Madrid, SpainAna Regina Cavalcanti Da Rocha, Centroin, BrazilAnanya S. Guha, Indira Gandhi National Open University, IndiaAndrea Kienle, University of Applied Sciences, Dortmund, GermanyAndreas Papasalouros, University Of The Aegean, GreeceAndreas Schrader, ISNM - International School Of New Media at the Un, GermanyAngélica Antonio, Universidad Politécnica De Madrid, SpainAngelo Di Iorio, University Of Bologna, ItalyAnirban Kundu, West Bengal University Of Technology, IndiaAntonio Reyes, Universidad Politécnica De Valencia, SpainArturo Mora-Soto, Carlos III University Of Madrid, SpainAsadullah Shaikh, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, SpainBéatrice Rumpler, Insa Of Lyon, FranceBeob Kyun Kim, Korea Institute of Science and Technology Informat, South KoreaBianca Shoen, University College Dublin, IrelandBo Hu, Universität Der Bundeswehr München, GermanyBrahmananda Sapkota, University Of Twente, NetherlandsCao Rong Zeng, IBM China Research Lab, ChinaCarsten Ulrich, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, ChinaChih Cheng Hung, Southern Polytechnic State University, UsaChristos Bouras, University Of Patras, GreeceChristos Georgiadis, University Of Mace<strong>do</strong>nia Thessaloniki, GreeceChunhua Tian, IBM China Research Lab, Chinaxv
Ciprian Dobre, University Politehnica Of Bucharest, RomaniaClo<strong>do</strong>veu Davis, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, BrazilConstantina Costopoulou, Agricultural University Of Athens, GreeceCostas Yialouris, Agricultural University Of Athens, GreeceDaniel Cunliffe, University Of Glamorgan, United King<strong>do</strong>mDaniel Schuster, TU Dresden, GermanyDebajyoti Mukhopadhyay, Calcutta Business School, IndiaDemetrios Sampson, University Of Piraeus, GreeceDiana Pérez Marín, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, SpainDirk Thissen, Rwth Aachen, GermanyDongqiang Yang, Flinders University, AustraliaElena Calude, Massey University At Albany, New ZealandElena Camossi, European Commission, Joint Research Centre, ItalyElias Kirche, Florida Gulf Coast University, USAElif Ubeyli, Tobb Economics And Technology University, TurkeyEloisa Vargiu, DIEE, ItalyEva Söderström, University Of Skövde, SwedenEzendu Ariwa, Lon<strong>do</strong>n Metropolitan University, United King<strong>do</strong>mFahim Akhter, Zayed University, United Arab EmiratesFan Zhao, Florida Gulf Coast University, UsaFatos Xhafa, Universitat Politècnica De Catalunya, SpainFlorence Sedes, Universite Paul Sabatier Of Toulouse, FranceFlorin Pop, University Politehnica Of Bucharest, RomaniaFrancesco Guerra, Universita Di Modena E Reggio Emilia, ItalyFrancesco Pagliarecci, Polytechnical University Of Marche, ItalyFuensanta Medina-Domínguez, Carlos III Technical University of Madrid, SpainFuhua Lin, Athabasca University, CanadaGeneen Stubbs, University Of Glamorgan, United King<strong>do</strong>mGeorge Gkotsis, University Of Patras, GreeceGeorge Koutromanos, University Of Athens, GreeceGeorge Vouros, University Of The Aegean, GreeceGheorghe Cosmin Silaghi, Babes-Bolyai University of Cluj-Napoca, RomaniaGiuseppe Patane, Cnr-imati, ItalyGui<strong>do</strong> Roessling, Darmstadt University Of Technology, GermanyGustavo Rossi, Universidad Nacional De La Plata, ArgentinaHakikur Rahman, Institute of Computer Management & Science (ICMS), BangladeshHamid Mcheick, Université Du Québec À Chicoutimi, CanadaHenry Oinas-Kukkonen, University Of Oulu, Finland, FinlandHolger Hinrichs, University Of Applied Sciences Lübeck, GermanyHorst Hellbrück, University Of Applied Sciences Lübeck Horst, GermanyIdris Rai, Lancaster University, United King<strong>do</strong>mIoan Toma, University Innsbruck, AustriaJ. Enrique Agu<strong>do</strong>, Universidad De Extremadura, SpainJ. K. Vijayakumar, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Saudi ArabiaJaime Ramírez Ramírez, Universidad Politécnica De Madrid, SpainJames Thong, Hong Kong University Of Science And Technology, Hong KongJames Walden, Northern Kentucky University, United StatesJan Zizka, SoNet/Dept. of Informatics, FBE, Mendel University, Czech RepublicJanez Brank, Jozef Stefan Institute, Sloveniaxvi
Javier Saldaña, Universidad Carlos Iii De Madrid, SpainJessica Rubart, Arvato Services, GermanyJinjun Chen, Swinburne University Of Technology, AustraliaJohn Garofalakis, University of Patras, GreeceJörg Roth, University Of Applied Sciences Nuremberg, GermanyJosé Laurin<strong>do</strong> Campos <strong>do</strong>s Santos, Instituto Nacional De Pesquisas Na Amazonia, BrazilJuan Ramón Pérez Pérez, Universidad De Ovie<strong>do</strong>, SpainJuhnyoung Lee, IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, UsaJulie Yazici, Florida Gulf Coast University, UsaKai Jakobs, RWTH Aachen University, GermanyKangsoo You, Jeonju University, Korea (south)Konstantinos Kotis, University Of The Aegean, GreeceKrzysztof Walkowiak, Wroclaw University Of Technology, PolandLars Braubach, Informatik Der Universität Hamburg, GermanyLazaros Iliadis, Democritus University Of Thrace, GreeceLeila Shafti, Universidad Autonoma De Madrid, SpainLiping Liu, University Of Akron, UsaLuca Spalazzi, Polytechnic University Of Marche, ItalyLucia Rapanotti, The Open University, United King<strong>do</strong>mManolis Tzagarakis, University Of Patras , GreeceManuel Montes y Gómez, INAOE, MexicoMara Nikolai<strong>do</strong>u, Harokopio University Of Athens, GreeceMargherita Antona, ICS - FORTH, GreeceMaria Claudia Buzzi, CNR - IIT, ItalyMarkos Hatzitaskos, University Of Patras, GreeceMartin Gaedke, Chemnitz University Of Technology, GermanyMassimo Marchiori, Unipd/ Utilabs, ItalyMauricio Marin, Yahoo! Research Santiago, ChileMaytham Safar, Kuwait University, KuwaitMichael Mrissa, University of Lyon, FranceMichal Wozniak, Wroclaw University Of Technology, PolandMichalis Vaitis, University of the Aegean, GreeceMiguel-Angel Sicilia Urbán, University Of Alcalá, SpainMing-Puu Chen, National Taiwan Normal University, TaiwanMiroslav Bures, Czech Technical University In Prague, Czech RepublicNikolaos Tselios, University Of Patras, GreeceNikos Karacapilidis, University Of Patras, GreeceNikos Karousos, University Of Patras, GreeceNikos Tsirakis, University Of Patras, GreeceOlga Santos Martín, Uned, SpainOmair Shafiq, University Of Calgary, CanadaOurania Hatzi, Harokopio University Of Athens, GreecePaolo Rosso, Universidad Politécnica De Valencia, SpainPedro Paredes, Universidad Autónoma De Madrid, SpainPenelope Markellou, University Of Patras, GreecePeter Geczy, AIST (National Institute of Advanced Industrial Sc, JapanRaquel Hervas, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, SpainRobert Burduk, Wroclaw University Of Technology, PolandRobert Goodwin, Flinders University, Australiaxvii
Runa Jesmin, University Of Lon<strong>do</strong>n, United King<strong>do</strong>mSamad Kolahi, Unitec Institute Of Technology, New ZealandSattanathan Subramanian, Uni-BCCS, NorwaySilvia Gaiani, Università Di Bologna, ItalySotiris Karetsos, Agricultural University Of Athens, GreeceStefan Dietze, The Open University, United King<strong>do</strong>mStefan Fischer, Universität Zu Lübeck, GermanySteven Demurjian, The University Of Connecticut, USAStuart Cunningham, Glyndwr University, United King<strong>do</strong>mSung-kook Han, Wonkwang University, Korea, Republic OfTayana Conte, Federal University Of Rio De Janeiro, BrazilTharrenos Bratitsis, University Of Western Mace<strong>do</strong>nia, GreeceThomas Springer, Tu Dresden, GermanyTobias Buerger, Salzburg Research, AustriaTomoo Inoue, University Of Tsukuba, JapanTukaram Fulzele, Indira Gandhi National Open University, IndiaVassilis Kapsalis, Industrial Systems Institute, GreeceVic Grout, University Of Wales, United King<strong>do</strong>mWei Hao, Northern Kentucky University, United StatesWilhelm Schwieren, Rwth Aachen University, GermanyYuanbo Guo, Microsoft, USAxviii
KEYNOTE LECTURESFROM THE INFORMATION SUPER HIGHWAY TO THE CLOUD:AN INCREDIBLE JOURNEYby Mark Frydenberg, Senior LecturerBentley University, USAAbstractWeb 2.0 marked the evolution of the World Wide Web from a “one way” web filled with staticcontent to a dynamic “read/write” Web that has become a platform for applications promotingcollaboration and communication, linking people as well as the digital information they share. Associety creates more online content than it can consume, the need to organize, search, andunderstand Web content becomes critical. Tim O’Reilly’s described <strong>Internet</strong> of Things and TimBerners-Lee’s vision of a Semantic Web are not far off. Or are they? This session will shareexamples of emerging Web trends, technologies, and patterns and look at what is possible whenboth data and applications live on the Web.THE OPEN WEB:PRACTICAL STANDARDS FOR FRONTEND DEVELOPERSby Molly Holzschlag, Web EvangelistDeveloper Relations, Opera <strong>Software</strong>, USAAbstractIn this keynote session, Ms. Holzschlag will discuss the OpenWeb vision, where it emerged fromand what it provides to real-world Web developers. A look at the advancements in browserevolution as well as visual examples of the Open Web Technology Stack will demonstrate apowerful, open-standards oriented approach to the evolving Web of applications.xix
Full Papers
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010A FEATURE-BASED TOOLKIT FOR ELECTRONICCONTRACT NEGOTIATION AND RENEGOTIATIONDaniel Avila Vecchiato*, Maria Beatriz Felgar de Tole<strong>do</strong>*, Marcelo Fantinato**and Itana Maria de Souza Gimenes****University of Campinas, Institute of Computing, Av. Albert Einstein, 1251, Campinas - SP, Brazil**University of São Paulo, School of Arts, Sciences and Humanities, R. Arlin<strong>do</strong> Béttio, 1000, São Paulo - SP, Brazil***University of Maringá, Department of Informatics, Av. Colombo, 5.790, Maringá - PR, BrazilABSTRACTE-contracts usually describe inter-organizational business processes defining e-services to be provided and consumed aswell as non-functional requirements such as Quality of Service (QoS). Organizations involved in a cooperation need toprovide explicit guarantees in an e-contract, which can involve renegotiation of contractual clauses, penalty application orintervention in the process execution. In this paper, feature modeling is used to represent e-services, QoS attributes andcontrol operations to be triggered when QoS attribute levels are not met. In addition, it describes FeatureContract, atoolkit to support contract establishment based on features. An application example is exploited to show the proposedapproach feasibility. The main contributions are related to improved structure and reuse in information in e-contracts.KEYWORDSBusiness Process Management, e-contracts, contract negotiation, contract renegotiation, e-services.1. INTRODUCTIONThe current Business Process Management (BPM) scenario includes: i) one or more organizations thatprovide and/or consume electronic services (e-services); ii) negotiation and establishment of electroniccontracts (e-contracts), including quality of service (QoS) attributes and levels; iii) definition, enactment,monitoring, and auditing of business process; and, iv) process analysis and optimization. E-contracts betweentwo or more partners interested in an inter-organizational business process establish the activities to beperformed and the obligations, permissions and rights related to each involved party. During contractenactment, if a party is unable to fulfill contractual clauses, a contract renegotiation may be triggered.Fantinato et al. (2010) have developed a new approach to reduce the complexity in the wide managementof e-contracts for Web services (WS-Contract). The approach, based on <strong>Software</strong> Product Line (PL)concepts, is named PL4BPM (Product Line for Business Process Management). A pre<strong>do</strong>minant part of thePL4BPM approach is the WS-Contract establishment process, focused on providing improved informationreuse and structuring based on the use of feature modeling (Fantinato et al. 2008).This paper discusses the e-contract life cycle from negotiation, establishment, enactment to renegotiationwithin the context of a feature-based BPM infrastructure. The main contributions are: i) an extension of acontract metamodel to include, respectively, the control operations to be performed in case of e-contractviolation and represent it by using the WS-Agreement specification; ii) an extended infrastructure to supporte-contract negotiation and renegotiation, including the extension of the FeatureContract toolkit; iii) moreefficient management, and reuse of information necessary for the establishment and renegotiation ofe-contracts; and, iv) an example of the approach showing the various stages of an e-contract establishment.The feature modeling technique used in the representation of e-services and QoS attributes has shown thefollowing advantages (Fantinato et al. 2008): flexibility for e-services specification; modularization facilitiesfor QoS attributes specification; and, structured representation of the optional and mandatory WS-contractelements. This may also be advantageous in contract renegotiations as we will see.The paper is organized as follows: Section 2 presents basic concepts; Section 3 presents some relatedwork; Section 4 presents the extended Feature and WS-Contract metamodels; Section 5 presents the3
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISextension made on the FeatureContract toolkit, within the proposed BPM infrastructure; Section 6 presentsan application example using the proposed approach; and, finally, Section 7 concludes the paper.2. BACKGROUNDIn this section, firstly e-contracts are described and then feature modeling concepts are presented as this is thetechnique used in this approach to represent information to be included in e-contracts.2.1 E-contractsOrganizations interested in <strong>Internet</strong> business partnerships must define details of the business process to beenacted and express them in e-contracts (Fantinato et al. 2008). An e-contract defines details about theorganizations, the activities to be executed and the contractual clauses that must be met during processenactment (Grefen et al. 2001). The clauses could be of three types: obligations, rights and prohibitions. Theobligation clauses include QoS of e-services within the inter-organizational process. In addition to thefunctional aspect of e-contracts, there is also the legal aspect that will not be considered is this paper.The activities to be contracted are e-services that may be implemented as Web services; when e-contractsare called WS-Contracts. Web Services have spread as a promising technology for the effective automationof inter-organizational interactions (Papazoglou 2007). The major benefit of it is the wide standardizationincluding: a language to describe service interfaces (WSDL), a service directory structure and APIs forservice publication and discovery (UDDI) and a communication protocol (SOAP).The contractual clauses may be specified in languages such as WS-Agreement, a specification offeringassurance about Web Services execution (Andrieux et al. 2007). It was developed to represent and establishagreements between two parts, usually a service provider and a consumer. The specification uses XML tostructure an agreement that is composed by elements such as Name, Context, Terms (Service Terms andGuarantee Terms). WS-Agreement also allows the definition of service level objectives and qualifyingconditions associated with importance, penalties and rewards representing the business value to the provider.2.2 Feature ModelingFeature modeling captures and manages common points and variabilities in software product lines (Pohl et al.2005). A feature model represents properties of some entity of interest. It can denote any functional or nonfunctionalproperty in the requirement, architectural or other levels. Features can be mandatory, optional oralternative (Czarnecki et al. 2005). They are organized into a tree-like diagram in which a node represents afeature and each feature can be described by a set of sub-features represented as descendant nodes. A featuremodel describes a system family. A family member can be configured by selecting the desired features fromthe model within the model variability limits, which is called feature model configuration.3. RELATED WORKThe CrossFlow project is precursor in the area of inter-organizational business process (Grefen et al. 2001).As some other earlier works, they use metamodels and templates to facilitate e-contract establishment. Morerecently, Angelov and Grefen (2008b) defined an e-contract metamodel with different perspectives such asfunction and communication perspective. They identify four e-contract lifecycle phases: i) information thatdescribes services and possible partners; ii) pre-contracting that customizes business operational aspects; iii)contracting that establishes how the business process will be carried out; and iv) enactment that comprises theexecution of the contracted e-services. Angelov and Grefen (2008a) also defined a reference architecture tocontract systems development, using a component-based approach. It provides a component for each phase ofe-contracting (information, pre-contracting, contracting and enactment).Bacarin et al. (2008) put forth a negotiation protocol with some primitive actions to assign propertyvalues, to send offers, request for proposal (RFP) and votes. They identify the following phases: negotiation4
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010announcement, leader determination, objective announcement, negotiation setup, restriction announcement,core negotiation, commit attempt, contract (re)construction.Some works (Angelov & Grefen 2008b; Bacarin et al. 2008; Grefen et al. 2001) use e-contract template tofacilitate e-contract reuse. In a general way, the renegotiation issue is still not completely addressed in aproper way by the works proposed in the literature. Some architectures and frameworks (Angelov & Grefen2008a; Bacarin et al. 2008) allows contract update during process execution. However, none of themspecifies the actions to be performed in the case of contract violation. This work addresses the issue ofcontrol operations to handle contract enactment in the case of any clause violation.4. FEATURE AND WS-CONTRACT METAMODELSThe BPM context involves business process composed by e-services. Our approach considers e-servicesimplemented as Web Services and hence the WS-Contracts to regulate the collaboration between the parties.The WS-Contract is composed of: parties, e-services, contractual clauses and a business process. WS-BPELis used to define the parties and the orchestration of the e-services within an inter-organizational context(Alves et al. 2007). E-services and QoS attributes are described in WSDL and WS-Agreement, respectively.The WS-Contract metamodel, presented in Figure 1, represents the structure that supports the creation ofe-contracts. Originally, it was proposed by Fantinato et al. (2008) and was extended (in gray color) torepresent control operations. The metamodel comprises: i) Web Services described in the WSDL; ii)Business process specified in the WS-BPEL; iii) QoS attributes of Web Services, described inWS-Agreement; and, iv) Control operations to be handled in case of contract violation, also described inFigure 1. WS-Contract metamodelWS-Agreement.The WS-Contract is composed of three sections, as follows: WS-BPEL definitions: this section defines the business process using the terms Variable, PartnerLink and Activity (including Basic Activity and Structured Activity); WSDL definitions: this is the services section, it contains the base elements Message Type, PartnerLink Type, Port Type and Operation. The last two describe the Web Services; WS-Agreement definitions: it defines the business terms. The following elements are used todefine QoS levels: Service Property (including Variable) and Guarantee Term (including Service Scope,Service Level Objective and Business Value List). It includes also:- Control operations: represented within the WS-Agreement definitions, more specifically in theBusiness Value List section using the “penalty tags" as illustrated latter in Figure 3.A useful strategy explored here is the use of contract templates. An e-contract template is defined onlyonce, but allows instantiation of distinct and similar contracts. To facilitate the creation of templates,Fantinato et al. (2008) proposed a feature metamodel. It originally consisted of two sub-trees – e-services and5
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISQoS-attributes, but it has been extended to include a Control Operations sub-tree as presented in Figure 2.The acronyms depicted in this figure are used to identify the feature type in the feature models, as in theFigure 4 presented later. In Figure 2, each sub-tree is described as follows: E-Services sub-tree: (mandatory) contains features representing the e-services offered by aninvolved organization; QoS-attributes sub-tree: (optional) contains features that represent the QoS attributes, which areattached to e-services defined into the e-Services sub-tree. It includes choices of QoS attribute levels; Control-operations sub-tree: (optional) it specifies control operations to be executed when QoSattribute levels are not met. These attributes are attached to e-services defined into the e-Services sub-treeand to QoS attributes defined into the QoS-attributes sub-tree. The Control Operation and Activity aredepicted latter in Figure 3, each control operation have a possibility to be controlled or not by an activity. Theelement Value, in dark gray color, will only exist in the fine application activity and is used, to represent thefine value.Figure 2. Feature Metamodel for e-Services, QoS and Control OperationsThe Control Operations sub-tree can be associated directly to an e-service or to specific QoS attributes.The former is used as a default option whereas the latter is used as a specialization option. When a QoSattribute is not met, if there are control operations settings defined for it, they are triggered; otherwise, ifthere are control operations settings defined for the associated e-service, these control operations aretriggered instead. With this feature structure support, a unique set of control operations options, defined onlyonce, can be reused by all the QoS attributes and levels associated to all the e-services. During feature modelconfiguration, specific control operations options can be selected for each QoS attribute or for each e-service.Figure 3 shows the possible Control Operations and the mapping with WS-Agreement section, as follows: Renegotiation: used for contract update in three ways: i) Clause (QoS attribute) that can beremoved, added or updated. It can be necessary if new requirements in the inter-organization cooperationappear; ii) Variable (QoS level) that can be renegotiated when triggering a penalty or control operations on aprocess are not necessary; and, iii) Price that a service or a QoS level price can be renegotiated. This can beapplied in services that are not having QoS attribute levels as expected; Penalty Application: used to apply a penalty to the offending party. The penalty is a fine tocompensate some eventual loss. It can be selected, for example, if the QoS attribute “availability" is notfulfilled causing loss of money or clients; Process: used to directly influence the business process execution. The available operations are: i)Rollback that un<strong>do</strong>es operations already executed by the business process. It can be selected, for example,for atomic e-services executed in a transactional way; ii) Suspend that stops the business process executionuntil some condition is reached. It can be selected, for example, for the QoS attribute “security”, since theprocess can be suspended until some security level is fulfilled; and, iii) Termination that terminates thebusiness process execution. It can be selected, for example, when clauses related to important e-services cannot be fulfilled and the process can not proceed.In the right side of Figure 3, the Business Value List is composed as follows (Andrieux et al. 2007): Penalty: defines an expression to be assumed when an associated objective is not met;6
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010 Value Unit: (type xs:string) defines the unit for assessing penalty. It is used, in this work, torepresent a currency in case of penalty application or a control operation such as renegotiation or process; Value Expr: (type xs:any) represents a value in case of penalty application or a control activity suchas variable, price or clause renegotiation; Assesment Interval: defines the interval over which a penalty is assessed. It can be one of thefollowing: i) Time Interval that defines the assessment interval as a duration. For example, a weekly ormonthly interval for defining the assessment; and, ii) Count that defines the assessment interval as a servicespecific count, such as the number of invocations.When the Contract Renegotiation operation is chosen, a negotiation protocol must be specified. It will beperformed after a notification sent by the monitor to the collaborating parties. Other operations such asProcess Terminate, Process Rollback and Process Suspend will be executed by the WS-BPEL server. Themonitor and WS-BPEL server are elements of the infrastructure described in Section 5.Figure 3. Mapping between control operation elements regarding both metamodels5. BPM INFRASTRUCTURE AND FEATURECONTRACT TOOLKITThe proposed BPM infrastructure comprises four organizations: consumer, provider, negotiator and monitor.The Consumer Organization includes: i) a structure called WS-Contract Definition responsible fornegotiation and establishment of WS-Contracts based on features; ii) a structure WS-Contract Executionresponsible for the business process execution; and, iii) a SOC System necessary if the consumer servicesare part of the business process to be executed. In the Provider Organization, the SOC System control theWeb Services subcontracted by the consumer. The Monitor Organization has one structure WS-ContractMonitoring that follows the business process execution guided by the QoS terms contained in the WScontractfor service monitoring. The Negotiator Organization has one structure WS-Contract Negotiationthat uses a set of protocols responsible to (re)negotiation of contracts between providers and consumers.The FeatureContract toolkit, extended in this work, implements the structure WS-Contract Definition andhas the following functionalities (Fantinato et al. 2008): i) Feature models creation and management; ii)Services section, business process and agreement terms creation from the feature model; iii) Contract modelmanagement through edition of its services section, business process and agreement terms; iv) Feature modelconfiguration that represents the services and related QoS levels to be contracted; and, v) e-contractinstantiation. The FeatureContract has a set of components that supports the different stages of contractestablishment, some were reused from other research and development groups whereas others weredeveloped by our research group. A description of each component is presented as follows: FeaturePlugin: supports the elaboration of feature models and also the configuration of suchmodels. It was developed by Czarnecki research group (Antkiewicz & Czarnecki 2004), as an Eclipse plugin,and it implements cardinality-based feature modeling. Only a few adaptations were necessary in order toincorporate it as a component of the FeatureContract toolkit;7
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADIS Feature Model Parser (FMParser): supports the automatic transformation from e-service featuremodels to an initial version of a WS-contract template. It was specifically developed to be a component ofthe FeatureContract toolkit. This component works as a <strong>do</strong>cument parser, it has been implemented as Javacode that is responsible to transform the XML exported by the FeaturePlugin in the services section, businessterms and business process; XML Editor: supports the graphical visualization and edition of XML specifications. Since there isno particular tool for editing WS-Agreement specifications yet, this tool is used to edit the business termssection, represented by the WS-Agreement definitions, of the WS-contract template, if necessary. It is anEclipse plugin, part of the Web Tools Platform (WTP) (Eclipse Foundation 2010b); WSDL Editor: supports the graphical visualization and edition of WSDL specifications. It is usedto edit the services section, represented by the WSDL definitions, of the WS-contract template generated bythe FMParser, if necessary. It is also an Eclipse WTP plugin (Eclipse Foundation 2010b); Eclipse BPEL: supports the graphical visualization and edition of WS-BPEL specifications (EclipseFoundation 2010a). It is used to edit the business process of the WS-contract template generated by theFMParser, which is created in a basic way. It is always necessary to edit it to fix the process logic; WS-Contract Factory: supports the automatic WS-contract instantiation, based on the WS-contracttemplate and on the e-services feature model configurations. It was specifically developed to be a componentof the FeatureContract toolkit. It works as a <strong>do</strong>cument parser, which removes all the parts of the templatelinked with features not present in the feature models configurations. This removal process is carried outfollowing the hierarchical levels of the contract parts, i.e. when an upper-level template element has to beremoved, all its internal lower-level element are removed as well.The FeatureContract toolkit is considered a prototype as not all the functionalities have been implementedyet, but it can express the feasibility of this approach as showed in the next Section. The extensions proposedhere were developed and an application example was chosen in order to be a complex task, but due to lack ofspace it was simplified.6. APPLICATION EXAMPLEThis section presents a summary of an application example to show the feasibility of the proposed approach.This example requires a contract to be established between two fictitious organizations: A Travel Agency andan Airline Company. The Travel Agency (Consumer)'s system supports tourism packages sale bycomposing third-party services; e-services provided by the travel agency include: customer notification,offers advertisement and travel packages that consume Airline Company e-services. The Airline Company(Provider)'s system supports flight ticket sale and booking; e-services provided by the airline companyinclude: flight booking and purchase; seat and food selection. The stages for e-contract establishment arepresented, only in the Airline Company perspective, as follows.In the first stage (Services Feature Model Elaboration), each company must elaborate a feature modelto represent: the provided e-services; the QoS levels related to each service; and the control operations relatedboth to e-services and/or QoS levels. Figure 4(a) presents a feature model example for an Airline Company,which has two service groups: flight services group and services selection group. This first group has thefollowing services: timetable query, flight purchase and flight booking; and the services selection group hasseat selection and food selection. Only some items are expanded. The Airline Company feature model givesthe consumer (Travel Agency) a structured overview of which e-services, QoS levels and control operationsare offered by the provider. During the feature model configuration stage, described in the following, withthe control operations associated to the feature model, the consumer can choose e-services and their QoSlevels with control operations to be applied when QoS levels are not met. With the services features modelselaborated, XML files can be exported by the FeaturePlugin to be used in e-contract template creation.In the second stage (e-contract Template Creation), the XML files exported from the feature models areused by the FeatureContract to extract the WSDL and WS-Agreement sections of the template. Moreover, theEclipse BPEL plugin is used to define the business process flow. However, BPEL and WSDL sections of thee-contract are not addressed in this paper since the extension proposed here is more closely related with theWS-Agreement section. The template is composed by all the services and related QoS levels offered to becontracted with the respective control operations in case of contract violation, as present in Figure 4(a). The8
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010main idea is to create one template that can be instantiated many times with different feature configurations.Figure 5 shows a WS-Agreement excerpt that represents renegotiation related to a QoS Level. Not all thepossible values are depicted due to lack of space. Latter they will be removed, only the level chosen in thefeature model configuration will be left as described in the following subsection.Figure 4. (a) Feature model; and, (b) Feature model configuration for the airline companyIn the third stage (Services Feature Model Configuration), the Travel Agency system selects thee-services to be contracted from the Airline Company system, QoS levels and control operations related tothese services are also configured. As depicted in Figure 4(a) by the symbol , all the features of the flightservices group are mandatory, the symbols and represents optional features that can be chosen by thecontracting party. Figure 4(b) depicts an example of a feature model configuration. The control-operationssub-tree is associated to the flight-purchase e-service and its QoS attributes. The renegotiation of price isdefined as the default control operation for the flight-purchase service, which must be triggered if any QoSattribute, for which there is no specialized control operation, is not met. Latter in the e-contract instantiationthe penalty tags, related to the flight-purchase e-service, that represents renegotiation of clause and variablewill be removed from the e-contract template. Only the penalty that represents price renegotiation will be left.Figure 5. WS-Agreement Template ExcerptIn the last stage (E-contract Instantiation), the feature models configurations of the Airline Companyand Travel Agency systems indicate which information are relevant to a specific e-contract instance. Fromthe feature models configurations, new XML files are generated. Using the WS-Contract Factory, of theFeatureContract toolkit, all the information related to e-services, QoS attributes and control operations notselected during feature models configuration are removed from the e-contract template. New WDSL,WS-Agreement and WS-BPEL files, containing only the information necessary to the specific agreement,form a new e-contract instance, including control operations information related to Web Services and QoSlevels.9
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADIS7. CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORKThis paper has presented an infrastructure that supports e-contract negotiation, establishment, enactment andrenegotiation. The emphasis was in the FeatureContract toolkit and the control operations in the contractmetamodel. The main advantages of the approach are: i) efficient information management, organization andreuse, necessary for the negotiation and renegotiation of e-contracts through feature modeling utilization; ii)understanding of the renegotiation process through identifying all possible alternatives to dynamically adjustthe e-contract; iii) information organization and presentation of e-services and QoS attributes linked withcontrol operations using feature modeling; and, iv) extension of the WS-Contract metamodel to include thecontrol operations elements already supported by the feature models.As some lessons learned, the use of feature models to represent control operations to handle e-contractviolations makes this process easier to understand, simple and systematic. It can bring benefits for distinctstakeholders, at different levels, as it has a high level of abstraction and structured way for representinginformation. However, some disadvantages or limitations of the approach can be pointed out: i) necessity ofknowledge about the feature modeling; and, ii) negotiation is still made in an offline way; negotiationprotocols have not yet been included to automatically perform negotiation.Future works, besides focusing on the weaknesses cited above, include: full implementation of theWS-Contract Negotiation element with some example protocols; and integration with the WS-Contractmonitoring tool which has been developed by the same research group.ACKNOWLEDGEMENTThis work was supported by The State of São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP) and The NationalCouncil for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq), Brazil.REFERENCESAlves, A et al. 2007, Business process execution language for web services version 2.0, OASIS, Available from:. [22 July 2010].Andrieux, A et al. 2007, Web services agreement specification (ws-agreement), Open Grid Forum, Available from:. [22 July 2010].Angelov, S & Grefen, P 2008, An e-contracting reference architecture, J. Syst. Softw., Vol. 81, No. 11, pp. 1816–1844.Angelov, S & Grefen, P 2008, Supporting the diversity of b2b e-contracting processes, Int. J. Electron. Commerce, Vol.12, No. 4, pp. 39–70.Antkiewicz, M & Czarnecki, K 2004, FeaturePlugin: feature modeling plug-in for Eclipse, in Proc. of the 2004 OOPSLAworkshop on eclipse technology eXchange, New York, USA, pp. 67–72.Bacarin, E et al. 2008, Contract e-negotiation in agricultural supply chains, Int. J. Electron. Commerce, Vol. 12, No. 4, pp.71–98.Czarnecki, K et al. 2005, Staged configuration through specialization and multi-level configuration of feature models, in<strong>Software</strong> Process Improvement and Practice, Vol. 10, No. 2, pp. 143-169.Eclipse Foundation 2010a, BPEL Project, Available from: . [22 July 2010].Eclipse Foundation 2010b, Web Tools Platform, Available from: . [22 July 2010].Fantinato, M et al. 2008, Ws-contract establishment with qos: an approach based on feature modeling, Int. J. CooperativeInf. Syst., Vol. 17, No. 3, pp. 373–407.Fantinato, M et al. 2010, Product line in the business process management <strong>do</strong>main, in Applied <strong>Software</strong> Product LineEngineering, eds K C Kang, V Sugumaran, & S Park, Auerbach Publications, pp. 497–530.Grefen, P et al. 2001, CrossFlow: Cross-Organizational Workflow Management for Service Outsourcing in DynamicVirtual Enterprises, Data Engineering Bulletin, pp. 52–57.Papazoglou, M 2007, Web Services: Principles and Technology, Prentice Hall.Pohl, K et al. 2005, <strong>Software</strong> Product Line Engineering: Foundations, Principles and Techniques, 1st ed, Springer.10
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010THE INTENDED USE OF MOBILE TOURISM SERVICESNiklas Eriksson* and Peter Strandvik***Arcada University of Applied Sciences, Jan-Magnus Janssonin aukio 1, 00550 Helsinki Finland**Åbo Akademi University, Institute for Advanced Management Systems Research, Jouhkahainenkatu 3-5A Turku,FinlandABSTRACTThis paper presents results from a study of the intended use of mobile tourism services. The theoretical foundation wasdrawn from the unified theory for the acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT) and from relevant research theories fora<strong>do</strong>ption of electronic and mobile services. The data was collected through a self-administered questionnaire which washanded out to 103 university students. The findings suggest that value expectancy has the most significant direct impacton the intended use of mobile tourism services. Moreover, attitudes towards mobile technology and social influence havea significant direct impact on the intended use of mobile tourism services.KEYWORDSMobile services, tourism, technology a<strong>do</strong>ption.1. INTRODUCTIONThe use of the <strong>Internet</strong> for <strong>do</strong>ing commerce or interacting with customers has been growing rapidly in theworld wide tourism industry. Mobile commerce, or e-commerce over mobile devices, on the other hand hashad many conflicting predictions on its future popularity. Most predictions have been overly optimistic.However, the benefits that arise from mobile technology have not yet been fully delivered, which to someextent is explained by the fact that mobile applications, due to complexity or lack of relevance, fail to meetcustomers’ expectations (Carlsson et al. 2006). Travel and tourism is an industry in which several differentprojects have been conducted where mobile applications have been developed, tested and implemented, someeven with moderate success (e.g. Schmidt-Belz et al 2003, Repo et al 2006, Riebeck et al. 2009). Moreover,there are a few different studies (e.g. Höpken et al 2007, Riebeck et al 2009, Katsura & Shel<strong>do</strong>n 2009) madeon consumer a<strong>do</strong>ption of mobile tourism services. Nevertheless, more is needed in order to fully understandthe a<strong>do</strong>ption issues of mobile services in different contexts.The New Interactive Media (NIM) project, with funding from the European Union and the regionalgovernment of the Åland islands, was a development programme of increasing knowledge, production anduse of new interactive media on the Åland Islands 1 in Finland during the years 2006 – 2008. Within theproject several mobile applications were developed for the travel and tourism sector on the islands. Two ofthem, Mobi<strong>Portal</strong> and MobiTour, will in this study be used as example services to investigate determinantswith direct effect the intended use of mobile tourism services.2. MOBILE TOURISM SERVICESThe services in the NIM project were planned with a common logic namely the Braudel rule: free<strong>do</strong>mbecomes value by expanding the limits of the possible in the structures of everyday life (as presented byKeen & Mackintosh 2001). The rule was then translated into a tourism setting which means that tourists’ real1 Åland is an autonomous and unilingual Swedish region in Finland with its own flag and approximately 26.700 inhabitants. Åland issituated between Finland and Sweden and consists of 6 500 islands. (www.visitaland.com)11
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISor perceived need had to be met by the services and moreover, the services need to profoundly change theway a tourist <strong>do</strong>es or experience something – and to the better (Harkke 2007).Mobi<strong>Portal</strong> is a mobile version of an information portal www.visitaland.com which is the official touristsite of the Åland Islands. The portal includes search for events, restaurants etc., a map service and facts onthe Åland Islands.MobiTour is a guide for attractions such as the Bomarsund fortress which is <strong>do</strong>wnloadable / streamable tothe visitors’ own devices. The guide includes voice and/or video guidance.See user interface of the two services in figure 1.Mobi<strong>Portal</strong>MobiTourFigure 1. User interface of Mobi<strong>Portal</strong> and MobiTourBoth services ought to expand the limits of a tourist according to the Braudel rule by enabling 1) instantaccess to local information and 2) experience enhancement for certain unmanned attractions. Especiallyexperience enhancement features are generally seen as key drivers for successful customer satisfaction intourism (Pine & Gilmore 1999). The determinants for the intended use of mobile tourism services are,however, a complex issue which will be discussed next.3. RESEARCH MODELSeveral models of technology a<strong>do</strong>ption have been developed. One of the most used models is the technologyacceptance model (TAM) by Davis (1989) which is based on the theory of reason action (TRA) by Fishbeinet al. (1975). Other often used models in technology a<strong>do</strong>ption research are the diffusion of innovationstheories (DIT) by Rogers (1995) and the unified theory for the acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT)by Venkatech et al. (2003) which combines TAM with several other a<strong>do</strong>ption models e.g. DIT. The UTAUTmodel states that there are three determinants performance expectancy, Effort expectancy and SocialInfluence with direct effect on the behavioral intention of technology. Two determinants facilitatingconditions and behavioral intentions have a direct effect on the actual use of technology and threedeterminants self-efficacy, efficacy, attitudes towards technology and anxiety are not direct determinants of theintended behavior. Moreover, four moderators gender, age, experience and voluntariness of use are includedin the UTAUT model. See figure 2. The focus in this study will be to examine determinants in UTAUT withdirect effect on intentional behavior: performance expectancy (PE), Effort expectancy (EE) and SocialInfluence (SI), as our aim is primarily to find out determinants with direct influence on the behavioralintention of mobile tourism services. Nevertheless, due to that UTAUT is primarily focusing onorganizational contexts and not on consumer contexts; we will modify PE, EE and SI and include thedeterminants Anxiety (AX) and Attitude (ATT) in our test. Moreover, based on previous tests of UTAUT amodification to the model should be made when investigating mobile services (Carlsson et al 2006). Herebywe discuss relevant research theories for a<strong>do</strong>ption on of electronic and mobile services to motivate themodification of UTAUT for PE, EE, SI, AX and ATT. The moderators are left out in this research paper.12
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010PerformanceexpectancyEffort expectancySocial InfluenceBehavioral IntentionsUse BehaviorFacilitatingConditionsGender Age Experience Voluntariness of UseFigure 2. The final UTAUT model3.1 Performance Expectancy (Value Expectancy)The TAM model proposes two determinants, perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use, which impactthe intended usage behavior of a system and the a<strong>do</strong>ption behavior as a result (Davis 1989). The first one,perceived usefulness, is defined as “the degree to which a person believes that using a particular systemwould enhance his or her performance”. In the UTAUT model perceived usefulness has emerged intoperformance expectancy and defined as the degree to which an individual believes that using the system willhelp him or her to attain gains in job performance. However, perceived usefulness and performanceexpectancy are foremost designed to research work performance improvements in organizational contexts. Inconsumer markets consumer behavior is also influenced by other factors. It is typical that non-efficiencyfactors impact consumer a<strong>do</strong>ption of technology, e.g. good tourist technologies are not only those that maketourists more efficient, but that also make tourism more enjoyable. Thus tourism can be characterized aswandering, where tourists attempt to enjoy the city environment and chance upon things of interest, ratherthan optimizing (Brown & Chalmers 2003). As the mobility (on the move) capability is generally seen as thekey value driver in m-commerce (Anckar & Eriksson 2003), mobile technology clearly has the potential tosupport the wandering aspect of tourism. A word like flexibility has commonly been used to describe theindependence of time and space that is provided by mobile technology. According to Kim et al. (2005) thehe<strong>do</strong>nic motivation or the enjoyment aspect of tourism has, however, not been clearly defined in mobiletechnology acceptance models. The perceived type and degree of perceived value of a mobile service depen<strong>do</strong>n the other hand on the situation or context of usage (Mallat et al 2006, Lee & Jun, 2005). Anckar & Dincau(2002) introduced an analytical framework that identifies the potential value creating features of mobilecommerce. Mobile value elements in the framework for consumers on the move are: Time-criticalarrangements, Spontaneous needs, Entertainment needs, Efficiency ambitions and Mobile situations. Timecriticalarrangements refer to applications for situations where immediacy is desirable (arise from externalevents), e.g. receive alerts of a changed transport schedule while on tour. Spontaneous needs are internallyawakened and not a result of external events, e.g. find a suitable restaurant while wandering around.Entertainment needs, killing time/having fun, especially in situations when not being able to access wiredentertainment appliances, e.g. kill or fill time in transportation. Efficiency ambitions aim at productivity, e.g.use dead spots during a travel to optimize time usage. Mobile situations refer to applications that in essenceare of value only through a mobile medium (e.g. localization services), which ought to be the core of mobilecommerce. Consequently perceived mobile value represent the degree to which a person perceives valuearising from the mobility of the mobile medium (when not being able to access a stationary PC).Nevertheless not only the mobile medium creates value for the consumer but the essence of the servicesas well. Electronic information systems can be divided into productivity oriented and pleasure (he<strong>do</strong>nic)oriented systems (van der Heijden 2004). The he<strong>do</strong>nic systems focus on the fun-aspect of using aninformation system rather than on productive use. For example, as discussed, good tourist technologies arenot only those that make tourists more efficient, but that also make tourism more enjoyableAs a result of the above discussion we will refer to performance expectancy as value expectancy whichincludes mobile value and service value as productivity value and pleasure value. We expect valueexpectancy to have a direct effect on intentional behavior.13
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISH1: Value expectancy has a significant direct effect on intentional behavior of mobile tourism services3.2 Effort ExpectancyThe second TAM determinant perceived ease of use is defined as the degree to which a person believes thatusing a particular system would be free of effort. In the UTAUT model the ease of use determinant hasemerged into effort expectancy and defined as the degree of ease associated with the use of the system.Moreover, the ease of use aspect has been widely discussed in mobile commerce. Limitations of mobiledevices (e.g. screen size) cause consumers to hesitate whether to a<strong>do</strong>pt mobile commerce or not. Accordingto Cho et al (2007) device limitations suggest that focusing on easy to use mobile applications could enhancethe consumer acceptance of mobile commerce. Kaasinen (2005) points out that mobile services need to beeasy to take into use as well (ease of a<strong>do</strong>ption) as mobile services are typically used occasionally and someservices may be available only locally in certain usage environments. As a consequence, information onavailable services should be easy to get and the services should be easy to install and to start using. The easeof a<strong>do</strong>ption aspect has not been taken into account in models such as TAM. The ease of taking a service intouse may in fact have a direct impact on the a<strong>do</strong>ption behavior of a mobile service (Kaasinen 2005). On theother hand when problems arise, users in the consumer market are often expected to solve the problems ontheir own (Repo et. al 2006). Consequently the use may rely on proper instructions or on a helping hand fromsomeone. Proper support conditions also in a consumer market may therefore be important especially foradvanced mobile services. This aspect is in the UTAUT called facilitating conditions which is proven tosignificantly influence the actual use of technology in organizational contexts. Nevertheless we argue thatconsumers many times expect to take a new product or service into use without instructions or help,especially when it will be only temporary used while visiting a tourist destination. Furthermore, facilitatingconditions didn’t have a direct link to the actual use of mobile services in a previous study by Carlsson et al(2006). Therefore ease of a<strong>do</strong>ption and facilitating condition will here together with ease of use be includedin the effort expectancy determinant. Hereby we expect effort expectancy to have a direct effect onintentional behavior.H2: Effort expectancy has a significant direct effect on intentional behavior of mobile tourism services3.3 Social InfluenceIn UTAUT social influence has been identified to influence the intended use of information technology. InUTAUT social Influence is defined as “the degree to which an individual perceives that important othersbelieve he should use the new system” (Venkatech et al., 2003). Social influence is also known as subjectivenorm in the theory of reason action (Fishbein et al 1975) and in its extension theory of planned behavior(Arjzen 1991). In consumer markets image and social status have been proposed to impact consumers’intentions to a<strong>do</strong>ption of a WAP-enabled mobile phone (Teo & Pok 2003). A positive or negative subjectivenorm can in fact in consumer markets make or break a new technology based product (Schepers and Wetzels2007). Hereby we expect social influence as image to have a direct effect on intentional behavior.H3: Social Influence has a significant direct effect on intentional behavior of mobile tourism services3.4 AnxietyAnxiety in UTAUT has been defined as evoking anxious or emotional reactions when it comes to performinga behaviour (e.g. using a computer), but has not been seen to have a direct influence on intentional behaviourof information technology. Therefore anxiety has not been included in the final UTAUT model. According toRogers (1995),”The innovation-decision is made through a cost benefit analysis where the major obstacle isuncertainty”. Perceived risk is commonly thought of as felt uncertainty regarding possible negativeconsequences of using a product or service and has been added to the two TAM determinants as a negativeinfluencer on intended a<strong>do</strong>ption behaviour (Featherman & Pavlou 2003). Trust, as trust in the service ven<strong>do</strong>rto minimize the risks, has also been added to the TAM model (e.g. Cho et al 2007, Kaasinen 2005) andpointed out as a strong influence on the intended use of mobile services due to that mobile commerce is stillat its initial stage (Cho et al. 2007). We refer to anxiety and trust as perceived risk defined by Featherman &Pavlou 2003. They divide the perceived risk for electronic services into the following elements; performance14
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010risk, financial risk, time risk, psychological risk, social risk and privacy risk. Performance risk refers to thepossibility of a service to malfunction and not performing as it was designed and advertised. The financialrisk refers to the potential monetary outlay associated with the initial purchase price as well as the subsequentmaintenance cost of the product and the possibility of fraud. Time risk refers to that the consumer may losetime when making a bad purchasing decision e.g. by learning how to use a product or service only to have toreplace it if it <strong>do</strong>es not perform to expectations. Psychological risk refers to the potential loss of self-esteem(ego loss) from the frustration of not achieving a buying goal. Social risk refers to potential loss of status inone’s social group as a result of a<strong>do</strong>pting a product or service, looking foolish or untrendy. Privacy risk refersto the potential loss of control over personal information, such as when information about you is used withoutyour knowledge or permission. At least security and privacy issues have been highlighted as barriers tomobile commerce (O’Donnell et al. 2007). Also financial risks in form of high costs, including operatingcosts and initial costs, have been highly ranked by consumers as hindrances for m-commerce in its earlystages (Anckar et al. 2003). Hereby we expect anxiety (perceived risk) to have a direct effect on intentionalbehavior. The element of social risk is already included in the determinant social influence as describedearlier and is therefore not included in Anxiety.H4: Anxiety has a significant direct effect on intentional behavior of mobile tourism services3.5 Attitude towards using Mobile TechnologyIn UTAUT Attitudes towards technology has been defines as an individual's overall affective reaction tousing a system. Attitude has been theorized as having no direct effect on intentional behavior of informationtechnology. Also in diffusion theories personal innovativeness has been argued to be a prior condition toother determinants of a<strong>do</strong>ption decisions (Rogers 1995). Mobile service studies, nevertheless, argue thatattitude of mobile technology in fact may have a direct effect on the intended behavior of mobile services(Carlsson et al 2006). Herby we expect attitudes towards using mobile technology to have a direct effect onintentional behavior. We see three relevant elements of the attitude aspects: try out of mobile technology ingeneral, willingness of purchasing the latest mobile devices and curiosity towards new mobile services.H5: Attitudes towards using mobile technology has a significant direct effect on intentional behavior ofmobile tourism services3.6 Behavioral IntentionInformation technology acceptance models separate between intended use and actual use. As we are onlydemonstrating examples of mobile tourism services to the respondents, without them being able to use theservices on their own, we cannot expect the respondents to give answers based on their actual use but only ontheir intended use of similar services. Therefore we need to investigate possible determinants which effect(positively or negatively) the intended use of mobile tourism services. Nevertheless the intended use inacceptance models has a direct effect on the actual use. We see three aspects of the intended use: the intendeduse in the near future (next time visiting e.g. Åland islands), believe in future use when visiting differentplaces and the intended use compared to use of ‘traditional services’ (e.g. paper brochures and guides).Based on the literature discussion possible determinants for the intended consumer a<strong>do</strong>ption of mobiletourism services are: value expectancy, effort expectancy, social influence, anxiety and attitude towardsmobile technology. The model to be tested is shown in figure 3.Value expectancyEffort expectancySocial InfluenceAnxietyAttitude towardsmobile technologyH1H2H3H4H5Intentions to use mobiletourism servicesFigure 3. Research model15
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADIS4. DATA AND METHODSBased on the literature discussion item statements were developed for each determinant. In total 19 itemstatements were measured on a five point Likert scale (1 = I totally disagree and 5 = I totally agree). Negativestatements were reversed in the analysis so that all scales were comparable. The used statements are viewedin Table 1.Data was collected at Arcada University of Applied Sciences in Helsinki Finland during May 2010. Thequestionnaire was handed out in a class situation and included a brief introduction to the two example mobiletourism services; MobiTour and Mobi<strong>Portal</strong>. The sample included in total 103 students, with a female student<strong>do</strong>mination of 62,1% . The average age was 21,5 years and 38,8% use mobile <strong>Internet</strong> services at least a fewtimes a month.We used the software Smart PLS 2.0 to analyze the data. Partial Least Square (PLS) path modeling isvery well suited for analyzing small samples (Chin & Newstedt 1999). PLS is also increasingly being usedwithin several research fields such as research of consumer behavior (Hensler et al. 2009). Thereby PLS iswell motivated to use for this study. A two-stage analytical procedure was conducted to assess themeasurement model and then the structural relationships.Table 1. Statements of the determinantsDeterminants Items Item statements, scale 1 – 5Value expectancy Mobile value I would find services like Mobi<strong>Portal</strong> / MobiTour useful when ‘on the move’ (when Ican’t access a stationary PC)Productivity value Using services like Mobi<strong>Portal</strong> / MobiTour would save me timePleasure valueUsing services like Mobi<strong>Portal</strong> / MobiTour would be funEffort expectancy Ease of use It would be easy for me to become skillful at using services like Mobi<strong>Portal</strong> /MobiTourEase of a<strong>do</strong>ption In my opinion services like Mobi<strong>Portal</strong> / MobiTour would be easy to take into use(access / install and learn to use)Facilitating condition I wouldn’t need anyone to help me use services like Mobi<strong>Portal</strong> / MobiTourSocial Influence Image / social status I feel trendy if I use services like Mobi<strong>Portal</strong> / MobiTourAnxiety*Reverse scalePerformance risk I <strong>do</strong>n’t trust services like Mobi<strong>Portal</strong> / MobiTour to perform as it is designed andadvertizedFinancial risk 1I fear that the monetary layout (e.g. transaction costs) would be high for services likeMobi<strong>Portal</strong> / MobiTourFinancial risk 2I fear that I would need to pay without being able to use the service anywayTime riskI fear that services like Mobi<strong>Portal</strong> / MobiTour would waste my timeAttitudes towardsmobiletechnologyBehavioralIntentionPsychological riskPrivacy riskMobile deviceMobile technologyMobile serviceNear futureTraditional useFuture useI believe I would be frustrated if services like Mobi<strong>Portal</strong> / MobiTour <strong>do</strong> not performas promisedI’m afraid of losing control over personal information when using services likeMobi<strong>Portal</strong> / MobiTourI want my mobile phone to be the latest modelI like to try out the latest mobile technologiesI’m curious about using new mobile phone servicesI intend to use services like Mobi<strong>Portal</strong> / MobiTour next time I visit e.g. the ÅlandislandI would rather use services like Mobi<strong>Portal</strong> / MobiTour than traditional ones (e.g.paper brochures and guides)I believe I will use services like Mobi<strong>Portal</strong> / MobiTour in the future when I visitdifferent places5. RESULTSThe results are assessed by analyzing the correlations between measures of potentially overlappingdeterminants. Therefore we calculated the average variance extracted (AVE) and the composite reliability toassess determinant reliability. AVE shared between each determinant and its measures should be greater thanthe variance shared with other determinants. All determinants expect for Anxiety showed good compositereliability (>0.7) and AVE (>0.5). The specific items should load heavier on their own determinants than theother determinants. All items of the model showed the highest loadings for their own determinant. The16
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010loading per item for a determinant should also exceed 0,55 and their significance should exceed 1,96. Thatwas not the case for a few items. Within the anxiety determinant the financial risk 1 and 2 items pluspsychological risk and privacy risk showed very low path loadings and low significance. Moreover bothAVE and composite reliability were low for anxiety and therefore these items were excluded from the finalanalysis.The latent scores were then calculated. Value expectancy and Attitude towards using mobile technologyshow the highest significant impact on the behavioral intention. Especially the determinant value expectancystands out with a loading of 0,306. Also social influence has a significant impact on the intentional behavior.Therefore the hypothesis H1, H3 and H5 are supported in this study. Nevertheless and surprisingly H2 andH4 are rejected as not significant. The R2 value for Intentional behavior is 0,522 which means that about52,2% of the variance in intentions to use mobile tourism services can be explained by Value expectancy,Social influence and Attitude. The R2 value is good compared to e.g. earlier TAM studies. See figure 3.Value expectancyEffort expectancySocial InfluenceAnxiety0,306***0,138 n.s.0,196*0,115 n.s.0,262**Intentions to use mobiletourism servicesR2 = 0,522Attitude towardsmobile technology*** P
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISAnckar, B., Carlsson C., Walden, P. 2003. Factors affecting consumer a<strong>do</strong>ption decisions and intents in mobilecommerce: empirical insights. Proceedings of the 16 th Bled eCommerce conference. Bled, Slovenia.Ajzen, I. 1991. The Theory of Planned Behavior. Journal of Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes.No. 50, pp. 179-211.Brown, B. and Chalmers, M., 2003. Tourism and mobile technology. Proceedings of ECSCW 2003. Helsinki, Finland,pp. 335-355.Brown B. et al, 2005. Sharing the square: collaborative leisure in the city streets. Proceedings of ECSCW 2005. Austria.Carlsson, C., Carlsson, J., Hyvönen, K., Puhakainen, J., Walden, P. 2006. A<strong>do</strong>ption of Mobile Devices/Services –Searching for Answers with the UTAUT. Proceedings of the 39th HICCS 2006. IEEE Computer Science Press.Chin, W. W., & Newsted, P. R. 1999. Structural equation modeling analysis with small samples using partial leastsquares. In: R. H. Hoyle (Ed.), Statistical strategies for small sample research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.Cho, D., Kwon, H., Lee, H-Y. 2007. Analysis of trust in <strong>Internet</strong> and mobile commerce a<strong>do</strong>ption. Proceedings of the 40thHawaii International Conference on System Sciences. IEEE Computer Science Press.Davis, F. D., 1989. Perceived Usefulness, Perceived Ease of Use and User Acceptance of Information Technology. MISQuarterly. Vol. 13, No.3, pp. 319-340.Featherman, M., Pavlou, P. 2003. Predicting e-services a<strong>do</strong>ption: a perceived risk facets perspective. Journal of HumanComputer studies, No. 59, pp. 451-474.Fishbein, M., Ajzen, I., 1975. Belief, attitude, intention and behavior: an introduction to theory and research. Reading,MA Addison-Wesley.Harkke, V. 2007. NIM Åland: the quest for useful mobile services. Proceedings of the 20th Bled eConference. Slovenia.Henseler, J., Ringle, C. M., Sinkovics, R. R. 2009. 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IEEE Computer Science Press.Riebeck, M., Stark, A., Modsching, M., Kawalek, J. 2009. Studying the user acceptance of a Mobile Information Systemfor Tourists in the field. Journal of Information Technology & Tourism. Vol. 10, No 3.Rogers, E., M 1995. Diffusion of Innovations. Free Press, 4th edition, New York, USA.Schepers, J., Wetzels, M. 2007. A meta-analysis of the technology acceptance model: Investigating subjective norm andmoderation effects. Journal of Information Management. Vol. 44, No. 1, pp. 90 – 103.Schmidt-Belz, B., Zipf, A., Poslad, S., Laamanen, H.2003. Location-based mobile tourist services – first userexperiences: In: Frew, A. J., Hitz, M. & O’Connor, P. (eds.) Information and Communication Technologies inTourism. Springer, Wien.Teo, T.S.H., Pok, S.H. 2003. A<strong>do</strong>ption of WAP-Enabled Mobile Phones among <strong>Internet</strong> Users. Omega No. 31, pp. 483-498.Van der Heijden, H. 2004. User Acceptance of he<strong>do</strong>nic information systems. 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ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISstudy in which TrailM was integrated with a ubiquitous commerce system (UbiTrade (Franco et al, 2009))and used for contextualized discovery of deal opportunities.The article is organized into six sections. Sect. 2 describes the TrailM architecture. The third Sect.discusses the TrailM use in the ubiquitous commerce guided by trails. Sect. 4 presents the TrailM and theUbiTrade prototypes as well as the integration between them, and still describes and evaluates the resultsobtained from a case study involving trails in discovery of deal opportunities. Sect. 5 discusses related worksand the contribution of this work. And finally, Sect. 6 presents the conclusions and the future works.2. THE TRAILM SYSTEMThis section presents the trails management system. Section 2.1 describes the main terms used by the system,mainly those related to the trails composition, and finally, Section 2.2 presents the system architecture.2.1 Entities, Trails, Ptrail, and TrailpointTrailM was designed to manage entities’ trails. In this context, entities represent persons, accessingcomputational resources (for example, a smartphone), or mobile objects (for example, a vehicle). We chooseentity, instead of user, because then the model could manage trails of any mobile object. In this scenario,different applications can be developed for trails. For example, a vehicle could have a trail, recordinginformation considered relevant, such as the occurrences of maintenances or failures.Applications that use TrailM must temporally store data that composes a trail. For this reason, we proposethat the applications have internally a structure called ptrail (piece of trail), which is composed of thefollowing attributes: entity, resource, event, context, and location. The values of the entity and resourceattributes are stored statically in the ptrail after that an entity logs in the model. Nonetheless, the values of theevent, context, and location attributes are automatically updated as the actions or movements made by theentity and monitored by the application. The records related to the contexts visited by an entity are stored inonly one trail. The trail is composed of a sequence of records of the ptrail. A record is composed of sevenattributes organized into three categories: identification, content, and temporality. The first category containsonly one attribute to identify the trail. The second category is used to store the ptrail content. The lastcategory contains date/time attribute, representing the time of the record creation.We named trailpoint the process that makes the trail composition. This process sends the valuescontained in the ptrail to be recorded in the entity’s trail, which is stored in a server. The trailpoint occurswhen the application automatically identifies that an entity performed an event, for example, entry or exitfrom a location, interaction with another entity, access to a file, among others. Figure 1 shows the trailcreation of a mobile device user. Each star represents the occurrence of an event, which causes a trailpoint.2.2 The System Architecture2.2.1 General OrganizationFigure 1. Example of trail compositionFigure 2 presents a general view of the system, which is composed of a server (TrailM Server) and a client(TrailM Client). In addition, TrailM considers the existence of an external provider that provides locationinformation. Next sections describe all these components, justifying why they are necessary.20
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 20102.2.2 TrailM Server(a) TrailM ServerFigure 2. The TrailM architecture(b) TrailM ClientSome of the TrailM Server basic tasks are to manage the entities’ trails and to enable application querying thetrails. To perform these functions, we designed the TrailServices module (see Figure 2a, which presents theTrailM Server architecture). The TrailServices provides basic services to manage the trails and, moreover,enables applications building their own specialized services according to their needs.The basic services perform generic tasks which are considered strategic for the management of the serverand the trails. These services are organized into three groups: ManageTrail, ComposeTrail, and QueryTrail.The ManageTrail group supports the services used for the control and management of the applications. TheComposeTrail group supports the services used for the trails composition. In this group stand out the servicerelated to the sending of ptrails in the trailpoint process. The QueryTrail group contains the services thatallow queries related to the trails.TrailM Server enables applications adding to the model their own specialized services, which can becomposed of basic services. Sect 3.2 describes four specialized services created to support the discovery ofdeal opportunities guided by trails. The server has a database to store information of the entities, the trails andtheir related content. The entities table stores identification data of the entities related to the trails that arebeen managed. The trails table stores the ptrails that compose the entities’ trails. The trail related content isstored in the others tables: context, region, event, extension of events and resources (see Figure 3).Figure 3. TrailM databaseSome services can have common functions, for example, to <strong>do</strong> database query and to manage the trails.For this reason, we designed the TrailManager component, which performs basic operations that can be usedby the services. The TrailManager aims to meet the basic functionality for trail management as the control ofrequests sent to the server, registration and authentication of users, access to the database and, one of its maintasks, the composition of the record for the storage of a ptrail at the trailpoint solicitation moment. TheTrailRepository provides an interface to access the database repository, thus supporting the TrailManager.2.2.3 TrailM ClientThe TrailM Client resides on the mobile device and supports the applications of TrailM. The clientinstantiates and manages the ptrails entities, making the synchronism of applications with TrailM Server. Theclient is organized into three layers (Figure 2b).The top layer is the communication (TrailClientComm) clientto the server. The intermediate layer (TrailClientLocation) handles the communication device with theexternal provider of geographic location. The management layer (TrailClientCore) manages access to devicecapabilities.21
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADIS3. UBIQUITOUS COMMERCEThis section presents the strategy used in the deal opportunities discovery guided by trails. Section 3.1describes the ubiquitous commerce environment, in which TrailM was integrated. Section 3.2 describes howthe trails were used in the discovery process of Deal Opportunities (DOs).3.1 The Ubiquitous Commerce EnvironmentThe UbiTrade architecture (Franco et al, 2009), presented in Figure 4, is composed of eight components. Thefirst is the Location System, which allows the identification of the users' current context. The second is theProfile System that stores the users' data. The third is the Category Tree, which keeps a taxonomy of productsand services. The fourth is the Reference System, which determines the users' reputation, according to theprevious transacted businesses. The fifth is the Service Manager, which operates as a layer of messagesexchange between the interface component and the others. The sixth is the Opportunity Consultant, which isthe main component of the model. It operates as an analysis engine, generating business opportunities fromthe profiles and locations of the dealers. Finally, there are two components used as interfaces with users, thePersonal Assistant and the Website.Figure 4. The UbiTrade ArchitectureThe deal opportunity identification depends of events occurrence. The opportunities, in UbiTrade, areclassified into three categories. The Buy & Sell category is generated from the desires of a dealer matchedwith the offers of another dealer. The Knowledge Exchange category is created based on the desires of adealer matched with the desires of another dealer. The Experience Exchange category is produced from thematching of desires of a dealer with businesses made by another dealer. The identification of the dealopportunities is made by Opportunity Consultant through the dealer’s location and profile and the ServiceManager in charge for warning the users about deal opportunities.3.2 Deal Opportunities Using Trails3.2.1 Specialized Services in TrailMThe deal opportunities discovery guided by trails was based on specialized services created in TrailM andaccessed by Opportunity Consultant of UbiTrade. Table 1 summarizes the created services. The informationreturned by the services is obtained through the analysis of the dealers’ trails. The preferences are determinedby the use frequency of contexts, regions, and business <strong>do</strong>ne in the trail.22
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010NamePreferredContextsDiscoveryDOsPreferredDealingContextsTypeOfBusinessByRegion3.2.2 The TrailM/UbiTrade IntegrationTable 1. Specialized services created in TrailMDescriptionReturns a list with the dealer’s preferred contexts in a trail.Returns a list containing all deal opportunities of dealers that have a desire and/or offerin common based on trail.Returns a list with the dealer’s preferred business conclusion contexts in a trail (forexample, jewelry store, restaurant or train).Returns a list with the type of business by region based on dealers’ trails (for example,shopping).The TrailM/UbiTrade integration was based on the following changes in UbiTrade: (1) we included thesupport to the TrailM services in the Personal Assistant; (2) the Opportunity Consultant inferences became toconsider the dealers’ profiles and the services available by TrailM (described in Table 1).Figure 5 presents the dynamic of the integration. In UbiTrade, the deal opportunities are warned to thedealers according to the events occurrence based on Profile System during their trail. Location Systeminforms the context in which the dealer is to Opportunity Consultant, which identifies the occurrence of oneevent that starts the process (step 1). Opportunity Consultant uses this information, combined with dealer’sprofile and the Reference System, to filter deal opportunities according the reference grade compatible withthe dealer (step 2). For dealers who have the data compatible, Opportunity Consultant matches the profiles,trying to identify the type of opportunity that they are looking for (step 3). In this stage, UbiTrade uses theTrailM services to improve its inferences. Identifying an opportunity, Opportunity Consultant sends anotification to dealers, using the warnings service of the Service Manager component (step 4).Figure 5. Discovery of DOs guided by trails4. PROTOTYPE AND CASE STUDYThis section describes the TrailM and the UbiTrade implementations. Furthermore, it discusses the case studyused to validate the model.4.1 The TrailM and the UbiTrade PrototypesThe TrailM Server prototype was implemented through the Java programming language. The Hibernateframework was used to access the database. The TrailServices layer is based on Web services.The UbiTrade prototype (Franco et al, 2009) was implemented through the C# programming language.The Opportunity Consultant and the Reference System components were designed as Win<strong>do</strong>ws services.The Category Tree component and the Profile System were implemented using the Firebird relationaldatabase. The Service Manager was developed using the standard Web service technology. The PersonalAssistant module was developed with .NET Compact Framework and runs on Win<strong>do</strong>ws Mobile. Moreover,23
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISto capture Wi-Fi signals and to store the profiles in the mobile devices, we used the OpenNETCF library andthe .NET System.Xml library, respectively.The integration between the TrailM and the UbiTrade prototypes was mainly based on changes made inOpportunity Consultant in order to access the services provided by the Web services of TrailServices. TheTrailM Client prototype was developed through the addition of new functionalities in Personal Assistant.The UbiTrade location system is based on triangulation of Wi-Fi antennas. Personal Assistant obtains theantennas’ powers and forwards to Location System through a Web service. The system uses this informationto infer the mobile device location. The locations must be previously registered on the system database. Themobile device location is inferred through a comparison between the data sent by Personal Assistant and thedata previously captured through samples.4.2 Case Study4.2.1 Obtainment of the TrailsThe case study was based on simulated generation of two dealers’ trails, which were used in the real scenariodescribed in section 4.2.2.Figure 6. Relationship of the real and simulation environment mapsFigure 6 presents the relation between the real and simulation environments used in the trails generation,which is composed of the Houses, the Metro, and the Shopping regions. For example, a movement fromroom 215 to room 206 represents the dealer’s presence on the train, moving from House to Shopping.We defined these regions because we wanted to monitor the dealers’ activities while they were movingfrom their houses to the shopping. Within the regions, we mapped some location where the users could go,for instance, the cabstand, the fast food 1, and station 2.The Metro region represents the area in which the dealers move from their houses to the shopping andvice versa, therefore, the system can record the events made by the dealer during the movement between thestations. The third region corresponds to the shopping. Within the shopping region, we defined twosubregions representing the stores and the food court. A region can be composed of one or more subregions,and each subregion contains at least one location with the values of its geographical position.Table 2. Example of the recordsDealer Device Event Location Extension DateCládio HTC 4351 Entry into location Shopping - Feb. 6 08:03Cládio HTC 4351 Offer inclusion Jewelry Store Title: PianoFeb. 6 12:01Category: Instrument SoundJoão HTC 4351 Entry into location Shopping - Feb. 6 19:32Cládio HTC 4351 Exit from location Jewelry Store - Feb. 6 20:03João HTC 4351 Created Opportunity Shopping DO Notification Feb. 6 21:12In the simulation, the dealers’ profile information was based in two real people, focusing their preferencesand interests related to desires and offers, and registered in UbiTrade. The trails generation was based on the24
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010possible events made by the dealers during a period of six months and was simulated using an applicationdeveloped specifically for this purpose. Considering possible displacements and deals, the applicationgenerated records related to the events of entry and exit from the locations, offers and desires inclusion,created opportunities, and performed business. Table 2 presents an example of these records.4.2.2 Validation through a ScenarioThe scientific community has been using scenarios to validate context-aware environments (according toDey’s approach (2001)) and ubiquitous environments (according to Satyanarayanan (2001)). Following thisstrategy, we created a scenario for tests and evaluations of the TrailM/UbiTrade integration, involving twodealers (João and Cládio). The scenario was tested in the validation environment described in Sect. 4.2.1. Thedealers, carrying HTC 4351 (see Figure 7(a)), simulated the scenario moving around the environment rooms.This scenario focuses on the discovery of DOs in different contexts based on the dealers’ trails, according tothe described below:“Cládio, who lives in Porto Alegre city, wants to sell a piano. During the week he takes the Train to go towork at the Shopping and have lunch at the food court between 12:15pm and 12:50pm (by the activitybecomes a "preferred” context). João wants to buy a piano, 3-4 times by month he goes with his family to theShopping, sometimes in the afternoon, sometimes at night (even so, the activity characterizes the context as"preferred"). Therefore, the Opportunity Consultant uses the PreferredContexts service of TrailM todetermine the preferred contexts of each user. Once some preference change is detected, the OpportunityConsultant uses the DiscoveryDOs service of TrailM to infer possible deal opportunities for dealers. So thedealer receives a message (see Figure 7(b)) about the deal opportunity and has the possibility to exchangemessages with the counterparty.Always that the dealers receive a notification of DOs, they can visualize (see Figure 7(c)) or delay theaccess. This action indicates that the dealers are interested in the deal, but they <strong>do</strong> not want to access it atthe moment, i.e., João stores the deal opportunity to see in another moment.”(a) HTC 4351 (b) Notification of DO (c) DO detailsFigure 7. The scenario snapshots5. RELATED WORKSThere are ubiquitous commerce models that use profiles and localization (Shekar et al, 2003; Roussos andMoussouri, 2004). The iGrocer (Shekar et al, 2003) was designed to be a smart assistant to provide helpwhile purchasing in supermarkets, its difference is the possibility of tracking and keeping the consumersnutrition profile, suggesting the purchase of products or even warn the ones that must be avoided.MyGrocer (Roussos and Moussouri, 2004) is an application projected to assist clients while the purchaseprocess. However, the main proposal is to control the stock of products. This control is performed incommercial spots by using sensors on the shelves that will indicate the quantity of such product still left ondetermined shelves. In the several works related to ubiquitous commerce (Zhang et al, 2009) none of themuse trails. To our knowledge this is the first work that focuses on the use of trails in ubiquitous commerce. Inaddition, the UbiTrade focuses on generating business for the users, whether in the role of customer orsupplier. UbiTrade is also generic, working with the trade of products in different areas, rather than focusingon a specific operation.25
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADIS6. CONCLUSIONThis article has presented a system to manage trails and its application in the deal opportunities discovery inubiquitous commerce environments. TrailM initially has been integrated with UbiTrade, but its proposal isgeneric and can be used by other systems. The use of trails allows the systems to be more effective, becausethey can use more precise information of the users’ behavior. The objective of the case study was todemonstrate that is viable to integrate ubiquitous systems with TrailM as well as to use the trails to improveautomatic decisions, in our case, deal opportunities.The main conclusions were: (1) the use of trails confirms the mobile computing potential to improve thedeal opportunity discovery; (2) the availability of the history of visited contexts stimulates the use of mobiledevices as instruments to access contextualized contents; (3) TrailM supports content distribution guided bytrails; (4) the prototype and the experiment attest the proposal feasibility.TrailM as well as its integration with UbiTrade is an initial proposal. The following activities will allowthe continuity of the study: (1) we will run additional tests with the trails obtained from simulation, forexample, the PreferredDealingContexts and TypeOfBusinessByRegion services were not used yet; (2) theheuristic to determine the preferred contexts (frequency of visit) can be improved through additionalinformation, for example, time of each use; (3) the services performance involving a significant amount ofrecords must be evaluated, because the experiment considered a few number.REFERENCESBaldauf, M., Dustdar, S. , and Rosenberg, F., 2007. A Survey on Context-aware Systems. International Journal of AdHoc and Ubiquitous Computing, Vol. 2, No. 4, pp. 263-277.Dey, A. et al, 2010. Location-Based Services. IEEE Pervasive Computing, Vol. 9, No. 1, pp. 11-12.Dey, A., Salber, D. , and Abowd, G., 2001. A conceptual framework and a toolkit for supporting the rapid prototyping ofcontext-aware application. Human-Computer Interaction, Vol. 16, No. 2, pp. 97-166.Diaz, A., Merino, P. , and Rivas, F.J., 2010. Mobile Application Profiling for Connected Mobile Devices. IEEEPervasive Computing, Vol. 9, No. 1, pp. 54-61.Driver, C. and Clarke, S., 2008. An application framework for mobile, context-aware trails. Pervasive and MobileComputing, Vol. 4, No. 5, pp. 719-736.Franco, L. et al, 2009. Exploring Business Opportunities in Ubiquitous Environments. VIII IADIS InternationalConference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong>. Roma, Italy, pp. 469-476.Hightower, J. and Borriello, G., 2001. Location Systems for Ubiquitous Computing. Computer, Vol. 34, No. 8, pp. 57-66.Hightower, J., LaMarca, A. , and Smith, I., 2006. Practical Lessons from Place Lab. IEEE Pervasive Computing, Vol. 5,No. 3, pp. 32-39.Hoareau, C. and Satoh, I., 2009. Modeling and Processing Information for Context-Aware Computing - A Survey. NewGeneration Computing, Vol. 27, No. 3, pp. 177-196.Levene, M. and Peterson, D., 2002. Trail Record and Ampliative Learning. Lon<strong>do</strong>n: University of Lon<strong>do</strong>n.Roussos, G. and Moussouri, T., 2004. Consumer perceptions of privacy, security and trust in ubiquitous commerce.Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, Vol. 8, No. 6, pp. 416-429.Satyanarayanan, M., 2001. Pervasive computing: vision an challenges. IEEE Personal Communications, Vol. 8, No. 4,pp. 10-17.Satyanarayanan, M. et al, 2009. The Case for VM-Based Cloudlets in Mobile Computing. IEEE Pervasive Computing,Vol. 8, No. 4, pp. 14-23.Shekar, S., Nair, P. , and Helal, S., 2003. iGrocer: a ubiquitous and pervasive smart grocery. Symposium on AppliedComputing. Melbourne, USA, pp. 645-652.Smith, A.D. et al, 2006. Towards Truly Ubiquitous Life Annotation. Memories for Life Colloquium. Lon<strong>do</strong>n, pp. 1-2.Vaughan-Nichols, S.J., 2009. Will Mobile Computing's Future Be Location? Computer, Vol. 42, No. 2, pp. 14-17.Zhang, L., Liu, Q. , and Li, a.X., 2009. Ubiquitous Commerce: Theories, Technologies, and Applications. Journal ofNetworks, Vol. 4, No. 4, pp. 271-278.26
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010SEQUENCING CONCEPTS FOR SUPPORTING ANE-LEARNING CLASS: AN APPROACH BASED ONONTOLOGIES AND THE STRUCTURE OF SIGNSHerli J. de Menezes 1,2 , Sean W. M. Siqueira 2 and Leila Cristina V. de Andrade 21 Federal University of Rio de Janeiro2 Federal University of the State of Rio de JaneiroABSTRACTLearning objects have been used in e-learning with the objective of allowing reuse content material. However, thisapproach also demands getting the right pieces of content and assembling them together in order to build a semanticallyricher instructional material. In order to guide this combination of the right content, it is necessary to define sequences oftopics to be covered and then the files to be used as learning objects. In this paper we discuss Learning Objectcomposition and sequencing from suggestions taken from Knowledge Domain Modeling. We propose the use of a<strong>do</strong>main ontology for allowing the suggestion of sequences of topics to be covered, which is also based on some conceptsof Semiotics and Linguistics applied to multimedia narrative structures. Learning environment and the teacher action isrepresented as an enactment where educational resources have a role similar to actors in a play. So, the unfolding of alesson is conceived as a narrative, like storytelling, so that the elements are assembled in a discourse. A representation ofthe Knowledge Domain is coined as ontology represented by means of OWL DL and the relevant concepts are arrangedin a list extracted from the representative graph of the <strong>do</strong>main. From this list of topics, the user can chose the mostadequate corresponding learning objects to be used in a class or learning scenario. The proposal was validated with<strong>do</strong>main specialists and the results are also discussed.KEYWORDSLearning Objects. E-Learning. Learning Objects composition. Ontology. Semiotics.1. INTRODUCTIONThe web nowadays has much information about almost everything. Finding the right information is not ahard task anymore. This great amount of available content could be used in educational scenarios. Althoughit is somewhat easy to find material about lots of subjects, organizing content to a specific audience is not sostraightforward. It is necessary to make the semantic connections about the concepts to be explored and theirlevel of explanation. When dealing with learning content there is a common sense towards the reuseapproach, resulting on the so called Learning Objects (LOs). LOs are a kind of resources defined as "anyentity, digital or non-digital, that may be used for learning, education or training" (IEEE, 2002). This widedefinition has the main purpose of encompassing different sort of resources (Wiley, 2002). In this paper, weare focusing on learning content that is available through the learning management systems or through theweb, so only Digital Learning Objects (DLOs) are addressed. There are several types of DLO such as textfiles, diagrams, drawings, mathematical formulas and expressions, exercises (quizzes, problems andexamples), sound and video files and multimedia files.Rodrigues et al. (2008) stated that creating DLO's is time consuming and expensive, so reusing alreadyexisting DLOs is desirable. In order to make this reuse possible it is necessary to provide mechanisms forfinding and accessing DLOs, and composing them according to the different possibilities of exploringcontent or different learning scenarios.For enabling searching and retrieving DLOs, they are described through metadata elements. There somemetadata standards for describing DLOs, but IEEE LOM (IEEE LTSC, 2002) is the most used. AlthoughLOM has a wide acceptance, some learning environments use other metadata not completely compatible withLOM, making finding DLOs a more difficult task as it is necessary to deal with heterogeneity. Therefore,27
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADIScomposing and sequencing DLO become even more complicated. In addition, DLO composition isinfluenced by DLO granularity as Wiley (2002) stated, reusability is in an inverse relationship to granularity.There are some proposals for composing learning content in the literature. Reusability of DLOs isdiscussed in (Barritt, 1999) from a modular perspective where five types are presented: concepts, facts,procedures, processes and principles. Guidelines are proposed to build Reusable Learning Objects (RLO) byaggregating (composing) such types. However, there is no guidance on how to sequence the adequate typesin specific learning scenarios and how each type complements the others.Aroyo (2003) proposed a modularized concept-based framework to build courseware centered on topicswhich are conceived as reification of concepts previously classified by an ontology so that its relationshipsare used to propose a sequence of topics. However, a contextual approach for topics composition is notdiscussed.Rodrigues (2008), from a component based approach, suggested a way for LO composition. A flexiblemode of LO composition is proposed using lower granularity components and an algorithm which defines asemiautomatic composition language based on some learning strategy. Since no specific learning theory isaddressed, this is a general proposal that can be applied in different learning contexts.In this paper, we consider learning objects composition starting from the conceptual <strong>do</strong>main modelingexploring the possibilities of LOs composition built from inferences of the conceptual structure of theconsidered <strong>do</strong>main. We also consider some ideas rooted in semiotic concepts about signs and discoursesgenerated from the rules for composing narrative structures. As a result we devise some criteria and asuggestion to compose Learning Objects.DLO can be considered as a digitally coded physical media supporting some content so it has the maincharacteristics of semiotic signs. From this assumption, we can think of a DLO as an entity comprising thecontent and the expression aspect. Content is associated to the semantics of the resource and expression to itsphysical form.Some learning-teaching requirements must to be considered when designing a course or a lesson. Thefirst one is setting the learning objectives which comprises the subject to be taught pertaining to a knowledge<strong>do</strong>main (KD). This subject has an internal structure, determined by the main concepts, axioms, experimentalfacts and its inter-relationships. From a teaching-learning perspective, this subject must be modeled, so thatthe main concepts and their relationships are identified and organized in a coherent way according to thelearning purpose. The second requirement is related to the learning outcomes to be accomplished. Theseoutcomes are verbal information, intellectual skills, cognitive strategies, attitudes and motor skills (Gagné,1974). The last requirement is related to the composition itself dealing with the promotion and holding thelearner attention by supplying elements to contextualize its previous knowledge and enhance its curiosity.These requirements can be associated to the content plane.The teaching-learning setting is modeled in (IMS, 2003) as a theatrical play, having acts so that each ofthem has one or more role-parts. These acts follow a sequence and the role-parts are associated to a role in anactivity. This activity describing the role action in a given environment is, according to the model, equivalentto an script which defines when the role-parts in an act runs in parallel, when there are many of them, or not.A lesson could be envisioned as having some features of a narrative structure, as discussed in (Barthes,1975), (Hagood, 2009), (Chatman, 1975) and (Dijk, 1975). The first is the story that according to (Hagood,2009), considering the multimedia context, is "collection of experiences represented as resources" and adiscourse representing "what part of the story" is to be told and ''how it is told" (presentation). So thisdiscourse is just the way the scripts are arranged, or how the story is told.We claim that for a virtual learning environment (VLE) these features are just like a storytelling systemusing LOs acting as resources or characters in a play as defined by (IMS, 2003) so that authoring tasks orlearning design procedures define the way to orchestrate these elements to compose a narrative structure thatholds the attention of its learners and meet the defined learning objectives. We consider some methods forachieving this from the starting point of a KD modeling in order to define the concept network issued fromthis model. KD modeling is <strong>do</strong>ne by means of ontology, defined by (Gruber, 1993) as a formalization of aconceptual model. The obtained concept model can be represented as a graph of nodes corresponding toconcepts and arcs to their relationships. The relevance of a node can be defined by the number of connectionson it (its degree) (Bollobás, 1998). The learning path in this representation corresponds to a path in the graphconnecting two concepts.The remainder of this paper has the following structure. Section 2 summarizes LOM metadata structuresused for describing LOs. Section 3 presents some features of signs from a structural semiotic perspective.28
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010Signifier and significant aspects of signs, as well as, Peirce’s conception of signs are briefly discussed as wellas compositional aspects of signs in a discourse and semiotic features of LOs are stressed. Section 4 discussescomposition of LOs from their metadata structure and KD aspects. Domain ontology is considered a keypoint to LO composition since a semantic structure is defined from the concepts of KD and their relationshipsto support contextual composition of LO as well as some general rules for LO orchestration. In Section 5 wepresent an example of the proposed approach applied to the field of introductory Physics and the opinion ofPhysics teachers on composing these concepts. Finally, in Section 6 we draw some conclusions and addressfuture works.2. LEARNING OBJECTS: A BRIEF DISCUSSIONLOs are described by a data model usually the LOM (Learning Object Metadata). LOM comprises ninecategories such as 1. General; 2. Lifecycle; 3; Meta-metadata; 4. Technical; 5. Educational; 6. Rights; 7.Relation; 8. Annotation and 9. Classification. These categories are depicted in Figure 1.Figure 1. Diagrammatic representation of LOM-IEEE.In an extensive study on learning objects metadata, Motelet (2007) remarked that the LOM datatypes canbe organized into four categories: (a) Primitive types (size, format, id, URL, time stamp or date) concerningto attributes like 1 : General.Identifier, Technical.duration, Technical.location; (b) Langstring type, used inelements like Educational.description, General.keyword and General.title, so that information can be given indifferent languages; (c) Vocabulary instances: Educational.interactivityType (=active, expositive, and mixed)and (d) vCard: a standard file format for business electronic cards.The Educational category is very important for educational purposes since it specifies some relevantparameters to teaching-learning process as the interactivity type useful to match learning resources to themodality of lesson (active, expositive, mixed). Another example is the “Learning Resource Category”, whosevalue space indicates several kinds of resources to be used, ranging from exercises to lectures, however thereis no indication about its expressing power.The sequencing and composing task must integrate some features related to the content and form of theseresources. In order to discuss theses aspects, we shift our approach to the semiotic field.1 We a<strong>do</strong>pt a general notation form LOM attributes in the form Attibute.sub-attribute.29
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADIS3. SIGNS AND ITS STRUCTURE: A BRIEF REVIEWSigns, as discussed in the field of Semiotics, are twofold entities, according to (Saussure, 1945), composedby a signified and a signifier represented as two layers. As stated in (Barthes, 1975), signified can be thoughtas the content layer and the signifier as the expression layer. A further unfolding of these layers was proposedby (Hjelmslev, 1974) into two sub layers of form and substance. Table 1 schematically shows the structure ofsigns, as discussed.For instance, let us take the sign Mountain: (a) its signifier is the string chain [m,o,u,n,t,a,i,n], (b) itssignified (the mental image of a mountain). The form of expression is given by the phonetic, orthographicrules to compose the sounds or the characters. The substance of expression is the elements used to compose(the text font family or the sound waves that are emitted). From the content layer side, the form of contentsublayer is the formal organization of signifiers and the substance of content is the emotional or ideologicalaspects, (‘that mountain I have climbed on the last week-end walk’.)Signifier (Expression)Table 1. Structure of Sign according to Saussure and Hejlmslev[Adapted from (Chandler, 2001) and (May, 2007)]SubstancePhysical Materials or the medium (words,sound recorded, words printed)FormLanguage, formal syntactic structure,technique and styleSignified (Content)Emotions, Ideological aspects, specificinformation content‘Semantic structure’, ‘Thematic structure’,Conceptual Structures, ontologiesPeirce (1955) represented signs as a triadic relation instead of dyadic representation of Saussure. In hismodel, the form which the sign takes is defined as the representamen; the interpretant is the sense made bythe sign and, the object is the substantial aspect of sign. It must be remarked that the representamen is itself asign, so, as stressed by (Eco, 1976), a sign is interpreted by means of other signs, in an unending recursiveprocess, defined as semeiosis (Peirce, 1955). This structure is represented in Figure 2.Figure 2. Sign components according to Peirce and its interaction (Semeiosis)A further aspect to be noted is that there are different kinds of signs. Iconic signs ‘stands for an object byresembling or imitating’ (Yeh, 2004) while the index ‘refers to the effect produced by the object’ and thesymbol, which refers to object as the ‘virtue of law, convention or rule’. These signs are combined to expressand form a discourse.Signs composition according to Structural Linguistics occurs in a plane defined by two dimensions. Thesyntagmatic dimension is composed by syntagmas, or the string of words that compose a larger unit in thespeech or in a sentence (Saussure, 1945). The syntagma gets its value as opposed to its predecessor orsuccessor. The second dimension is the paradigmatic one, referred to the associative fields whosedetermination can be, in linguistic context, by sound affinity (materialization/conceptualization) or by sense(education/learning). The speaker chooses from his/her repertory the sign he/she must use to convey theintended message.30
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010The outcome of this operation is a discourse defined, in the linguistic field, as a “... formal discussion of asubject in speech or writing 2 ”. In a broader sense, this definition can be extended as a “...system ofrepresentation consisting of a set of representational codes for constructing and maintaining particularforms of reality within the ontological <strong>do</strong>main defined as relevant to its concerns” (Clandler, 2001).These semiotic categories can be used to analyze other kinds of 'discourses', such as movies orhypermedia. In movies <strong>do</strong>main, we have syntagmatic elements such as long shots, close up, travelings 3 thatare matched with sound (special effects, music and dialogues), that are arranged to transmit the film maker orauthor's intention according to some paradigmatic composition 4 . Lets us move to LO field in order to discusssome of its semiotic aspects.4. LEARNING OBJECTS AS SIGNSWhen a user interacts with a learning environment (LE) he/she establishes a communication link since theusers (receptor/leaner) and a sender (LE) interchange messages. There is, surely, another ‘virtual’ element,the author, represented by the LE. Messages are structured as a discourse composed by syntagmas andstructured according to some system, or paradigm. This is not a linear discourse since it comprises differentmedias and different and simultaneous codes.A Knowledge Domain (KD) can be represented by means of ontologies which are the formalrepresentation of the concepts and relationships on a <strong>do</strong>main (conceptualization) (Gruber, 1993). Ontologiescan are represented as assertions expressed by means Description Logic axioms. These assertions can berepresented in a machine understanding form by means of OWL DL, a subset of the family of XML-basedlanguages proposed by W3C consortium (Antoniou, 2008).The abstract form of ontology is provided by Description Logics, whose main constructs are the set ofaxioms, terminology elements and facts. Let us consider, for instance, a set of concepts C and a binaryrelationship dependsOn, represented by D. The dependence relationship between the concepts C 1 and C 2 ,conceived as classes of individuals, is expressed in Description Logic as , the set of instances (orindividuals) of C 1 that depends on the instances of C 2 . The relationship between concepts can be representedas a graph, where nodes represent the concepts and edges, the relationship between them. Then, it is possibleto retrieve paths from a concept to another, which is equivalent to exploring the semantic relationships oflearning content to guide the LOs’ composition.We can apply these concepts to model a small knowledge <strong>do</strong>main with only one type of relation. In orderto <strong>do</strong> this we built an ontology for the Introductory Physics sub <strong>do</strong>main in order to <strong>do</strong> a preliminary test forthe proposed method.5. AN EXAMPLE FROM INTRODUCTORY MECHANICSFrom the considered sub <strong>do</strong>main, we choose a set composed by the concepts: Mass, Force, Work, Velocity,Derivative, Squared Velocity (SquaredVelocity), Acceleration, Conservative Force (ConsForce), Limit,Potential Energy, Kinetic Energy and Energy. An Ontology for this set was constructed as OWL DL classesusing Protégé 4.1 5 editor, a free open source editor and knowledge base framework and its graphicalrepresentation using the OntoGraph plug-in is displayed in Figure 3, where the <strong>do</strong>tted arrows mean therelation DependsOn and continuous ones stand for the inferred relationship hasSubClass. In order toaccomplish the requirements of the proposed approach we have also defined some relationships between LOsand concepts using the LOM structures mapping them to the ontology.2 Ran<strong>do</strong>m House, Webster's Everyday Dictionary.3 Travelling refers to the camera movement following the actor walking keeping the same relative position (Source: www.wipedia.org).4 According to (Metz, 1972) paradigmatic features in a semiology of movies is somewhat feeble, since the inventory of probable units isopen, although finite.5 http://protege.stanford.edu/31
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISFigure 3. Proposed OWL DL graph for concepts, learning objects and their relationshipsFrom the ontology model, a graph structure was modeled (Figure 4) and the set of nodes and edges wasprocessed in order to determine all the paths in the graph starting from ‘energy’ node to ‘limit’ node using aBreadth First Search algorithm written in Python language. These paths were determined and a conceptdependence list (output list) below was obtained.Figure 4. Graph obtained from ontology information>>> find_all_paths(graph,'energy','limit')[['energy', 'force', 'mass', 'acceleration', 'velocity', 'deriv', 'limit'],['energy', 'force', 'mass', 'velocity', 'deriv', 'limit'],['energy', 'work', 'force', 'mass', 'acceleration', 'velocity', 'deriv','limit'],['energy', 'work', 'force', 'mass', 'velocity', 'deriv', 'limit']]>>>32
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010Notice the results of the output list should be considered in inverted order, i.e., it is necessary to departfrom limit and finish on energy. This output list could suggest a sequence of concepts so that a user couldselect matching learning objects from LOM description (keyword) to each concept. From a semioticapproach, this implies that the composition and sequencing is <strong>do</strong>ne, so that the path extracted from ontologygraph is the form of content.We took the longest path ['energy', 'work', 'force', 'mass', 'acceleration', 'velocity', 'deriv', 'limit'] and askedthem to put the concepts in the order they think is the best way to be presented to the students. The results areshown in the Table 2.Table 2. Suggestions for sequencing learning objects as tested by physics teacherProfessor Energy Work Acceleration Velocity Limit Force DerivativeA7 6 4 3 1 5 2B 7 6 4 3 1 5 2C 6 7 4 3 1 5 2D 7 6 4 3 1 5 2It is also important to notice that the longest path ['energy', 'work', 'force', 'mass', 'acceleration', 'velocity','deriv', 'limit'] is really similar to the professors’ answer ['energy', 'work', 'force', 'acceleration', 'velocity','deriv', 'limit'], which demonstrates the proposed approach has a good result. A remarkable fact is that all theprofessors defined the same sequence and none included the concept ‘mass’. However, this fact <strong>do</strong>es notseems to be of capital importance, since at graduate level, “mass” is a fundamental concept related to theinertial properties of the particle. Its deep meaning is worth discussing if gravitational or inertial propertieswould be discussed. The other paths were also considered valid by the professors although which is the bestalternative depends on the learning situation. In addition, as the discussion on which were the most adequateLOs for presenting each concept was divergent, we decided not to address such questions, but to investigatepossible reasons as future works6. CONCLUDING REMARKS AND FUTURE WORKSIn this paper we discussed some features of Learning Objects composition and sequencing assuming thatthese objects have some properties or characteristics similar to signs as studied in Semiotics. As anarrangement of signs, this composition shares some features with narrative structures, so that its form ofcontent is given by the ontology of the addressed KD.The ontology was modeled from the dependence relationships between concepts. Since ontologies can berepresented as directed graphs, paths can be defined in these graphs so that they can be interpreted as possiblesolutions for sequencing learning content to be explored in a class. For each concept in the path, somesuitable set of LOs can be assigned according to a specific learning strategy. This association between LOsand the concepts can be achieved by means of LOs descriptors that can be used to tentatively map to the mostadequate set of LO to explore some concepts according to the learning situation (learner’s characteristics,didactical and pedagogical aspects, technological restrictions etc.). Educational descriptors such asInteractivity Type, LearningResourceType, InteractivityLevel, and SemanticDensity as well as the physicalaspects (Format, Size, Location, Operating System or Browser requirements, InstallationRemarks andDuration) are media centric, and generally are closed packed, which demands additional work to decomposeand reuse them.An example was developed and the evaluation of the approach showed promising results. The ontologydeveloped for testing the approach aimed to represent the concepts and their relationships for an ElementaryClassical Mechanics sub <strong>do</strong>main. Four professors were considered to validate the sequence generated by theprototype.However, our proposal has some limitations. The first one comes from the fact that the selection of LOs isexecuted manually, however, from the use Semantic Web tools, such as SPARQL query language, selectioncould be <strong>do</strong>ne by means of the agent technology executing on LOM expressed in OWL DL. The secondlimitation is due to the fact that our model is a simplified one, <strong>do</strong> not encompassing other intrinsicrelationships among the concepts of a complex <strong>do</strong>main as Physics. The third limitation comes from the33
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISreduced scope of the test scenario, whose main result was to confirm, in some aspects, the correctness of theproposed ontology from the teacher practice standpoint. These limitations are going to be addressed in futureworks.It is important to emphasize, however, the quality of the sequencing strategy as it was equivalent to theprofessors’ answer. This is a promising approach to guide students to automatically find the concepts that arenecessary in order to learn a specific subject. Additional work is necessary to automatically make a completesequence of learning material according to the learning situation.REFERENCESAntoniou, G. et al. 2008. A Semantic Web Primer. The MIT Press, New York.Aroyo, L., et al. Using Topic Maps for eLearning. In Proceedings of The IASTED International Conference onComputers and Advanced Technology in Education, CATE 2003.Barritt, C. et al, 1999. Cisco Systems Rusable lnformation Object Strategy. Definition, Creation Overview andGuidelines. Version 3.0, June 25, 1999. Cisco Systems Inc.Barthes, R. Élements de Sémiologie. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1964. Portuguese translation by Blikstein, r. S Paulo:Editora Cultrix, 1974.Barthes, R. et al. An Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative. New Literary History, VoI. 6, No. 2, OnNarrative and Narratives (Winter, 1975).Bollobás, B. 1998. Modern Graph Theory. Springer Verlag, BerlinChandler, D. 2001. Semiotics for Beginners. Available http://www.aber.ac.ukjmedia/Documents/S4B, retrieved in June,2010.Chatman, S. Toward a Theory of Narrative. New Literary History, VoI. 6, No. 2, 1975.Dijk, T. A. Action, Action Description, and Narrative. New Literary History, VoI. 6, No. 2, (Winter, 1975).Eco, U. 1976. A theory of Semiotics. Valentino Bompiani & Co., Milan.Gagné, R., et al. Principles of Instructional Design. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. New York, 1974.Gruber, T. Thomas R. Gruber (1993). Toward principles for the design of ontologies used for knowledge sharing. InInternational Journal of Human-Computer Studies, Volume 43, Issue 5-6 Nov./Dec. 1995, Pages: 907-928Hagood, C., et al. Investigating a thematic approach to narrative generation. In: Proceedings of International Workshopon Dynamic and Adaptive Hypertext: Generic Frameworks, Approaches and Techniques (DAH'09) 2009.Hjelmslev, L. Prolegômenos a uma teoria da Linguagem. In Ensaios Linguísticos, 91-92. São Paulo: Ed. Perspectiva,1974.IEEE, 2002. Learning Object Metadata Specification. Available at Itsc.ieee.org/wgI2/20020612-Final- LOM-Draft.htmlIMS. IMS Learning Design, Best Practices and Implementation Guide. IMS Global Learning Consortium, 2003.Martin, M. Le Langage cinématographique. Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1990.May, M. 2007. A Semiotic Framework for the Semantics of Digital Multimedia Learning Objects. In: 14th InternationalConference on Image Analysis and Processing Workshops, 2007. ICIAPW 2007, pp. 33-38.Metz. C. Essays sur la signification au cinéma. Paris: Editions Klincksieck, 1968. Portuguese translation A Significaçãono Cinema, São Paulo: Ed. Perspectiva, 1972.Motelet, O. Improving Learning Object Metadata Usage during Lesson Authoring. PhD Thesis. Universidad del Chile,2007.Peirce, C. S. et al. Phylosophical Wittings of Peirce. Dover. New York, 1955.Rodrigues, D. S. S. et al., R. N. A Strategy for Achieving Learning Content Repurposing. In: Lecture Notes in ComputerScience. Berlin, Springer- Verlag, 2008.Saussure, F. Curso de Lingüistica Estrutural, p. 91. Editorial Losada. Buenos Aires: 1945.Wiley, D. et al. The Instructional Use of Learning Objects. Agency for Instructional Technology. Association forEducational Communications & Technology, 2002.Yeh et al. 2004. Towards a Semiotic Framework for Using Technology in Mathematics Education: The Case of 3DGeometry. International Conference on Computers in Education34
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010EXPANDING A KNOWLEDGE MODELREPRESENTATION TO BUILD CULTURALLYMEANINGFUL ANALOGIES FOR WEB APPLICATIONSDouglas O. de Freitas, Marcos A. R. Silva, Johana M. R. Villena, Bruno A. Sugiyama,Gilberto Astolfi and Junia C. AnacletoFederal University of São CarlosWashington Luis KM 235, São Carlos, SP, BrazilABSTRACTIn this paper, we describe a strategy to improve the Minsky’s model in order to be used in the search for analogies. Weinvestigated the Gentner’s theory to understand how the process of finding analogy is. We realized that the relations usedby Gentner are flexible and dynamic. Thus, we created other kind of relation that we named as meta-relation which isobtained through Minsky’s model. We believe that this new kind of relation is more meaningful because it expressesaction and characteristic which, according to Gentner, both attribute more semantic to relation. We made twoexperiments to search for analogies in the commonsense semantic network that uses Minsky’s model: the first one usedjust this model while in the second the meta-relations were added. Through these experiments, we observed that the useof meta-relation increased the quality of the results.KEYWORDSe-Learning, Analogies, Minsky’s Model, Gentner’s Theory, Meaningful Learning.1. INTRODUCTIONThe research and the use of semantics in computer applications is a subject that has been gaining prominence.Assigning meaning to information or understanding data and knowing how to manipulate them are importantfactors for the most effective use of the computer (Liu and Singh, 2004).One way to enable the effective use of semantics, especially for a better understanding of information bypeople, is to understand how people see some information, how they know it, perceive it and believe in it.Because of that, it is important to find ways to collect, store and process cultural knowledge. An example isthe semantic network from the OMCS-Br project that uses cultural knowledge to develop cultural sensitivecomputer applications taking into consideration the user’s cultural background. Through this semanticnetwork, it is possible to obtain some resources that can support on creating these contextualizedapplications, such as analogy.A practical use is in educational application where contextualizing it is one of the main pedagogicalissues found in the literature and commonsense knowledge can be used for this purpose (Ausubel, 1968;Freinet, 1993; Freire, 1996). Ausubel’s Theory defends a similar approach. According to Ausubel, in order topromote a meaningful learning, teachers should make the students attach the new piece of knowledge to theknowledge which is already in their cognitive structure.Analogy is an example of a way that allows the teacher presenting a new subject according to thestudent’s cultural knowledge. The teacher can explain through analogy new concepts considering otherconcepts that the student already know. This facilitates the learning and the memorization. For instance, innutrition area, the teacher can explain about a Brazilian fruit called Jabuticaba building an analogy with agrape: both of them are fruit, small, sweet and round. These characteristics are part of the students’ commonsense, thus it is important that teachers are aware of this kind of knowledge in order to explain a new onebased on the ones that were already assimilated.35
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISIn this context, the main goal of this work is to improve a commonsense semantic network in order toperform better searches for analogies and to create meaningful analogies. We intend, through this strategy, tohelp teachers promoting meaningful learning.The paper is structured as follows: the first section shows an overview of the OMCS-Br Project that wea<strong>do</strong>pt its commonsense semantic network that use Minsky’s model. The second one describes Gentner’stheory about analogy. The following section provides the experiments and our strategies to improve thesearch for analogies. The last section shows some conclusions of this work.1.1 OMCS-Br ProjectThe Open Mind Common Sense in Brazil (OMCS-Br) project, developed by the Advanced InteractionLaboratory (LIA) at Federal University of São Carlos (UFSCar) in collaboration with Media Lab fromMassachusetts Institute Technology (MIT), has been collected common sense of general public through aweb site which can be accessed by anyone through http://www.sensocomum.ufscar.br. The database isaccessible over the internet through an API for computer applications. This common sense database encodesthe relationships between statements generated by people though the common sense database project andrepresents cultural knowledge about specific subject. Of particular relevance to our project is that thedatabase provides demographics that allow us to access the beliefs, attitudes and vocabulary specific to aparticular age group in a particular geographic location.The website collects data from its visitors. After entering, a person can register and have access to variousactivities and themes available for them on this website in order to complete statements about the themes.Some examples of themes are Personal Preferences, Slang, Children Universe, Sexuality, Health and others.Statements are completed by filling in a template sentence pattern such as in Figure 1.Figure 1. Example of two templates where the dynamic part is filled in by the computer, the fixed part is the querystructure and the last part is where the user fills in their thoughtsWords or phrases are typed in by the users in natural language, parsed and stored. The parser derivestokens from the text and then interprets them using an engine that is based on Marvin Minsky´s model(Minsky, 1987) about knowledge representation. This engine generates a semantic network calledConceptNet (Liu and Singh, 2004), shown in Figure 2.The ConceptNet organizes the knowledge in a graph where nodes are the concepts and the directionallinks represent relations. In this paper, the relations based on Minsky’s model were defined as Minsky’srelation by us. For example, the template “banana is used for eat” (Figure 1) has a link labeled “UsedFor”between “banana” and “eat”. This template is stored as a tuple: {UsedFor “banana” “eat”}. There are othersrelations, such as: IsA, MotivationOf, DefinedAs, CapableOf, etc. as defined by Minsky (Liu and Singh,2004). His model has shown to be useful for culturally sensitive software development (Singh, 2002).Figure 2. Example of a semantic network36
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010This ConceptNet intends to reflect a simplistic, usable structure related to human cognitive structure. Itcan support people, through the information encoded, to plan, to execute and to complete an activity. For ourpurposes, it is not important whether the “facts” are true or not that are encoded in the database; in fact, theywill likely be inconsistent as it is the perceptions and beliefs which is what we are after.2. GENTNER’S THEORYGentner worked with Natural Language Processing (NLP) to identify methods to discover literal similarity,analogies, metaphors and abstraction (Gentner, 1983). The base that she works is different from OMCS-Brbase which uses Minsky’s relations to connect and store concepts. The main challenge that we consider is tounderstand Gentner’s theory and map it to be applied in order to expand the semantic network of the OMCS-Br project to improve analogies search.Analogy is a comparison between source <strong>do</strong>main and target <strong>do</strong>main relations, i.e. edges (relations)(Gentner 1983). For example, it is shown in Figure 3 one example that illustrates an analogy between Earthand Electron because there is the same relation (revolve) in both independently of the others concepts. Inother words, Earth and Electron revolve around the sun and the nucleus, respectively.Figure 3. Two analogy concepts3. MINSKY AND GENTNERMinsky and Gentner use different relations to map the knowledge. Gentner uses actions and properties tocompose relations. Therefore, the number of relations are bigger and more specific than Minsky’s one, whichcontain approximately 20 relation (Liu and Singh, 2004), augmenting the concept semantics.In next section, we present the first experiment using Gentner theory applied in OMCS-Br base.3.1 First ExperimentWe developed a prototype to investigate analogies in the OMCS-Br semantic network. We choose ran<strong>do</strong>mlya concept that we want to look for analogies, in this case the concept “banana”. Through this concept theprototype generated a specific semantic network related to the concept “banana” as shown in Table 1:Table 1. Specific semantic network of the concept bananaFormal SpecificationRelation(Concept1, Concept2)LocationOf(banana, fruit bowl) R1 (X, Y1)UsedFor(banana, eat) R2 (X, Y2)IsA(banana, fruit) R3 (X, Y3)PropertyOf(banana, yellow) R4 (X, Y4)MadeOf(ice cream, banana) R5 (Y5, X)MadeOf(cake, banana) R6 (Y6, X)Table 1 shows just the first six results as example. With the result of Table 1, the prototype search fordifferent concepts that match just each relation R in the whole semantic network of the OMCS-Br project.For each relation, in Table 1, we will show three matches in Table 2:With these matches we can define a score which represents the times that a concept is linked through thesame relation (R). For example, the score between “banana” and “legume” is 1, because they have therelation LocationOf in common. Table 2 shows the concepts with higher score based in the results of Table 1.37
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISIt is important to observe that the concept that has a higher score is more similar to the concept “banana”,i.e. more analogous.Table 2. Matches for analogy between relations related to banana with other conceptsFirst Search:LocationOf(banana, fruit bowl)LocationOf(car, gas station)LocationOf(paper, library)LocationOf(legume, refrigerator)Third Search:IsA(banana, fruit)IsA(car, vehicle)IsA(<strong>do</strong>g, animal)IsA(woman, human)Fifth Search:MadeOf(ice cream, banana)MadeOf(cheese, milk)MadeOf(bacon, pig)MadeOf(table, wood)Second Search:UsedFor(banana, eat)UsedFor(<strong>do</strong>ll, play)UsedFor(computer, work)UsedFor(pencil, write)Fourth Search:PropertyOf(banana, yellow)PropertyOf(woman, pretty)PropertyOf(cat, cute)PropertyOf(fruit, sweet)Taking into consideration the matches of Table 2, the prototype gives us the analogies concepts based inMinsky’s relation. Some examples are illustrated in Table 3.Table 3. Analogous concepts related to banana order by ScoreConcept Score Number of Search (Table 2)Car 2 first and thirdWoman 2 third and fourthDog 1 thirdLegume 1 FirstObserving the results of Table 3, we can see that the concepts are analogous just because they are linkedthrough the same Minsky’s relations. For example, in the Table 3, we can observe that the concept “car” wasconsidered analogy because it has two same relations (LocationOf and IsA) but these relations are notspecific, i.e., there are a lot of concepts in semantic network with them although we <strong>do</strong> not identify analogyamong the concepts. It is worth saying that these results showed us that it is not feasible to consider anyMinsky’s relation to generate analogies. Thus, things like car, <strong>do</strong>g and woman are considered by thisprototype analogous to banana. On the other hand, we did not consider that a good result. The kind ofrelations used by Gentner are more specific and give a stronger semantic. In order to allow that Minsky’srelation could have these characteristics, we propose a strategy that combines Gentner’s theory and Minsky’smodel to expand its potential. This strategy that we named as meta-relation is described in the next section.4. DEFINITION OF META-RELATIONThe relations used in Gentner’s theory are flexible and have a semantic that can be an action or acharacteristic, while Minsky’s relations are established, approximately 20 (Liu and Singh, 2004). In order toenhance the potential of Minsky’s model, we create a strategy to combine his relations to generate moreflexible and specific ones named meta-relations.The meta-relations have two properties: flexibility and specificity. Flexibility because the meta-relationsare created from the set of relations and concepts in semantic network and when it increases, new metarelationscan be generated. Specificity because in the meta-relation there are the same characteristics as theones Gentner uses, such as action and/or characteristic.One way to create a meta-relation is combine the relations CapableOf and UsedFor from Minsky’srelations, represented as follow:38
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010The example of meta-relation that we defined is represented by Y, in the formula above. To create it wecombine two Minsky’s relations (CapableOf and UsedFor) because we perceive that they complement eachother. If X 1 is capable of Y and if X 2 is used for Y, then X 1 and X 2 can be connected through the actionrepresented by Y.For example, to create a meta-relation to the sentence “a monkey eats banana”, considering the sentencespresented in Figure 1, there is the possibility of creating the meta-relation “eat”. The mapping to define ameta-relation is described as follow:CapableOf(monkey, eat) + UsedFor(banana, eat) = eat(monkey, banana)The complementation cited above can be observed, in this case, because CapableOf express the ability ofa concept and UsedFor express for what a concept is used for. In other words, if the monkey is capable of eatand the banana is used for eat, then it is possible to create the relation that express the monkey eats banana,i.e. eat(monkey, banana).Thus, we can observe that the meta-relation “eat” is more specific than the Minsky’s relations, because itexpress an action that, according to Gentner’s theory, give us more semantic. Different from Minsky’srelation, where different concepts can be linked through the same relation, the meta-relation “eat” involves a<strong>do</strong>main of concepts more specific (only the ones involved with this action).In order to observe the potential of the meta-relation, which apparently has more semantic than Minsky’srelation, we decided to make the second experiment in order to investigate if the use of the meta-relation canimprove the analogies results.4.1 Second ExperimentWe choose the same concept used in the first experiment, “banana”. Through this concept the prototypegenerated a specific semantic network related to the concept “banana”, as shown in Table 4:Table 4. Specific semantic network with meta-relations of the concept bananaRelation(Concept1, Concept2) Formal SpecificationLocationOf(banana, fruit bowl) R1 (X, Y1)UsedFor(banana, eat) R2 (X, Y2)IsA(banana, fruit) R3 (X, Y3)PropertyOf(banana, yellow) R4 (X, Y4)MadeOf(ice cream, banana) R5 (Y5, X)MadeOf(cake, banana) R6 (Y6, X)Cook(mother, banana) MR1(Y7, X)Cut(man, banana) MR2(Y8, X)Eat(monkey, banana) MR3(Y9, X)Buy(supermarket, banana) MR4(Y10, X)Peel(woman, banana) MR5(Y11, X)Table 4 shows just the first six results considering Minsky’s relation and the first fifth results consideringmeta-relations. With the result of Table 4, the prototype search for different concepts that match just eachrelation R and meta-relation MR in the whole semantic network of the OMCS-Br project. For each metarelation,in Table 4, we will show three matches in Table 5. We just added the meta-relation matches becausethe Minsky’s relation matches were presented in Table 2.39
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISTable 5. Matches for analogy between relations related to banana with other conceptsSixth Search:Cook(mother, banana)Cook(chief, pasta)Cook(grandmother, potato)Cook(human, pasta)Eighth Search:Eat(monkey, banana)Eat(rabbit, carrot)Eat(child, chips)Eat(<strong>do</strong>g, meat)Tenth Search:Peel(woman, banana)Peel(knife, carrot)Peel(peeler, potato)Peel(woman, potato)Seventh Search:Cut(man, banana)Cut(knife, meat)Cut(scissors, vegetable)Cut(peeler, potato)Ninth Search:Buy(supermarket, banana)Buy(butchery, meat)Buy(restaurant, pasta)Buy(mother, vegetable)It is worth pointing out that the first concept in each meta-relation presented in Table 5 represents entities(Y) that can perform an action (MR) in something (X). For instance, the meta-relation eat(monkey, banana),formally expressed by MR(Y, X), shows that the entity “monkey” can perform the action “eat” in the object“banana”. With these matches we can define a score which represents the times that the same concept has thesame relation (R) or meta-relation (MR) as banana. Table 7 shows the concepts with higher score based inthe results of Table 2 and Table 5.Table 6. Literal similarity concepts to banana order by ScoreConcept Score Number of Search (Table 2and 5)Potato 4 Sixth, seventh tenth and tenthPasta 3 Sixth, sixth and ninthMeat 3 Seventh, eighth and ninthVegetable 2 Seventh and ninthCarrot 2 Eighth and tenthCar 2 first and thirdWoman 2 third and fourthDog 1 thirdLegume 1 FirstComparing the results between the two experiments, we noted that the analogous concepts which have thesame meta-relations are more related with banana because they are capable of receiving the same action. Forexample, “banana” and “potato” are analogous concepts because both can receive the actions of cook, cut andpeel, different from the first experiment, where “banana” and “car” are analogous concepts because they havethe LocationOf and IsA relation.Of course other meta-relation can be considered to refine the results in order to augment the specificity.The results are just one example to illustrate the potential of the meta-relation, i.e. considering more metarelationthe results will be stronger.5. CONCLUSIONThe early results presented show evidences that the Gentner’s theory to search for analogies in the semanticnetwork of the OMCS-Br Project was not suitable. Because, for analogy, it is necessary to use a network withmore semantic, provided by the addition of the meta-relation created by the combination of Minsky’srelations.It is important to explain that nowadays there are Minsky’s relations and meta-relations in the OMCS-Brsemantic network in order to search literal similarity and analogies. On the other hand, in this paper, we just40
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010presented the use of the meta-relation in analogy search because we consider that using only Minsky’srelation <strong>do</strong>es not bring expressive results.Searching analogies using meta-relation showed good results because when there is the same metarelationin two or more concepts, they are more analogous than Minsky’s relation because meta-relationexpress action and characteristic which according Gentner both attribute more semantic to relations.Nowadays, our prototype <strong>do</strong>es analogy search using Minsky’s relation and meta-relation. Because of that,the score is the sum of the both results. On the other hand, in our second experiment there was not this sum,because there were not common concepts between Minsky’s relation and meta-relation results as shown inTable 6. Nevertheless, this sum is possible and it helps to attribute more semantic to results.A weak point of the meta-relations presented in this work lies in its creation. The meta-relations arecreated by matches between Minsky’s relations, so the meta-relation <strong>do</strong>es not cover all types of concepts,only those who are able to <strong>do</strong> some kind of action, expressed by the relation CapableOf. For future work, weintend to investigate even more Minsky’s relations to create new matches to generate meta-relations.Finally, the commonsense semantic network of OMCS-Br combined with the Minsky’s relation andmeta-relation allow a better search for analogies which any educational computational application can use.For example, there is a computational application called Cognitor (Buzatto et al, 2009) which any educatorcan create on-line learning material taking into consideration students’ commonsense knowledge. This toolcan provide a list of analogous concepts, considering as parameter concept inputted by the teacher. Throughthis material, students can easily understand the subject of the material because it is explained considering theknowledge that already learned.It is important to mention that through the API any computer application which has access to the internetcan use analogies to build educational materials or any learning content.ACKNOWLEDGEMENTWe thank FAPESP, CNPq and CAPES for partial financial support to this research. We also thank all thecollaborators of the Brazilian Open Mind Common Sense Project who have been building the common senseknowledge base considered in this research.REFERENCESAnacleto, J. C.; Carvalho, A. F. P. De, 2008. Improving Human-Computer Interaction by Developing Culture-sensitiveApplications based on Common Sense Knowledge. Advances in Human-Computer Interaction. Vienna: I-Tech.Ausubel, D.P., 1968. Educational Psychology: A Cognitive View. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York.Freinet, C., 1993. Education Through Work: A Model for Child Centered Learning. Edwin Mellen Press, New York.Buzatto, D.; Anacleto, J. C.; Dias, A. L., 2009: Providing Culturally Contextualized Metadata to Promote Sharing andReuse of Learning Objects. In: ACM International Conference on Design of Communication (SIGDOC 2009).Bloomington, Indiana. p. 163-170.Freire, P., 1996. Pedagogia da Autonomia: Saberes Necessários à Prática Educativa, 31 ed. Paz e Terra, São Paulo.Gentner, D., 1983. Structure-mapping: A theoretical framework for analogy. In: Cognitive Science 7(2), (1983): 155-170.Go<strong>do</strong>i, M. S., 2007. Uso de conhecimento de senso comum na educação para a geração de similaridades e analogias.Master's degree dissertation, UFSCar.Silva, M. A. R. ; Anacleto, J. C., 2009. Promoting Collaboration through a Culturally Contextualized Narrative Game. In:Filipe, J.; Cordeiro, J.. (Org.). Enterprise Information Systems - ICEIS 2009. 1 ed. Berlin: Springer-Verlag, v. 1, p.870-881.Liu, H. and Singh, P. 2004. ConceptNet - A Practical Commonsense Reasoning Tool-Kit. BT Technology Journal 22, 4(Oct. 2004), 211-226.Minsky, M., 1987. The society of mind, Simon & Schuster.Singh, P., 2002. The public acquisition of commonsense knowledge. In: AAAI Spring symposium on acquiring (andusing) linguistic (and world) knowledge for information access. Palo Alto, CASingh, P.; Barry, B.; Liu, H., 2004. “Teaching machines about everyday life”. BT Technology Journal, v. 22, n. 4. pp.227-240.41
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISA FEASIBILITY STUDY ON DISTRIBUTEDCOOPERATIVE OCR SYSTEMS USING WeOCRHideaki GotoCyberscience Center, Tohoku UniversityAoba-ku, Sendai-shi, 980-8578 JapanABSTRACTCollaboration of the network and optical character recognition (OCR) has a great potential to extend the applications ofOCR and to open up new vistas in some future services using OCR. We presented the basic ideas of synergetic OCRsystem in 2004, and developed a platform called WeOCR to realize the web-based OCR services. The number ofaccesses has soared since the experimental servers were put into service in 2005. This paper provides an overview of thecurrent WeOCR system, shows some updated statistics, and describes the knowledge obtained through a feasibility studyon the web-based OCR system using WeOCR. The unique survey conveys some useful hints for future development ofnetwork-oriented OCRs, not limited to WeOCR, and potential OCR applications in the Grid/Cloud Computing era.KEYWORDSWeb-based OCR, WeOCR, OCRGrid, character recognition, <strong>do</strong>cument analysis, Cloud Computing1. INTRODUCTIONCollaboration of the network and optical character recognition (OCR) is expected to be quite useful formaking lightweight applications not only for desktop computers but also for small gadgets such as SmartPhones and PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants). For example, some mobile phones with character recognitioncapabilities became available in the market (Koga 2005). Another mobile phone with a real-time English-Japanese translator was proposed by a Japanese company. Although it has a simple, built-in OCR, it requiresa large language dictionary provided by an external server on the <strong>Internet</strong>. Another example is wearablevision system with character recognition capabilities for visually-impaired people (Goto 2009). Due to thelimitations of the hardware, it is very difficult to put a large character-set data and a dictionary for languageprocessing into such small gadgets or wearable devices. In addition, we cannot use a sophisticated characterrecognition method because the processor power is quite limited. Thus, use of network can be beneficial tovarious applications.The network-based architecture has some advantages from the researchers' and developers' points of viewas well. Recent OCR systems are becoming more and more complicated, and the development requiresexpertise in various fields of research. Building and studying a complete system has become very difficult fora researcher or a small group of people. A possible solution is to share software components as web services.Since the programs run on the server sides, people can provide computing (pattern recognition) powers toothers without having their source codes or executables open (Lucas 2005, Goto 2006).We presented a new concept of network-oriented OCR systems called Synergetic OCR (Goto 2004), andproposed a revised version called OCRGrid in 2006 (Goto 2006). Since year 2004, we have been designing aweb-based OCR system, called WeOCR, as a HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol)-based implementation ofOCRGrid. The WeOCR system was put into service in 2005. To our knowledge, there was no commercialweb-based OCR service at that time. In addition, WeOCR is currently the only Grid-oriented, cooperativeOCR platform in the world. One of the biggest concerns with web-based OCR is about the privacy of<strong>do</strong>cuments. A simple question arises – Do people really want to use a system like that? To answer thisquestion, we need to investigate the usage of the system.42
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010In this paper, we provide an overview of the current WeOCR system, show some updated statisticsfollowing our previous survey (Goto 2007), and describe the knowledge obtained through a feasibility studyon the web-based OCR system using WeOCR.2. OVERVIEW OF THE WeOCR SYSTEM2.1 Basic ConceptWe designed OCRGrid to make a lot of OCR engines work cooperatively over the network worldwide togain some synergetic effects such as performance improvement of OCR, to realize multilingual, highfunction,sophisticated OCR systems, and to provide ubiquitous OCR services. The basic concept ofOCRGrid is quite simple. Many OCR servers are deployed on a network as shown in Figure 1. The OCRservers work either independently or cooperatively communicating with each other. A client connects to oneof the OCR servers and sends text images to it. The servers recognize the images and send the recognitionresults (i.e. character codes, etc.) back to the client.Although OCRGrid is expected to be used world-wide over the <strong>Internet</strong>, we may use any networks suchas wireless networks, corporate local area networks (LANs), virtual private networks (VPNs),interconnection networks in parallel servers, and even inter-process communication channels.Some potential applications of the platform have been discussed in (Goto 2004, Goto 2006).Unlike some commercial OCR systems equipped with web user interfaces, we are expecting WeOCRservers will be supported by the communities of researchers, developers, and individuals as well asapplication service providers.cooperative workOCRserverOCRserversend imagesclientreceiverecognition resultsOCRserverclientFigure 1. OCRGrid platformOCRserverOCRserverOCRserverWAN/LAN2.2 WeOCR Toolkit and Server Search SystemMaking a web-based OCR from scratch as an application server requires a lot of expertise about networkprogramming and network security. Since many OCR developers and researchers are not so familiar withnetwork programming, we developed a toolkit to help those people build secure web-based OCRs easily.(See http://weocr.ocrgrid.org/)The <strong>do</strong>cument image is sent from the client computer to the WeOCR toolkit via the Apache web serverprogram. The programs in the toolkit check the image size, examine the file integrity, uncompress the file ifnecessary, convert the image file into a common file format, and invoke the OCR software. The toolkitincludes some programs for protecting the web server from malicious attacks or from the defects of the OCRprograms. The recognition results are converted into HTML data and sent back to the client.To enable the end users to search for appropriate OCR engines easily, we developed a directory-basedserver search system. Figure 2 depicts the overview.43
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISFigure 2. Directory-based server search systemA specification file written by the server administrator is attached to each OCR engine. The specificationfile is written in XML (eXtensible Markup Language) so that automated data handling becomes easy. Thefile describes the specifications of the server, including the location (URL) of the server, the location of theapplication interface program (CGI), the name of the OCR engine used, supported languages, supported<strong>do</strong>cument types, etc. The portal server has a robot program for collecting the specification data automaticallyand periodically from the OCR servers. The robot analyzes each specification file in XML and updates thedatabase entries. A simple search program picks up the OCR servers that match the client's needs from thedatabase and shows the search results.2.3 Available ServersTable 1 shows the WeOCR servers known to the author as of Sept. 2010. All the servers are constructedbased on Open Source OCR software. Although these OCR engines work very well with some limited kindsof <strong>do</strong>cuments, the average performance is basically inferior to that of commercial products. Thanks toTesseract OCR (Smith 2007), the situation is improving.Table 1. WeOCR servers (as of Sept. 2010)Server name/ location Sub-ID Engine Deployed DescriptionMichelleocrad GNU Ocrad Feb 2005 Western European languages/ Japangocr GOCR Nov 2005 Western European languages(formerly known asocr1.sc)Maggieocrad GNU Ocrad Jun 2006 Western European languages/ Japanhocr HOCR Jun 2006 Hebrew OCR(formerly known tesseract Tesseract OCR Aug 2006 English OCRas appsv.ocrgrid) scene Tesseract OCR+ private preprocessorApr 2007 Scene text recognition forEnglish (experimental)Jimbocho/ Japannhocr NHocr Sep 2008 Japanese OCRFeb 2010(mirror of ocrad, tesseract andnhocr on Maggie)Since there was no Open Source OCR for Japanese, we also developed a Japanese OCR engine calledNHocr from scratch to contribute to the developers and end-users who eager to have one. (Seehttp://code.google.com/p/nhocr/)Unfortunately, there is no server outside our laboratory today. Actually, there was a Turkish WeOCRserver with a private (closed) post-processing in Turkey. It was shut <strong>do</strong>wn sometime a couple of years agofor unknown reasons. We have heard from some developers that they are interested in deploying OCRservers. However, none has been completed or opened to the public as far as we know. Although some44
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010commercial web-based OCR services have been launched so far, none of them has WeOCR-compatible WebAPI (Application Programming Interface).The following list shows the web-based OCR services and demos spotted by the author.• LEADTOOLS OCR Service – by LEADTOOLS• Web OCR service – by KYODONETWORKS (for Japanese text only)• OCR Demo – by Startek Technology (for printed numerals only)• ocrNow! – by Wordcraft International Limited (limited trial)• Google Docs – by Google (built-in OCR engine can handle some European languages only)None of them takes into account Grid-based, collaborative use of OCR engines as far as we know.Our idea of “Grid-style open OCR servers” has not been successful yet. For commercial providers, one ofthe reasons is probably the lack of plausible business model. From the researchers’ and developers’ points ofview, the incentives may not be so clear because the return gains are often indirect. Without a lot ofcontributions, we would not be able to achieve collaborative environments or synergetic effects such asmultilingual processing. We need to investigate the feasibility of OCRGrid platform further.3. FEASIBILITY STUDY ON WEB-BASED OCR SYSTEM3.1 Access StatisticsWe are interested in how frequently the WeOCR servers are used. A survey was conducted from Nov. 2005to July 2010. Note that a warning message “Do not send any confidential <strong>do</strong>cuments” is shown on everyimage submission page (portal site). Some detailed information about the privacy is also provided.Figure 3 shows the monthly access counts on the two WeOCR servers, Michelle and Maggie. Thenumbers of requests to six engines (except NHocr) are added together. The line “access” represents thenumbers of requests, while another one “image_ok” shows the numbers of successful image uploading. Thefailures were mainly due to file format mismatch and interrupts of data transmissions.The number of accesses was increasing gradually in the first year, despite the privacy concerns, until thefirst automated client was spotted. Then, the server load began soaring and reached to the current averagearound 400,000 counts/month (July 2010). One of the heavy users seems to be running a program formonitoring numerals shown on displays of some kinds of apparatuses. Figure 4 shows the access counts onthe NHocr server only, which is almost free from an automated client. The server load has reached to thecurrent average 25,000 counts/month.Figure 3. Monthly process counts. (Michelle + Maggie)45
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISFigure 4. Monthly process counts. (NHocr on Maggie)These results show that there are a lot of applications of OCR in which privacy <strong>do</strong>es not matter. Statisticsof processed image types can be found in our previous report (Goto 2007).3.2 Applications of WeOCRThe WeOCR platform has been used in various ways.For example, majority logic is known to be useful for combining multiple classifiers and improving theaccuracy of character recognition (Miyao 2004, Tabaru 1998). We also investigated the accuracyimprovement based on the majority logic using WeOCR (OCRGrid) platform (Goto 2006). Some privateOCR engines were deployed on a local WeOCR platform in our laboratory in the experiments. A clientprogram sends each character image to multiple WeOCR servers, collects the recognition results from theservers, and chooses the most popular character as the top character candidate. A WeOCR server itself canalso become a client. Since the methods based on majority logic require a lot of OCR engines with differentcharacteristics, the Grid-based approach should be quite useful.People in “Seeing with Sound – The vOICe –” project (Meijer 1996) have made an e-mail interface formobile camera phones. The server receives an image from the mobile phone and sends the recognized textdata back to the user. An OCR engine on the WeOCR platform is used as a back-end server. The system wasoriginally developed in order to help visually-disabled people read text on signboards, etc. Any OCRdevelopers can help those people through the WeOCR platform.Table 2 shows the WeOCR application software/server known to the author so far. These applications useWeOCR platform instead of a built-in OCR library. All the applications except the last one were madeindependently by developers having no special relationship to our laboratory. In addition, some otherexperimental WeOCR client programs and web services have been spotted on the <strong>Internet</strong>. Thus, ourWeOCR platform has been accepted as a useful building block by many developers, and created new OCRapplication design and usage styles suitable in the Grid/Cloud Computing era. Actually, any developers canadd OCR functions to their programs quite easily using WeOCR platform.A potential future application of WeOCR (OCRGrid) platform is multilingual processing. Thousands oflanguages exist all over the world. ABBYY FineReader, one of the world’s leading OCR packages, canhandle around 180 languages so far. However, the spell checking is supported for about 40 languages only. Itseems impossible to have a large number of languages and dialects supported by OCR engines from only acouple of companies. WeOCR platform can provide a lot of community-supported OCR servers withlocalized dictionaries. We will be able to obtain better recognition results, since we can expect that theservers for a language are better maintained in the countries where the language is used. In addition, having alot of OCR servers for various languages are very useful for research on multilingual OCR systems.46
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010Table 2. WeOCR client software. (as of Sept. 2010)Name Platform DescriptionThe vOICe server (server) e-mail interface for mobile camera phonesWordSnapOCR Android Proof-of-concept application for word input using camera onAndroidKanji YomiEigo YomiKanji Yomi LiteAndroidKanji/English reader with online Kanji-English dictionary look-upfunctionC’est What? Android, iPhone A mobile OCR & translation application for iPhone and Android<strong>WWW</strong>JDIC for Android Android frontend for <strong>WWW</strong>JDICAndroidReading Assistant– online editionWin<strong>do</strong>ws A proof-of-concept toy Reading Assistant for helping the visuallyimpaired(developed by the author)3.3 Extensions of WeOCR and OCR EngineDuring the WeOCR usage observation, we have recognized a need for single-character recognition inJapanese and Chinese. Looking-up individual Kanji (or Han character) is a popular way of finding themeaning, stroke order, similar characters, etc. Figure 5 shows an example of single Kanji look-up.Although single-character recognition mode was taken into account in the early design of WeOCRtoolkit, we have revised the API and defined a new data structure so that client programs can receive sometop candidates of characters. We have also added single-character mode to the OCR engine NHocr to fulfillthe demands in some applications. NHocr produces a few top candidates of characters, and this functionallows the end-user to choose a correctly recognized character.Figure 5. Character recognition and Kanji look-up by Kanji Yomi4. CONCLUSIONSWe have introduced WeOCR system, which was designed to realize a distributed, cooperative, synergeticOCR environment, and described the results of a feasibility study on the web-based OCR system. We havebeen operating the world’s first and only Grid-style web-based OCR servers for almost five years. Accordingto the usage statistics, the number of accesses to the servers has soared significantly. The followingconclusions have been drawn.• There are a lot of applications of OCR in which privacy <strong>do</strong>es not matter. Many people are willing touse online OCR despite the privacy concerns. Actually, some commercial web-based OCR services havebeen launched these couple of years.47
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADIS• WeOCR system has become a nice building block for various OCR application software / servers inthe Grid/Cloud Computing era. Some interesting applications have been developed and become popular,especially on Smart Phones. In other words, WeOCR has been successful in expanding OCR applications andin providing developers with ready-to-use OCR engines.• Full-featured OCR with strong <strong>do</strong>cument layout analysis is obviously desired. On the other hand,even a single-character recognition feature has been proved to be quite useful in various applications.• Despite the open, Grid-oriented design of WeOCR, our laboratory is currently the only serviceprovider. None of the commercial servers is known to have WeOCR-compatible Web API. Our idea of“Grid-style open OCR servers” has not been successful yet.• A popular complaint from the users is about the precision of the OCR engines. As long as we useOpen Source OCR engines, the precision is limited in general. There is an urgent need to provide the userswith better OCR engines online.If some state-of-the-art OCR engines are registered, WeOCR (OCRGrid) system will be very useful notonly for end-users worldwide but also for researchers and developers working on OCR systems. We wouldlike to encourage many developers and researchers to provide WeOCR services of their own. Our futurework includes investigating the feasibility of OCRGrid platform further, developing some applications andarchitectures to draw synergetic effects, and refinement of WeOCR API and toolkit.ACKNOWLEDGEMENTThis work was supported by Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research No.18650036 mainly, and No.22300194partially, from JSPS, Japan. The author would like to thank all the developers of WeOCR client applicationsand services.REFERENCESGoto, H. and Kaneko, S., 2004. Synergetic OCR : A Framework for Network-oriented Cooperative OCR Systems.Proceeding Image and Vision Computing New Zealand 2004 (IVCNZ2004), pp.35-40.Goto, H., 2006. OCRGrid : A Platform for Distributed and Cooperative OCR Systems. Proceedings of 18th InternationalConference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR2006), pp.982-985.Goto, H., 2007. An Overview of the WeOCR System and a Survey of its Use. Proceeding Image and Vision ComputingNew Zealand 2007 (IVCNZ2007), pp.121-125.Goto, H. and Tanaka, M., 2009. Text-Tracking Wearable Camera System for the Blind, Proceedings of 10thInternational Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR 2009), Volume 1, pp.141-145.Koga, M. et al, 2005. Camera-based Kanji OCR for Mobile-phones: Practical Issues. Proceedings of 8th InternationalConference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR 2005), pp.635-639.Meijer, P., 1996. Seeing with Sound – The vOICe – (website), http://www.seeingwithsound.com/Miyao, H. et al, 2004. Printed Japanese Character Recognition Using Multiple Commercial OCRs. Journal of AdvancedComputational Intelligence, Vol.8, pp.200-207.Smith, R., 2007. An overview of the Tesseract OCR Engine. Proceedings of 9th International Conference on DocumentAnalysis and Recognition (ICDAR 2007), Volume II, pp.629-633.Tabaru, H. and Nakano, Y., 1998. A Printed Japanese Recognition System Using Majority Logic. Proceedings of ThirdIAPR Workshop on Document Analysis Systems (DAS’98), pp.185-188.48
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010HEALTH 2.0 IN PRACTICE: A REVIEW OF GERMANHEALTH CARE WEB PORTALSRoland Görlitz, Benjamin Seip, Asarnusch Rashid and Valentin ZachariasFZI Forschungszentrum Informatik,Karlsruhe, GermanyABSTRACTContemporary studies show that the usage of health-related web portals increases continuously. Additionally, theinternet’s usage is in a transition towards more user participation by allowing more and more user generated content. Inthe area of health care this development is commonly called health 2.0; a development that leads more patients and<strong>do</strong>ctors to actively participate and contribute on health portals their virtual communities. This results in numerousopportunities for health care providers to capitalize on online health communities.In order to aid the understanding of this emerging trend, this paper presents an extensive analysis of up-to-date Germanweb portals that provide health-related content from a user perspective. They are classified as well as clustered accordingto their characteristics regarding usage of web 2.0 technologies and health care specialization. With this clustere<strong>do</strong>verview of the current health care web portals this paper tries to clarify the term health 2.0. Additionally, general designoptions for health care portals are drawn from the analyzed web portals and state-of-the-art literature to aid in thedevelopment of new health care portals.KEYWORDSHealth 2.0, Medicine 2.0, e-Health, health care, virtual community, review1. INTRODUCTIONWith emerging new technologies and applications the use of the internet changed drastically in the course ofthe past decade giving rise to the term “Web 2.0” (O'Reilly, 2007). In the frame of web 2.0, many derivateshave appeared, for example music 2.0, enterprise 2.0, science 2.0, health 2.0 and medicine 2.0. The latter twoare found to be denoted very similar and both terms are generally attributed to eHealth, which already poppedup in the context of telemedicine in the year 2000 (Hughes et al., 2008, Mitchell, 2000). It is usedinconsistently and unfortunately there is no clear definition, but due to the strong influence of the internet, itsconception is gradually shifting to health care practices based upon usage of telecommunication and internet.Nevertheless, eHealth, in contrast to medicine 2.0 and health 2.0, <strong>do</strong>es not imply collaboratively generatingand utilizing content. In particular, health 2.0 is characterized by an interactive information sharing and usercentereddesign. Nevertheless, it is not defined what extent of user-centered design health 2.0 generallyimplies.According to contemporary studies, the use of health-related web portals increases continuously. Due toadvancing health 2.0, the user generated content (UCG) is becoming more and more important (Kummervoldet al., 2008). This offers numerous chances, because the <strong>do</strong>ctor is an expert in identifying a disease, but thepatient is an expert in experiencing it. In this context there are many publications that discuss the influence ofthe internet on medical practice in general and on individual consumers focusing on information quality, trustand acceptance. Furthermore, there are studies that focus on social interaction and benefits of crowd sourcingin health care. However, there are no publications that review and analyze health-related web portals’utilization of web 2.0 technologies and virtual communities, thus the importance of user generated content intheir business model.This paper presents a broad review of German health-related web portals. The range of incorporatedsocial media is analyzed from a user perspective and they are clustered according to their degree ofspecialization in health care and potential interaction between users. Due to this two-dimensional49
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADIScharacterization, the websites are clustered according to their purpose, offered services and means ofparticipation, which facilitates the comparability among the portals. Individual portals are then analyzed witha focus on the utilization of web 2.0 components and virtual communities. Then a set of design options thatallows describing the web portal’s business model according to a framework for virtual communitiesdescribed by Leimeister et al. (Leimeister and Krcmar, 2004). Thus, by reviewing contemporary healthrelatedwebsites, design options for virtual community business models in health care are identified.2. HEALTH CARE AND THE WEB 2.0In the last decade the internet started to be perceived as an important source of information and naturally italso became a source for patients seeking health information (Wilkins, 1999, Baker et al., 2003, Diaz et al.,2002). Since health information are vital, many publications assess the quality of health information on theinternet (Impicciatore et al., 1997, Eysenbach, 2002, Baker et al., 2003, Wilkins, 1999), assess thetrustworthiness of experts performing these quality assessments (Craigie et al., 2002) and evaluate its effecton transforming the traditional system of medical primary care (Murray et al., 2003, Cross, 2008).However, with the upcoming of web 2.0 technologies, the research focus has switched to the effects ofthe collaborative components of health care websites, which utilize the collective wis<strong>do</strong>m of the crowd. Forexample, Eysenberg discusses the influence of social networks as well as the willingness for patients tocollaborate regarding health related subjects online in his article about medicine 2.0 (Eysenbach, 2008).Because of an increasing number of people that use social networks regularly, an increasing number ofpeople use social networks to find answers to health-related problems. Nevertheless, there was no evidencefound that the influence of virtual communities and online peer to peer interaction did have a significantimpact on the patient’s convalesce (Eysenbach et al., 2004, Griffiths et al., 2009). Furthermore, ininterrelation to the common lack of willingness to pay for content that is available online, people are notwilling to pay for health related content either (Adler, 2006).3. METHODOLOGYThe metho<strong>do</strong>logy of health portal analysis is two-fold and has a qualitative as well as a quantitative approach.The first part consists of a quantitative search for German health-care-related portals, their classification andsubsequent clustering. In the second part, a set of business-oriented design options for community-centeredhealth care portals is identified through qualitatively analyzing particular portals more closely and state-ofthe-artliterature.3.1 Searching, Classifying and Clustering of Health <strong>Portal</strong>sThe search process for the German health-related web portals incorporates three procedures: a web searchusing Google, Bing and Yahoo with the German key words depicted in Table 1 in which the first 20 searchresults are considered excluding pages that <strong>do</strong> not target an audience seeking health-related information,products and services; interviews with healthcare researchers as well as <strong>do</strong>main experts; and examiningrelevant links on the retrieved websites that are identified with the first two procedures.Table 1. Translated German key terms used for the web searchAgeCareCare relativesCare supportCommunityDiseaseDoctorGeriatricsHealthHealth CareHealth insuranceHelping the elderlyLiving in old ageMedicineNursing homeNursing servicePatientPhysicianRelativesRetirement homeSelf-help groupSeniorsWellnessAfter the search process, the identified health-related web portals have to be classified in order tocompare their characteristics as well as cluster similar portals together. Consequently, the portals areclassified along two dimensions, which assess their accentuation of health care and user participation.50
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010Precisely these two dimensions were chosen, because they grasp the core of health 2.0: health care and userparticipation.The results of the classification are plotted in a chart in which the x-axis denotes the “degree of web 2.0,”which represents the user involvement in generating the offered content and the y-axis denotes the websites’“degree of specialization” in health care. The degree of user involvement ranges from 1, indicating no userinvolvement at all, to 5, in which the user provides all the content. The second dimension, the degree ofhealth care specialization also ranges from 1 to 5, whereas 1 is a rather universal portal that among othersalso addresses health care issues (e.g.Wikipedia) and 5 implies a very specialized website focusing on oneaspect of a disease. All the found web portals are classified according to the two introduced dimensions bytwo persons independently. If the two analysts classify one particular website differently, it is assessed againand its characteristics are determined together.After searching and classifying the German web portals with health-related content, they are explorativelyclustered subject to their position in the chart that indicates the individually classified specialization in healthcare and degree of user involvement.3.2 Identifying Design Options for Health <strong>Portal</strong>sIn the second part of the analysis design options for virtual community business models are determinedexploratively. They are grouped according to a framework describing virtual community that was introducedby Leimeister et al. (Leimeister and Krcmar, 2004). Leimeister defines four separate models that need to beconsidered when designing a virtual community, thus the design questions are grouped according to thepartial models for strategy, products and services, actors and revenue. An initial set of design questions isspecified iteratively through analyzing representative web portals that have been identified in the first part.4. RESULTS4.1 Results of the Health Care Web <strong>Portal</strong> ClassificationThe search yielded 246 German web portals with health care related content. The specific URL and thecorresponding degrees of specialization in health care and web 2.0 of each web portal are depicted in Table 2.Table 2. The 246 web portals and the classified values for their degree of web 2.0 and degree of specialization in healthcare denominated X and Y, respectivelyWeb <strong>Portal</strong> X Y Web <strong>Portal</strong> X Y Web <strong>Portal</strong> X Ywww.achse-online.de 1 4,5 gesundheitsinformation.de 1 3 www.pflege.org 1 4www.ahano.de 3 2 www.gesundheits-laden.de 1,5 3 www.pflegeagentur24.de 1 4www.aktiv-in-jedem-alter.de 1 2 www.gesundheitslexikon.de 1 3 www.pflegebedarf24.de 1 4www.aktiv-mit-ms.de 2,5 5 www.gesundleben-apotheken.de 2,5 2,5 www.pflegebeduerftig.de 1 4www.patienten-verband.de 1 3 www.getwellness.ch 1,5 2 www.pflegeberatung24.de 4,5 4www.alzheimerblog.de 5 4,5 www.g-netz.de 1 3 www.pflegeboard.de 4 3www.alzheimerforum.de 2 4,5 www.goldjahre.de 2,5 2 www.pflegedienst.de 1 4www.alzheimerinfo.de 2 4,5 www.gutefrage.net 5 1 www.pflege-erfahrung.de 4 4www.amazon.de 2 1 www.pflegehilfe.biz 1 4 www.pflegehilfe.de 1 4www.pflegedienst.org 1 4 www.helphive.com 5 1 www.pflegenetz.at 1,5 4angehoerigenberatung.de 1 1 www.hilfe-und-pflege.de 1 4 www.pflegenetzwerk.com 1 3www.aok.de 2,5 2,5 www.hilfe.de 2,5 1,5 www.pflegen-online.de 1,5 4www.aok-gesundheitsnavi.de 3 3 www.hilferuf.de 2,5 1 www.pflegestufe.info 1 4,5www.apotheke.de 1 2,5 www.hilfswerk.at 1 1,5 www.pflegeverantwortung.de 2,5 4www.apotheke-am-marktbielefeld.apodigital.de1 2,5 www.illumistream.com 1 2 www.pflegewiki.de 5 4www.apotheken-umschau.de 2,5 2,5 www.ime<strong>do</strong>.de 4 3 www.thema-altenpflege.de 2,5 4www.<strong>do</strong>wn-syndrom.org 1 4,5 www.info-aerzte.de 1 3 www.planetsenior.de 3,5 2www.arzt-atlas.de 1,5 3 www.medizin-2000.de 1 3 www.platinnetz.de 4 2www.arzt-auskunft.de 1,5 3 www.iquarius.de 4 2 www.pro-senior-direkt.de 1 2www.arztverzeichnis.at 1 3 www.jameda.de 2 3 www.qualimedic.de 2,5 3www.awo-pflege-sh.de 1 4 www.karlsruhe.de/fb4.de 1 1 www.qype.de 2 1www.barmer.de 1 2,5 www.kkh-allianz.de 1 2,5 www.rehacafe.de 2,5 2,5www.beauty24.de 1,5 2 www.klinik-krankenhaus.de 1 3 www.richtig-beantragen.de 1 151
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISwww.<strong>do</strong>ktor.ch 2 3 www.nakos.de 1 2 www.wellness.de 1 2www.<strong>do</strong>ktor.de 1 2 www.net<strong>do</strong>ktor.de 1,5 3 www.wellnessfinder.com 1 2<strong>do</strong>ktorlar24.de 2,5 3 www.pflegebegleiter.de 2,5 4 www.wellness-heaven.net 1 2www.drk.de 1 1,5 www.nai.de 1 2,5 www.wellness-united.de 1 2www.ebay.de 5 1 www.neuroonkologie.de 1 5 www.wellness.at 1,5 2Web <strong>Portal</strong> X Y Web <strong>Portal</strong> X Y Web <strong>Portal</strong> X Ywww.elternimnetz.de 1 1 www.lpfa-nrw.de 1 4 www.wellness.info 1 2www.eltern.de 2,5 1 www.onmeda.de 2,5 3 www.w-h-d.de 1 2elternpflege-forum.de 4,5 4 www.optikur.de 2,5 2 www.wellness-lebensart.de 1 2www.seelsorge-im-alter.de 1,5 2 www.otto.de 1,5 1 www.das-wellness-lexikon.de 1 2www.exchange-me.de 5 1 www.paradisi.de 2,5 2 www.wellness-shop.de 1 2www.feierabend.de 2,5 2 www.patient-zu-patient.de 4,5 3 www.wellness.ch 2 2www.fitforfun.de 1,5 2 www.patienteninitiative.de 1 3 www.wikipedia.de 5 1www.forum-demenz.net 1 4,5 www.patienten.com 1 3 www.wir-pflegen.net 2,5 4www.forum-fuer-senioren.de 4 2 www.patienten-erfahrungen.de 4,5 3 www.wissen.de 1 1www.beruf-und-familie.de 1 1 www.krankenhaus.de 1 3 www.wellness-gesund.info 1 2www.besano.de 2,5 3 www.krankenhaus.net 1 3 www.selbsthilfe-online.de 1 2,5www.betanet.de 1 3,5www.krebsforum-fuerangehoerige.de4,5 4 www.selbsthilfe-tirol.at 1 2www.betreut.de 4,5 1 www.pflege-gt.de 1 4 www.lungenemphysem-copd.de 2 5www.bloghaus-ms.de 1,5 5 www.pflege.portal-lb.de 1 4 www.pflegende-angehoerige-sz.de 1 4www.brambor.com 1 4 www.landesseniorenrat-bw.de 1 1 www.selbsthilfegruppe.at 2,5 5www.bremer-pflegedienst.de 1 4 www.last-minute-wellness.com 1 2 www.pflegehilfe24.com 1 4www.arzt.de 1 3 www.leben-mit-ms.de 2,5 5 www.senior-balance.de 1 2www.patienten-beraten.de 1 3 www.lebenshilfe.de 1 3,5 www.senioren-seelsorge.de 2,5 3,5www.careshop.de 2 4 www.lifeline.de 2,5 3 www.senioreninfo.de 1 2www.caritas.de 1 1,5 www.special-pflege.de 2 4 www.senioren-online.net 4 2pflegende-angehoerige.or.at 2,5 4 www.lust-auf-abnehmen.de 2,5 2 www.senioren-ratgeber.de 2,5 2www.copd-aktuell.de 1 5 www.mcgesund.de 2 2 community.seniorentreff.de 4 2www.dak.de 1 2,5 www.medfuehrer.de 2,5 3 www.s-wie-senioren.de 1 2www.altersportal.de 1 2 www.medhost.de 1 3 www.zuhause-altern.de 1 4www.gerontologie-forum.de 4,5 4 www.mediclife.de 1,5 2 www.senioren-fragen.de 1 4www.das-pflegeportal.de 1 4 www.medikompass.de 2 3 www.senioren-hilfe.org 1,5 2www.ernaehrung.de 1 2 http://www.medinfo.de/ 1 3 www.seniorenland.com 1,5 2www.pflegen-zuhause.net 2,5 4 www.medizin.de 1 3 www.seniorennet.de 1 2www.demenz-support.de 1 4,5 www.medizinfo.de 1,5 3 www.seniorenportal.de 4 2www.familienatlas.de 2,5 1 www.medknowledge.de 3,5 3 www.seniorweb.ch 3 2www.deutsche-alzheimer.de 2,5 4,5 http://www.medisuch.de/ 1 3 www.familie-siegen.de 1 1,5www.hirntumorhilfe.de/ 1 4,5 www.mein-pflegeportal.de 2 4 www.spiegel.de 2,5 1www.krebsgesellschaft.de 1 4 www.meine-gesundheit.de 1 2 www.sprechzimmer.ch 1 3www.krebshilfe.de 1 4 www.menschen-pflegen.de 1 4 www.stiftung-gesundheit.de 1 3www.dmsg.de 2,5 5 www.menshealth.de 2,5 2 www.netz-fuer-pflegende.de 1 4www.gliomnetzwerk.de 1 5 www.mobidat.net 1 2,5 www.thema-pflege.de 1,5 4www.deutsches-krankenhausverzeichnis.de1 3 www.mobile-pflegehilfe.de 1 4 www.tk-online.de 1 2,5www.krebsinformation.de 1 4 www.mobilepflege.net 2 4 treffpunkt-pflegende-angehoerige.de 1 4www.medizin-forum.de 4,5 3 ms.ms-angehoerige.de 2,5 4,5 unabhaengige-patientenberatung.de 1 3www.diakonie.de 1 1,5 www.ms-gateway.de 2,5 5 www.unterstuetzungskasse.de 1 2,5www.diaet.com 2,5 2 www.ms-infozentrum.de 1 5 www.vz-bawue.de 1 1www.dmsg.de 2,5 5 www.ms-lexikon.de 1 5 www.vitalitat.de 4 2www.<strong>do</strong>ccheck.de 2,5 3 www.ms-life.de 2,5 5 www.vitalusmedical.de 1 3<strong>do</strong>cinsider.de 4 3 www.ms-world.de 4 5 www.vitanet.de 1 3www.<strong>do</strong>cmed.tv 1 3 my-cure.de 4,5 4,5 www.vivantes.de 1 3www.gesundheitslexikon.com2 3 www.my-hammer.de 5 1 www.weisse-liste.de 1 3www.forumgesundheitspolitik.de1 3 patienten-information.de 1 3 www.wohlfahrtswerk.de 1 4www.geroweb.de 1 4 www.patientenleitlinien.de 1 3 www.wohnen-im-alter.de 1,5 3,5gesundheit-regional.de 2,5 2 www.patienten-scout.de 1 3 www.wohnforumplus.de 1 3,5gesundheitsprechstunde.ch 1 3 www.patientenverfuegung.de 1 3,5 www.pflegeheim.de 1 4www.gesundheit-lifestyle.de 1 2 www.patient-informiert-sich.de 1 3 groups.yahoo.de 4,5 1www.gesundheit.ch 1 2 www.pflege-nachbarschaft.de 2 4 www.yourfirstmedicus.de 2,5 3www.gesundheit.de 2,5 2 www.pflege.de 1,5 4 www.zukunftsforum-demenz.de 1 4,5www.gesundheit-aktuell.de 1 2 www.pflege.net 1,5 4In Figure 1 the distribution of the 246 individually assessed web portals is visualized. While determiningeach portal’s characteristic degree of health care specialization as well as the utilization of web 2.0technologies, it became evident that from a user perspective the offered services and social networkcomponents are difficult to compare. Therefore, the identified web portals are clustered according to theirindividual characteristics into 23 exploratively identified clusters, which is illustrated in Figure 2. Since everyweb portal can be appointed to a definite cluster, a complete analysis of each individual web portal can be52
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010BayerHealthCare and only deals with the disease multiple sclerosis. It offers various information, studies andliterature on multiple sclerosis and allows the users to exchange details of their personal health record and toenter a personal health therapy sponsored by Bayer. The portal is supposedly financially supported by Bayer,but its business model might be self-sustaining due to the offered personal health therapy.4.2 Determining Design OptionIn addition to the health portal review, a catalogue of 70 design options for virtual community portals inhealth care was created. The initial options were iteratively refined by determining their value for exemplarywebsites out of the 16 more closely considered clusters. The final set of design options that have anenormous influence on the business model for health care virtual communities is divided into the fourcategories strategy, products and services, actors and revenue. The main aspects covered by the designoptions are- strategic questions, such as the legal form of the portal, its language and regional or nationalorientation, the used technology and the decision between commercial or non commercial;- questions concerning the products and services, i.e. what is offered, how much user generatedcontent is allowed, is the portal specialized in a certain healthcare <strong>do</strong>main, how to ensure credibility and whatis the actual added value for the future customers;- involved participants and their communication, i.e. is communication between users allowed, areoffline contacts between users desirable, how much are users involved in the community as well as the portalund <strong>do</strong> I want to incorporate third party content;- possible revenue, such as connections between the offered services and products, transactiondependent as well as transaction independent sources of revenue and the question of whether the user or thirdparty members have to pay.5. CONCLUSIONOne striking aspect distilled from the conducted review of German health care web portals is that most of thefound portals are pre<strong>do</strong>minantly “web 1.0,” for which the operator provides and controls all the informationthat is published. In contrast to the possibilities user generated content offers, only a fraction of theinvestigated portals tries to live on these potentials by applying health 2.0. Furthermore, there are manydifferent concepts of user generated content, ranging from simply rating the professionally created content upto creating all the content available on a website. Particularly, portals that deal with specialized health care ordiseases, for example multiple sclerosis or regional care giving support groups, try to employ the most usercentereddesigns and interactive information sharing. Thus, a common definition of health 2.0 cannot bederived.This review’s design options for developing health care community portals offer support for the creationof a new health care web portal. However, the portals have only been analyzed from the user’s point of view.Certain options cannot be defined exactly, because data either from the operator or from other reliablesources is necessary. Therefore, an interesting future approach would be to interview the stakeholders ofparticular health care web portals.Despite its drawbacks the accumulated and reviewed health care portals as well as the created designoptions are a unique snapshot of contemporary German health care portals and a valuable instrument,respectively. In a further step either specific health care portals that incorporate user generated content needto be investigated further by obtaining data from the operators or a newly designed web portal will beprototyped and evaluated.55
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISREFERENCESAdler, K. G. 2006. Web portals in primary care: an evaluation of patient readiness and willingness to pay for onlineservices. Journal of medical <strong>Internet</strong> research, 8, e26.Baker, L., Wagner, T. H., Singer, S. & Bun<strong>do</strong>rf, M. K. 2003. Use of the <strong>Internet</strong> and e-mail for health care information:results from a national survey. JAMA : the journal of the American Medical Association, 289, 2400-6.Craigie, M., Loader, B., Burrows, R. & Muncer, S. 2002. Reliability of health information on the <strong>Internet</strong>: anexamination of experts' ratings. Journal of medical <strong>Internet</strong> research, 4, e2.Cross, M. 2008. How the internet is changing health care. British Medical Journal.Diaz, J. A., Griffith, R. A., Ng, J. J., Reinert, S. E., Friedmann, P. D. & Moulton, A. W. 2002. Patients' Use of the<strong>Internet</strong> for Medical Information. Journal of General Internal Medicine, 17, 180-185.Eysenbach, G. 2002. Empirical Studies Assessing the Quality of Health Information for Consumers on the World WideWeb: A Systematic Review. The Journal of the American Medical Association, 287, 2691-2700.Eysenbach, G. 2008. Medicine 2.0: Social Networking, Collaboration, Participation, Apomediation, and Openness |Eysenbach | Journal of Medical <strong>Internet</strong> Research. Journal of Medical <strong>Internet</strong> Research, 10.Eysenbach, G., Powell, J., Englesakis, M., Rizo, C. & Stern, A. 2004. Health related virtual communities and electronicsupport groups: systematic review of the effects of online peer to peer interactions. British Medical Journal.Griffiths, K. M., Calear, A. L. & Banfield, M. 2009. Systematic review on <strong>Internet</strong> Support Groups (ISGs) anddepression (1): Do ISGs reduce depressive symptoms? Journal of medical <strong>Internet</strong> research, 11, e40.Hughes, B., Joshi, I. & Wareham, J. 2008. Health 2.0 and Medicine 2.0: Tensions and Controversies in the Field. Journalof Medical <strong>Internet</strong> Research, 10.Impicciatore, P., Pan<strong>do</strong>lfini, C., Casella, N. & Bonati, C. 1997. Reliability of health information for the public on theworld wide web: systematic survey of advice on managing fever in children at home. British Medical Journal.Kummervold, P. E., Chronaki, C. E., Lausen, B., Prokosch, H.-U., Rasmussen, J., Santana, S., Staniszewski, A. &Wangberg, S. C. 2008. eHealth trends in Europe 2005-2007: a population-based survey. Journal of medical <strong>Internet</strong>research, 10, e42.Leimeister, J. M. & Krcmar, H. Year. Revisiting the virutal community Business Model. In: Tenth Americas Conferenceon Information Systems, 2004 New York.Mitchell, J. 2000. Increasing the cost-effectiveness of telemedicine by embracing e-health. Journal of telemedicine andtelecare, 16, 16-19.Murray, E., Lo, B., Pollack, L. & Donelan, K. 2003. The Impact of Health Information on the <strong>Internet</strong> on Health Care andthe Physician-Patient Relationship: National U.S. Survey among 1.050 U.S. Physicians. Journal of Medical <strong>Internet</strong>Research, 5.O'reilly, T. 2007. What is Web 2.0: Design patterns and business models for the next generation of software. SocialScience Research Network Working Paper Series, 65, 17-37.Wilkins, A. S. 1999. Expanding <strong>Internet</strong> access for health care consumers. Health Care Management Review, 24, 30-41.56
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010AN INVESTIGATION INTO THE ACCESS AND USAGE OFTHE INTERNET IN KENYARuth Diko Wario and Theo McDonaldDepartment of Computer ScienceUniversity of Free StateABSTRACTPrevious studies on <strong>Internet</strong> activity in Kenya were mostly concerned with numbers: how many hosts, how many users orsubscribers and how much bandwidth. Little is known about what Kenya users actually <strong>do</strong> on the <strong>Internet</strong>, their usagepatterns, and interaction between <strong>Internet</strong> governing frameworks and policies, services and usage demographics andbehaviours. This study is intended to answer these questions and to lay a foundation for future studies in terms of accesstechnologies and behaviour patterns of the Kenya <strong>Internet</strong> population. It provides a basic understanding of the Kenya<strong>Internet</strong> market to institutions involved in the development of the <strong>Internet</strong> market. It thus facilitates the development ofsound policies that will drive Kenya’s information economy. As an outcome of the study a profile of the characteristics ofa typical <strong>Internet</strong> user in Kenya will be provided.KEYWORDS<strong>Internet</strong> access technologies, <strong>Internet</strong> usage patterns, <strong>Internet</strong> user profile, Kenya1. INTRODUCTIONThe use of the <strong>Internet</strong> was first initiated by the military and academics. It has now, in a short while,progressed from being a scientific means of communication to the main method of exchanging informationfor almost everyone (Attaran and Vanlaar, 2000). As a growing and rapidly diffusing technology, the <strong>Internet</strong>is an innovation that promises to become the economic reinforcement for all successful countries in the newglobal economy (National Telecommunications and Information Administration, 2006). Understanding whois connected to the <strong>Internet</strong> and how it is being used is critical to the development of sound policies in thisarea (National Telecommunications and Information Administration, 2006). What is currently facinggovernments and non-governmental organisations alike is the challenge to expand the connectivity of the<strong>Internet</strong> in their different countries to even grassroots level.Previous studies (Centre for Democracy and Technology, 2000; Oyelaran-Oyeyinka and Adeya, 2002),however, revealed that several factors contribute heavily to this challenge. These include the poor state of theunderlying telecommunications infrastructure, high telephone call charges, high <strong>Internet</strong> Service Providers’(ISP) charges, advances in access technologies, policies and regulations around <strong>Internet</strong> market development,and income and socio-economic status. The majority of African countries <strong>do</strong> not possess basic infrastructure.In some cases, efforts have been made, but proved to be insufficient. In others, technological infrastructure isobsolete as a result of the rapid developments of digital technologies (Oyelaran-Oyeyinka and Adeya, 2002).The objective of this study was to investigate the <strong>Internet</strong> access technologies available in Kenya and the<strong>Internet</strong> usage patterns among Kenyan users. The goal was to establish a profile of a typical user, his/herperception of the <strong>Internet</strong> and what the future holds for the <strong>Internet</strong> in Kenya. This study is intended to lay afoundation for future studies in terms of access technologies and behaviour patterns of the Kenya <strong>Internet</strong>population. It provides a basic understanding of the Kenya <strong>Internet</strong> market to institutions involved in thedevelopment of the <strong>Internet</strong> market. It thus facilitates the development of sound policies that will driveKenya’s information economy.The rest of the paper will be structured as follows. In the next section background information of how the<strong>Internet</strong> developed in Kenya will be provided. That will be followed by the metho<strong>do</strong>logy used in conductingthe research. Consequently the results of the study will be provided and discussed.57
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADIS2. BACKGROUND2.1 History of the <strong>Internet</strong> in KenyaMweu (2000) asserts that the <strong>Internet</strong> first became available in Kenya in 1993. As with many other Africanstates, <strong>Internet</strong> development in Kenya was primarily led by Kenyans returning from overseas studies,Western expatriates and personnel of Inter-governmental Organizations (IGOs) and Non-GovernmentalOrganization (NGOs). Individuals in these groups had been exposed to the <strong>Internet</strong> and upon their return toKenya demanded <strong>Internet</strong> access (Centre for International Development and Conflict Management, 1998).Initially, access to the <strong>Internet</strong> was achieved through a Gopher service, which was text-based. Theconnectivity was made possible through either international leased lines or X.25 connections (Mweu, 2000).The African Regional Centre for Computing (ARCC), an NGO based in Nairobi, became the first provider ofWeb-based <strong>Internet</strong> services, based on the Mosaic browser. The connection to the global <strong>Internet</strong> backbonewas via an analogue leased line. The first commercial ISP, Form-net, began operating in 1995, and with theentry of three other ISPs, competition soon increased. Today, there are over 50 ISPs operational in Kenyaoffering different services (Communications Commission of Kenya, 2008a).2.2 Regulation of the <strong>Internet</strong> Service in KenyaThe Kenya Communications Act – KCA (No. 2 of 1998) provides the framework for regulating thecommunications sector in Kenya (Waema, 2007). The Act was enacted by Parliament in 1998, to givelegislative teeth to the Postal and Telecommunications Sector Policy Statement, issued by the Ministry ofTransport and Communications in January 1997 and updated both in 1999 and 2001.The Policy Statement defines the policy for the telecommunications operation and provides a frameworkfor the introduction of structural changes in the sector. The Policy Statement was set out against a deliberatemove by the government to optimise the sector’s contribution to national development by ensuring theavailability of efficient, reliable and affordable communication services throughout the country.The Act unbundled Kenya Post and Telecommunication into five separate entities including Telkom, thefixed line operator; the Postal Corporation of Kenya (Postal); the Communications Commission of Kenya(CCK) and the National Communications Secretariat (NCS). It also created an Appeals Tribunal for thepurpose of arbitration in cases where disputes arise between parties under the KCA. The national regulator,CCK, issued a statement in September 2004 containing/introducing a new licensing framework. The generalgoal of this framework was “to ensure that the regulatory environment in the sector is friendly to investmentin and conducive to the provision of modern communication services - <strong>Internet</strong>” (Waema, 2007).The specific objectives of the new licensing framework were to ensure that Kenya has a more dynamicand competitive <strong>Internet</strong> environment, improved access to <strong>Internet</strong> infrastructure and services and choice inthe provision of communication services to meet the socio-economic needs of the society.2.3 Available Technology Choices for <strong>Internet</strong> AccessAccess to the <strong>Internet</strong> service in Kenya is not widely spread as compared to other services e.g. mobilephones, despite the liberalization of the sector (Communications Commission of Kenya, 2008b). This isbrought about by among other things, high costs of bandwidth. Kenyans have the option of accessing the<strong>Internet</strong> using either modems with dial-up connections or leased lines. Dial-up connections are availablethrough both fixed telephone lines as well as Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) technology introducedin Kenya in late 2005.Three operators provide CDMA wireless access technology: Telkom Kenya, Popote Wireless andFlashcom. Other operators plan to offer a wireless option as a business strategy to remain competitive in theincreasingly liberalized telecommunications market. By some estimates 400,000 new <strong>Internet</strong> users will relyon the wireless option in the first half of the year 2008 (Kinyanjui, 2009). Many Kenyans opt for CDMA asequipment costs drop and coverage extends throughout the country. Currently, the coverage by Telkom islimited to 50 kilometres of the major urban centres of Nairobi, Kisumu, Nakuru, El<strong>do</strong>ret, Mombasa, andNyeri.58
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010<strong>Internet</strong> access is available through either 64/128/256 Kbps leased lines or through 64 Kbps dial-upaccounts (Ochara, et al, 2008). Home users in Kenya mainly choose either the dial-up accounts option or thewireless option because they are less expensive than leased lines. The leased line market is <strong>do</strong>minated by four<strong>Internet</strong> Gateway and Backbone Operators (IBGOs). Data collected from the IBGOs indicate that they have7,637 customers on leased lines while 17,737 customers are on dial-up accounts (Ochara, et al, 2008). Thisproportion of users on dial-up accounts, as an indicator of customers using modems, representsapproximately 70 percent of the total <strong>Internet</strong> user population. While there are a number of corporatecustomers on more than 64Kbs bandwidth, the larger proportion of customers have connections of 32Kbs and64Kbs.Other technologies that can be used for access include XDSL, fixed wireless and Fibre access. At present,only Telkom Kenya Limited (TKL) has a fibre optic installation. The fibre optic installation providesjunction circuits between digital exchanges replacing the old copper pair junction routes. Demand forbroadband services is increasing and the TKL plans to install fibre optical cable networks to customerscountrywide. The coming of high-speed fibre optic cables, and at least two more expected to go live by 2010(BharatBook, 2009), will result in costs reduction and rise in connection speed, thus making technologyaffordable and accessible to larger segments of the population.3. METHODOLOGYThe research design used in this study is a descriptive survey that seeks to explore <strong>Internet</strong> usage and itsmotives. The metho<strong>do</strong>logy employed a combination of qualitative and quantitative approaches. The findingswere based on the results of questionnaires and interviews from the Kenya <strong>Internet</strong> service providers (ISPs),communication commission of Kenya (CCK) and general users.Several factors influenced the sample selection. For instance, only the people living in urban areas areconnected to electricity as compared to those living in rural areas. Therefore, users are highly concentrated inNairobi and are estimated to account for 80% of the country’s <strong>Internet</strong> subscriptions (Lilech, 2008). Nairobi,the national capital, is also known for its cosmopolitan nature, and is the commercial hub of the region. Itconsists of a large portion of the literate population, and is the main terminus of the region’s communicationinfrastructure, particularly the <strong>Internet</strong>. This city can, therefore, be seen as representing the country as awhole in terms of <strong>Internet</strong> access and usage, and will be the main focus of this exploratory survey.In order to obtain a truly ran<strong>do</strong>m sample representative of <strong>Internet</strong> users in Nairobi, a complete list withcontact details of every <strong>Internet</strong> user was required. Such a list was not available and alternative methods hadto be followed. The following two methods of questionnaire distribution were, consequently, used: e-maildistribution of questionnaires and usual handing out of printed questionnaires. The e-mailed questionnaireswere sent to individuals at homes, companies, schools, and government departments. Their email addresseswere extracted from the personal address books of several colleagues. The printed questionnaires weredelivered by hand to various <strong>Internet</strong> cafes for customers to complete on a voluntary basis. In this way 500questionnaires were distributed. It is acknowledged that this was not a scientific way to obtain the sample,but giving a lack of sufficient resources and no access to required information, it was most suitable at thetime.Out of 500 questionnaires that were distributed, only 148 were returned, constituting a response rate of30%. Even though this return rate is low, it is similar to that conducted in other studies (Rivard, 2000).Although the scenarios obtained from this survey may be sufficiently accurate to describe general levels of<strong>Internet</strong> usage by the respondents, the low sample size and the way the sampling was conducted requirecaution when using the data for strategic decision making and should, therefore, only be used as an indicativeguide for the industry in general.The questionnaires served to gather information relating to the access and use of the <strong>Internet</strong> in Kenya. Itaimed to determine the penetration of the <strong>Internet</strong> and the characteristics of a typical user in Kenya byinvestigating methods of accessing the <strong>Internet</strong>, reasons why people use the <strong>Internet</strong>, as well as how oftenand from where they access the <strong>Internet</strong>. Two separate questionnaires were designed, one to collectinformation from general users and one to collect data from the ISPs. Data collection took place duringDecember 2009.59
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADIS4. RESULTS4.1 ISPsA list of 50 registered ISPs with contact details were obtained from CCK and they were all contacted forinterviews. Twenty nine of them could not be reached even after visiting their physical addresses. Sixteenwere reached and questionnaires were sent, but even after several attempts to retrieve the questionnaires noresponse was achieved. Two ISPs responded positively and provided the required information. Five otherISPs responded, but were only willing to provide the date of establishment. Attempts to ensureconfidentiality of the information failed to convince these ISPs to provide the information required. Theinformation used in this analysis is, therefore, from the two ISPs who responded – Wananchi online Ltd andIwayAfrica.The consumer base is mostly made up of businesses and private consumers, and the market is mostly forboth email and browsing customers. The popularity of cyber-cafes is increasing, as signified by the largenumber of users who subscribe to them. Other services provided by the ISPs include <strong>do</strong>main registration,web design and hosting, web security, Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) and Virtual Satellite ApertureTerminals (VSATs).According to the report obtained from the Communications Commission of Kenya (2008a), the totalnumber of <strong>Internet</strong> users was 3.3 million, compared to 2.8 million of the previous year, representing a 9%increase. The number of dial-up customers was higher (7,846) as compared to leased lines (1,809) andwireless connectivity (5,226). There was a decline in the number of leased line customers and dial-upcustomers by 6.7% and 1.9% in 2008 compared to 29% and 32% in 2007. The decline has been characterizedby the demand for wireless connections that has grown by 0.97%. The 2 ISPs reported that www.google.comand www.yahoo.com are the most visited sites respectively.4.2 The Users4.2.1 Demographic InformationWith more and more people becoming <strong>Internet</strong> users, the demographic composition of the users arecontinually changing. Currently in Kenya the proportion of males (64%) is higher than that of females (36%).The average age of <strong>Internet</strong> users is one of the most significant indicators of <strong>Internet</strong> penetration in a country.In Kenya the prevalent age group, which is approximately 57% of the total number, is between 16 - 25 yearsas presented by Figure 1Figure 1. The Age of <strong>Internet</strong> UsersIn terms of educational level the results indicated that 94% of the respondents are people who havestudied either at university or college. Students represent the most numerous group, about 48% whileprofessions /professionals (working class) represent 45% of the <strong>Internet</strong> users.The results further indicated that the higher an individual’s income is, the more likely he/she is to haveaccess to the <strong>Internet</strong>. About 47% of adults with an income of more than Ksh10, 000 reported that they use60
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010the <strong>Internet</strong>. This is significantly higher compared to those who earn between Ksh5000 – 10,000, and thoseearning below Ksh5000 as shown in Figure 2.Figure 2. Monthly Income of <strong>Internet</strong> UsersRegarding PC ownership, 68% of the respondents have a PC at home, while 32% of the respondents didnot own a PC at all. For those who have PCs at home, 41% of the respondents could access the <strong>Internet</strong> athome. This suggests that <strong>Internet</strong> services still remain out of reach for the majority of Kenyans as comparedto other countries, especially the USA where more than 80% of Americans have computers at home. Almost92% of the Americans who own PCs have access to the <strong>Internet</strong> (Nielsen Online, 2009).The frequency at which respondents access the <strong>Internet</strong> is shown in Figure 3. Among the respondents,about 59% of the respondents use the <strong>Internet</strong> daily, 30% weekly and 7% monthly.Figure 3. <strong>Internet</strong> Usage – Frequency of AccessIn terms of the question on purpose of <strong>Internet</strong> use, the results indicated that about 54% of therespondents use the <strong>Internet</strong> for email purposes and 46% use it for World Wide Web applications such asFacebook, news, Google and sports. The most popular types of information searched for are informationrelating to education (37%), followed by culture/sport/entertainment (26%), news (16%) andeconomic/finance (14%).It is clear from the results that the opportunity of online shopping is not widely used. About 65% of therespondents reported lack of interest in e-commerce or buying online. About 27% were interested in e-61
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADIScommerce while 8% were not sure. The common reasons given for not using e-commerce on the <strong>Internet</strong>were security reasons, lack of credit cards and poor financial resources.The general experience of those who have purchased goods online shows that they were satisfied with thepractice. Nearly 20% of the respondents reported the practice to be good, 33% reported that they were notinterested, 40% reported satisfaction, while 7% were not sure whether they would use it again. The mostpopular search engine among <strong>Internet</strong> users in Kenya is Google (62%), followed by Yahoo (27%) and othersearch engines (6%).Generally, the respondents expressed the desire to use the <strong>Internet</strong> service more. However, the cost andconvenience of access has limited <strong>Internet</strong> use. Consequently, access times are short. Another factor is theslow access speed. This is due to the poor quality of telecommunication links, partially attributed tocongestion. This frustrates many potential users and discourages <strong>Internet</strong> surfing. According to thequestionnaire survey, 52% of the respondents regarded slow page <strong>do</strong>wnload time as their biggest problem,37% reported cost to be their biggest problem, 5% failure to find the information on the web and 6% constanterror pages.5. DISCUSSION5.1 <strong>Internet</strong> Access Technologies Available in KenyaIn Kenya, <strong>Internet</strong> access is provided through dial-up or leased lines. Recently, broadband has beenintroduced in the form of ADSL, fixed wireless, fibre access and cable modem. The government is currentlysupporting several projects aimed at boosting the country’s broadband infrastructure with the most highprofileprojects being the fiber optic international submarine cable to the country’s shores, East AfricaMarine Systems (EAMS) and the East Africa Submarine Cable System (EASSYs). These initiatives willconnect the countries of Eastern Africa via a high bandwidth fiber optic cable system with the rest of theworld. TEAMS, a multi-million <strong>do</strong>llar fibre optic cable link from Mombasa (Kenya) to Fujaira in the UnitedArab Emirates, is expected to link East Africa to the rest of the world (Kenya Business, 2008).5.2 Profile of a Typical Kenyan <strong>Internet</strong> UserA user of the <strong>Internet</strong> in Kenya is typically a single male aged between 16 and 25 years of age with auniversity/college degree and earning a monthly salary of less than Kshs 5000 1 . Although he owns a PC athome, he is accessing the <strong>Internet</strong> from his workplace and using it on a daily basis. The most common uses ofthe <strong>Internet</strong> include e-mail and searching for information on education, sport, news and entertainment. Thepreferred search engines are Google and Yahoo among others. He is not yet ready for e-commerce and<strong>Internet</strong> banking.5.3 <strong>Internet</strong> Usage Pattern among Kenyan UsersThis study is the first report on <strong>Internet</strong> usage patterns of the <strong>Internet</strong> population in Kenya. Although <strong>Internet</strong>usage in Kenya is low and lags behind other telecommunication services, for example mobile phones(Communications Commission of Kenya, 2008b), it still remains beyond the capability of many Kenyanhouseholds. Quite a number of people have expressed a desire to use the <strong>Internet</strong> more, mainly because of itseconomical, political, social and cultural development and possibilities.From this research it appears that a considerable number of the Kenyan population gets access to the<strong>Internet</strong> from their workplaces rather than any other source. The arrival of the fibre optic internationalsubmarine cable to the country will lower the rates of international bandwidth which will finally increase thenumber of <strong>Internet</strong> connections (Electronics Newsweekly, 2009).The results of this study clearly indicate that the exploitation of the <strong>Internet</strong> for commercial transactions isstill in its infancy. This is due to the absence of enabling legislation (Information and Communication1 US$1 is about Kshs 7762
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010Technology Kenya, 2005). As it is evident that there is potential for usage of e-commerce in Kenya, it isinteresting to note that some people still feel they are not yet ready for e-commerce or <strong>Internet</strong> banking. Themost popular reason is that the <strong>Internet</strong> is not secure for monetary transactions. Credit cards are also not sopopular in Kenya and this is another reason why there isn’t much activity in e-commerce. A substantialnumber of people still prefer physically going shopping.5.4 The Future of the <strong>Internet</strong> in KenyaFor <strong>Internet</strong> uptake to be enhanced in the country there is a need for infrastructure improvement to improveaccessibility. Wider <strong>Internet</strong> connectivity can enhance Kenya’s economic growth. Wider access to the<strong>Internet</strong> will result in more people spending more time on the <strong>Internet</strong>. In future, many organizations arelikely to use the <strong>Internet</strong> to <strong>do</strong> business and create many jobs related to the technology. As the <strong>Internet</strong>continues to expand tremen<strong>do</strong>us potential exists for its use.The future outlook of the <strong>Internet</strong> in Kenya is positive as commissions embark on the implementation ofthe Kenya Communications Amendment Act of 2008. Telecommunication infrastructure will have a majorboost with the completion of the National Optic Fibre Backbone infrastructure. This key infrastructure isexpected to increase bandwidth capacity in most parts of the country. This should have a positive impact on<strong>Internet</strong> diffusion in rural and remote areas. For example, the arrival of the first ever fibre optic internationalsubmarine cable to the country’s shores in mid-2009, with at least two more expected to go live by 2010, willlower the rates of international bandwidth which will finally take the <strong>Internet</strong> to the mass market.6. CONCLUSIONThe investigations of this study revealed that access technologies such as dial-up or leased lines arecommonly used while broadband technologies have only recently been introduced. The findings also showedthat in Kenya access and usage of the <strong>Internet</strong> are mainly associated with age, education, income and socioeconomicstatus, and that the market is occupied mainly by young people who are the frequent users of the<strong>Internet</strong> and who would also like to try <strong>do</strong>ing online business transactions in the near future.Kenya’s <strong>Internet</strong> market looks positive and the government’s awareness of the advantages can increase itsusage. The much-anticipated undersea fibre optic cable and the improved competition regulatory frameworkwill boost <strong>Internet</strong> penetration. The introduction of broadband services by mobile operators is expected tofurther boost <strong>Internet</strong> penetration and use.This study has shown that, with the rate at which the number of <strong>Internet</strong> users is increasing, the <strong>Internet</strong> isbecoming more familiar to the Kenyan. This is especially true for the younger generation (26-35 years) thatregards it as a revolutionary technology that in the near future will permanently change the nature of datacollection, storage, processing, transmittal, and presentation. Information technologies have become essentialto enhancing the economic, social, and educational development of the country.REFERENCESAttaran, M. and Vanlaar, I., 2000. Privacy and Security on the <strong>Internet</strong>: How to secure your personal information andcompany data. Information Management and Computer Security, Vol.7, No.5, pp 241 - 246.BharatBook, 2009. Kenya Convergence Broadband and <strong>Internet</strong> Markets. URL http://www.bharatbook.com/Market-Research-Reports/Kenya-Convergence-Broadband-and-<strong>Internet</strong>-Markets.html [Accessed 14th October 2009]Centre for Democracy and Technology, 2000. The Digital Divide: <strong>Internet</strong> Access in Central and Eastern Europe. URLhttp://www.cdt.org/international/ceeaccess/reports.shtml [Accessed 30th November 2009]Centre for International Development and Conflict Management (CIDCM), 1998. The <strong>Internet</strong> in Kenya: Impacts andDeveloping. URL cidcm.umd.edu/afrtel/research/papers/internet_in_kenya.pdf [Accessed 12th June 2009]Communications Commission of Kenya (CCK), 2008a. Communication Statistic Reports Second Quarter 2008/2009.URL http://www.cck.go.ke/resc/statistics/Sector_Ststistics_Report_Q2_0809.pdf [Accessed 6th November 2009]Communications Commission of Kenya (CCK), 2008b. Annual Reports 2007/2008. URLhttp://www.cck.go.ke/resc/publications/annual_reports/CCK_Annual_Report07-08.pdf [Accessed 24th August 2009]63
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISElectronic Newsweekly(2009). Kenya-Convergence, Broadband & <strong>Internet</strong> Markets. URLhttp://www.highbeam. com/<strong>do</strong>c/1G1-210810131.html [Accessed 2nd October 2009]Information and Communication Technology Kenya (ICT Kenya). (2005). Kenya's Information & Communicationstechnology Sector. URL http://www.epzakenya.com/UserFiles/File/ictKenya.pdf [Accessed 5th June 2009]Kenya Business. (2008). Telecommunications and IT Overview. URL http://www.kenyarepjp.com/business/telecommunications_e.html[Accessed 2nd August 2009]Kinyanjui, K., 2009. Kenya: ISP’s warn against Price Regulation. URL http://allafrica.com/stories/200910020007.html[Accessed 6th August 2009]Lilech, H., 2008. Kenya: Wireless Industry. URLhttp://<strong>do</strong>cs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:mpZ194W2wZUJ:www.buyusa.gov/sanfrancisco/117.pdf+Kenya:+Wireless+Industry&hI=en&gl=za&pid=bI&srcid=ADGEEShbH5fzhiplz2iapMOie8YrTKpQ5gTtoQxXgqAN5KOrfI26F7fUSfIFRfqyQeKUROJVwXZvsAIq6SjDUjkbkW8WqqYKNSzbgOrssmassjYobNy69Q1vANutoeJwOYChNDmRq3Q5g&sig=AHIEtbSbtCvU1LsZyRiDB3oHCuBW9yHh2A[Accessed 30th November 2009]Mweu, F., 2000. Overview of the <strong>Internet</strong> in Kenya. URLhttp://www.itu.int/africainternet2000/countryreports/ken_e.htm [Accessed 26th November 2009]National Telecommunications and Information Administration, US Department of Commerce, 2006. Falling Throughthe Net: Part II – <strong>Internet</strong> Access and Usage. URL http://www.ntia.<strong>do</strong>c.gov/NTIAHOME/FTTN99/part2.html[Accessed 30th November 2009]Nielsen Online, 2009. Home <strong>Internet</strong> Access: Continuing to Grow, But Big Differences Among Demographics. URLhttp://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/home-internet-access-continuing-to-grow-but-big-differencesamong-demographics/[Accessed 5th September 2009]Ochara, N. et al, 2008. Global Diffusion of the <strong>Internet</strong> X111: <strong>Internet</strong> Diffusion in Kenya and Its Determinants - ALongitudinal Analysis. Communications of the Association for Information Systems, Vol.23, No.7, pp 123 - 150.Oyelaran-Oyeyinka, B., Adeya, C. (2002). <strong>Internet</strong> access in Africa: Empirical evidence from Kenya and Nigeria. URLhttp://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6V1H-488NNKW-2&_user=736898&_coverDate=02%2F29%2F2004&_r<strong>do</strong>c=1&_fmt=high&_orig=search&_sort=d&_<strong>do</strong>canchor=&view=c&_searchStrId=1227238381&_rerunOrigin=scholar.google&_acct=C000040978&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=736898&md5=1cc508253400b7b8ffddcfff3c134dba [Accessed 2nd July 2009]Rivard, H., 2000. A survey on the impact of information Technology on the Canadian Architecture, Engineering andConstruction Industry. Electronic Journal of IT in Construction, Vol. 5, pp 37.Waema, T., 2007. Kenya Telecommunications Sector Performance Review. URLhttp://www.researchictafrica.net/new/images/uploads/RIA_SPR_Kenya_07.pdf [Accessed 25th August 2009]64
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010SOFTWARE-BASED PROTECTION FOR CONTENTMEDIA DISTRIBUTIONMalek Barhoush and J. William AtwoodDepartment of Computer Science and <strong>Software</strong> Engineering, Concordia University1455 de Maisonneuve Boulevard, West, Montreal, Quebec, H3G 1M8ABSTRACT<strong>Software</strong>-based protection for digital content is a promising and flexible solution for the content provider whosedistribution is to a community in which the majority of clients are computer and laptop users. In this paper, we explore anexample of software-based copy protection for temporal media distribution that has been published by Grimen, et al. Weevaluated the security protocols provided in the example and found two security attacks. We provide the solution toovercome the discovered attacks.KEYWORDSDRM, Tamper Resistant <strong>Software</strong>, Formal Validation.1. INTRODUCTIONWatching movies and TV channels through the <strong>Internet</strong> gives the client the flexibility to explore forinteresting programming, and then start viewing. The content provider (CP) on the other side has themotivation to use the <strong>Internet</strong> to deliver the content media because the cost of distributing the information islow. However, the problem is that the <strong>Internet</strong> <strong>do</strong>es not facilitate access control for electronic goods.Digital rights management (DRM) is an application framework introduced to help a CP to control theaccess to electronic products and to enforce the usage according to the permissions and constraints stated bythe CP or the owner of the electronic product. The central component of a DRM system is a tamper resistantentity; this entity may be implemented in hardware or software. The whole security protection andenforcement mechanism of a DRM system depends on the fact that the tamper resistant element is guaranteedto be unbreakable [Stamp_digital].Tamperproof hardware provides physical protection and tries to hide the protection technologies used tosecure the content media. Because the end user may have hacking tools and the time to compromisetamperproof hardware, hiding protection technologies <strong>do</strong>es not provide a permanent solution. It is typicallymore effective than a software solution, but it is harder to recover when the hardware is compromised. A<strong>do</strong>ngle provides hardware copy protection and should be connected on one of the computer ports in order touse <strong>do</strong>ngle-based software. Dongle-based software checks the presence of a token issued by the <strong>do</strong>ngle. Ifthe software discovers that the <strong>do</strong>ngle is not connected then it <strong>do</strong>es not give the necessary signal to execute orto run the full version of the software. The security of this metho<strong>do</strong>logy depends on the difficulty of cloning<strong>do</strong>ngles. The protection provided by a <strong>do</strong>ngle is susceptible to reverse engineering and code modification[Maña-Framework].The Open Mobile Alliance DRM2.1 (OMA-DRM2.1) is a framework solution to control the access tomobile ringtones, pictures or songs. OMA-DRM2.1 enabled devices have tamper resistant hardware thatcontains a unique id for identification purposes and a unique private/public key pair as well as a certificate.This feature allows the operator or the rights issuer to easily authenticate the OMA-DRM2.1 enabled devices.Each right object issued to a specific device is cryptographically bound to that device. The whole security ofOMA depends on hiding the private key [Nützel-DRM, OMA-DRM2.1]. Hardware tamper resistant devicesare difficult to deploy, especially when the majority of viewers is using a personal computer or a laptop. Ifthe solution provided by tamper resistant hardware is compromised, then replacing the failed hardware is not65
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISsimple. A fast solution is to revoke the compromised device [Grimen-DRM1], but this may not be verysatisfying to the end user.The software-based protection task touches on many aspects: “intellectual property protection”,preventing a software hacker from extracting sensitive information via reverse engineering or static andbehavior analysis, and controlling the use of digital media. All protection mechanisms provide “short-termprotection” [Maña-Framework].Apple's DRM solution is built on a software-based tamper resistant approach; it depends on hiding arepository key in a secret algorithm embedded in the iTunes application. This repository key is needed todecrypt a user key stored in the user side, the user key is needed to decrypt a master key, which is needed todecrypt the corresponding protected media file. The whole idea of the protection mechanism depends onmaking this secret algorithm hard to expose. This called security via obscurity. This method did not survivebecause an attacker was able to reverse engineer the iTunes application and extract hidden secrets such as thesecret algorithm. For more details see [Grimen-DRM1, <strong>WWW</strong>-FairPlay].Microsoft DRM is another example of a software-based controller used to control protected media. Itdepends on keeping a blackbox file hidden from the end user. This blackbox contains the client key, which isgenerated in the individualization of the user's blackbox. This key is stored in a scrambled form andtheoretically is hard to extract. This key used to cryptographically bind the license file with the user’s DRMenabledapplication. The license contains the content key that is used to encrypt the content media. Thissolution also did not survive, because it depends on keeping the secret hidden from the end user. The enduser has the ability, with sufficient time and tools such as memory dumping and reverse engineering, toextract this information, for more details see [Grimen-DRM1, Req-DRM].A DRM system works in the customer environment. Thus the customer has full control to analyze andreverse engineer the DRM workflow. One way to make the attacker’s work more difficult is to integratehardware tamper resistance with DRM workflow, such hardware is used to embed some protectioncomponents. An example of hardware tamper resistance is using smart cards for authentication purposes orusing set-top-boxes for protecting electronic media. The main problem with hardware tamper resistance isthat it is expensive to integrate with the majority of end-user laptops and personal computers, which are notprepared for DRM purposes. Another way is to integrate software tamper resistance with a renewabilitymechanism. Renewability is a mechanism used to periodically modify the software protection component. Itis hoped that this will be <strong>do</strong>ne before the protection component has been compromised. <strong>Software</strong>-basedprotection is flexible, inexpensive to transfer within a public network and works on different platforms[Grimen-DRM, Grimen-DRM1, Req-DRM 1].Bar-El claims that no security technology can predict or prevent future attacks. Renewing protectiontechnology prevents an attacker from taking advantage of the defects discovered in current protectiontechnology. Bar-El suggests that for a renewable protection scheme, the scheme at least needs to be dividedinto two pieces: a permanent component such as the viewer application and a modifiable component such asplug-in components [Bar-El]. Renewability in the context of the Motion Picture Experts Group (MPEG-4)Intellectual Property Management and Protection (IPMP) extension is accomplished by renewingcompromised tools that are used for authentication, decryption and watermarking of content media [MPEG-4_IPMP, MPEG-4_IPMP2, MPEG_Eval]. As far as we have been able to discover, MPEG <strong>do</strong>es not preventa reverse engineering attack. Jonker et al. suggests that all security systems need to adapt protection systemmeasures to compensate for any attack [Jonker-CoreSec]. Grimen et al. suggest that changing the viewersoftware that is responsible for rendering the content media is equivalent to reconfiguring that viewer, thiskind of reconfiguring of viewer software may be able to detect and prevent any hacker attacks [Grimen-DRM2].Grimen et al. [Grimen-DRM2] proposed a software solution based on periodic renewal of the protectionscheme that is used to control the access to content media. The software-based solution they proposedappeared to be a promising solution, but we have found two attacks against the protocol that they use tocontrol the access to protected media. We will discuss their solution and the attacks in section 2. In Section3, we will give a formal model of the attack. In Section 4, we give a solution to the attack, and demonstrateits security. In Section 5, we offer our conclusions.66
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 20102. GRIMEN PROTECTION MODEL LIFE CYCLEGrimen et al. [Grimen-DRM2] proposed an architecture for software-based secure content distribution thatconsists of four players: the content provider (CP), the stream server, which we are going to call the contentserver (CS), the viewer software (VS) and the security server (SS). The CP encodes the content media, anddivides it into many pieces. It then produces as many symmetric keys as there are media pieces, in order toprotect each piece with one unique symmetric key. This process results in what they called an encryptedencoded media <strong>do</strong>cument (EEMD) and makes it ready for distribution. See Figure 1. The authors called thetime period for each piece a trust interval.The CS is in charge of distributing the EEMD piece by piece. The VS player is running within the userenvironment. It is responsible for decrypting and decoding the EEMD and then rendering the content mediaand making it available for viewing. The SS is responsible for generating and delivering a piece of codecalled a Mobile Guard (MG), which is able to execute in the user environment. The MG needs to be pluggedinto the VS. The MG needs to be sent to the VS in order to configure the VS to maintain security states ofthe media <strong>do</strong>cument. The MG is responsible for checking the integrity of the VS components, including theMG itself, and then after successful integrity checking, the SS is going to deliver a corresponding media keyfor a current delivered piece of the EEMD. The authors claim that the MG is hard to compromise; ifsuccessful software modifications happens, it will be detected and the system will have “break once breakeverywhere resistance” [Grimen-DRM2].Figure 1. Dividing the media content [Grimen-DRM2].As the encoded media <strong>do</strong>cument is being split into multiple pieces, each piece is encrypted with adifferent key. The SS is going to provide the decryption key for each piece only at the start of its particulartrust interval, upon request and after checking the integrity of VS; the VS needs to prove its good intentionbefore delivery of the new decryption key. This good intention is achieved when the VS receives andexecutes a new generated MG, which means that for every decryption key there is a new MG. Each MG isdistinct from the others, and each one is responsible for reconfiguring and securing the VS. The MG needs tobe obfuscated to prevent the software hacker from predicting the internal logic of the MG [Grimen-DRM2].The MG is replaced for each trust interval, in order to prevent the software attacker from predicting theVS configuration when he has the time to gain the knowledge. Each instance of the MG is responsible forprotecting the access control mechanism used by the VS for the duration of the trust interval. Each MGinstance is going to check the integrity of the VS every new trust interval. The VS is going to request thecorresponding decryption key at the end of each trust interval. The SS is responsible for receiving thechecksum for the VS for each trust interval. Then, upon verifying the correctness of each checksum, it isgoing to send the next decryption key that corresponds to the new media piece. Figure 2 shows the Grimenet al. proposed architecture. The details of the process of receiving the decryption key for each trust interval(as proposed by Grimen et al. [Grimen-DRM2]) are as follows: The VS generates a ran<strong>do</strong>m unpredictable transport key. The MG executes and determines the integrity checksum of the VS along with the MG itself. The integrity checksum is determined by computing a one-way hash function across the VSinstructions, the MG instructions, MG’s public key and the generated transport key. See Figure 5. The VS encrypts the transport key with the SS public key. The VS sends the encrypted transport key to the SS along with the integrity checksum. The SS verifies the checksum. Since the SS can extract the transport key, and since it knows the VSinstructions, the MG instructions, MG’s public key and the generated transport key, the SS can then generate67
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISthe checksum. The SS verifies the calculated checksum against the received checksum. If the verification issuccessful, the SS encrypts the corresponding trust interval's media key with the transport key and sends it tothe VS. The VS now can decrypt the corresponding piece of the EEMD. See Figure 3.Figure 2. Grimen et al. proposed system architecture [Grimen-DRM2].Figure 3. Key exchange protocol [Grimen-DRM2].We analyzed the presented protocol and found two security attacks. The first attack happens becausethere is nothing that can prevent the software attacker from forwarding the MG to another VS, and then theforwarded MG produces a new transport key and sends that key to the SS. There is nothing to tell the SS thatthe MG is a copy, not the original. In this case the server will respond with the media key encrypted with thenew generated transport key provided by the pirated MG. Another attack appears because the generation ofthe transport key is <strong>do</strong>ne by the VS, because the VS executable file is stored in the client environment. Thusthe client has the chance to statically or dynamically analyze the code and learn the memory address of thetransport key.The main problem with this key exchange protocol comes from the fact that there is nothing to distinguishany instances of MG. All of them have the same features and no individualization technique has beenattached to them. The secondary problem is due to the fact that the client has enough time to statically ordynamically analyze the VS. One way to prevent the previous attacks is to individualize the MG for eachclient and to store the transport key in an unpredictable place. In the next Section we will discuss how toachieve both goals.3. ATTACK ANALYSISAutomated Validation of <strong>Internet</strong> Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) is a tool used for formalmodeling and analyzing of <strong>Internet</strong> security protocols. The model is specified in high level protocolspecification language (HLPSL), which represents the message exchanged between participants. Thoseparticipants represent roles that send messages and receive messages, these messages may contain thenecessary keys needed to establish secure sessions and convey authentication actions between roles[AVISPA-Manual]. We translated the Grimen et al. key exchange proposal into the following messages:1- MG -> S: {Nm|Tki|MG}_Ks | hash(MG|VS|Nm|Tki)Where MG: The identity of the mobile guardS: The identity of the security serverNm: nonce generated by MG for authentication purposes.68
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010Tki: transport key for session i, a generated symmetric key ran<strong>do</strong>mly generated by MG, used to transportthe media key for the ith trust interval session.Hash: one way hash function.Ks: public key for S.VS: is the instructions of the viewer software along with MG’s instructions, see Figure 5.|: concatenation.2- S-> MG: {Nm|Ns|S}_KmWhere Km: public key for MG.3- MG-> S: {Ns|MG}_Ks4- S->MG: {Mki|S}_TkiWhere Mki: media key for the trust interval ith session.Figure 4 depicts the protocol exchanged between the two roles.Figure 4. Protocol Simulation.Figure 5. Input of hash function calculation [Grimen-DRM2].Figure 6. Attack trace for key exchange protocol proposed by Grimen et al.We translated the previous message exchanges into HLPSL and simulated the attack. Figure 6 shows theattack simulation. “i” represents the intruder entity who is trying to gain access to the media key for allsessions. An intruder is a forwarded MG, i.e., an illegal copy of MG, who knows MG’s public key.The first message shows that the intruder generates a transport key and a new nonce, and encrypts themwith SS’s public key. Then, the intruder generates a checksum that is a result of applying code instructionsinto a hash function, these instructions are: fixed parts of the binary code of the VS and MG, transport keyand nonce. Then the intruder sends the result to SS. SS extracts the transport key and nonce, and thencalculates the checksum code, since the VS has all inputs for the hash function, and then compare the resultwith received information. Upon successful verification, the SS creates a nonce and then sends the SS’snonce along with MG’s nonce all encrypted with MG’s public key. The intruder who has the MG’s publickey can extract the SS’s nonce and then encrypt it with SS’s public key and then send it to SS. The SSbelieves that he is talking to a legal MG, and then encrypts the media key for ith session with the transportkey. This leads to an attack since the intruder can extract that media key. We assume that forwarding theMobile Guard to an illegal user is a DRM attack, which means that the illegal user uses indirectly the MGpublic key or at least the pirated MG can decrypt any messages that have been encrypted with MG's publickey.The problem with the Grimen et al. solution is that generating a new transport key from any MG instance<strong>do</strong>es not correspond to the validity of any MG instance, thus any message from a pirated MG is accepted. A69
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISsolution to prevent the previous attack is to give the ability for the SS to distinguish each MG instance. Wecan achieve this distinction by individualizing all legal MG copies.4. INDIVIDUALIZATION PROCESSApple's DRM solution used three keys to protect its products: master key, repository key and client key. Theproduct media is encrypted with the master key, the master key is encrypted with the client key, and theencrypted master key is attached to the protected content. When the user asks for a license to use the productmedia, the server that locally stores the client key sends the requesting user a license that includes the clientkey encrypted with the repository key. The application that presents the product media at the client side hasthe repository key and is attached with a secret algorithm embedded in the presentation software. Theprotection mechanism is dependent on keeping the secret algorithm hidden from the user. Each user has adistinct client key and repository, which simplifies the license individualization process. The client key isran<strong>do</strong>mly created by the server and saved in the server's database for further use. The repository key iscalculated from serial number of the first hard disk, BIOS version, CPU name and win<strong>do</strong>ws ID, which isassumed to be unique [Grimen-DRM1].In the Microsoft DRM solution the product media are encrypted with a content key and the content key isencrypted with client keys. When the user asks for a license to use the product media, the license server sendsthe license that contains the encrypted content key to the user. In the client side, there is a blackbox file thatcontains the client key. Each client has an individualized blackbox, which means each instance of a blackboxcan only work for a specific machine. The protection mechanism relies on keeping the blackbox hidden fromthe user access, which simplifies license individualization process [Grimen-DRM1].OMA DRM standard encrypts the product media with a content encryption key (CEK), the CEK isencrypted with a DRM agent’s public key and then inserted into a right object (RO). This processcryptography binds an RO into DRM agent. Each DRM agent has a unique public and private user key; whena DRM agent asks for right object to use a specific product, the server, who is responsible for creating rightobjects, can obtain the DRM agent's public key, and create a unique right object for each DA that includesthe CEK key, which is encrypted with a DA’s public key. Only the DA who has the corresponding privatekey can use that RO and get the CEK [OMA-DRM2.1].From the previous solutions we have two software solutions and one hardware solution for the end-userindividualization process. The case that we are working with needs to prevent an end user from forwardingthe MG to another user. To <strong>do</strong> this, we need to individualize each MG and make MG code not to work onany other user. We suggest that the SS, which is responsible for generating an MG, needs to authenticateeach user and then embed a unique identity (Ticket) in the MG. The security server is going to accept onlyone request for media decryption key from each legal MG instance per trust interval. Due to the fact that thegeneration of transport key is unpredictable to both SS and user, the ticket value along with generatedtransport key will be the unique identifier for each MG per trust interval. When the SS receives two requestsfor the same MG that have the same ticket and a different transport key, the second key request will notreceive any response. This will prevent a pirated MG instance from successfully attacking the business modelpreviously discussed. Here is the modified protocol:1- MG -> S: _{Nm|Tki|MG|Ticket}_Ks}_Km | hash(MG|VS|Nm|Tki|Ticket)2- S-> MG: {Nm|Ns|S}_Km3- MG-> S: {Ns|MG}_Ks4- S->MG: {Mki|S}_TkiWhere Km here is a symmetric shared key between the MG and the SS, and the Ticket is the unique valuefor each generated MG.Before SS delivers an MG to a valid VS, it embeds a symmetric key Km into the generated MG. If alegitimate user receives a valid MG, and then forwards that received MG to his friend, both MGs will havethe same identity (ticket). Each MG is going to run and generate a unique transport key at the client host; thismakes a checksum calculation unique since the transport key is one of the hash function inputs. We will callthe result of the hash function a checksum. When both MGs send the first message, which contains: nonce,ran<strong>do</strong>m generated transport key, mobile guard identity and ticket all encrypted with the SS’s public key andthen again encrypted with shared key (Ks), the second part of the massage is the checksum. The SS canextract the ticket value and the transport key and use them to calculate the checksum. The SS compares the70
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010received checksum with the one it calculates, if both match then the MG has sent correct information. The SSchecks the ticket value, if it receives it for the first time, then the MG is legal, so it will respond with thesecond message. If it receives the ticket for the second time, and if the checksum is the same, then it cansafely reply to the second message, assuming that its previous response was lost in the network. If the SSreceives the same ticket with a different checksum, this means that illegal MG sends the second request, inthis case the SS will not reply to the request. The second message contains a generated nonce from the SSside, MG’s nonce and the SS identity all encrypted with the shared key Km. The third message is from theMG side and contains: SS’s nonce and MG’s identity all encrypted with SS’s public key. Now the SS andMG are mutually authenticated, the forth message is from SS side and contains the media key for the ithsession and the SS’s identity all encrypted with the transport key for ith session.To prevent the software hacker from discovering the transport key in the VS space by using static ordynamic analysis, the MG needs to create a ran<strong>do</strong>m Transport Key and store it in a ran<strong>do</strong>m place in the VS,or keep it in MG space; the VS should implement a way to call the transport key generation from the plug-inMG instance. This will prevent the end user from knowing the location of the transport key for a short time.Figure 7. Message exchange for revised protocol.In the solution we provide, the SS only accepts the first media key request for each unique ticket, andrejects any subsequent request for the same ticket with different checksum. Figure 7 shows the protocolsimulation. We ran the new protocol on AVISPA and did not find any attack. We therefore believe that ourprotocol is correct and helps the SS to authenticate valid instances of MG.5. CONCLUSION<strong>Software</strong> based protection is a promising solution for CP to deploy especially when the clients are generalpurpose computers or laptops. We studied the software based solution introduced by Grimen et al. to protectany content media at a client machine. We found two attacks, one in the key exchange protocol and the otherin their architecture design. We used AVISPA to simulate the attack for first flow. We proposed a modifiedprotocol that removes the first attack, and changed a little bit in the architecture design to remove the secondattack. We demonstrated its correctness using AVISPA.ACKNOWLEDGEMENTMalek Barhoush acknowledges the support of Concordia University and of Yarmouk University.J. William Atwood acknowledges the support of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Councilof Canada, through its Discovery Grants program.71
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISREFERENCES[AVISPA-Manual] 2006. Automated Validation of <strong>Internet</strong> Security Protocols and Applications-AVISPA v1.1 UserManual Document Version: 1.1. http://www.avispa-project.org/package/user-manual.pdf.[Bar-El] Hagai Bar-El, 2005. Challenges of Standardizing Renewable Broadcast Security, White paper,www.hbarel.com/publications/Challenges_of_Standardizing_Renewable_Broadcast_Security.pdf[Grimen-DRM1] Gisle Grimen et al., 2006. Building Secure <strong>Software</strong>-based DRM systems, NIK-2006 conference,http://www.nik.no/.[Grimen-DRM2] Gisle Grimen et al., 2005, <strong>Software</strong>-based copy protection for temporal media during dissemination andplayback. In the 8 th international conference on Information Security and Cryptology - ICISC 2005. Springer-Verlag,Berlin Heidelberg, volume 3935 of LCNS, pp 62-377.[Jonker-CoreSec] H.L. Jonker and S. Mauw, 2007. Core Security Requirements of DRM Systems, Digital RightsManagement -- An Introduction. ICFAI University Press, pp 73-90.[Maña-Framework] Antonio Maña et al., 2004. A framework for secure execution of software. In International Journalof Information Security, Springer Berlin / Heidelberg. pp 99-112.[MPEG-4_IPMP] Ming Ji, SM Shen and Wenjun Zeng, 2004. MPEG-4 IPMP Extension- For Interoperable Protection ofMultimedia Content, EURASIP Journal on Applied Signal Processing, Special Issue on Multimedia Security andRights Management, pp. 2201-2213.[MPEG-4_IPMP-2] MPEG-4 IPMP Extension, Frequently Asked question, http://mpeg.chiariglione.org/faq/mp4-sys/sysfaq-ipmp-x.htm.[MPEG_Eval] HweeHwa Pang and Yong<strong>do</strong>ng Wu, 2005. Evaluation of MPEG-4 IPMP extension, Acoustics, Speech,and Signal Processing,. Proceedings. (ICASSP '05). IEEE International Conference, vol.2, no., pp. 18-23.[Nützel-DRM] Jürgen Nützel and Anja Beyer, 2006. How to Increase the Security of Digital Rights ManagementSystems Without Affecting Consumer's Security, ETRICS 2006, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg, LNCS 3995, pp.368 - 380.[OMA-DRM2.1] OMA, 2008. DRM Architecture Approved Version 2.1 – 14 Oct 2008, pp 1-28.http://www.openmobilealliance.org/technical/release_program/<strong>do</strong>cs/DRM/V2_1-20081106-A/OMA-AD-DRM-V2_1-20081014-A.pdf[Req-DRM] Barhoush, Malek and Atwood, J, 2010. Requirements for enforcing digital rights management in multicastcontent distribution, Telecommunication Systems, Springer Netherlands, volume 45, pp 3-20.[Stamp_digital] Mark Stamp, 2003, “Stamp: Digital Rights Management: The Technology Behind The Hype”, Journal ofElectronic Commerce Research, VOL. 4, NO. 3, pp 102-112.[<strong>WWW</strong>-FairPlay] sdebswrbh, FairPlay, In Art & Entertainment, http://articleleader.info/fairplay/, Accessed Sep 24,2010.72
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010HOTLINK VISUALIZER: ADDING HOTLINKS ON THESPOT – VISUALIZING THE OUTCOMEGregory Triantafillidis and John GarofalakisUniversity of Patras, Computer Engineering and Informatics Department26500, Patras, GreeceABSTRACTHotlink assignment is a constantly growing field of research addressing the problem of low information access rates inthe World Wide Web. In this paper we attempt a more practical approach to the problem, by proposing an administrativetool, the ‘HotLink Visualizer’, which implements hotlink additions to stored instances of the web site in question, in auser friendly way. Our tool obtains and stores all the necessary information concerning the web site’s connectivity usinga modified and specially configured web crawler. The outcome is a series of stored web site instances, produced byapplying different sets of hotlinks (generated by specific hotlink assignment algorithms) to the initially stored instance,which can be edited and visualized by the user. ‘HotLink Visualizer’ aims to bridge the gap between the severaltheoretical hotlink assignment methods proposed by researchers and the need to put their results into use.KEYWORDSHotlinks Assignment, <strong>Software</strong> Tools, Algorithms.1. INTRODUCTIONThe World Wide Web has become established as the most popular source of information retrieval. Asexpected, the older it gets the more information it contains and thus the number of the web sites with giganticgrowth and bad information access rates are constantly increased within it. The efforts to optimize theseaccess rates are continuous and towards those, several fields of research have developed, such as theimprovement of web design, clustering and caching. Obviously, although a web site is only a cell of theWorld Wide Web, a well designed and organized site contributes to the improvement of the informationaccess rates in the web. Good structure for a web site means less traffic on the <strong>Internet</strong>, as the user gets thepiece of information required without wandering unnecessarily in it. Furthermore, a properly organized siteconstitutes a more appealing choice for the users.During the last years the matter is being addressed with the development of several hotlink assignmentalgorithms for web sites. The idea behind those algorithms is to spot the most popular or more likely to beaccessed data and provide better access to it by assigning additional links (hotlinks) pointing to the webpages containing it. These algorithms are not applied to the actual representations of these web sites butusually to their corresponding direct acyclic graphs (DAGs) or to other even more strict structures. However,it is widely known that a web site in its true form is not a DAG, since there can be found many links pointingto just one page, thus forming circles and repeated nodes within the graph. Hence, there is a gap between thetheoretical determination of a set of hotlinks and the actual application of this set to a real web site.In this paper we first address the issue of acquiring and storing the exact map of a web site with its fullconnectivity, which can be considered as a first step towards the assignment of hotlinks in real web sites. By‘storing’ we mean keeping an offline, viewable and -for our purposes- editable instance of the web site’smap. To <strong>do</strong> so, we first clarify theoretically what a web site’s map with the complete connectivityinformation should be and we determine the subsequent prerequisites that our crawler must have. We thenproceed with the appropriate specification and modification of an existing web crawler, with functionalitysuited to our specific needs. Finally we propose an administrative tool, the ‘Hotlink Visualizer’, which, afterstoring in tabular data all the necessary information to capture a web site’s real map, it visualizes the outcomeand implements hotlink additions by adding with an automated procedure the generated hotlinks in the web73
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISpages of the site. Thus we have the ability to maintain in row data, different forms and versions of theoriginally parsed web site, as they can be formed from the assignment of different hotlink sets to the originalsite. Our tool aims at being user friendly from a web master’s point of view and oriented towards the easyoptimization of the web site’s information access rates.2. RELATED WORKRelated work in this field of research includes algorithmic methods for hotlink assignment and tools that aimto improve the design and the information access rate of a web site. Also all relative research that is orientedtowards a practical implementation of its results.Garofalakis, Kapos and Mourloukos put forward an interesting proposal in [1], where an algorithm forreorganizing the link structure of a web site was presented. The algorithm was based on data extracted fromthe log files. The main criterion was the page popularity extracted by the page’s depth and hit count. Thestudy assumed a binary tree structure for the site. However, in spite of the strict representation, there wasconsideration for reentering the links initially removed in order to achieve the binary tree structure, thusminimizing the loss of information of the sites’ link structure.Miguel Vargas Martin in [5], presented metrics, detailed methods and algorithms targeting the HotlinkAssignment problem. He targeted different aspects of the problem and provided measurements solidifying hisresults. He also provided the NP-completeness proof of the Hotlink Assignment problem.In [9], D. Antoniou et al, presented the hotlink assignment problem in a context-similarity based manner.They proposed a direct acyclic graph model for the studied site, new metrics and an algorithm for theprocess. Their context similarity approach takes interest in avoiding misplacement of the hotlinks.In the field of web site optimization tools, Garofalakis, Giannakoudi and Sakkopoulos presented somework in [3]. They noticed that there are no integrated tools presented for web site semantic log analysis thatcould be delivered as end-user applications to help the web site administrator, so they proposed andimplemented a new information acquisition system that aims to enhance and ease log analysis by use ofsemantic knowledge. Their tool takes into consideration both the site content semantics and the web site pagevisits. It also extracts information about the user preferences and in general can be considered as a valuableapplication for the administrator’s decision-making about the web site reorganization.However, apart from the work mentioned above, in general it is fair to say that researchers have put moreeffort in specifying and theoretically proving their web site optimization proposals, as opposed to puttingthem more into use and making them accessible to the end user.3. A LINK ORIENTED CRAWLER3.1 The Notion of a Link Oriented CrawlerCrawlers are software that traverse the Web automatically, access and <strong>do</strong>wnload pages mainly for use insearch engines. In general, a web crawler takes as input a list of URLs. Then it <strong>do</strong>wnloads the web contentthat the URLs point to and by discovering new URLs the procedure continues retroactively [7]. In our casewe implemented a web site crawler. The obvious difference is that a web site crawler takes as an input oneURL, the home page. During the crawling procedure, every new URL discovered is compared to that “base”URL and the crawler adds it to its queue only if the “base” URL is part of the new URL. Apart from thisdifference, a web site crawler <strong>do</strong>esn’t need to be built around the need to <strong>do</strong>wnload and process huge amountof data, or keep the gathered content fresh, by revisiting the web sites. Such issues concern web crawlers thatare built around the notion of the node - web page and in our research are not taken into consideration.Our main goal is to acquire all the information of the sites’ link structure. Thus we are not concerned withthe content of each web page. In other words we want to obtain the real map of the web site and store it in asuitable formation, in order to perform hotlink additions on it. This provides us with a totally differentcontext in terms of choosing a crawler to work with and configuring its algorithm and overall operation.Firstly, we need to clarify what we mean by “real map”. The first step in every research proposal forhotlink assignment is to come up with a model for the web site’s representation. According to the74
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010researcher’s goals, a web site is usually represented as a full binary tree, a direct acyclic graph, or as someother restrictive structure. It is common ground that most of the link structure information is lost in that firststep and what’s more, it is never retrieved. So to say we have extracted and stored the “real map” of a website, it means we make sure that no possible link will be passed over by the crawling process and all possiblepairs of {father node, child node} will be recorded.With this last concession alone, it becomes transparent that we build the algorithm of our crawler aroundthe notion of the link between two nodes – web pages of the site, contrary to what applies to most -web pageoriented- crawlers. Or as we said before, we implement a link oriented, web site crawler.3.2 The Notion of a Link Oriented CrawlerOur specific crawling needs as described above, infer several other matters that we need to consider inspecifying the crawling algorithm. Firstly, it is common ground that in actual web sites, a user can be lead toa web page from more than one parent pages. It is important however for our study to be able to record thedistance of each web page from the root, because this information will provide a measure of the access costof the page, which can be exploited later on. In particular we take special interest in identifying the firstappearance of a web page, which is the page with the minimum depth from the root. Recording thisinformation means that our crawling algorithm must be able to identify that first appearance, process it in adifferent manner and of course store that information. To succeed in that, we request that our crawler followsbreadth first search. The reason is better depicted in the two following figures. In the first we see how theweb site would be traversed by a depth first algorithm and in the second by a breadth first algorithm.Figure 1. a) Depth first. The numbers next to the nodes depict the order in which the crawler visits the nodes. In this treelikerepresentation we see that each page occurs more than once, since in real sites each page can emerge from manydifferent parents. With depth first search, Node ‘E’ would first occur at a depth of d=2.b) Breadth first. This time node ‘E’ is rightly recorded as having its first appearance with depth: d=1.In the case of recording the web site’s real map, the mistake described above would be significant. Forinstance, if we miscalculate the depth of the first appearance of a web page, this would result in themiscalculation of all depths of its children pages and so on. In the end we would not be able to regenerate thecorrect map from the stored data. We could seek the first appearance of a web page by just looking for theminimum depth (since the depth is retrieved anyway). However we want to store all the appearances of a webpage in the site and also store them in the order that they actually occur. The <strong>do</strong>wnloading and parsing of thepage is performed only once and only in its first appearance (the following appearances are simply recorded).So the correct determination of that first appearance is a necessary step for the correct mapping of the site.Since we need to know all the transitions between the nodes of the site, we must record all possibleparents that a child node can occur from. This means that crawling only once for each page-node is notenough. When a common crawler opens a new page, it looks for links. If those links have already beenfound, or lead to pages that have already been crawled, they are ignored since they are treated as old pagesthat have no new information to provide. In our case however we record the link structure and are notinterested in storing the content of the pages. Consequently, our crawler <strong>do</strong>es not ignore links that lead topages that have already been traversed. Instead we check if those links occur for the first time, considering ofcourse the current father node. In other words, if the current pair {father_node, child_node} occurs for thefirst time, this to us is new information and therefore needs to be recorded. For instance, consider the casethat while the crawler parses a page A, finds a link to a page B that has not appeared before. Page B, will be75
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISadded to the queue for future expansion. Later when the crawler parses another page C, finds again a link topage B. We <strong>do</strong>n’t ignore this link. We record its appearance as new information for the site’s link structure.However we <strong>do</strong> not send again page B to the queue for <strong>do</strong>wnloading and expansion. The following tablesums up how we deal with all possible cases.Table 1. The behavior of the crawler depending on the found linksDuring page parsing: Check ActionFound link to newpageFound link to analready queued orparsed pageFound other links, notconsidered as properlinks (files etc.), ordisallowed by webmaster-Check if the link:{father_node, child_node}is unique• Submit new page toqueue• Record linkRecord link if yesIgnore link if no- Ignore linkThere were several other issues concerning the crawling algorithm that we had to deal with. We providedflexibility regarding the ability of the web master to block certain types of files or even whole directories ofhis site from the crawling process. Consider for example the case where a web site supports more than onelanguage. Some of those sites implement multilingual services by “repeating” the whole site with the samestructure, under another directory (www.website.com/index.html - .website.com/gr/index.html). Such a designwould be mapped by our crawler as repeating the whole link structure one level below the home page, sincethe URLs of the pages would appear different for each language and normally the links would not beidentified as already parsed. Cases like the following example would need to be treated specially. We providesuch options for the web masters.Table 2. Data Retrieved by the Crawler?URLFather URLTitleDepthPage fileParent codeDirectory URLAppearanceThe URL of the link currently parsed.The URL of the father nodeThe title of the web page as retrieved from the tag.The minimum number of steps required to get to this page from the homepage.The filename of the webpage in the server.The html code of the link that lead to this page. Useful for automatic hotlink application.The URL of the page’s parent directory in the web server.The order of appearance of this specific page, contrast to the appearance of the same pagefrom other father pages. The greatest ‘Appearance’ of each page, equals to the number ofdifferent parent pages this page can occur from.In other equally important issues, we only allow one thread to undertake the crawling, in synchronousmode, since we noticed rare but existing anomalies in the sequence of the parsed pages when operating inmulti threading mode. Also there was a lot to consider due to the embedment of the crawler to a webenvironment in terms of usability and security concerns. In addition, the crawling algorithm underwentseveral changes in order to support our need to store several extra data during the crawl. In two different,intervened stages of the crawling process we collect for each page the data shown in table 2. Finally somemore interventions were made, concerning the parsing of the pages, pages pointing to themselves, URLnormalization and the storing of the collected information in the database.3.3 Configuring the WebSPHINX CrawlerAll the specifications and needs previously described constitute a very different web crawler. Obviously weneeded to start our work on a highly dynamic and configurable machine. The link oriented charactercombined with the web environment in which the crawler is embedded, led us to choose a light weight, java76
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010web crawler named WebSPHINX (Website-Specific Processors for HTML INformation eXtraction) [6]. Javathrough its object oriented nature provided us with the perfect base for altering the functionality of thecrawling algorithm as needed. The fact that WebSPHINX is designed for crawling small parts of the web, isnot a problem since our targets are web sites. With careful memory handling, we managed to increase thecrawl capacity up to a few tenths of thousands of pages which is more than enough for our needs.As aforementioned, our main effort was to make the crawler operate around the notion of the link instea<strong>do</strong>f the web page - node. In figure 3, we see a small flow chart depicting how our crawler handles the links asthey occur during the parsing of a web page. Notice that each time a link pointing to an already found pageoccurs, we increment a counter and attach it to that link. This way we store in the correct order and count allthe appearances of each page. The use of this information will become apparent later on when we present the‘Hotlink Visualizer’ tool. After we check whether the link points to a valid page according to the webmaster’s criteria, we proceed as described in the first table.Figure 3. Flowchart that shows the handling of each new link found in a currently parsed page by the crawler.4. EXPERIMENTS – VERIFYING THE CRAWLER’S FUNCTIONALITYThe crawler’s functionality underwent testing both with dummy web sites in the lab and with real, large websites on the web. Testing with dummy sites provided answers for targeted algorithmic and functionalityissues and was continuous throughout the specification and development phase. Testing with real web sitesprovided feedback concerning size, data storage and memory handling issues and also concluded thecrawler’s algorithmic tenability. We also tested with all possible forms of links.77
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISN Fn D #1 A 0 12 B A 1 13 C A 1 14 A B 2 25 A C 2 36 D C 2 17 A D 3 48 B D 3 3Figure 4. A dummy web site on the left and the link-structure information that our crawler extracts for it.(N: Page-node, Fn: Father page-node, D: Depth, #: Counter and order of node’s appearance)5. THE WEB MASTER TOOL ‘HOTLINK VISUALIZER’In this section we describe the proposed web, administrative tool ‘Hotlink Visualizer’. In short, it is a webbased tool that embeds the crawler described previously and stores in a database all the web site’sconnectivity information. It provides a visual representation of the site’s structure in a tree-like (expandcollapse)formation. After storing this map, it gives to the user the ability to add hotlinks to the site’s mapwith an automated procedure then visualize the outcome and finally make permanent the changes of the linkstructure to the site. The option of maintaining different versions of the web site’s map is also available. Ourproposed tool guides the user in a step by step process to optimize his site as he or she sees best.The tool is programmed in Java/JSP which ensures better interoperability with our java crawler,flexibility and greater functionality in the web context of our study. It is supported by an Oracle 10g ExpressEdition database for the data storage, which provides adequate database capacity and scalability whenworking with large amount of data. The web server used is an Apache Tomcat 6.0.Figure 5. The ‘Hotlink Visualizer’ tool. The web crawler’s page for initiating new crawling processes.The home page of the tool welcomes the user and asks whether he or she would like to start a new crawl,or work on an already stored instance of the web site of interest. The user beforehand has specified someinformation concerning his file system. The paths of the web server and the web application’s source files arerequired in order to enable the automated hotlink addition. Additional editing paths for the web application’ssource code can be specified. In case the user opts for a new crawl, he or she will fill in some information and78
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010proceed to the next screen that can be seen in figure 5. Here we embed in an applet form the web site crawlerdescribed earlier. The crawler is simplified to the basics however the user still has a number ‘Advanced’options. All the adjustments necessary are set by default, thus all the user has to <strong>do</strong> is to provide the startingURL of the web site. Instructions are provided in case the user wants to eliminate parts of his site from thecrawl, or specify unwanted pages or files. The crawler by default looks for pages within the server and onlyunder the specified homepage. The user during the crawl can see real time statistics for the ongoing crawl.After the crawling is finished the data is stored to the database and the user can move on to the next step.The user can get to this next intermediate page of the ‘Available Crawls’ also from the homepage, if he orshe selects to work on an existing crawl. From this page the web master can see a table containinginformation for all the web site instances stored during previous sessions and can also edit basic, descriptiveinformation about these instances or delete them completely. What’s important is to select from this page thecrawl to work with (from hereon referred to as ‘active crawl’), by clicking on the corresponding radio button.This action activates a specific web site - instance and allows the user to begin interacting with it. A new,relevant sub menu appears on the right part of the tool titled: ‘Active Crawl: crawl_name’, with two optionsspecific for the selected active crawl. The first option reads ‘Visualize’ and the second ‘Hotlinks Home’.ICON INDEX: Page’s 1 st appearance (site’s DAG): Hotlink added by the user: View page’s detailsFigure 6. A small part of a tree-like representation of a dummy web site, crawled by our tool.By clicking the ‘Visualize’ link the user progresses to the web site’s map visualization page. Theconnectivity data stored by the crawler is properly fetched and a tree-like structure is created, depicting theweb site. At first only the home page appears awaiting the expansion, by clicking on the corresponding ‘+’button. Each page, if it has children, can be expanded or collapsed. Some of the web pages-nodes dependingon whether they are hotlinks or whether they belong to the site’s direct acyclic graph (consisted of all of thefirst appearances of each page) can have appropriate symbols accompanying them. In figure 6 we can see asmall part of a web site’s map as generated by our tool. Each page is shown in the site’s map is by its tag, as it is retrieved during the parsing phase. If the title for any reason in not successfully retrieved, thecomplete URL is shown instead. The title or URL shown is a physical link to the web page that opens in anew tab or browser, in order for the user to have immediate views of each page. By clicking on the arrownext to the title or link of the page, the user is transferred to the ‘Node Details’ page. The index in figure 6explains the icons that can be seen in a site’s map.In the detailed page of each link-node the web master can view a full connectivity status concerning thespecific page. Apart from the standard information retrieved during the crawl, such as the URL, depth etc. theweb master can see by a click of a corresponding button a detailed table with all of the other appearances ofthe node in the site, another table with all the possible father nodes and also all the children nodes. Finallyfrom this page the web master can initiate the procedure for a hotlink addition that has as a father page thecurrent node and as a target a page that he or she will specify next. The addition is completed with the help ofa new side menu that appears when the procedure begins and that guides the user through this quick process.The ‘Hotlinks Home’ page is one where the web master can view the hotlinks and their status that havealready been added for the active crawl and perform the automated addition of those already specified but notyet physically added to the site. The automatic addition uses information about the physical path of the website’s files in the web server that the user has already specified. The source code of the links that wasretrieved and stored during the crawl is also used in order to provide better formatted links. The links areappended to the bottom of the father page and though this <strong>do</strong>es not produce the desired result, it usuallysimply requires the transfer of the link to the suitable place, thus making the completion of the changes thatthe web master aims to be easy, fast and straightforward.To better illustrate the functionality of the ‘Hotlink Visualizer’ we present bellow the steps required for aweb master to acquire the exact map of a site, perform the optimizations that he sees best, make themeffective and also maintain the older image of the web site for his own reference and comparison purposes.1. The user begins by acquiring the initial map of the web site. He <strong>do</strong>es that by choosing to start anew crawl and then using the embedded crawler as aforementioned.79
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADIS2. The hotlink assignment procedure is repeated until all the desirable changes are completed.3. From the ‘Hotlinks Home’ page the web master automatically inserts those of the suggestedhotlinks approved. The user has the option to specify hotlinks just for visualization andcomparison without adding them. The transformation of the site is completed with this step.4. Now the user can duplicate the stored instance of his site either automatically or by repeatingstep 1 (crawl the altered site and acquire the site’s map with the hotlink additions).5. Finally the web master can activate the first crawl and delete the hotlinks added in step 2.The above procedure will leave the user with both the new and old versions of the web site. Of courseonly the last version exists live on the server. By following the same steps the web master can enrich theinstances-versions of his web site that are stored by ‘Hotlink Visualizer’ thus providing an archive of siteversions which he or she will be able to edit, compare and apply at any time.6. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORKIn this paper we attempted an approach on the hotlink assignment problem from a more practical perspective.We proposed a new administrative tool that aims to help the user exploit this field of research which being soimportant, remains relatively unapplied.The ‘Hotlink Visualizer’ leaves numerous options open for expansion and future research. First of all, as atool oriented towards the World Wide Web, its specifications must constantly evolve accordingly in order toavoid any limitations in its use. An interesting prospect for future expansion is the crawling in the hiddenparts of the site or the deep Web as discussed in [8]. The potential of embedding invisible crawl functionalityin a web, administrative tool such as the ‘Hotlink Visualizer’ would broaden massively its perspective andgenerality of use. Strictly from a usability point of view, there could be additions, statistic enhancements an<strong>do</strong>ptimizations, depending on the use and acceptance of the tool and of course the feedback. There are alreadyideas for a more unambiguous grouping of each crawl’s hotlinks. What is even more exciting as a prospectthough is to develop a library of hotlink assignment algorithms, suitably specified as to be applicable to themodel of the web site instances that are acquired by our crawler. Research in this direction would requireconsiderable effort in embedding other hotlink assignment methods in such a library, but will provide thecommunity with a complete hotlink assignment tool that could be a frame of reference for future web siteoptimization research attempts.REFERENCES1. John Garofalakis, Panagiotis Kappos and Dimitris Mourloukos, 1999. Web Site Optimization Using Page Popularity.IEEE <strong>Internet</strong> Computing, July-August 1999.2. John Garofalakis, Panagiotis Kappos and Christos Makris, 2002. Improving the performance of Web access bybridging global ranking with local page popularity metrics. <strong>Internet</strong> Research – Westport then Bradford, volume 12,part 1, pp. 43-54.3. John Garofalakis, Theo<strong>do</strong>ula Giannakoudi, Evangelos Sakkopoulos, 2007. An Integrated Technique for Web SiteUsage Semantic Analysis: The ORGAN System, Journal of Web Engineering, (JWE), Rinton Press, Vol. 6, No 3, pp.261-280.4. Fuhrmann S., Krumke S.O., Wirth H.C., 2001. Multiple hotlink assignment. Proceedings of the Twenty-SeventhInternational Workshop on Graph- Theoretic Concepts in Computer Science.5. Miguel Vargas Martin, 2002. Enhancing Hyperlink Structure for Improving Web Performance, PhD thesis, CharletonUniversity.6. The WebSPHINX crawler main site: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rcm/websphinx. Carnegie Mellon University.7. Junghoo Cho and Hector Garcia-Molina, 2002. Parallel crawlers. In Proceedings of the eleventh internationalconference on World Wide Web, Honolulu, Hawaii, USA, pp 124–135. ACM Press.8. He, Bin et al, 2007. Accessing the Deep Web: A Survey. Communications of the ACM (CACM) 50, pp 94–101.9. D. Antoniou et al, 2009. Context-similarity based hotlinks assignment: Model, metrics and algorithm. In press forjournal Data & Knowledge Engineering.80
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010CRITICAL FACTORS IN ELECTRONIC LIBRARYACCEPTANCE: EMPIRICAL VALIDATION OFNATIONALITY BASED UTAUT USING SEMRita Oluchi Orji*, Yasemin Yardimci Cetin** and Sevgi Ozkan***Computer Science Department, University of Saskatchewan, Canada**Informatics Institute, Middle East Technical University, Ankara, TurkeyABSTRACTWhile millions of <strong>do</strong>llars are spent building digital libraries, research findings indicate that millions of potential usersmay still be ignoring them. Researchers have applied different Technology Acceptance Models to determine theacceptance of Information System (IS). In this research, we recognized the existence of different groups of users ofElectronic Library System (ELS) with different usage behavior and, therefore, developed and validated a Nationalitybased Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (NUTAUT) model adapted from UTAUT model to accountfor each group of users’ acceptance. Nationality was introduced based on the assumption that the UTAUT independentvariables will impact the acceptance and usage differently when moderated by nationality. The result from 116 (58international and 58 national) student participants provides support for NUTAUT by showing that the various UTAUTconstructs exert varying degree of effects. It not only confirms the NUTAUT robustness in predicting acceptance of bothNational and International Students (91% and 98% respectively) but also determines the importance of each independentconstruct to each group in determining acceptance. Performance Expectancy (EE) and Social Influence (SI) aresignificant factors for International students while Effort Expectancy (EE) and Facilitating Conditions (FC) have thesame effect for the two groups. Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) was used as the main technique for data analysis.This study is useful to school managers, bank managers and other Information Science designers that make decisionabout IS that are used by people of different nationalities. The NUTAUT model can also be applied in cross-culturalacceptance and so we provide more insight into the understanding of Technology Acceptance through this study.KEYWORDSDigital Library, Information Retrieval, Technology Acceptance, Structural Equation Modeling1. INTRODUCTIONReal world libraries are hard to use. Attempts to reduce the accessibility problems associated with real worldlibraries led to the concept of Electronic Library Systems (ELS) (also referred to as, Digital Library). ELShave become an inevitable part of today’s educational systems. ELS aims to acquire, store, organize andpreserve information for easy access. Leedy [16] found that information seekers often need the assistance ofa librarian, especially when the catalogue and guides are difficult to use. In recognition of this, many attemptshave been made towards the establishment and improvement of the structure of a library to achieve both ahigh degree of usefulness and easier access to information.Consequently, many universities have digitized their library systems. However, while many resourceshave been devoted to developing these systems, library researchers have observed that digital libraries remainunderutilized [28] and if these systems are not widely utilized, it will be difficult to obtain correspondingreturn on investments. Therefore, there is a clear need to identify and compare factors that can influence ELSacceptance and use by people from different nations so that information system designers, school managers,library managers and others can formulate strategies to design systems that can be acceptable by all(international and national). In this regard, Tibenderana and Patrick [23] found that relevance moderated byawareness plays a major role in acceptance of ELS services. In addition, James et al [13] developed a modelof digital library user acceptance based on the technology acceptance model and concluded that acceptance ispreceded by a user’s perception of a system’s usability and this is directly dependent on interface81
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADIScharacteristics, organizational contexts, and individual differences. However, no study has recognized theexistence of different group of users of ELS and the factors that affects the acceptance of each group.In this paper, we argue that national and international users will exhibit different usage behaviors. Wethus, developed a NUTAUT Model to account for the moderating effect of nationality on the UTAUT model.This was motivated by the observation that different groups of users (national and international students)exhibit different use behavior towards ELS. Our research model not only predicts the varying degrees ofacceptance for each user groups but also shows the degree of importance of each independent construct(Performance Expectancy (PE), Effort Expectancy (EE), Social Influence (SI), Facilitating Condition (FC))in determining acceptance for each group. The study contributes significantly towards understanding of theacceptance of ELS in academic environments and can also be useful to school managers, bank managers an<strong>do</strong>ther IS designers that make decisions about IS that are used by people of different nationalities.This paper is organized as follows: In Section 2, we discuss the theoretical background of the study andpresent our NUTAUT model in Section 3. Section 4 highlights methods employed in our research andSection 5 presents the analysis of the result and discussion. Section 6 concludes by presenting our findingsfollowed by limitations and recommendations for future work.2. THEORETICAL BACKGROUND AND RELATED WORK2.1 Digital Library SystemsThere have been significant advances in the technical development of digital libraries in areas such asinformation storage, information retrieval, and system integration, resulting in dramatic improvements intheir performance. While many resources have been devoted to developing these systems, library researchershave observed that ELS remain underutilized [28]. ELS have received a lot of attention from researchers.Neuman [20] in her naturalistic inquiry detailed some of the difficulties 92 high school freshmen andsophomore displayed as they interacted with ELS. Her data revealed the basic differences between structuresinherent in database and the conceptual structure that students bring to searching. These differences are socompelling that they seriously hamper students’ independent use of these resources (p.74). The students’ lackof understanding of the organization of information hampered their access of appropriate information fortheir research. The study demonstrated that information search has not become easier with the advent oftechnology.2.2 Technology Acceptance TheoriesIt is a common belief that introducing a new technology automatically results in its acceptance and use.However, several research findings dispute this claim, showing that there are several other factors that affecttechnology acceptance and use [5]. Many IS researcher have published on various theories that could explainthe acceptance of information systems. These theories include the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) byDavis et al [7]; the Theory of Reasoned Action (TRA) by Fishbein and Ajzen [9]; the Theory of PlannedBehavior (TPB) by Ajzen, [1] and the UTAUT by Vakentash [26] which is the most recent of all thetechnology acceptance theories. The TAM model is the most widely used and has “perceived usefulness” and“perceived ease of use” as its main elements. The model suggests that when users are presented withtechnology, “perceived usefulness” and “perceived ease of use” influence their decisions about how andwhen they will use the technology. The perceived usefulness is defined as “the degree to which a personbelieves that using a particular system would enhance his or her job performance,” while perceived ease ofuse is defined as “the degree to which a person believes that using a particular system would be free ofeffort” [7].Since the development of UTAUT model, it has attracted attention of many scholars in IS researchbecause of its predictive performance of 70% [26]. This is a major improvement over the widely used TAMmodel with predictive capacity of 35% [18, 25]. Various researchers [2, 17] validated the model and others[6, 12, 19, 23] extended it in different contexts, including multicultural studies [21], and all found itsconstructs highly predictive [19]. This, in addition to the fact that the moderating variables offer flexibility toallow the introduction of new dimensions into the model, was the major motivation for the use of UTAUT82
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010model in the current investigation. We approached the a<strong>do</strong>ption and discovery of critical factors that affecta<strong>do</strong>ption of ELS from the perspective of technology acceptance.3. MODEL FORMULATION3.1 Nationality based UTAUT (NUTAUT)NUTAUT was adapted from UTAUT by introducing a new modulating variable nationality. The definitionof the NUTAUT constructs is as given in Table 1 and Table 2 and the model is shown in Figure 1.Nationality was introduced based on the assumption that the UTAUT independent variables PE, EE, SI andFC will impact on behavior intention (BI) differently and BI with FC will also impact on use behavior (UB)differently when moderated by nationality.DeterminantPerformance expectancy (PE)Effort expectancy (EE)Social influence (SI)Facilitating conditions FC)Behavioral Intention (BI)Use Behavior (UB)ModeratorGenderAgeExperienceVoluntariness of useNationalityTable 1. NUTAUT ComponentsDescriptionDegree to which an individual believes that using the system will help attain gains in jobperformanceThe degree of ease associated with the use of the systemThe degree to which an individual perceives that important others believe he or she shoulduse the new systemThe degree to which an individual believes that an organizational and technicalinfrastructure exists to support use of the systemThe measure of the likelihood of an individual to employ the system.This measures the acceptance of the system.Table 2. NUTAUT ModeratorsDescriptionGender roles have a strong psychological basis and are enduring.Age has an effect on attitudes.Deals with how long the user has used the system.If usage is voluntary or mandatedWhether the user is in the national or international students categoryPEESIFCBIUBNationalityVoluntarinessExperienceGenderAgeFigure 1. Nationality Based UTAUT (NUTAUT)3.2 HypothesesThe expectations are that there are varying degrees of acceptance by international and national students. Fourhypotheses have been postulated to guide this study:83
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISH1: UTAUT moderated by Nationality will demonstrate varying degrees of acceptance by these groupsH2: Social Influence will be an important predictor for international students when moderated bynationalityH3: Facilitating Condition mediated by Nationality will demonstrate more effect on Use Behavior forinternational studentsH4: Effort Expectancy impacts behavioral intention more than performance expectancy when moderatedby nationality4. METHODOLOGYThe data-gathering instrument used for this study was a self-administered online questionnaire. Thequestionnaire was based on the pre-existing tool developed by Venkatesh [25] and has been used byAnderson and Schwager [2], Moran [19], and Tibenderana & Ogao [23]. The research question was dividedinto three sections. Section 1 contained 18 close questions which collected the participant demographicinformation and their experience with computers and ELS. Section 2 contains a total of 21 questions aboutELS hardware and services provided by Middle East Technical University (METU) library. These questionscollected the student’s awareness of these facilities and services. The respondents chose either a “Yes”, “No”or “Not Sure” answer in response to each ELS services and facilities indicated. Section 3 contained 25questions with a 5-point Likert scale where a 1 represented ‘strongly agree’ and a 5 represented ‘stronglydisagree’. There were a total of 116 participants: 58 International and 58 National graduate students.Moreover, the number of male and female participants was fairly evenly distributed across the disciplines. Apilot study was carried out on 10 participants to reassure absence of ambiguity in the questions.5. RESULT ANALYSIS AND DISCUSSION5.1 Validation of the Survey Instrument and NutautThe data analysis was <strong>do</strong>ne using SPSS and Linear Structural Relations (LISREL) structural equationmodeling tool. SPSS was a<strong>do</strong>pted to conduct Principal Components Analysis (PCA) and to assess thevalidity of the scale. The Cronbachs’ Alpha was calculated to examine the reliability of each factor. TheAlpha values of the questionnaire exceeded 0.8 (Table 3, column 4), demonstrating the good reliability.Before conducting PCA, Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO) and Bartlett sphericity test was checked to measure forthe sampling adequacy [14]. The KMO were all >0.700 and the result of Bartlett sphericity test wassignificant at 0.7) than cross-loadings on other factors (
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010Table 3. Construct validity and reliability measuresGroup Comparison KMO BartlettSphericityCronbach’sAlphaP-Value χ 2 /df RAMSEARecommended >0.5 0.90 >0.90International0.951 0.851 0.946 0.950National0.935 0.901 0.995 0.943DependentVariableBehavioralIntentionUseBehavioralTable 5. T Test and P Values for participantgroupsT-testP-ValueNational 2.49
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADIScondition and reduction in the amount of effort expectancy for ELS user enhances the acceptance and use oftechnology. This agrees with the finding of Tibenderana & Ogao [23] that library end-users in the universityaccept and use electronic library system. The difference in acceptance between the two is mostly attributed tofacilitating condition which is the most important construct for the two groups. A plausible explanation isthat the facilitating condition includes the generality of all the assistance and supports that foster usage ratherthan just external controls related to the environment; therefore, use behavior cannot occur if objectiveconditions in the environment prevent it [24] or if the facilitating conditions make the behavior difficult. Thisis consistent with the empirical studies of Thompson et al [22] and others [25, 26] who found the direct effectof facilitating condition on usage behavior. International students need to be provided with some additionalassistance which national students might require. This assistance includes training and librarian assistance,especially at the early stages of their enrolment. This was explained by Neuman [20] statement which statesthat there is a basic difference between structures inherent in ELS and conceptual structures that studentsbring to searching: these differences are so compelling that they seriously hamper students. Most of thenational participants of this research also did their undergraduate degrees in the university and therefore haveworking knowledge of the ELS.Table 6. Comparison of national and international model contributionsConstructs International(N=58) National(N=58) No. of QuestionsAskedPE 0.50 0.30 4 4EE 0.52 0.52 6 5SI 0.12 0.02 3 2FC 0.78 0.76 6 2BI 0.25 0.25 3 2UB 3 2Table 7. Comparison international student and national students modelsModel Behavioral Intention Use Behavior TotalInternational 25% 66% 91%National 25% 73% 98%No. of QuestionsRetainedH2: Social Influence will be an important predictor for international students when moderated bynationalityThis hypothesis is also supported; social influence shows a more significant effect on behavioral intent forinternational students than national students with a prediction of 12% and 2% respectively. This is expectedsince international students are likely to move in groups and therefore are easily influenced to use this systemby people that matter to them in the environment. This can, to an extent, be likened to the effect offacilitating condition; the groups function as a motivator and can provide necessary assistance especially forthose that are new to the system. Practically, the results of this study suggest that organizations should usedifferent strategies in motivating the use of a new technology for different situations/groups. For someinformation systems whose usage is mandatory, those factors contributing to Social Influence such as theinstructors/supervisor's prodding might work. However, when the usage is voluntary, like the case of ELS,the managers might want to think of better ways to promote usage. Though social influence is a factor for allstudents but show stronger effect for international students, the effect is greatly reduced when moderated byexperience and training, and therefore should not be used as a strong motivator. This is consistent withprevious studies (e.g., Venkatesh & Davis [25]); the effect of SI to BI is significant under mandatory andinexperienced use situationsH3: Facilitating condition mediated by Nationality will demonstrate more effect on Use behavior forinternational studentsThis is only partially supported with 78% and 76% prediction for international and national studentsrespectively. This shows that irrespective of nationality, facilitating condition is still crucial. Our initialassertion that facilitating condition will not be as important for national students owing to the availability ofalternatives including resources from friends and families seems to be wrong. This can possibly be explainedby the fact that the University invests considerable amount of resources to provide both online, offline andremote access to the ELS, so international students as well as national students still exhibit use behavior on86
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010the ELS despite availability of alternatives. This is consistent with the empirical studies of Thompson et al[22] who found the direct effect of facilitating condition on usage behaviorH4: Effort expectancy impacts on behavioral intention more than Performance expectancy whenmoderated by nationalityThis is partially supported by the model. EE contributed 52% compared to 30% of PE for nationalstudents which support the hypothesis but there is no significant difference between the two for internationalstudent with PE of 50% and EE of 52%. This means that for national students, acceptance is more dependenton EE than PE, while international students attached similar degrees of importance to both. In other wordsnational students are unlikely to use the system if it is difficult to use even if it is useful. This can also beexplained by the fact that the availability of alternatives or competition generates a negative effect, affectingperceived EE. The national students have other sources of getting materials for their research, more easilythan international students, and might not afford to spend a lot of time and energy searching through complexELS, while international students value both ease of use and useful systems alike. This could also mean thatin the absence of alternatives, PE becomes as important as EE. This agrees with Andrea and Virili [3]:Technology acceptance is basically a choice among different alternative technologies/tools to accomplishuser tasks.6. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORKThe results suggest that Nationality is a significant moderator that affects the acceptance of ELS and thateffect exerted by UTAUT constructs on individual group (international and national students) varyconsiderably. Facilitating condition significantly influences the acceptance and use of ELS.In general, the NUTAUT <strong>do</strong>es predict the successful acceptance of ELS by graduate students. Theparticipants showed higher inclination to use ELS by showing higher percentage of use behavior. We believethat this is a result of the role played by readily available access and easy to use library facility on-campuscompared to off-campus, since the majority of the participants stay on-campus and can easily andconveniently access the ELS as compared to students living off-campus. To increase acceptance of ELS, thisresearch suggests that the universities working towards increasing acceptance of ELS should makeaccessibility (facilitating conditions and effort expectancy) of the ELS to both outside and inside the campuseasy.This study shows that the variables, facilitating condition, effort expectancy, performance expectancy andsocial influence (listed in decreasing order of relevance), are the critical components that affect students’acceptance and use of ELS. However, these factors are shown to have varying effect on different groups. Forthe two groups (international and national students), facilitating condition and effort expectancy remains themost critical factors that contribute to acceptance, while performance expectancy and social influences werefairly insignificant (30% and 2% respectively) for national graduate students.Finally, though this research focused on the acceptance of ELS in educational institutions, the findingscan be applied to other context like in Government to Citizen (G2C) Systems or websites used for electroniccommerce. These findings can be applicable to any systems where the use and acceptance of the system maydiffer by international and national users. The study has contributed to the development of NUTAUT and byidentified the critical factors, in order of importance, that affect acceptance when UTAUT is moderated bynationality. We also showed that nationality is an important moderator that determines the factors affectingacceptance.In conclusion, for a successful implementation of ELS that will be accepted, more emphasis should beplaced on facilitating conditions and effort expectancy but at the same time, performance expectancy andsocial influence should not be overlooked.This research was carried out in a university environment and may not reflect ELS acceptance outside theuniversity environment, although we plan to validate NUTAUT elsewhere as future work. The number ofparticipants (116) may indeed be a limitation of this study, and so we want to conduct another study with alarger number of participants and in another environment to confirm the results shown in this research.87
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISREFERENCES[1] Ajzen, I. 1991. The Theory of Planned Behavior. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes,50,179-21[2] Anderson, J. E. and Schwager, P. H. 2006. The Tablet PC: Applying the UTAUT Model, Paper presented at theAmerican Conference on Information Systems, Acapulco,Mexico[3] A. V. Pontiggia and Virili, F. 2009. Network effects in technology acceptance: Laboratory experimental evidence.International Journal of Information Management, 30(1): pp. 68 – 77.[4] Bagozzi R P and Yi Y. 1988. "On the evaluation of structural equation models," Journal of the Academy ofMarketing Science, 16(1), pp. 74-94.[5] Carlsson, C., J. et al 2006. A<strong>do</strong>ption of Mobile Device/Services Searching for Answers with the UTAUT. Proceedingof the 39th Hawaii International Conference on System Science. Hawaii. USA. 1 – 10.[6] Cody-Allen, E. and Kishore, R. 2006. An Extension of the UTAUT Model with E- Eqality, Trust & SatisfactionConstructs. CPR: 183-189.[7] Davis, F. D. et al 1989. User Acceptance of Computer Technology: A Comparison of Two Theoretical Models.Management Science. 35(8): 982-1002.[9] Fishbein, M. and I. Ajzen, Belief, 1975. Attitude Intention and Behavior: An Introduction to Theory and Research.Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company.[10]Gefen D et al 2000. "Structural Equation Modeling and Regression:Guidelines for Research Practice,"Communications of the Association for Information Systems, vol 4, pp. 1-70.[11]Guo Z. 1999. Social Statistics Analytical Methods—the Application of SPSS. Beijing: China Renmin University Press[12]Heerik, M. et al 2006. Human-Robot User Studies in Eldercare: Lessons Learned. Institute for InformationEngineering, University of Amsterdam, Oudweg, The Netherlands.[13] J. Y. L Thong, et al 2004. What leads to user acceptance of digital libraries? Communications of the ACM, 47(11),79-83.[14]Kaiser, H. 1970. A Second Generation Little Jiffy. Psycometrika, 35, 401-415.[15]Lee, Y. et al 2003. The Technology Acceptance Model: Past, Present, and Future. Communications of theAssociation for Information Systems. 12(50): pp.752-780[16]Leedy, P. 1993. Practical Research, Planning and Design: Columbus, Ohio, Merrill, 17-42.[17]Louho, R., M. et al 2006. Factors Affecting the Use of Hybrid Media Applications. Graphic Arts in Finland. 35: 3.[18]Meister, D. B. and Compeau, D. R. 2002. Infusion of Innovation A<strong>do</strong>ption: An Individual Perspective: Proceedingsof the ASAC. Winnipeg, Manitoba.[19]Moran, M. J. 2006. College Student’s Acceptance of Tablet PCs and Application of the Unified Theory ofAcceptance Technology (UTAUT) Model. Ph. D. Thesis. Capella University. Mennesota, USA.[20]Neuman, D. 2004. Learning and the Digital Library. Youth information seeking behavior. Theory, model and issues(pp. 65-95).[21]Oshlyansky, L. et al 2007. Validating the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) toolcross-culturally. Proc. of HCI. 2 BCS, 83-86.Pontiggia A. V. and Virili, F. 2009. Network effects in technology acceptance: Laboratory experimental evidence.International Journal of Information Management, 30(1): pp. 68 – 77.[22]Thompson R. L. et al 1991. Personal Computing: Toward a Conceptual Model of Utilization. MIS Q. 15(1):125–43.[23]Tibenderana, P. K. and Patrick J. O. 2008. Acceptance and Use of Electronic Library Services in UgandaUniversities. ACM JCDL.[24]Triandis, H. 1980. "Values, attitudes, and interpersonal behavior", Nebraska Symposium on Motivation, pp.195-259.[25]Venkatesh, V. and Davis, F.D., 2000. A theoretical extension of the technology acceptance model: fourlongitudinalfield studies. Management Science, 46 (2), 186–204.[26]Venkatesh, V. et al. 2003. User Acceptance of Information Technology: Toward a Unified View. MIS Quarterly,27(3): 425-478[27]Wiederhold, G. 1995. Digital libraries, Value and Productivity. Communicaton of ACM 38(4) 85–96.[28]Wood, F. et al, 1995. Information Skills for Student Centered learning. The Association for InformationManagement. Milton Keynes, Lon<strong>do</strong>n, UK, 134–148.[29] Wixom, B. H. & Todd, P. A. 2005. A Theoretical Intergration of User Satisfaction and Technology Acceptance.Information Systems Research, 16(1): 85-102.88
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010XLPATH: A XML LINKING PATH LANGUAGEPaulo Caetano da Silva*, Marcelo Men<strong>do</strong>nça <strong>do</strong>s Santos** and Valéria Cesário Times***Federal University of Pernambuco - Center for Informatics, PO BOX 7851, Brazil**Área 1 Science and Technology Faculty, Salva<strong>do</strong>r, BrazilABSTRACTXLink are XML elements used for describing relationships and semantic information contained in valid XML <strong>do</strong>cuments.Thus, the structure of XLink can be navigated and their components (arcs, locators, resources and title) can be retrievedthrough a path language, like XPath. However, it was not specified to retrieve information from specific elements ofXlink, which can contain semantic information. This paper proposes XLPath, a path language turned to navigation onXLink, which allows performing queries on the elements that compose the links between XML <strong>do</strong>cuments. Aiming todemonstrate the use of XLPath, a processor prototype for this language was developed, which was evaluated in a casestudy based on XBRL <strong>do</strong>cuments, since XBRL is a technology that makes extensive use of XLink.KEYWORDSXLPath, XLink, Navigational Language, XML.1. INTRODUCTIONCurrent software applications usually have to deal with multiple data sources and data formats. In order tominimize this problem, XML has been a<strong>do</strong>pted as a way to integrate data in a standard format. As a result ofthe increasing need of data integration and data exchange, XML <strong>do</strong>cuments are turning into very huge andrather interlinked files. Often, these <strong>do</strong>cuments have complex link networks pointing to all kinds ofresources. These resources should be used only combined with the XML <strong>do</strong>cument, since their semantics aredefined by the link networks. The XML Linking Language (XLink) [XLink, 2001] is used to describerelationships among resources included in XML <strong>do</strong>cuments and referenced by links. By the use of XLink, itis possible to create association rules among the link resources, as well as to define the semantics needed fortraversing a given link according to the specific meaning of this relationship. Processing <strong>do</strong>cuments with linknetworks has become a challenging task, because query languages usually <strong>do</strong> not support link traversingtechniques.One of the mechanisms used on data structures based on XML are the extended links provided by XLink.The extended links allow the establishment of more complex link structures, capable of relating an arbitrarynumber of resources [Lowe et.al, 2001]. An extended link basically consists of an XML element that containsother elements, where a namespace [Namespace, 2009] is used for declaring attributes specified by XLink,assigning to these sub-elements functionalities. Due to the functionalities offered by these mechanisms, insome situations the extended links have been used to represent the data semantic, modeling relationshipsbetween elements structured on XML or on XML Schema [Schema, 2004]. An example of how the datasemantic is represented on XLink is XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language) [XBRL, 2003], aninternational standard for represent and publish financial reports that uses extended links for modelingfinancial conceptsHowever, despite of the functionalities provided by XLink, the maintenance and manipulation ofstructures that are based on extended links becomes a costly and inefficient task when a solution to automatethe navigation through these interconnected data structures is not available, making difficult the execution ofdata retrievals from the extended links. In this scenario, a process that demands the identification of remoteinformation, from an extended link, implies in a need of users performing a detailed analysis of the XML<strong>do</strong>cument structure, “navigating” visually through the references established by the links until they reach thedesired information. Obviously, as the volume of data stored in the database increases, this navigation task89
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISmay become prohibitive. A possible solution would be the use of XQuery [XQuery, 2007] or XPath [XPath,1999] for recovering information structured on XML. The first one consists of a query language for XMLdata, just like SQL is for relational data, while the second one allows exploring the nodes of the tree basedstructure of XML <strong>do</strong>cuments. According to [Harold et. al., 2004], XPath is a language to capture nodes andnodes groups of this tree. However, as we will discuss in Section 2, these languages appear to be insufficientwhen interconnected XML data are queried. It demands, therefore, a language whose properties arespecialized on the treatment of this link network. In Section 6, we will investigate the solutions created withthis purpose. Nevertheless, we will show that the deficiencies and restrictions presented by them justify thecreation of the language proposed in this paper.In this paper, we propose XLPath (XML Linking Path Language), a language that is based on queryexpressions, is similar to XPath, and has been designed for navigating in an extended link network of XML<strong>do</strong>cuments. This language allows the elements that compose the networks to be accessed according torefining criteria defined by users. This paper is organized as follows. In Section 2, the concepts aboutextended links and the limitations of XQuery and XPath to manipulate these links are presented. Thespecification of XLPath language is presented in Section 3 and its processor is detailed in Section 4. A casestudy based on a XBRL <strong>do</strong>cument is discussed in Section 5. In Section 6, corelated studies are evaluatedregarding their limitations and advantages. At last, this paper conclusion is in Section 7.2. EXTENDED LINKS AND ACTUAL BOTTLENECKSIn this section, we will discuss concepts inherent to extended links, showing an example, Figure 1, which willbe used through the whole paper to explain XLPath. It will also be discussed the restrictions that happen incurrent W3C [W3C, 2010] standard languages to the navigation and query in XML <strong>do</strong>cuments.XLink provides two types of links. The first one, the simple type, may be considered as a simplificationof the extended link. A simple link associates exactly two resources, one local and one remote, with an arcgoing from the former to the latter. The second type corresponds to the extended links, which allow theconnections creation: (i) outbound – in which the source resource is local and the destiny resource is remote;(ii) inbound – when the source resource is remote and the destiny resource is local; and, (iii) third-party –when both, source and destiny, are remote. In this case, separated <strong>do</strong>cuments are created, called linkbases, inwhich the links are grouped. Using extended links it is possible to associate an arbitrary number of resources.In order to provide such flexibility, the structure of extended links contains elements that: (1) point to remoteresources through an URI – xlink:type=”locator”; (2) consist of local resources - xlink:type=”resource”, usedfor encapsulating information inside the link; (3) define arc traversing rules - xlink:type=”arc”. An arcconnects two resources and provides information about the link traversing, such as the navigation directionand the application behavior regarding the traversing; and (4) provides descriptive information regarding thelink - xlink:type=”title”. In this paper, the terms locator, resource, arc and title refer to the homonym typesub-elements.Figure 1 illustrates a code excerpt for an extended link of the type third-party. This code was extractedfrom the XBRL taxonomy of project COREP [COREP, 2005], an initiative of CEBS (Committe of EuropeanBanking Supervisors) to provide a framework of financial reports for some institutions from European Union.In this code, locators were declared to refer the elements d-ba_BankingActivitiesDomain, d-ba_TotalBankingActivities and d-ba_TotalBankingActivitiesSubjectBIA, found in the scheme d-ba-2006-07-01.xsd. In addition, arcs are used to establish relationships of the type <strong>do</strong>main-member between theseelements. In virtue of the increasing usage of XML as a mean for storing data, query languages carry out abase role, allowing access to data and metadata that compose the semi-structured data files. However manylanguages with this purpose exist, as XQL [Robie et al., 1999] and XML-QL [Deutsch et al., 1998], thelanguages constructed by W3C, XQuery and XPath, attend the main needs of access to databases and XML<strong>do</strong>cuments. The main use of XQuery is the performance of queries to data stored in native XML data bases.The XPath use query expressions called location path, which determine a navigation path between the<strong>do</strong>cument parts, called nodes, exploring the relationships characteristic of the tree formed by these nodes (e.g. parent, child, sibling). In extended links case, once they are XML base data, it is possible to explore themunder the nodes tree perspective through XPath. Figure 2 shows a simplified nodes tree (without theattributes) that characterizes the extended link of Figure 1.90
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010. . .Figure 1. Example of an extended link.childparentlink:definitionLinklink:locsiblinglink:loclink:definitionArclink:loclink:definitionArcFigure 2. Extended link nodes tree.As an example of XPath expression, the following location path may be used to find, from the XML<strong>do</strong>cument root, the element locator whose label is “BankingActivitiesDomain”:/descendant‐or‐self::link:definitionLink/child::link:loc[@xlink:label=”BankingActivitiesDomain”]. The query resulting fromthe computation of this expression is performed in stages called location steps (isolated by “/”), whosegeneral form is: axis::nodeSpecification[Predicate].The axis indicates in each direction from one reference node – called context node – the query must beperformed, placed that in majority of cases this direction regards to one of the relationships of the XML tree.The node specification determines which nodes in this direction must be selected. Besides that, it is possibleto filter the result using a predicate (optional), which consists in a boolean test applied to the selected node:when the result is true, the node is maintained; otherwise, it is discarded. The expression organization insuccessive location steps allows any node in the tree to be accessed, making XPath an ideal tool fornavigating in this type of structure. XPath has been seen as a de facto standard in the XML query researcharea. However, it <strong>do</strong>es not provide a means of navigating through XLink links. As a result, both thesemantics and the processing issues concerning link data are compromised.When the interest is exploring the information according to the extended links perspective, this solutionappears to be insufficient. For example, to formulate a query whose purpose is to select all the destinyelements of arcs, whose source is the element d-ba_TotalBankingActivities, two important issues must beconsidered: (i) differently from a traditional XML tree, the data structure resulting from referencesestablished by the links characterize a network; and (ii) there is no restriction regarding the location of areferred resource, which may be in any part of the XML <strong>do</strong>cument or, yet, in a distinct <strong>do</strong>cument. Thus,exploring the information related by the extended link using XPath, when it is not possible (in the case ofrefreences between distinct XML <strong>do</strong>cuments), demands a formulation of complex queries. With XQuery thesituation is not different, since mechanisms as FLWOR clauses are not proper for navigation in links. It isevident, therefore, the need for a query language specialized in the extended links mechanism. However, it isimportant to ponder that the development of a language based on a completely new syntax would cause abigger difficult assimilation from the users who are already familiar with XPath syntax. To minimize thisimpact, it is desirable the existence of a proximity between these syntaxes. The language proposed in thispaper, XLPath, is based on location path expressions of XPath, in which new axis, node tests and predicateswere developed aiming the navigation through the networks formed by extended links.91
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADIS3. XLPATH SPECIFICATIONIn this section, the language proposed will be presented. In Section 3.1, the requirements identified as a guideto XLPath specification are given. In Section 3.2, we will discuss two approaches to perform queries used inXLPath. In Section 3.3 the language syntax and semantic are detailed.3.1 XLPath requirementsFrom the need verified regarding the navigation over links, as well as XLink conceptual approaches, it ispossible to compile a series of requirements have guided the XLPath construction: i) Conceptual distinctionbetween arcs and connections, and the elements that define them – From XLPath point of view, an arc ora connection must be taken as an “act” of an element refer another, through a label present in the attributesfrom and to of XLink, or through an URI in the href attribute. Thus, it is correct to affirm that, whenregarding queries based on this language, an arc may start from an element locator to an element arc, or viceversa.;(ii) Navigation in different levels of abstraction – The main purpose of a query language over linksis allowing the navigation through the network formed by the existing references between distinct elements.However, references through URI (href) constitute the only possible path between two elements that referthemselves in this way. Thus, XLPath must provide the option of abstracting these connections, decreasingthe quantity of steps necessary to reach the query final purpose; (iii) Approach for simple links as theirextended equivalents – Aiming to avoid a very long syntax, XLPath must be capable of navigating oversimple links based on the same syntax used for extended links. To <strong>do</strong> so, this language must start from anapproach that assimilates the simple links as their extended equivalents; (iv) Identification of implicit arcs –In situations in which links are declared without the occurrence of arcs, or that, in the occurrence of them, theattributes from and/or to have been omitted, XLPath must be capable of identifying the occurrence of implicitarcs, maintaining, thus, the conformity with the XLink specification; (v) Similarity with the XPath syntax –The language proposed here for navigation over links must have the maximum possible number ofsimilarities with the XPath syntax, in order to facilitate the assimilation for the users. (vi) Conditions forqueries refinement – Placed that may exist an arbitrary number of links referring a given element, XLPathmust enable refinement conditions to be applied to the query, in order to allow the distinction among thedifferent elements that constitute these links, starting from their names or values of attributes; and (vii)Absolute and relative path, and query performed in steps – Just like it happens in XPath, XLPath followsthe concept of query in steps, where each step selects a list of nodes that is passed as an input parameter forthe next step until the execution of the last step and obtainment of the final result. The initial step may startfrom a <strong>do</strong>cument root (absolute path), or from a specific node in its interior (relative path).3.2 Graphical viewOne way of analyzing how the structure formed by extended links may be explored by a query language isrepresenting it graphically. We suggest two different approaches to represent the links, Low Level Approachand High Level Approach. These approaches are exemplified through a link illustrated in Figure 1, a<strong>do</strong>ptingthe symbolism presented in Table 1.Low Level Approach: The low level approach offers a detailed view of the link, considering all theelements involved in the existing references, which includes locators, arcs and resources. The advantage ofthis approach for a query language is to allow the access to all these elements. Figure 3 shows the link ofFigure 1 represented in low level. To differentiate elements of the same kind and with the same name,numbers corresponding to the order in which each element appears in Figure 1 are used as labels.High Level Approach: In an extended link, a type locator element has the function of being the localrepresentation of certain remote resource. Due to it, for each remote resource there will be only one locatorreferring it. The high level approach offers a simplified vision of the link, where the locators are omitted andthe arcs make direct reference to the correspondent remote resource. For a query language, it would result inthe formulation of simpler queries to <strong>do</strong> a link crossing (when we navigate from one resource to anotherpassing by the link). Figure 4 shows the representation in high level for the link shown in Figure 1.92
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010Table 1. Simbology for extended links.SimbolRepresentationElement of extended linkRemote resourcesub‐element arcsub‐element locatorreference through URIreference through labelSchemLinkbased‐ba_BankingActivities1href2fromd‐ba_TotalBankingActivitieshref3to4 from 6href5tod‐ba_TotalBankingActivitiesSubjectBIASchemaLinkbased‐ba_BankingActivitiesDomain1fromd‐ba_TotalBankingActivities4 to from 6tod‐ba_TotalBankingActivitiesSubjectBIAFigure 3. Low level representation of an extended link.Figure 4. High level representation of an extended link.3.3 Syntax and semanticThis section presents the XLPath sintactic mechanisms, accompanied of examples that demonstrate theirinterpretation. The basic structure of an XLPath query expression is similar to the location path of XPath,including the axis elements, element specification – analogue to the node specification of XPath – andpredicate. Besides those, to enjoy the advantages of the two navigation approaches suggested in Sections 3.2,the XLPath query expressions make use of a mechanism that indicates the level of abstraction. Thus,expressions preceded by LL navigate through the extended links structures according to the low levelapproach, while expressions preceded by HL navigate in high level.Axis Specification: The basic blocks of an expression location path of XPath are the location steps, whichdetermine the paths that conduct to the desired information in an XML <strong>do</strong>cument. These paths are directed bythe axis, which, in XPath, correspond mainly to the traditional relationships between nodes of XML<strong>do</strong>cuments trees. In XLPath, the same principle is used, however with the difference of the paths, in this case,are determined by the references among the elements that compose the links networks. Graphically, thesereferences correspond to the lines and arrows that connect the elements as given in Figure 3 and in Figure 4.It is possible to realize that elements of the type arc are always associated to two link references: onethrough the attribute xlink:from and another through the attribute xlink:to, each one of them represented byan arrow, which identifies the directional character of this type of association. An important detail is that,from XLPath perspective, each one of these arrows is considered an arc. It means that there is a distinctionbetween arcs and elements of the arc type. This distinction is made to allow that XLPath access elements ofthe arc type like nodes of the links networks, navigating until them through arcs, i.e. references originatingfrom elements of the arc type. Thus, XLPath axes are used to specify the type of existing association betweenthe context element – equivalent to the context node of XPath – and the elements connected to it. These axesare: linked axis – directs the query to all the elements that refer or are referred by context element,including references by label and by URI; arc-source axis – directs the query to all the elements that are target nodes of arcs whose contextelement is the source;93
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADIS arc-destination axis – directs the query to all the elements that are source nodes of arcs whose contextelement is the target.The first axis, linked, is the most generic. Graphically, the result of its application is equivalent topropagate the query through all the lines and arrows connected to the context element. The other axes, arcsourceand arc-destination propagate the query through arrows whose context element is source or target,respectively. Table 2 exemplifies the axes application, in different levels of abstraction, to the elements ofFigure 1. To differentiate elements with repeated names, the same numeration used as labels in Figures 3 and4 were superscribed on them.Table 2. Examples of abstraction levels and axis.Table 3. Examples of element specification.Context element Level and Axis Identified Elements Context element Element Specification Selected Elementsd‐ba_TotalBankingActivitiesd‐ba_TotalBankingActivitiesLL::linkedHL::linkedlink:loc 3 ,link:definitionArc 4 ,link:definitionArc 6link:definitionArc 4 link:loc 3 ,,link:definitionArc 6 link:definitionArc 4 ,link:definitionArc 6d‐ba_TotalBankingActivities, locator() link:loc 3link:loc 3arc()link:definitionArc 4 ,link:definitionArc 6link:loc 3 LL::arc‐source link:definitionArc 6 link:definitionArc4 ,link:definitionArc 6 arc(link:definitionArc) link:definitionArc 4 ,link:definitionArc 6d‐ba_BankingActivitiesDomainlink:definitionArc 6HL::arc‐source link:definitionArc 4 BankingActivities,d‐ba_Bankingd‐ba_TotalActivitiesDomainLL::arcdestinationlink:loc 5 link:loc 3 ,link:definitionArc 4 ,d‐ba_BankingActivitiesDomainremote(d‐ba_TotalBankingActivities)element()d‐ba_TotalBankingActivitieslink:loc 3 ,link:definitionArc 4 ,d‐ba_BankingActivitiesDomainElement Specification: The element specification determines which elements in the axis direction will beselected. The selection criteria may be the type and the name of each element, determined, respectively, bythe parameter of the function elementType(elementName). XLPath provides the following elementspecification: locator(elementName) – selects elements of locator type with the name elementName; arc(elementName) – selects elements of arc type with the name elementName; resource(elementName) – selects elements of resource type with the name elementName; remote(elementName) – selects remote resources with the name elementName; element(elementName) – selects elements of any type with the name elementName.When the parameter elementName is not provided, the filtering is made based only on the type ofelement. Thus, the function element() may be used to put all the elements back in the direction of an axis,regardless the name and the type. Table 3 shows examples of element specification applied to elementsshowed on Figure 1.Predicate: In the examples of Table 3, in some situations, even specifying the element name and type, theresult is an element list. To filter this result, one may use predicates, which consist in conditions tested oneach element on the list. Just like in XPath, the usage of predicates is not mandatory. Table 4 exemplifies thepredicates to filter the list of elements extracted from Figure 1. XLPath provides the following conditions: attribute(attributeName)=’attributeValue’ – tests if the element has an attribute attributeName withthe value attributeValue; text()=’textValue’ – tests if the text content of the element equals textValue; link(linkName) – tests if the element belongs to the link linkName.Table 4. Examples of predicatesContext element Predicate Filtered Elementslink:definitionArc 4 ,link:definitionArc 6 attribute(title)=’definition:BankingActivitiesDomain to TotalBankingActivities’ link:definitionArc 4link:loc 3 link(link:definitionLink) link:loc 3The XLPath grammar is illustrated in Figure 5, described through representation based on an EBNF [37].94
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010XLPathExpr ::= AbsLocationPath | RelLocationPathAbsLocationPath ::= “/” RelLocationPathRelLocationPath ::= Step | RelLocationPath “/” StepStep ::= LevelSpec AxisSpec ElementSpec Predicate*LevelSpec ::= (“HL” | “LL”) “::”AxisSpec ::= (“arc‐destination” | “arc‐source” | “linked” | “link‐part‐child” | “link‐part‐descendant”) “::”ElementSpec ::= ElementName “(” QName? “)”ElementName ::= “arc” | “element” | “locator” | “remote” | “resource”Predicate::= “[” Operator Spec“]”OperatorSpec ::= AttributeSpec | LinkSpec | TextSpecAttributeSpec ::= “attribute(” QName “)=” ValueLinkSpec ::= “link(” QName “)”TextSpec ::= “text()=” ValueFigure 5. XLPath EBNF.4. XLPATH PROCESSORThis section presents the definitions of an XLPath language processor, whose architecture is based on MVC(Model-View-Controller) pattern. This architecture and the processing algorithm are described follow.4.1 ArchitectureFollowing MVC pattern, the Model layer of XLPath processor is formed by the components: (i) Expression –maintain XLPath query expressions; (ii) Step – sub-divide XLPath expressions in steps to be sequentiallyprocessed; and (iii) Element Store – store the elements resulting from each step processing.The layer View has the components: (i) Console – provides the user with an interface for the entrance ofquery expressions and <strong>do</strong>cuments, as well as with the presentation of the obtained results; and (ii) Formatter– format the results for visualization by the user.The layer Controller is composed by the modules: (i) Executor – generate a representation of the input<strong>do</strong>cuments in the memory, based on DOM (Document Object Model) technology [Hégaret et al., 2005], andconducts it to the processing together with XLPath expression; and (ii) Processor – processes the XLPathexpression steps sequence and stores the result in an Element Store.Figure 6 brings a representation of XLPath processor containing the components described here.4.2 AlgorithmXLPath processing algorithm is based on the functions xlpathExecutor and xlpathProcessor. At first,xlpathExecutor receives as a parameter an XLPath expression and a representation in DOM of an XML<strong>do</strong>cument. From them, it identifies the initial context element and invokes xlpathProcessor, passing as aparameter the context element identified and the query expression. Next, xlpathProcessor interprets each stepof XLPath expression, going through the links network to identify the interest referentiations that involveeach context element. Figure 7 illustrates this algorithm.5. SAMPLES OF XLPATH USEThe query used as an example in Section 2.2, besides other examples, is solved bellow through XLPath:Select all arcs destiny elements whose element d-ba_TotalBankingActivities is the origin./d‐ba_TotalBankingActivities::HL::arc‐source::arc()/HL::arc‐source::element()Select the locator belonging to the link:definitionLink that connects itself to the element d-ba_BankingActivitiesDomain./d‐ba_BankingActivitiesDomain::LL::linked::locator()[link(link:definitionLink)]95
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISSelect the remote resource that attend the following conditions: (i) be connected to the locator whoselabel is “TotalBankingActivities”; and (ii) be the origin of the arc whose element dba_TotalBankingActivitiesSubjectBIAis destiny./d‐ba_TotalBankingActivitiesSubjectBIA::HL::arc‐destination::arc() /LL::arc‐destination::locator()[attribute(xlink:label)=’TotalBankingActivities’]/LL::linked::remote()Execute the link crossing from the element d-ba_BankingActivitiesDomain to the element d-ba_TotalBankingActivities./d‐ba_BankingActivitiesDomain::HL::arc‐source::arc()/HL::arc‐source::remote(d‐a_TotalBankingActivities)ResultQueryandDocumentsFormatterConsoleProcessorExecutorDOMElementStoreExpressionView Controller ModelStepfunction xlpathExecutor (expression, <strong>do</strong>cument)beginelementStore.setContextElement (expression ,<strong>do</strong>cument)return xlpathProcessor (expression, elementStore)endfunction xlpathProcessor (expression, elementStore)beginfor each step : expression.getStepsfor each element : elementStore.getElementssearch element referencesend forend forelementStore.setElements (references)return elementStoreendFigure 6. XLPath processor architecture.Figure 7. XLPath algorithm.These examples show how XLPath perform queries in XML <strong>do</strong>cuments interconnected by XLink. Todemonstrate its usage in a real application, a prototype for XLPath processor was developed in Javalanguage, based on the architecture and algorithm defined in Sections 4.1 and 4.2. Each component of thisarchitecture was modeled in a Java class, and these classes were grouped in packages named Model, Viewand Controller, according to MVC approach. Figure 8 shows the XLPath processor console. This prototype iscomposed by two input data parameters – one for the query expression and another for the <strong>do</strong>cument to bequeried –, besides a field for data output, where the query results are exhibited. Figure 8 illustrates a queryperformed in the <strong>do</strong>cument d-ba-2006-07-01.xsd, Figure 1. This <strong>do</strong>cument contains elements referred by thelink link:definitionLink, which is in a linkbase. During the query execution, the XLPath expression identifiesthese references and, automatically, identifies the corresponding linkbase. This type of query cannot beperformed by the languages XPath, XQuery, or by the proposals discussed in Section 6. Thus, of the maincontribution of XLPath is the ability to perform queries in XML <strong>do</strong>cuments interconnected by extended links.The output data of an XLPath query is organized by the XLPathFormatter class, which shows the stepssequency of the XLPath expression submitted and the respective resulting elements of its processing by theXLPathProcessor class. Figure 9 illustrates XLPath query based on the <strong>do</strong>cument illustrated in Figure 1andthe complete result extracted from the console. In this example, XLPath expression submitted was composedby five steps, to combine low and high level approaches, and, in some cases, making use of predicateoperators to refine the query. Thus, all the mechanisms provided by XLPath could be tested: the specificationof abstraction level, of axis and of element, and the predicate operators.6. LANGUAGES FOR NAVIGATION IN XML DATA WITH LINKSXLPath comes from XPath+ language [Silva et al., 2008 and 2009], which main characteristic is allowingqueries fulfillment over the arcs that compose the links. This language is capable of locating arcs, whetherthey are in an instance, in an XML Schema data scheme, or in a linkbases. The main mechanisms providedby XPath+ are the link-source and link-destination axis. The first selects a list of nodes that has context nodeas a source resource, while the second selects a list of nodes that has the context node as a destiny resource.This semantic is reproduced in XLPath through the arc-source and arc-destination axis, however combinedwith other mechanisms that allow the filtering of the elements obtained as a result of its application.96
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010Figure 8. XLPath processor console.‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ XLPath Query ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐/d‐ba_BankingActivitiesDomain::HL::arc‐source::arc(link:definitionArc)/LL::linked::locator()[attribute(label)='TotalBankingActivities']/LL::linked::remote()/HL::arc‐source::arc(link:definitionArc)/HL::arc‐source::remote(d‐ba_TotalBankingActivitiesSubjectBIA)‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ XLPath Result ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐Step (1): /d‐ba_BankingActivitiesDomain::HL::arc‐source::arc(link:definitionArc)Locators = {}Arcs = {definition: BankingActivitiesDomain to TotalBankingActivities}Resources = {}Remotes = {}Step (2): /LL::linked::locator()[attribute(label)='TotalBankingActivities']Locators = {TotalBankingActivities}Arcs = {}Resources = {}Remotes = {}Step (3): /LL::linked::remote()Locators = {}Arcs = {}Resources = {}Remotes = {TotalBankingActivities}Step (4): /HL::arc‐source::arc(link:definitionArc)Locators = {}Arcs = {definition: TotalBankingActivities to TotalBankingActivitiesSubjectBIA, definition: TotalBankingActivities toTotalBankingActivitiesSubjectSTAAlternative, definition: TotalBankingActivities to TotalBankingActivitiesSubjectAMA}Resources = {}Remotes = {}Step (5): /HL::arc‐source::remote(d‐ba_TotalBankingActivitiesSubjectBIA)Locators = {}Arcs = {}Resources = {}Remotes = {TotalBankingActivitiesSubjectBIA}Figure 9. XLPath processor exit.May and Malheiro [2001 and 2002] propose an extension for the namespace xlink, dbxlink, whichenables links behavior specification in the moment of the query. Through the inclusion of namespacedbxlink, it is possible to choose how the linkbase elements are added to the original XML <strong>do</strong>cument.However, to <strong>do</strong> so, the XML <strong>do</strong>cument must be changed, including at least, the standard settingdbxlink:transparent. This is not very practical in real applications and it is not applicable in <strong>do</strong>cuments whoserelationship semantic is important. Because of this semantic in the linkbases, what is expected is the recoveryof the meanings without changing the <strong>do</strong>cuments. May et al. [2008] propose an implementation to performqueries in XML based on dbxlink. The links are not seen as explicit connections, in which the users must beaware of the links and explicitly cross them in their queries. This proposal extends the XML native data basesystem eXist [eXist, 2009]. Different from XLPath, which proposes itself to be a language for navigation andquery to XML <strong>do</strong>cuments interconnected by XLink, this solution is included in the category of XML database system. Besides, the XLPath proposal is based on following the links explicitly when consulting anddeclaring them explicitly in its operators.97
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISBry and Eckert [2005] also propose and extension of XLink for linkbases processing in the Web. Theyintroduce the concept of interface for links structure and a linkbases management mechanism. This proposalis different from XLPath in the purposes, because, while XLPath is proposed as a navigation language forlinks based on elements and attributes defined in XLink, Bry and Eckert proposal suggests a way ofmanaging linkbases in the Web. The proposal described by Lizorkim [Lizorkim et al., 2003 and 2005, and S-exp, 2009] suggests an extension of XPath. Despite of this solution be similar to XLPath, because it is anextension of XPath, its implementation is performed based on expressions S, a native type in the functionallanguage Scheme. This requires the conversion of XML files to the SXML format, a representation of XMLInformation Set in S-expression form. The SXPath proposal refers to the implementation of the XPathlanguage to manipulate links in the functional language Scheme. Thus, in the SXPath approach, there isinitially the conversion of the XML <strong>do</strong>cument to SXML. Like occurs in XLPath, it is possible to highlight thecoherence that exists between the data structuring form (DOM and S-expressions) and their manipulation(Java and Scheme). However, to reach this coherence, SXPath needs to convert the XML format in SXML,which, in spite of being similar, results in an additional effort. Ahmedi [2001 and 2005] proposal was base<strong>do</strong>n the protocol LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) to make a query, through XPath expressions,XML <strong>do</strong>cuments interconnected with links of the type XLink. As LDAP has a data model different fromXML, XML <strong>do</strong>cuments with the links need to be mapped for this model. A similar solution, proposed byAhmedi and Arifaj [2008], there is no need for mapping for a data model different from XML. However,XPath queries, in this proposals, are based on the xlink:href attribute, not exploring all the power of semanticexpression of XLink, i.e., the queries processing <strong>do</strong> not consider the semantics attributes of XLink (title, rolee arcrole), the behavior attributes (show e actuate), or the values for the xlink:type attribute (resouce, locator,arc and title).XLink Processor (XLiP) is a Fujitsu implementation [XLip, 2005] to extract XLink and XPointerinformation in XML <strong>do</strong>cuments. Based on Java and DOM, enables the use of all types of links expressed byXLink. However, diferently from XLPath, it is owner. Other commercial solution to deal with XLink, base<strong>do</strong>n Java and DOM, it is Batavia XBRL Java Library (BXJL) [Batavia, 2009], it is however specific tomanipulate only XBRL <strong>do</strong>cuments. Java XBRL API Implementation [XBRLAPI, 2008] is an open codeproject that provides an XLink processor for XBRL <strong>do</strong>cuments. This processor is a solution based on SAX,manipulating XLink events. Another approach based on SAX is XLink Filter [Laurent, 1998], which createsa links collection that may attend to applications requires to identify which elements contain links, as well astheir purposes and behaviors. SAX usage has the advantage of being more efficient regarding memory use,but is not a solution standardized by W3C. XLinkit [Nentwich et al., 2000] is a tool to generate linksaccording to rules and verify the <strong>do</strong>cuments consistence. As an entrance, the tool receives a group of XML<strong>do</strong>cuments and a group of potential rules that connect these <strong>do</strong>cuments contents. The rules representconsistence restrictions among the resources. XLinkit conduct back a linkbase with a group of links XLink,which allow the navigation among the resources elements.In XSPath [Cavalieri et al., 2008], the notion of queries performed through steps, present on XPathexpressions, is extended in order to allow the navigation through the connections contained in the schemethat associates the elements, specified in XML Schema <strong>do</strong>cuments, to their data types, being also possible tonavigate inside data complex types [W3, 2010]. However, there is not always the interest in explore a datacomplex structure. Therefore, XSPath offers two different navigation approaches: low level expressions,which analyze complex types intern structures, and high level expressions, which steps <strong>do</strong> not depend on howthe element are combined to form complex types.According to the study of these proposals, to attend the navigation in XML <strong>do</strong>cuments interconnected bylinks, some solutions require a transformation in the XML <strong>do</strong>cument, as the proposals based on SXML, theLoPiX, and the one which defines three navigation modes in linkbases (transient, temporary and permanent),others are limited to specific solutions, such as the ones for XBRL and the XLinkit. Java XBRL APIImplementation and XLink Filter are funded by the use of SAX, what restricts its application, since SAX isnot a W3C pattern. Besides, none of these solutions are specified as language for navigation in links of theXLink type. XSPath is a proposal of language for navigating in XML Schema <strong>do</strong>cuments, which served as abase of the high and low level approaches for XLPath queries proposed in this paper. Table 5 presents someresults derived from the comparison among the proposals discussed in this section and XLPath. This analysisis made considering the capacity for links manipulation. It is settled that XLPath manipulates any type of linkbased on XLink and that it <strong>do</strong>es not require any change on the original XML <strong>do</strong>cuments. Besides, XLPath isan open code solution and based on patterns W3C (DOM, XPath, XML Schema and XLink.) and it is a98
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010navigation language for XLink. These characteristics may be considered as advantages of XLPath comparedto other approaches.Table 5. Comparison among XLPath and other proposals.ProposalsChanges the XML<strong>do</strong>cumentBased on W3CpatternsManipulatesXLink type linksOpen code solution Language for navigationin XLinkdblink Yes No Yes Yes NoSXML / SXPath Yes No Yes Yes YesXlink Filter No No Yes Not informed NoXLiP No Yes Yes No NoBatavia XBRL No Yes No No NoJava XBRL API No No No No NoXlinkit Yes Yes Do not apply Not informed NoManagement of Linkbases Yes No Do not apply Yes NoXLPath No Yes Yes Yes Yes7. CONCLUSIONThe language for navigating over links proposed in this paper allows the performance of queries withexpressions that are similar to XPath, then the “paths” formed among the elements that compose the links aregone through, and these elements accessed. Besides that, the language provides means to establish criteriaaccording with the navigation will happen, enabling this way that users and/or applications reach specificelements that compose the extended links networks. XLPath uses mechanisms based on XPath, such as axis,element specification and predicate. XLPath uses axes that guide the navigation according to the contextelement condition, as arcs source or destiny. This semantic is based on the axes originating from XPath+language. In XLPath, the mentioned mechanisms are used to compose navigation expressions, whosearrangement is similar to the location path expressions, from XPath. Thus, its syntax assimilation isfacilitated, above all for those users who are already familiar with XPath. In order to continue this project, itis intended to develop a new version for XLPath processor, which would allow the navigation through linkspresent in distributed data sources. The addition of an optimizer module in the XLPath processor is seen asanother indication of future work.REFERENCESAhmedi, L. and Arifaj, M., 2008. Processing XPath/XQuery to be aware of XLink hyperlinks. 2nd European ComputingConference (ECC’08), Malta, pp. 217-221.Ahmedi, L. and Arifaj, M., 2008. Querying XML <strong>do</strong>cuments with XPath/XQuery in presence of XLink hyperlinks.WSEAS Transactions on Computers, Vol. 7, No. 10, pp. 1752-1751.Ahmedi, L., 2001. Global access to interlinked XML data using LDAP and ontologies. PhD dissertation from Albert-Ludwigs, Freiburg.Ahmedi, L., 2005. Making XPath reach for the web-wide links. ACM Symposium on Applied Computing. Santa Fe, US,pp. 1714-1721.Batavia Business Reporting. Batavia XBRL Java Library (BXJL). Retrieved January, 2009, from SourceForge:http://batavia-xbrl.sourceforge.net/.Bry, F. and Eckert, M., 2005. Processing link structures and linkbases in the web’s open world linking. Proceedings ofsixteenth ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia, Salzburg, AT.CavalieriI, F., Guerrini, G. and Mesiti, M., 2008. Navigational path expressions on XML schema. 19th InternationalConference on Database and Expert Systems Applications – DEXA, Turin, IT.COREP XBRL Project, 2005. Retrieved July 10, 2010, from Eurofiling: http://www.eurofiling.info/index.html.Deutsch, A., Fernandez, M., Florescu, D., Levy, A. and Suciu, D., 1998. XML-QL: a query language for XML.Retrieved July, 2010, from: http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-xml-ql/.Exist. eXist-db Open Source Native XML Database. Retrieved September, 2009, from SourceForge:http://exist.sourceforge.net/.Harold, E.R. and Means, W.S. 2004. XML in a nutshell. O'Reilly, Sebastopol, US.99
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISHégaret, P.L., Withmer, R. and Wood, L., 2005. Document object model (DOM), 2005. Retrieved August, 2010, from:http://www.w3.org/DOM/.Laurent, S.S., 1998. XLinkFilter: An open source Java XLink SAX parser filter. Retrieved January, 2009, from:http://www.simonstl.com/projects/xlinkfilter/.Lizorkim, D. and Lisovsky, K., 2005. Implementation of the XML linking language XLink by functional methods.Programming and Computer <strong>Software</strong>, Vol. 31, No. 1, pp. 34-46.Lizorkim, D. and Lisovsky, K., 2003. SXML: an XML <strong>do</strong>cument as an S-expression. Russian Digital Libraries Journal,Vol. 6, No. 2.Lizorkim, D. and Lisovsky, K., 2003. XML Path Language (XPath) and its functional implementation SXPath. RussianDigital Libraries Journal, Vol. 6, No. 4.Lizorkim, D. and Lisovsky, K. XSLT and XLink and their implementation with functional techniques. Russian DigitalLibraries Journal, Vol. 6, No. 5.Lizorkim, D., 2005. The query language to XML <strong>do</strong>cuments connected by XLink links. Programming and Computer<strong>Software</strong>. Vol. 31, No. 3, pp. 133-148.Lowe, D. and Wilde, E., 2001. Improving web linking using xlink. Open Publish, Sydney, AU.May, W. and Malheiro, D., 2003. A logical, transparent model for querying linked XML <strong>do</strong>cuments. GI-FachtagungDatenbanksysteme fur Business, Technologie und Web.May, W. and Malheiro, D., 2001. LoPiX: A system for XML data integration and manipulation. Proceedings of the 27thVLDB Conference, Roma, IT.May, W. and Malheiro, D., 2002. Querying linked XML <strong>do</strong>cument networks in the web. Proceedings of the 11thInternational World Wide Web Conference, Honolulu, US.May, W., Behrends, E. and Fritzen, O., 2008. Integrating and querying distributed XML data via XLink. InformationSystems, Vol. 33, No. 6, pp. 508-566.Nentwich, C., Capra, L., Emmerich, W. and Finkelstein, A., 2000. Xlinkit: a consistency checking and smart linkgeneration service. ACM Transactions on <strong>Internet</strong> Technology, Vol. 2, No. 2, pp. 151-185.Robie, J., 1999. XQL (XML Query Language). Retrieved July, 2010, from: http://www.ibiblio.org/xql/xql-proposal.html.S-exp based XML parsing/query/conversion. Retrieved January, 2009, from SourceForge: http://ssax.sourceforge.net/.Silva, P.C. and Times, V. C., 2009. XPath+: A tool for linked XML <strong>do</strong>cuments navigation. XSym 2009 - SixthInternational XML Database Symposium at VLDB'09, Lyon, FR.Silva, P.C., Aquino, I. J. S. and Times, V. C., 2008. A query language for navigation over links. XIV Simpósio <strong>Brasileiro</strong>de Sistemas Multimídia e Web, Vitória, BR.W3 Schools. XML Schema ComplexType Element. Retrieved July, 2010, from:http://www.w3schools.com/Schema/el_complextype.asp.W3C. About W3C. Retrieved August, 2010, from: http://www.w3.org/Consortium/.W3C Recommendation. Namespaces in XML 1.0, Third Edition, 2009.W3C Recommendation. XML Linking Language (XLink) Version 1.0, 2001.W3C Recommendation. XML Path Language (XPath) Version 1.0, 1999.W3C Recommendation. XML Schema part 1: Structures second edition, 2004.W3C Recommendation. XQuery 1.0: an XML query language, 2007.Walmsley, P., 2007. XQuery. O'Reilly, Sebastopol, US.Wirth, N., 1996. Extended Backus-Naur Form (EBNF), ISO/IEC.XBRL. Extensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) 2.1. Recommendation, 2003.XBRLAPI. A read-only API for XBRL. Retrieved January, 2008, from XBRLAPI: http://www.xbrlapi.org/.XLiP (XLink Processor). User’s Guide, 2005. Retrieved January, 2009, from: http://software.fujitsu.com/en/interstagexwand/activity/xbrltools/xlip/index.html.100
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010ONTOMO: WEB SERVICE FOR ONTOLOGY BUILDING -EVALUATION OF ONTOLOGY RECOMMENDATIONUSING NAMED ENTITY EXTRACTIONTakahiro Kawamura, I Shin, Hiroyuki Nakagawa, Yasuyuki Tahara and Akihiko OhsugaGraduate School of Information Systems, University of Electro-Communications1-5-1 Chofugaoka, Chofu-shi, Tokyo 182-8585, JapanABSTRACT<strong>Internet</strong> services using ontology in its background are rapidly increasing in the web. Those are sort of "lighter" ontologiescompared with ontologies which have been used in design and diagnosis. So, this paper proposes ONTOMO that is anontology building service specialized for lightweight ontologies. ONTOMO is also designed not for ontology experts, butfor users and/or developers of public web services. Here, we focused on ease of use, no installation, cooperative workenvironment, and providing sample applications to help the users' ontology building. Especially, it has a function whichrecommends instances and properties which belong to a certain ontology class in order to help the users to register them.In the recommendation function, we developed our own Named Entity Extraction mechanism based on bootstrappingmethod. In this paper, after the ONTOMO overview, we present the instance and property recommendation withexperimental evaluations.KEYWORDSOntology, Named Entity Extraction, Web Service1. INTRODUCTIONRecently, web services using ontology has increased. Most of ontologies for those services are definitions ofmetadata, and have simpler structures in comparison with conventional ontologies for design and diagnosis.Faltings (2007) says that "is-a" relation makes up 80-90 % of all the relations in such lightweight ontologies.However, ontology building tools proposed and developed so far are mainly for ontology experts, and few ofthem are focusing on public developers and users of <strong>Internet</strong> services. Therefore, we have developedONTOMO, an ontology building service aiming at offering an environment in which those people are able toeasily make necessary ontologies for their purpose. So the main target of ONTOMO is the people who havelittle expertise about what are an ontology, its schema, organization, and technical terms. Or, the people whohave some knowledge about the ontology, but no experiment of ontology building are also its targets.ONTOMO has been trying to clear the following three hurdles that the target people may have in theconventional ontology tools, which has been retrieved from interviews to non-ontology developers andprogrammers around.1. Necessary tool preparation and its usage are unclear, because of rich technical terms and functions.2. It's hard to know what term should be input as classes, instances, and properties, because they havenever thought about things according to ontology own scheme.3. Difficult to register a large amount of the terms (this point are relatively common regardless of thenon-expert or not).To solve these problems, ONTOMO takes the following approaches.A. Easy preparation for introductionONTOMO has no installation of any tools, and can be used by web browsers.B. Improvement of usability (design of user interface)It uses the public words without the technical terms, and narrows the functions <strong>do</strong>wn to ones only forbrowse and edit the lightweight ontology. Also, it keeps visibility and operability even in the browser.101
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISC. Support of term registrationIt would be almost impossible that a single person can think of every instances and properties in a large<strong>do</strong>main. So, ONTOMO estimates candidates of instances and properties referring the registered terms, andthen recommends them to the user.D. Keeping of motivationTo introduce the user's incentive, ONTOMO prepared sample applications to show what services can bemade by using ontologies. Also, it opens web service APIs to the ontologies to be used by any externalservices.E. Support of collaboration workMultiple accesses are possible for an ontology on ONTOMO, then the ontology can be built by a team.The above three problems would not be solved by any single approach, and have 1-to-n relations to thefive approaches. Fig.1 shows the relations between the problems and approaches we have assumed.Furthermore, their effect measurement for each problem would not be necessarily verified quantitatively,because of the large dependency of user's feeling and sensitivity. Therefore, this paper firstly describesoverview of ONTOMO system, and then we would like to focus on the approach C. Support of termregistration with details of implementation and evaluation of the instance and property recommendationfunction. Although the approach C is corresponding to the problem 3 and 2, we believe that an accuracy ofrecommended terms can be regarded as a metric to measure the degree of the user support for theseproblems.ProblemApproach1. Necessary toolpreparation and its usageare unclear2. hard to know what termshould be input as classes,instances, and properties3. Difficult to register alarge amount of thetermsA.Easy preparation forintroductionB.Improvement of usability(design of user interface)C.Support of term registrationD.Keeping of motivationE.Support of collaboration workFigure 1. Problems and approachesThe outline of this paper is as follows. We first describe the overview of ONTOMO with its interface andfunctionality in section 2. Then section 3 shows the instance recommendation function and its evaluation,where we compare the function with manual intervention to register the terms and show that it reduces theuser’s strain. Also, section 4 shows the properly recommendation and its evaluation. In section 5, we discussour limitation and improvement. Finally, we show the related works in section 6, and mention the futureissues in section 7.2. ONTOMO OVERVIEWONTOMO logically consists of a front-end (Flash web site) and a back-end (web services) (Fig.2). The frontendhas an ontology edit function, the recommendation function, and two search applications as the samples.Then, the back-end provides the APIs to access the ontologies built by ONTOMO so that other systems canuse the ontologies. We connected the front- and back-end by Asynchronous Flash, and realized highresponsibility and operability as a whole. This section describes the edit function, the search applications andimplementation issues of ONTOMO.102
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010OntologyDeveloperWeb BrowserServerEdit func.FlexRecommendationfunc.Ontology Processing EngineJenaDBXML fileSearch ApplicationXMLEngineRPC ComponentrequestresponseRPC ComponentWeb ServiceServiceDeveloperClient Layer(Front-end)Server Layer(Back-end)Resource LayerFigure 2. ONTOMO architecture2.1 Edit FunctionDistance of nodesGraph XML List SearchSelected nodeTree paneSpring Graph paneRecommended instancesclassinstanceClass list Property list Instance listNissanHondaToyotaMatsudaSuzukiSubaruDaihatsuMitsubishiBWMIsuzuPorscheVWCancelFigure 3. ONTOMO Interface103
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISThe edit function is for the lightweight ontology, and has two roles: browsing major components of anontology such as the classes, instances and properties, and basic functions like new addition, edit, and deleteof them.We provide three ways of the ontology browsing. The first one is Graph view to intuitively figure out theontology structure. Fig.3 top shows that Flash and Spring Graph which is an automatic graph allocationlibrary based on a spring model, visualize a hierarchical structure composed of the classes, subclasses andinstances. It can adjust, for example, a distance of an instance and a class with a focus on operability andvisibility. In addition, if the user moves a class, then instances of the class automatically follows and are rearrangedwith the pre-defined distance. Also, if the user <strong>do</strong>uble-clicks a class, the instances will hide, andvice versa (unfortunately, we only have Japanese interface right now).On the other hand, Graph view is unsuited to read through a list of the instances, and check the details oftheir definitions. Therefore, we added List view and XML view. List view (Fig.3 bottom right) has three listsfor the classes, properties, and instances. XML view shows OWL (2004) data of the ontology as follows.MobilePhone OWL OntologyOntology editing is started with a popup menu which will appear by a right click on Graph view (the rightclick is realized by Flash). If the user right-clicks a class or instance, the popup menu with "addition", "edit",and "delete" will appear. Furthermore, the ontology built by ONTOMO is stored in DB in the back-end, andcan be exported in an OWL file, or accessed by the web services.2.2 Search ApplicationONTOMO also has a product search application, where the user can find products with key properties.ONTOMO prepared the product ontologies of three <strong>do</strong>mains in advance: mobile phones, digital cameras, andmedia player like iPod. If the user searches any products with a common property like "SD card", theproducts match that property will be found across the three <strong>do</strong>mains. It's also possible to search with multipleproperties like hours of continuous operation and TV function, and then the ontologies of the mobile phonesand the media players will be searched.Moreover, a blog search application shows the related blogs to the product found by the above usingGoogle blog search. The latest information about the product will be useful for the user and to update theproduct ontology.2.3 ONTOMO ImplementationONTOMO is a 3-tier system (Fig.2), where a client layer provides a flexible user interface using Flex (2010).Then, a server layer has an ontology processing engine with Jena (2009), and a resource layer stores theontology data in XML form with MySQL. Asynchronous call between the client layer and the server layer isrealized by Flex components like Flex Remote Object,Flex Data Service. When the user operates the viewswith Flash, the client layer sends a request to the server layer, and the Flex component calls correspondingAPIs. The result is returned in XML form for the graph or the list to the client layer, and then XML enginetransforms it to show on the Flash view.104
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 20103. INSTANCE RECOMMENDATIONIn the practical work of the instance addition, it would be difficult to register every term without any help.Especially, consumer electronics, CD/DVDs, package software, etc. are increasing on a daily basis, so theirquick registration with a manual work would be impossible. Thus, we developed the function to recommendcandidates for the instances based on records of the user's registration. This function estimates the instanceswhich belong to the same class with the registered instances as seeds using Named Entity Extraction (NEE).But, the user finally selects and adds some of them as new correct instances. For example, if the user registers"Nissan" and "Honda" as the instances, and added "Toyota" as the third instance, then the function takes thelatest three instances {"Nissan", "Honda", "Toyota"} as the seeds for the NEE, and recommends othercandidates for the instances to the user after exclusion of the already-registered ones (Fig.3 bottom left).3.1 Named Entity Extraction with BootstrappingThere already exist free Named Entity Extraction services such as Google Sets (2007) and SEAL (2008) onthe web. However, our investigation found that those have maintenance difficulty for the quick registration ofthe latest information. Therefore, we developed our own Named Entity Extraction engine using bootstrappingmethod (Brin 1998). The bootstrapping firstly generates patterns from <strong>do</strong>cuments using a small number ofthe seed terms, and extracts other terms from the <strong>do</strong>cuments using the patterns. Then, it generates newpatterns using the extracted terms as the new seeds again. This repeated process can extract a large number ofterms from a few seeds. The following describes our bootstrapping process with four steps.(1) Selection of seedsWe first need some seeds to execute the NEE. Selection of the seeds greatly effects on the extracted terms.We prepare a seed list which includes at least three instances in advance. At the first time, it's ran<strong>do</strong>mselection and the bootstrapping is executed, and the extracted terms are added to the seed list. At the secondtime, we take also ran<strong>do</strong>mly two old instances used before and new one extracted as the seeds, because newlyextracted instances may not be necessarily correct. So we take old two and new one after the second time forextending the terms and keeping the accuracy.(2) Collection of Web pagesWe collect the top 100 web pages using search engines like Google and Yahoo!, where the query is acombination of three instances.(3) Pattern generationThen, we find HTML tags which surround all three seeds from collected web pages. For example, if theseeds are {"Nissan", "Honda", "Toyota"}, the surrounding tag is as follows.NissanHondaToyotaMatsudaSuzukiHere tag surrounds all three tags, then term is taken as a pattern. The reason we find thetag surrounding all three seeds is to keep the accuracy. The stricter the condition is, the higher the accuracybecomes. Our preliminary experiences for some kinds of product showed that in case of two seeds the hugenumbers of irrelevant terms were extracted. But, more than four seeds greatly reduced the extracted terms.Therefore, this number of seed is our experimental setting, and should be revised at least for other <strong>do</strong>main.(4) Extraction of termsFinally,we extract other terms from the same <strong>do</strong>cument using the generated patterns. Although webpages have several styles according to their authors, it seems that the same style (pattern) would be used atleast within the same <strong>do</strong>cument. In the example of (3), we can take "Matsuda" and "Suzuki" from this<strong>do</strong>cument, and add them to the seed list.However, we still have a possibility to extract the irrelevant terms in the above process. So we setthreshold for the number of patterns which can be generated in a <strong>do</strong>cument. In our experience, we have beenable to extract the terms most effectively in case that the number is more than two. Therefore, if thegenerated patterns are more than two kinds, we add them to the list. If not, they are discarded.105
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADIS3.2 Instance Recommendation with named Entity ExtractionThe set of terms extracted by the above process is not necessarily the same as the one the user expects as theinstances for a certain class. Naive recommendation may put a heavy strain on the user for proper selection ofa large number of terms. This paper, therefore, proposes an adaptation filter, which combines the NEE andthe hierarchical structure of the ontology to raise the accuracy of extraction.If the intended set Si of the user is equal to the extracted set Se, then all members of Se are registered tothe list. This is an ideal case. However, if not, we have two cases.3.2.1 Improvement of RecallIf only a few terms of Si are included in Se (Fig.4 left), recall will be low because of few correct terms in Se.So we add some terms of Si, which are not included in Se, and try to extend Se to Se' (experiment 1).SiNeed to add●Nissan●Matsuda● Chrysler●Toyota●Daihatsu●Suzuki●Mitsubishi●GM●Honda● Cadillac●Ford●Sony●DaikinSeRecommendedtermsSe’Extended setSeSiRecommended termsNeed to add●Matsuda●Nissan●Toyota●Daihatsu●Mitsubishi●Suzuki●Honda●Sony●Daikin●Ford●GM●Cadillac●ChryslerSxNeed to delete3.2.2 Improvement of PrecisionFigure 4. |Se∩Si|
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 20103.3 EvaluationAs mentioned above, the instance recommendation is mainly to stay up-to-date in a <strong>do</strong>main with dynamicnature. However, we took a relatively static <strong>do</strong>main for this experiment in order to accurately measure theprecision and the recall. Here, we focused a world ranking of car manufacturers (2007), and took the top 50car manufacturers (and their spin-off brands) in total 76 as the correct set in the experiment 1, excludingchina and OTHER manufacturers. It's because the current china manufacturers, that is, the correct set seem tohave been changed from the above data in 2007, and have fluctuation of description and many spin-offbrands that we could not investigate. In the experiment 2, total 16 of Japan manufacturers and their brandsare taken as the correct set. Also, in the experiments we regarded other descriptions than ones in the correctset as incorrect. In the original use, the instance recommendation leaves the final selection for the addition ofthe extracted terms to the ontology to the user. But, in the experiment the function automatically adds everyextracted term expect for the overlaps in order to confirm the accuracy. In the following sections, we evaluatehow we can raise the precision and the recall using the NEE and the adaptation filter.RecallPrecision= Registered correct instances / All the correct instances= Registered correct instances / All the registered instances (including irrelevant ones)3.3.1 Experiment 1 (Named Entity Extraction)In the experiment 1, we evaluated how we can effectively increase the instances in contrast to the number ofoperations using the NEE for the 76 world car manufacturers. As the first seeds we registered {"Nissan","Honda"} to Car class, then take the next instance "Toyota" according to the listed order of the correct setexcept for the overlaps. So, the NEE is executed with the latest registered seeds {"Nissan", "Honda","Toyota"}, and gets the candidates for the instances Se. Then, it registers all of them to the class except forthe overlaps. When all the correct instances are registered by repeating the above, this experiment isterminated. Evaluation metrics are as follows.Recall = (3 + ∆ ) / 76Precision = (3 + ∆ ) / (3 + ∆ + irrelevant instances), where ∆ is the registered correct instancesThe result is shown in Fig.6. In terms of the recall, because simple input means to manually register thecorrect instance one by one, the recall moved up in proportion to the number of operation, and achieved100 % at the 73rd time. On the other hand, because the NEE extracted a number of instance candidates at theearly stage, the recall moved up quickly, and achieved 71.1 % at the second time. After that, however, theextracted terms began to overlap with the registered ones and the move became slowly, then finally itachieved 100 % at the 24th time. As a consequence, we confirmed the NEE increases the instanceseffectively with a small number of operations.In terms of the precision, it remained 60.3 % even at the last time due to the irrelevant terms extracted inNamed Entity Extraction, although the simple input always kept 100 %.RecallR 100%90%80%70%60%50%40%30%20%10%Sim ple Input0%0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 55 60 65 70Tim eNEEP recision100%90%80%70%60%50%40%30%20%10%Sim ple Input0%0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 55 60 65 70Tim eNEEFigure 6. Result of experiment 1107
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADIS3.3.2 Experiment 2 (Adaptation Filter)In the experiment 2, we evaluated how we can keep the precision using the adaptation filter for the 16Japanese car manufacturers. Because the adaptation filter uses the hierarchical structure of ontology asmentioned above, we assumed here that Japan car is a subclass of Car and US car is also a subclass of Car inthe same level as Japan car like Fig.5. As the first seeds we registered {"Nissan", "Honda"} and {"GM","Ford", "Chrysler"} to Japan and US car respectively. Then, we repeated the procedure of the experiment 1with the adaptation filter to eliminate the instances which seems to belong to a different class (US car).Evaluation metrics are as follows.Recall = (3 + ∆ ) / 16Precision = (3 +∆ ) / (3 + ∆ + irrelevant instances), where ∆ is the registered correct instancesThe result is shown in Fig.7 (note that 0 time of the precision is omitted here). In terms of the precision,the NEE was 19.5 % at the 7th time due to US and European manufacturers included in the instances. But,the NEE with the adaptation filter got 26.1 %, and the gap was extending over time. As a consequence, weconfirmed the adaptation filter has effect to raise the precision.However, in terms of the recall, the adaptation filter remained 66.7 % at the 7th time, although NamedEntity Extraction achieved 100 % at that time. It's because some Japan car instances were also eliminatedtogether with the irrelevant terms.R ecalle c all100%90%80%70%60%50%40%30%20%NEE NEE w / Filter10%0%0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7Tim ePrec P c isionn30%25%20%15%10%5%0%1 2 3 4 5 6 7Tim eNEENEE w / FilterFigure 7. Result of experiment 24. PROPERTY RECOMMENDATION4.1 Property Recommendation with Named Entity ExtractionAs well as for the instances, it would be difficult to register every property without any help. Propertyrecommendation collects the properties using the NEE for the bootstrapping as well. But, in case of theproperty, we use three properties belonging to a class and an instance of the class as the query to collect theweb pages. This is because adding the instances would be useful to collect the related web pages like productspecification pages. The seeds for the NEE also include three properties and an instance. For example, if theuser puts "optical zoom", "digital zoom" and "pixels" to a camera class, then the property recommendationtakes those three properties and an instances of the camera, and extracts other properties like "focal length","sensitivity", and "shutter speed" to recommend for the user. After that, the seeds are changed to two oldproperties, one new property, and one new instance. In essence, the NEE using the bootstrapping is to extractterms written in the same style. So, we can expect that the seeds in different levels, that is, the property andthe instance <strong>do</strong> not work well. But, most of the product specification pages have a product name at thebeginning, then its specs (properties) later, so that we considered this seed combination would not affect somuch for the property extraction.108
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 20104.2 EvaluationA property belongs not only to a certain product <strong>do</strong>main, but also to multiple ones. For example, "screensize" is for a digital camera, and also for a laptop PC. Therefore, it is difficult to explicitly classify theproperties to each class unlike the instances, and the adaptation filter has a possibility to greatly reduce therecall. So, the experiment uses the NEE without the adaptation filter. We selected the target product <strong>do</strong>mains(classes) which relatively have many properties: camera, lens, TV, PC, LCD, Blu-ray player, and made thecorrect properties set. A flow of the experiment in case of the camera is as follows. We first register theproperties {"optical zoom", "digital zoom", "pixels"} as the seeds to the camera class in advance, and get aninstance of the camera using the instances recommendation. Then, we execute the NEE with the seeds {acamera instance, "optical zoom", "digital zoom", "pixels"}, and extract the candidates of the properties.The result is shown in Fig.8. We confirmed the recall achieved 70-80 %, and almost all the properties ofthe class were extracted. However, the precision remained 50-60 % on the whole. Although it's ideal toextract all the properties from pages such as the product specification of the manufacturers, this experimenthas not selected the page to be extracted. As a consequence, it extracted a number of the irrelevant termsfrom the pages like explanation of the property meanings, and they lowered the precision.recallprecisioncameralensTVPCLCDBlu-rayFigure 8. Result of property recommendation5. DISCUSSIONIn terms of C. Support of term registration in section 1, we presented that the instance and propertyrecommendation reduces the user's strain. The instance recommendation also introduced the adaptation filterdue to insufficient precision of the Named Entity Extraction. As the result, it raised the precision though itlowers the recall. However, the reason we rather emphasize the precision is that it would be more difficult forthe target users of ONTOMO who are not experts of the ontology to pick the correct terms from a large setwith many irrelevant terms (Of course, it depends on the <strong>do</strong>main knowledge). On the other hand, in case ofthe low recall the user needs only to repeat the process of the recommendation, which would be a relativelysimple task (if the precision keeps high). Furthermore, the property recommendation could not use theadaptation filter, so that to improve the precision we are now considering introduction of a process to selectthe pages to be extracted by looking at hit count of search, and so forth.However, the ontology which can use this recommendation function is limited to ones, where a class iscorresponding to the already-existing category like a product <strong>do</strong>main. This is a kind of limitation of the NEEfrom the web, which means that it can not collect the terms of a classification unless someone classified it inadvance. Moreover, the current procedure of the instance recommendation can not classify the classes whichare not determined by just three terms. For example, the instances {"Tokyo", "Shinagawa", "Shinjuku"} arefor Tokyo City class, and also for Train Station class, and then those are not determined automatically. But,as the property recommendation we can add a typical keyword like "City" or "Station" when searching thepages, and specify the classes to some extent. In the future, we will discuss this improvement with our patternextraction method.In terms of other approaches: A. Easy preparation for the introduction and B. Improvement of usability(design of user interface), as mentioned in section 1 we skipped the tool install by using the web browser, and109
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISrealized operability of a desktop application using Flex. Also, Spring Graph realized visibility of the wholeontology and the details of the definitions. In terms of D. Keeping of motivation, we are trying to motivatethe user by providing sample applications and open web APIs, and for E. Support of collaboration work anexclusive access control of ontology DB enabled multiple developers to build an ontology at once. For thoseapproaches, however, there are some other ways like improvement of <strong>do</strong>cuments, innovative user interface,and point system to registration, etc. In the future, we will compare several ways and discuss their effectmeasurement.6. RELATED WORKSThis section shows comparisons with other ontology building tools and Named Entity Extraction methods.As the famous ontology building tools, we compare with Protégé, Hozo, and KiWi. Protégé (2010) is themost popular ontology editor mainly used by ontology researchers for more than ten years, and has severaladvanced features like inference. Also, it opens plug-in specification, and now has 72 plug-ins in its officialsite such as data import from RDB, term extractions by text mining, etc. Hozo (2010) is a tool which has aunique feature to handle Role concept. It also has a distributed development environment which can keepdata consistency by checking difference of ontologies edited by multiple users. However, those are theheavyweight ontology tools mainly for the ontology experts, thus different from ONTOMO in its target userand problems to be solved. In the future, we will consult them with their ontology visualization plug-in andmechanism to keep the consistency of data, and so forth.On the other hand, KiWi (Knowledge in A Wiki) (2010) focused on the lightweight ontology, andextended Wiki by semantic web technology. It enables the user to edit its content through the same interfaceas Wiki, so the user can register the instances and properties without any special knowledge of ontology. It'sa different way than ONTOMO, but for the same purpose in easy introduction for non-expert, improvementof usability, and collaborative work. In the future, ONTOMO would also like to take Wiki-based changehistory and difference management.They all <strong>do</strong> not have any recommendation function for the instances and the properties, so that we couldalso distinguish ONTOMO by this function. But, we next compare this function with DIPRE and Snowball,which are the famous Named Entity Extraction methods for structured <strong>do</strong>cuments. DIPRE (Brin 1998) is apioneer of the bootstrapping from the web pages. First, it prepares a list of pairs of an author name and abook title, and searches them by a search engine. Then, if it finds a regular expression like "URL, prefixstring, book title, middle string, author name, suffix string" from the result, it adds the pairs of the authorname and the book title which match the regular expression. Snowball (Agichtein 2000) is an extension ofDIPRE, and tried to extract named entities in comparison with the string pairs of DIPRE. In contrast, we triedto extract the terms (instance, property) which belong to a certain set, and has a feature that the adaptationfilter eliminates the irrelevant terms using the hierarchical structure of the ontology, in addition to setting thethreshold to the number of patterns based on the experiment, and so forth. In the future, we consider anyperformance evaluation with the above-mentioned Google Sets and SEAL managing to make the samecondition for them.7. CONCLUSIONThis paper presented development of an ontology building service, ONTOMO. In addition to the abovefuture issues, we will consider an automated construction of ontology itself in the future. Web pages whichhave relatively high credibility of its content like Wikipedia would be a good source of the ontology. Thereare already some researches to build the ontology from part of Wikipedia content, but a point in the futurewould be how we merge the information from a variety of sources accurately. We will continue to offer theontology tool for the public developers and users of the <strong>Internet</strong> services incorporating a diverse range oftheir opinions.110
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010REFERENCESA<strong>do</strong>be Flex, < http://www.a<strong>do</strong>be.com/products/flex/>.B. Faltings, V. Schickel-Zuber, 2007. Oss: A semantic similarity function based on hierarchical ontologies. Proceedingsof 20th Int. Joint Conf. on Artifical Intelligence (IJCAI 2007), pp.551-556.Boo!Wa! - A List Extractor for Many Languages (former Seal), .E. Agichtein, L. Gravano, 2000. Snowball: Extracting relations from large plain-text collections. Proceedings of 5thACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conf. on Digital Libraries (JCDL 2000), pp.85-94.Google Sets, .Hozo, .Jena - A Semantic Web Framework for Java, .KiWi - Knowledge In A Wiki, .OWL Web Ontology Language, .S. Brin, 1998. Extracting patterns and relations from the world wide web. WebDB Workshop at 6th InternationalConference on Extended Database Technology, pp.172-183.Spring Graph, .The Protégé Ontology Editor and Knowledge Acquisition System, .World Ranking of Manufacturers Year 2007, .111
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISFROM THE PROBLEM SPACE TO THE WEB SPACE:A MODEL FOR DESIGNING LOCALIZED WEB SYSTEMSClaudia Iacob and Li ZhuDipartimento di Informatica e Comunicazione, Università degli Studi di MilanoVia Comelico 39, 20139 Milano (Italy)ABSTRACTWeb systems provide solutions for real world problems from various <strong>do</strong>mains. Defining a problem space andmaterializing its solution within a web space brings a set of challenges that come from both the diversity of end usersfacing the problem and the diversity of technologies available today. This paper addresses the design of Web systemsseen as web spaces which provide their end users with tools tailored to their <strong>do</strong>main, their role in the <strong>do</strong>main, theirculture and the platform they are using. These tools help end users develop their exploration of the problem at handwithout being lost in the space. We propose an abstraction model able to support the design of localized web systems andwhich preserves software quality measures like maintainability, reuse and consistency. The method for applying thismodel together with a concrete example of its application is presented.KEYWORDSAbstraction, languages, software design, Web.1. INTRODUCTIONIn the Web 2.0, there is an increasing need of allowing end users – i.e. people who are not computer scienceexperts, but are supported by software systems in performing their everyday work activities (Brancheau,1993) – to access applications and information in a seamless way, using different platforms (Lin, 2008) oracting different roles (Carrara, 2002). Many of these end users often develop creative activities, such asdesign (Xu, 2009), medical diagnosis (Costabile, 2007) or artistic creation (Treadaway, 2009). The goals ofthese activities are not sharply defined at the beginning of each activity, but emerge progressively by theexploration of the problem space. The end users develop their creative processes as unfolding processes, inwhich their problem space is progressively “differentiated to create a complex solution” (Borchers, 2001).End users therefore need to access a web space, which is a “space of opportunities” (Alexander, 1977) wherethey find tools which allow them to develop their exploration without being lost in this space and convergingto their final results. In their activities, end users of different cultures and working in different <strong>do</strong>mains oftenface a common problem and collaborate to reach its solutions. They need to work in teams, share tools aswell as knowledge and wis<strong>do</strong>m about the problem’s solutions; moreover, they need to access all resourcesaccording to different styles of interaction, which respect different cultural conventions. Hence, they usedifferent communication and reasoning tools in their collaboration, giving rise to a set of issues anddifficulties to be faced.Based on the study of previously designed web systems addressing various problem <strong>do</strong>mains – such asmedicine (Costabile 2006), engineering (Valtolina, 2009), geology (Carrara, 2000) - we argue that end usersneed to be supported in their daily work activities by being allowed to interact with tools tailored to their<strong>do</strong>main, role, culture and platform in use. These tools must reflect the problem <strong>do</strong>main and need to bematerialized and managed in the Web. Moreover, as experts in their own <strong>do</strong>mains, end users should besupported to freely express their knowledge of the <strong>do</strong>main and intentions by using the tools they areaccustomed with. Therefore, we aim to design web interactive systems (WIS) which support end users’ intheir work by: i). allowing them to reason in their own system of signs and to exploit their skills andknowledge, ii). mitigating - on the side of the users - the process of changing the flow of reasoning from oneproblem <strong>do</strong>main to another and iii). allowing the materialization of a WIS on diverse digital platforms.112
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010Research in modeling WISs is being <strong>do</strong>ne on several levels. Of interest to our work is the modeling ofWISs in ways that allow the shaping of the system to the user and the platform in use while preserving thequality standards of software design. For example, in (Lin, 2008) the materialization of a web system isabstracted by a set of design patterns. These patterns can be applied as a starting point of the design of thespecific system, considering that they provide a solution to a common and usually broadly met problem. Themajor disadvantage of this kind of approach is that the collection of generic design patterns is limited andmay not address all the problems of design. In (Calvary, 2003), a framework – Cameleon ReferenceFramework – for describing multi-target user interfaces is presented. The framework follows an objectorientedapproach, modeling at an abstract level the <strong>do</strong>main of the problem in terms of objects and therelationships between them. Moreover, the behavior of the system is modeled at the level of task comprisingthe description of a set of inter-related tasks. UsiXML (Molina, 2005) is a language used to describe abstractuser interfaces which are independent from the hardware and software platform in use, the physicalenvironment where the interaction takes place and the user’s abilities.The model presented by this paper follows a different approach in that it models the dynamics of eachindividual entity in the system separately. The behavior of the overall system is never modeled as a whole,but decided by the end user during her/his interaction with the system on the basis of the possible actions s/hecan perform on each entity. Moreover, the model allows the localization of a WIS on four levels: problem<strong>do</strong>main, end user’s role and culture and the platform in use.2. THE DESIGN MODEL PROPOSEDThe section proposes an abstraction model to be used for designing WISs localized to the problem <strong>do</strong>mainthe system is a solution for, to the end users’ profiles (in terms of their role and culture) and to the platform inuse. The model is defined by a hierarchy of levels of abstraction (Figure 1). Each level is described by one ormore XML-based languages which make possible the definition and localization of the virtual systems to theend users’ profiles (<strong>do</strong>main, role, culture and platform). The hierarchy of levels is organized using a top<strong>do</strong>wnapproach, following the description of the web system from the most abstract level of definition to itsconcrete instantiation.Figure 1. The hierarchy of abstraction levels of the design model proposed1). The top level – the meta-model level – describes the rules for defining <strong>do</strong>main-specific languages ableto define WISs, seen as web spaces in which tools to support <strong>do</strong>main knowledge-related activities are madeavailable to the end users. This level prescribes how to define the common structure of WISs, describingthem as web spaces and abstracting from their end users’ roles and cultures and the platforms in use. Themeta-model level is defined by a meta-language – Interaction Multimodal Markup Language (IM 2 L). IM 2 L isused for defining <strong>do</strong>main-specific object languages at the <strong>do</strong>main level.2). The <strong>do</strong>main level localizes the WISs to a specific <strong>do</strong>main. In each <strong>do</strong>main, end users may havedifferent roles. At the <strong>do</strong>main level, the common characteristics of the web space defined for end users113
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADIShaving different roles in a specific <strong>do</strong>main are described. These common characteristics are related to theknowledge-related activities specific to the <strong>do</strong>main and to the structure of the web space associated to theWIS. From the definition of IM 2 L, <strong>do</strong>main-specific object languages – called G-IM 2 L - can be derived. Eachsuch language is tailored to be highly productive in defining web spaces for a specific problem <strong>do</strong>main.Therefore, for each application <strong>do</strong>main, one G-IM 2 L language can be derived. A set of <strong>do</strong>cuments written inG-IM 2 L describes a web space for a particular <strong>do</strong>main and a specific role in the <strong>do</strong>main3). The configuration level comprises two sublevels: the culture localization and platform materializationsublevels. End users having the same role in the same <strong>do</strong>main may belong to different cultures and may usedifferent platforms to interact with the WIS. The configuration level localizes the web space defined at the<strong>do</strong>main level to the culture of the end user and to the platform s/he is using. The configuration level issupported by the definition of two languages – Localization Markup Language (LML) that addresses theculture and Template Language (TL) which addresses the platform.4). The instance level comprises instances of a WIS defined at the <strong>do</strong>main and configuration level andmaterialized on a specific platform. At this level, the end user can access the WIS, explore it as a web spaceand interact with the tools offered within it to perform the activities of interest to him/her.5). The system level comprises the family of WISs addressing the same <strong>do</strong>main, but diverse end users(with different roles and cultures) and platforms.2.1 Meta-model LevelIM 2 L is a XML-based meta-language whose specification allows the derivation of <strong>do</strong>main-specific languageswhich describe WISs as web spaces localized to a <strong>do</strong>main. Within a web space, the end user can live someexperiences and make events happen (Borchers, 2001) by performing knowledge-related activities whichallow the externalization of implicit knowledge. IM 2 L describes the rules for defining the characteristics andthe refined structure of web spaces (Alexander, 1977). IM 2 L meta-language prescribes how to define <strong>do</strong>mainspecificlanguages which allow the description of WISs abstracting from the end users’ roles, cultures andplatforms in use. In this way, IM 2 L defines an abstraction model which allows the design and theimplementation of personalized instances of WISs which allow their localization to a <strong>do</strong>main, and end user’srole and culture and a platform. To express the model, we unify and group together the commoncharacteristics of different knowledge activities based on a knowledge base which must be created,maintained and updated. The activity of managing the knowledge base is the annotation, which allows endusers to update it by adding comments next to data in order to highlight this data’s meaning (Costabile,2007). Therefore, annotation supports and enhances the communication, as well as the knowledgeproduction.IM 2 L defines a web space as superimposing a set of specialized subspaces: infoSpace, workspace,operatorSpace, messageSpace and transparentSpace. An entity (Costabile, 2007) e 2 – in this case, aspecialized subspace - is superimposed to another entity e 1 – in this case, the spaces - when e 2 belongs to e1and every action on both the entities is only handled by e 2 and <strong>do</strong>es not reach e 1 (Bottoni, 1997). Theclassification of spaces is made on the basis of the pattern of events made available by each space. AninfoSpace allows the end user to get directions on how to navigate through the space and understand it.Examples of entities superimposed to an infoSpace are labels and titleBars. A workSpace is the working areaof the system, in which the end user develops activities of interest to her/him, including annotating theknowledge base. As example, the workSpace in an application like Google Maps is the entity on the screencontaining the map. The operatorSpace permits the end user to interact with the system. A toolbar is aconcrete example of operatorSpace, met in a large variety of web systems. The messageSpace allows the enduser to receive feedback from the system s/he interacts with. As concrete example, a warning message issuperimposed to a messageSpace.Each type of space superimposes entities – possibly other spaces – which define it and allow the end userto perform activities within it. Each entity is defined by a set of characteristics, N = {ID, DESC, T, D, IS, C,S} where:a). ID uniquely identifies the entity.b). DESC shortly describes the entity.c). T denotes the type of the entity.114
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010d). D denotes the dynamics of the entity. The dynamics of an entity describes its behavior in response tothe end user’s actions. This behavior is identified by a set of states an entity could have and a set ofinteraction steps through which the entity moves from one state to another.D := + *Any state must be identifiable and may express at least one property like gravity, emotion, complexity.State := +; PROPERTY = {Emotion, Complexity, Gravity}For example, an operator could express an alarming emotion providing that some condition is met.An interaction step specifies the fact that an entity which is in a state, statePre, moves into a new state,statePost, under an action from the end user and a possible additional condition. The actions that an end usercan perform on an entity are classified as Selection, Indication and Activation. As example, moving themouse over a button triggers an Indication action.Step := *• ACTION = {Selection, Indication, Activation}• statePre, statePost are of type State• cond is the condition under which the transition (statePre, ACTION) -> statePost (1) occursMoreover, this transition may trigger several effects on other entities.Effect := < effectEntity> • ID identifies the effect uniquely• effectEntity is the ID of an entity defined in the system which is affected by the transition (1)• newState is the ID of a defined state for the entity effectEntity. Following the transition (1), effectEntitywill change its state into state newStatee). IS is the representation of the initial state of the entity. The initial state follows the definition of ageneric state, but identifies the representation of the entity at the start-up of the system.f). C is the context of the entity, that is the set of entities to which this entity can be superimposed.g). S is the structure of the entity, which is the set of entities which can be superimposed to it.The tree structure of the IM 2 L language makes it feasible for the overall definition of IM 2 L to be specifiedby a XML Schema. Hence, each entity: i). is being defined by the set N = {ID, DESC, T, D, IS, C, S} and ii).is identified by its position in the XML Schema.2.2 Model LevelEach WIS is associated with a <strong>do</strong>main-specific web space. From the definition of the IM 2 L meta-language, aset of <strong>do</strong>main-specific object languages – called G-IM 2 L languages – can be derived. Each G- IM 2 L languageallows the description of web spaces designed for a particular <strong>do</strong>main. A G-IM 2 L language localizes a WISto a specific <strong>do</strong>main, describing the knowledge activities to be performed in that <strong>do</strong>main by end users playingvarious roles in different cultural contexts. A set of <strong>do</strong>cuments written in G-IM 2 L defines a web space for aspecific role in a particular <strong>do</strong>main, describing the <strong>do</strong>main-specific activities allowed to end users with aparticular role in the <strong>do</strong>main. Moreover, it abstracts this definition from cultural details and frommaterialization specific technicalities.Respecting the definition rules provided by the IM 2 L meta-language, any G-IM 2 L language defines theweb space, a set (or all) of the specialized subspaces and a set (or all) of the entities superimposed to them interms of:a). ID: Any G-IM 2 L must define a unique ID for each entity. The rules for defining the ID are <strong>do</strong>maindependent, so each <strong>do</strong>main specific object language defines them independently. For example, a specific G-IM 2 L language may define an ID as a string of characters containing at least one digit.b). DESC: An entity defined in a G-IM 2 L language may be described by a significant name in the <strong>do</strong>mainof the language.c). T: Entities defined in G-IM 2 L languages may have a ‘type’ attribute. Each <strong>do</strong>main defines its specifictypes for each entity defined. For example, the admissible types for a workshopSpace may be ‘ordered’ and‘unordered’: T = {ordered, unordered}. For an ordered space, one would assume that the order of the entitiessuperimposed to the workshopSpace matters, while for an unordered workshopSpace this order <strong>do</strong>es notmatter.d). D: Conform to the IM 2 L definition of a state, each <strong>do</strong>main defines the structure of the states of anentity within the <strong>do</strong>main together with the possible actions an end user can perform on the entities defined for115
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISthe <strong>do</strong>main. For example, a particular <strong>do</strong>main-specific G-IM 2 L language may define a state as beingidentifiable and expressing an emotion.State := ; Emotion = {appreciation, surprise, disappointment, sense of danger}Moreover, each G-IM 2 L language defines the possible actions – specific to the <strong>do</strong>main associated to theG-IM 2 L language.e). IS: The initial state is a particular state which follows the same definition as a generic state. Any entitydefined in a <strong>do</strong>main specific G-IM 2 L must have an initial state associated to it.f). C and S: The definition of a G-IM 2 L is given by an XML Schema, hence the context and the structurefor each entity is embedded within the tree structure of this schema. The entities described by the children ofa node represent the structure, S, of the entity described by the node. The context, C, of an entity isrepresented by the entities described by the nodes in the path from the root node of the tree to the noderepresenting the entity.The entities defined by a G-IM 2 L language provide means of defining abstractly web spaces tailored to aspecific <strong>do</strong>main and providing the end user – having a specific role – only with the tools required forperforming the specific <strong>do</strong>main related knowledge activities.2.3 Configuration LevelTailoring WISs to the end user and the platform in use requires the localization of the <strong>do</strong>main-specific webspace (associated to the system) to the culture of a certain end user, and to the platform s/he uses.Consequently, we define two mark-up languages – Localization Markup Language and Template Language –able to: i). enhance the abstraction model defined by IM 2 L ii). progressively shape an instance of the WISabstractly described by G-IM 2 L <strong>do</strong>cuments (and defined for a <strong>do</strong>main and a role within the <strong>do</strong>main) to aspecific end user by describing localization and materialization details about the instance.Localization Markup Language (LML)LML localizes a web space to a specific culture. The goal of LML is to describe the culture-relatedproperties of the <strong>do</strong>main-specific web space associated with an instance of a WIS. These properties are: colorrepresentation, shapes, text alignment, language, and topology (Wright, 1997). LML is a mark-up language,its elements being <strong>do</strong>cuments respecting the LML definition – given by a XML Schema (Barricelli, 2009b).Each targeted culture is associated with a LML <strong>do</strong>cument. Text alignment is a culture related property whichspecifies the order in which text is displayed for one particular entity or for the overall web space. Thepossible values for this property are: ‘left-to-right’ or ‘right-to-left’.Color representation is a culture-dependent property which is described in LML by functions associatingeach G-IM 2 L defined value for each property of a state to a color embedding the meaning of the property’svalue. For example, for a state transmitting an emotion, each possible emotion transmitted is associated to acolor which embeds the meaning of the specific emotion in a particular culture. Table 2 provides a mappingbetween the color associated to emotions for the Italian and the Japanese cultures.Table 1. Italian and Japanese color-emotion mappingEmotion Italian Japaneseappreciationsurprisedisappointmentsense of dangerThe instance of the system for the Italian culture will use yellow for representing the states expressingappreciation, while the instance for the Japanese culture will use green to represent the same states.Language is addressed in LML by a language dictionary repository which assigns to each G-IM 2 L definedentity the translation of the text associated with it in the language of the culture targeted. Topology specifiesthe order in which entities will be represented for a specific culture. The shapes property associates eachentity with a set of shapes that may be used for representing it for a specific culture.Template Language (TL)TL localizes a web space to a specific platform. TL provides means to describe the way each instance ofthe WIS will be materialized on the platform in use. TL describes the platform specific properties of the116
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010instances of WISs and the way their structure is affected by these properties. Examples of materializationproperties are relocatable geometry, and graphical properties (such as the lines thickness). As example, aninstance of a WIS materialized on a laptop will address the specificities of the display of the laptop, while aninstance of the same system designed for a mobile device will respect different properties of materializationaccordingly to the platform’s specification (memory, input/output devices, display size, resolution and so on).The elements of TL are <strong>do</strong>cuments which respect the schema definition of TL (Barricelli, 2009b).A TL <strong>do</strong>cument describes a set of templates to be applied for a specific platform. Each templateassociates a G-IM 2 L defined state of an entity with the parameterized snippet of SVG or HTML code to beused for its materialization on a specific platform. As example, describing the materialization of aninformation type entity, its initial state may be associated to a snippet of code which will describe a label andwill replace the text and the color of the label with parameters whose values will be decided at run-timebased on the culture of the end user.3. THE MODEL APPLIEDThis section describes a step-wise design method for reaching concrete instances of WISs applying theaforementioned model. The method follows a top-<strong>do</strong>wn approach and progressively shapes personalizedinstances of WISs. The sequence of steps to be followed during the instantiation of the system has as startingpoint the existing definition of the IM 2 L meta-language (Meta-Model Level in Figure 2), based on which<strong>do</strong>main-specific G-IM 2 L languages can be defined. A set of G-IM 2 L <strong>do</strong>cuments (Domain Model Level inFigure 2) abstractly describes an instance of a WIS, seen as a web space localized to a <strong>do</strong>main and addressingend users having a specific role in the context. The G-IM 2 L definition of the <strong>do</strong>main-specific web space isbeing augmented at the configuration level by the culture localization (Culture Configuration sublevel inFigure 2) and the platform materialization (Platform Configuration sublevel in Figure 2). The culturelocalization phase adds to the web space the culture-related properties described by the LML <strong>do</strong>cuments,while the platform materialization phase binds it to a specific platform, by applying to it the propertiesdescribed by the TL <strong>do</strong>cuments.Figure 2. The flow of reasoning in reaching families of interactive virtual systems from IM 2 LCulture localization and platform materialization properties are merged with the abstract descriptiondefined by the G-IM 2 L <strong>do</strong>cuments, reaching an instance of the WIS (Instance Level in Figure 2). Anyinstance of a WIS addresses a specific <strong>do</strong>main, an end user’s culture and role in the context and a platform.The set of all instances of a WIS defined for a specific <strong>do</strong>main and for end users having different roles,cultures and using different platform form a family of system (System Level in Figure 2).The flow of execution for reaching a particular instance of a WIS starts with checking the profiles of theend user who accesses an instance of the WIS, in terms of her/his role in the context, her/his cultures, and theplatform in use. The G-IM 2 L <strong>do</strong>cuments are then loaded together with the culture localization (LML) and117
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISplatform materialization (TL) <strong>do</strong>cuments according to the end user’s profiles. The LML and the TL<strong>do</strong>cuments become the input for a XSLT processor. The XSLT processor merges the LML and TL<strong>do</strong>cuments, creating a localized template for the instance. The localized template is further on merged withthe G-IM 2 L <strong>do</strong>cuments. The result of the XSLT processor is a full tree representing the initial state of theentire instance of the WIS, which is then materialized on the screen and ready to react to the end user’sactions. The end user’s actions are captured as events and are treated according to the dynamics rulesembedded in the G-IM 2 L <strong>do</strong>cuments.3.1 A Concrete ExampleThe design method proposed by this paper follows an iterative approach in that it allows, at each step of itsdefinition, the design and the implementation of concrete examples of WISs. The example presented in thissubsection – the Valchiavenna <strong>Portal</strong> - is one iteration of the method (Barricelli, 2009). The portal addressesthe tourists and <strong>do</strong>main experts interested in a valley situated in the northern part of Italy, calledValchiavenna.The design of the portal initiates with deriving from IM 2 L a G-IM 2 L object language addressing thetouristic <strong>do</strong>main. This <strong>do</strong>main-specific language provides means of defining touristic web systems whichallow viewing and annotating points of interest on a map of the Valchiavenna region. The abstractcharacteristics and the structure of these spaces are described by two sets of <strong>do</strong>cuments written in thetouristic-specific G-IM 2 L object language: i). one set describes the touristic web space for tourists and ii). thesecond set describes the touristic web space for <strong>do</strong>main experts (such as historians, geologists). The commonactivity for both types of end users of the portal is the annotation – they are all allowed to annotate points onthe map. However, for each role, different annotation means are described. Tourists are allowed to associatepoints on the map with visual links (emoticons) to the personal comments on their visit of the place. On theother hand, <strong>do</strong>main experts are provided with tools to associate points on the map with star operators ( )which are linked to certified specialized multimedia descriptions of the place. Two LML <strong>do</strong>cuments aredefined for describing the culture related characteristics for the Italian and the Japanese cultures. Moreover,two TL <strong>do</strong>cuments describe the materialization characteristics of the system for two different platforms: PDAand laptop.Figure 4. Valchiavenna portal for Japanese tourists (A) and Italian <strong>do</strong>main experts (B) using laptopsFigure 4 shows the representation of two possible final instances of the portal, both being part of the samefamily of systems. The first one addresses Japanese tourists using a laptop; it: i). respects the culturalconventions of the Japanese culture (like language, color and shape representations) and ii). provides the enduser with the specific tools needed for a tourist (annotating points on the map by providing the personalfeedback on the visit of the place). A localized instance of the system may be materialized also for Italiantourists using different types of devices. The second instance addresses Italian <strong>do</strong>main experts; it: i). respectsthe Italian cultural conventions and ii). provides the end user with the specific tools needed by <strong>do</strong>mainexperts (annotating places on the map providing specialized multimedia descriptions of the place). Similarly,Japanese <strong>do</strong>main experts may be provided with an instance of the system localized to their culture andpossibly other platforms.118
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 20104. CONCLUSIONWe argue that nowadays, end users should be supported in the exploration of the problem space they arefacing by web spaces addressing each end user’s profile. The paper considers as part of end user’s profilehis/her culture, his/her role in a <strong>do</strong>main and the platform s/he is using in interacting with the web space. Wedescribe an abstraction model for designing web interactive systems, seen as web spaces and which can belocalized to the end user’s profiles, allowing him/her to interact with the system using systems of signsfamiliar to him/her. The paper also describes the method to be used in applying the model together with aconcrete example of the model applied.ACKNOWLEDGEMENTThe authors would like to thank Piero Mussio for the useful and insightful discussions. This work wassupported by the Initial Training Network "Marie Curie Actions”.REFERENCESAlexander, C. 1977. A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction. Oxford University Press, Oxford.Barricelli, B. R., Iacob, C., Zhu, L. 2009. Map-based Wikis as Contextual and Cultural Mediators, Community Practicesand Locative Media workshop at Mobile HCI’09. Bonn, Germany. Available online: http://www.unisiegen.de/locatingmedia/workshops/mobilehci/barricelli_mapbased_wikis_as_contextual_and_cultural_mediators.pdf(Retrieved: August 23rd, 2010)Barricelli, B. R. et al, 2009. BANCO: A Web Architecture Supporting Unwitting End-user Development,” In: IxD&A,Design for the Future Experience, Vol. 5, No. 6, pp. 23-30.Borchers, J., 2001. A Pattern Approach to Interaction Design. John Wiley & Sons, Inc, Hoboken, New Jersey.Bottoni, P. et al, 1997. Defining visual languages for interactive computing, In IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man andCybernetics, Part A: Systems and Humans, Vol. 27, No. 6, pp. 773-783.Brancheau, J. C. et al, 1993. The management of end-user computing: status and directions. In ACM Computing Surveys,Vol. 25, No. 4, pp. 437-482.Calvary, G. et al, 2003. A Unifying Reference Framework for Multi-Target User Interfaces, In Interacting withComputers, Vol. 15, No. 3, pp. 289–308.Carrara, P. et al, 2002. Toward overcoming culture, skill and situation hurdles in human-computer interaction, InInternational Journal Universal Access in the Information Society, Vol. 1, No. 4, pp. 288-304.Carrara, P., Fresta, G., and Rampini, A. 2000. Interfaces for geographic applications on the World Wide Web: anadaptive computational hypermedia. Proc. of ERCIM Workshop on User Interfaces for all. Florence, Italy, pp. 341-342.Costabile, M. F. et al, 2007. Visual Interactive Systems for End-User Development: a Model-based Design Metho<strong>do</strong>logy,In IEEE Transactions on Systems Man and Cybernetics, Vol. 37, No. 6, pp. 1029 – 1046.Lin, J. and Landay, J. A. 2008. Employing patterns and layers for early-stage design and prototyping of cross-device userinterfaces. Proc. of CHI ’08, Florence, Italy, pp. 1313-1322.Molina Massó, J. P., Vander<strong>do</strong>nckt, J., Simarro, F. M., and López, P. G. 2005. Towards virtualization of user interfacesbased on UsiXML. Proc. of the Conference on 3D Web Technology, Bangor, UK, pp. 169-178.Treadaway, C. P. 2009. Hand e-craft: an investigation into hand use in digital creative practice. Proc.of C&C’09,Berkeley, USA, pp. 185-194.Valtolina, S., Mussio, P., Barricelli, B. R., Bordegoni, M., Ferrise, F., and Ambrogio, M. 2009. Distributed knowledgecreation, recording and improvement in collaborative design. Proc. of KES IIMSS ‘09, Venice, Italy, pp. 31-41.Wright, P. et al, 1997. Techniques & Tools for Using Color In Computer Interface Design. In Crossroads, Vol. 3, No. 13,pp. 3-6.Xu, A., Smith, B., and Bailey, B. 2009. A collaborative interface for managing design alternatives. Proc. of C&C’09,Berkeley, USA, pp. 443-444.119
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010the blogs. This approach is used by blog indexing services like Technorati, Icerocket and Blogcatalog 1 .Thesecompanies maintain tagging services for <strong>Internet</strong> sites and blogs, considerably increasing the semantic levelassociated to them [Mathes, 2004]. For instance, if a blog post related to a math class is marked with aneducation tag, it is inserted into the educational context, hence facilitating the search process and providingbetter search results to the user.In this light, in order to enable users to perform their searches, the text and information related to eachblog need to be properly indexed and stored. Such a task is performed by blog crawlers [Arasu et al., 2001].In order to build a blog crawler, we should consider many aspects related to blogs itself, such as languageused by them, blog indexing service, preprocessing tasks, and indexing techniques. In addition, the blogcrawler should be easily extendable, due to the dynamic nature of the Web.Thus, a good framework for constructing blog crawlers should attend to all these issues [Johnson andFoote, 1988]. With a framework that could be easily extendable for different applications, the users wouldcreate specific blog crawlers with little effort.Accordingly, we propose a framework for building context-based blog crawlers. The framework uses tagsto increase the semantic level of the blogs and provides many services, such as preprocessing, indexing andgeneral text extraction from HTML. We also present an instantiation of the framework based on Technorati’stagging system.This article is structured as follows: Section 2 details the framework’s architecture components. Anexample of how to instantiate the proposed framework, as well as first results and discussion are shown inSection 3. Related work is presented in Section 4. Finally, in Section 5, we present our conclusions and futurework.2. THE FRAMEWORK’S ARCHITECTUREThe proposed system architecture consists of a white-box framework which allows the development ofcontext-based blog crawlers. This framework provides application services such as text preprocessing, blogindexing, text extraction from HTML pages, and an API allowing the user to easily implement datapersistence. The general architecture is shown on Figure 1. The aforementioned services are explained inmore detail below.2.1 The Crawler ModuleThis is the main module of the framework. The Application and TagParser classes from this module aredirectly connected to the framework’s core. In order to create an application with it, the user must extendthese two classes. The user can configure some aspects of the application by initializing a few attributes whenextending the Application class. For example, she can define the language that will be used by the crawler,the preprocessing algorithm, and the text extraction method, just to mention a few. Concerning the TagParserclass, the only requirement for using it, is to define the tagSearch() method, which executes a search andreturns a list of blogs matching a given tag. This will be further discussed in the Section 3.1.2.2 The Application and General Services ModulesThe Application Services Module provides many services that are used in the crawling process. Theseservices allow users to create several applications, i.e., in other scenarios, the framework is not limited to thecreation of blog crawlers. It follows a short description of all these services: Preprocessing: This service removes the information considered irrelevant to the blog analysis. Thecurrent version of the framework can perform four types of preprocessing: i) CleanHTML [Hotho et al.,2005], which is responsible for cleaning all HTML tags; ii) EnglishFiltering [Frakes and Baeza-Yates, 1992]which can filter just English text; iii) EnglishStemming [Porter, 1980], performing a classical stemmingtechnique, reducing the word to its lemma; and iv) WhiteSpace, which removes extra whitespaces;1 http://technorati.com, http://www.icerocket.com and http://www.blogcatalog.com, respectively.121
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADIS Indexing: We delegated the implementation of this service to the Lucene 2 tool. The service is incharge of indexing texts for the search process. Text Extraction from HTML pages: This service extracts the textual content of blog posts. It isbased on the SummaryStrategy algorithm that will be discussed in Section 2.4; Persistent storage API: This API is responsible for saving, retrieving and updating instances ineither a MySQL 3 database or in a RDF schema-based repository as Sesame 4 .The General services module implements basic services which are used in the crawling process. Itprovides file manipulation, HTTP requests, XML file manipulation, and language detection. All webconnections are handled by the HTTP service provided by this module.Figure 1. The framework's architecture2.3 The toolkit and Persistence ModulesThe Toolkit Module has several interfaces to the following set of APIs and tools: i) Lucene and Lingpipe 5 ,for extraction and text retrieval; ii) Hibernate and Elmo, which handle data persistence transparently; iii)HttpClient, for HTTP page retrieval; iv) Google Language Detection, to detect the language of the blogs text.The Toolkit module makes transparent the use of each one of these tools, providing an effortless access tothem which decreases the learning time. For instance, the user <strong>do</strong>es not to go deeper in details about LuceneAPI in order to build an application that actually uses it. Instead, she could delegate to the Lucene’s functionsof the framework.The Persistence Module is responsible for the storage. It supports MySQL databases and Sesame, whichis an open source Java framework for storage and querying of RDF data. Particularly, if the user chooses touse Sesame, she has to define the ontology which will be used as the database schema.2 http://lucene.apache.org3 http://www.mysql.com4 http:// www.openrdf.org5 Lingpipe is a toolkit for processing text using computational linguistics: http://alias-i.com/lingpipe/122
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 20102.4 The Summarystrategy AlgorithmDuring the implementation of this framework, we have faced the task of extracting the textual content ofblogs posts. In order to <strong>do</strong> that, we had to find the delimiters indicating both the beginning and the ending ofthe posts within a blog page. Furthermore, the fact that each blog has its own HTML structure makes thistask more difficult. Therefore, we propose the SummaryStrategy algorithm which uses both the link of theoriginal blog to retrieve it and a brief summary of the post to find its text within a blog page. Since we rely onblog indexing services like Technorati’s to retrieve the summaries of the blogs, their acquisition was a minorissue. Being the summary text and the text inside the blog exactly the same, the algorithm can make use ofthe former as a reference to find the latter inside the blog page. However, the blog summary is sel<strong>do</strong>m writtenin plain text (without any formatting markup), contrasting with the text inside the blog and this fact canprevent the algorithm to locate the summary within a blog page. To overcome that difficulty, if the algorithmwas not able to find the beginning of the posts text content, it tries to use smaller fragments of the summaryas a reference, until it finds it.The algorithm also has to detect the posts endings. By analyzing the layout tags used by different blogpages, we noticed that we could use the block-delimiting HTML tags (i.e. ) as delimiters of the textualcontent of blogs posts. The Figure 2 shows the pseu<strong>do</strong>code of the SummaryStrategy algorithm, whereSummary and blogHTML are strings, and possibleEndings is a list of strings.1 while (length of Summary > 0) <strong>do</strong>:2 if (Summary is found within blogHTML) then:3 textStart ← position of Summary within blogHTML4 for each ending in possibleEndings <strong>do</strong>:5 if (ending is found within blogHTML, after textStart) then:6 textEnd ← ending position within blogHTML, after textStart7 return text between textStart and textEnd8 end if9 end for10 return “not found”11 end if12 delete the last character of Summary13 end while14 return “not found”Figure 2. Pseu<strong>do</strong>code of the summarystrategy algorithm.The algorithm is fast and has low processing requirements. The <strong>do</strong>wnside of the algorithm is that it relieson a summary and on hardcoded delimiters (i.e. the div tag) to extract the full text from blogs posts.In a future version of our framework, we could implement webpage template-detection techniques such asproposed by [Wang et al., 2008]. The template-detection algorithms are able to infer the layout template of aweb site, generally by counting block frequencies. Thus, these algorithms can be used to determine the blogsposts.3. THE FRAMEWORK’S INSTANTIATIONThis section briefly describes the development of an application using the proposed framework, anddiscusses an analysis of the developed application.3.1 Developing an Application with the FrameworkAs previously stated, the only requirement to create an application using our framework is to extend theApplication and TagParser classes.When extending the Application class, the user can configure some aspects of the application by settingattributes of the class. The user can define features as the desired language of blogs, the type of persistence,123
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISthe preprocessing and indexing techniques, and the tags to search for. This gives a lot of flexibility to theapplication.In order to extend the TagParser class, the user only needs to implement the tagSearch() method. Thismethod is responsible for finding blogs with a specific tag. At first this may seem a difficult task, however itgets a lot simpler by making use of tagging services as the one provided by Technorati´s. Nevertheless, it’sworth mentioning that we <strong>do</strong> not recommend the use of multiple data sources, i.e., using several blogindexing services at the same time, because this can cause information inconsistency.In our instantiation we used five categories (tags): education, economy, entertainment, sports and movies.We have chosen to use a limited number of categories to simplify our analysis. For the tagSearch() methodwe used Technorati’s search service because it provides a wide range of tags (both general and specific ones).For instance, there are general tags in politics context and specific tags related to political personalities, asBarak Obama. In addition, even though the framework allowed us to work with blogs in many languages, forthe sake of simplicity, we preferred just to deal with blogs in English. The SummaryStrategy algorithm wasused for the text extraction from blogs posts.3.2 Results and DiscussionWe evaluated one framework’s instantiation and the results are discussed below. The evaluation was based intwo common metrics of information retrieval systems: precision and recall [Baeza-Yates and Ribeiro-Neto,1999]. The precision allowed us to know how many of the retrieved posts were relevant. In our context, apost was considered relevant only if it was complete and written in English. The recall indicates how manyrelevant posts were retrieved, considering the total set of relevant posts.For this first simple analysis, we selected twenty blogs from each of the five aforementioned categories.The crawling results were inspected manually. Table 1 shows the results.Table 1. Results by categoryCategory Precision RecallEducation 61.5% 65%EconomyEntertainmentSportsMovies83.3%60%87.5%75%66.6%60%80%88%Average 73.46% 71.92%As we could notice, some categories performed better in this evaluation than others. For instance, thesports category got a precision of 87.5% and a recall of 80%, while the entertainment category scored 60%for both the precision and recall. This variability in the results occurred due to differences in the level oflanguage in which the blogs are written in. Sports blogs tends to be more formal and better structured,because they tend to have connections with larger organizations. On the other hand, blogs aboutentertainment subjects are mainly written by the general public, they tend to be less formal and contain slanglanguage that affects the text extraction process.The algorithm managed to achieve an average precision and recall of 73.46% and 71.92%, respectively.4. RELATED WORK[Glance et al., 2004] proposed an application for analyzing collections of blog using machine learning andnatural language processing techniques to select the most quoted phrases and accessed blogs.In [Hurst and Maykov, 2009], the authors proposed a blog crawler that was concerned with specific issuessuch as performance, scalability and fast update. Their crawler takes in account low latency, high scalabilityand data quality, and appropriate network politeness. The distributed crawler architecture is composed ofscheduling, fetching, and list creation subsystems, as well as a natural language parser.More recently, [Wei-jiang et al., 2009] tried to increase the quality and accuracy of searches in blogs.The authors proposed a blog-oriented crawler, and compared it to a topical crawler using their specific124
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010features. For the development of this blog crawler, it was considered three algorithms for recognizing blogpages, for blog crawling, and for links extraction.Despite the fact that all works described above explored important and interesting features of theBlogosphere, they are not directly concerned with the blog retrieval and blog description issue. For Glance etal. the blog retrieval is important, however they use metrics that <strong>do</strong> not increase the description level of theblogs. Wei-jiang et al. focused on blog searching, considering some aspects of the extraction and informationretrieval issues. Finally, Hurst and Maykov just considered the blogs searching task as the more importantrequirement of their system.In our framework’s instantiation, we used tagging systems to enhance the semantic level of retrievedblogs, improving the search process. Indeed, all the cited works are focused on one specific <strong>do</strong>main.Contrarily, our proposal is more open and general in which the user will have little effort to extend ourframework for creating new applications. In other words, our proposed framework is at a higher level ofabstraction which facilitates the customization of blog crawlers in the context of any greater application.5. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORKThe main purpose of this work was to propose a framework for building context-based blog crawlers. Theproposed framework comprises a large set of tools and keeps a high level of abstraction for the developer,providing an easy access to its tools and APIs. Many of its aspects were detailed. The potential of ourframework was evidenced by an instantiation on a typical blog extraction task that achieved satisfactoryresults: an average precision of 73.46% and average recall of 71.92%.The framework presents many expected features suggested by the software engineering field, such as:reliability, risk reduction, rapid prototype development, and easy maintenance, among others. Furthermore,our framework provides access to many tools and is able to deal with multiple languages.As future work, we intend to: (1) perform a deeper evaluation of an improved version of theSummaryStrategy algorithm (with some more heuristics). In addition, we would like to compare it with otherlayout template-detection algorithms; (2) add an information extraction module for enabling further blogsanalysis; and finally, (3) provide a component for combining the tags suggested by several blog indexingservices, based on a fine-grained information extraction performed by the aforementioned module. Moreover,this same component would be able to classify new untagged retrieved blog pages improving in this way therobustness of our framework.REFERENCESArasu, A. et al., 2001. Searching the web. ACM Transactions on <strong>Internet</strong> Technology, 1(1), pp. 2–43.Berwick, R. C. Abney, S. P. and Tenny, C., 1991. Principle-Based Parsing. Computation and Psycholinguistics. SIGARTBull, 3 (2), pp. 26-28.Baeza-Yates, R. A. and Ribeiro-Neto, B., 1999. Modern Information Retrieval.: Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing.Boston.Chau M., Lam P. , Shiu B., Xu J. and Cao J. 2009. A Blog Mining Framework. Social Network Applications. IEEEComputer Society.Frakes, W. B. and Baeza-Yates, R. A., 1992. Information Retrieval: Data Structures & Algorithms. Upper Saddle River:Prentice-Hall.Glance, N.S. Hurst, M. and Tomokiyo, T., 2004. Blogpulse: Automated trend discovery for weblogs. In: <strong>WWW</strong>2004,workshop on the weblogging ecosystem: aggregation, analysis and dynamics. New York City, USA, 17-22.Hotho, A. et al., 2005. A Brief Survey of Text Mining. GLDV Journal for Computational Linguistics and LanguageTechnology, 20 (1), pp.19-62.Hurst, M. and Maykov, A., 2009. Social streams blog crawler. In: Proceedings of the 2009 IEEE InternationalConference on Data Engineering, Shanghai, China.Isotani, S. et al., 2009. Esta<strong>do</strong> da arte em web semântica e web 2.0: Potencialidades e tendências da nova geração deambientes de ensino na internet. Revista Brasileira de Informática na Educação, 17 (1), pp.30-42.125
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISJohnson, R. E. and Foote, B., 1988. Designing reusable classes. Journal of Object-Oriented Programming, 1 (2), pp.22–35.Manning, C. D. et al., 2008. Introduction to Information Retrieval. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Mathes, A., 2004. Folksonomies-cooperative classification and communication through shared metadata. ComputerMediated Communication.Mooney, R. J. and Bunescu, R. C. 2005. Mining knowledge from text using information extraction. SIGKDDExplorations, 7 (1), pp.3-10.Porter, M. F., 1980. An algorithm for suffix stripping. Program, 14 (3), pp.130-137.Wang, Y. Fang, B. Xeng, C. Guo, L. Xu, H., 2008. Incremental Web Page Template Detection. In: <strong>WWW</strong>2008: 17 thInternational World Wide Web Conference. Beijing, China 21-25.Wei-jiang, L., Hua-suo R., Kun H., Jia L., 2009. A New Algorithm of Blog-oriented Crawler. In: International Forum onComputer Science-Technology and Applications, IFCSTA.White, D. and Winn, P., 2008. State of the Blogosphere [online] Available at: [Accessed 29 August 2010].126
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010ENFORCEMENT OF NORMS IN SELF-ORGANIZINGVIRTUAL COMMUNITIESJuliana de Melo Bezerra and Celso Massaki HirataComputer Science Department, ITAS.J.Campos, BrazilABSTRACTIn virtual communities, norms are established in order to discipline and organize their members. The community is calledself-organizing virtual community when members are responsible to define and update the norms. Cooperation isrequired both in the execution of the community activities and in the definition of norms. As consequence of cooperation,conflicts may arise, and as consequence of conflicts, norm infractions may occur. Norm infractions can be alsoconsequence of vandalism and misunderstanding of norms. Dealing with norm infractions is essential to keep the order inthe community. An effective way to deal with norm infractions is provide approaches of enforcement of norms. Thisarticle presents an extension of self-organizing virtual community model and a process for enforcing the norms. Themodel considers malicious members, enforcement norms, and enforcement procedures. The process takes into accountnorm infractions detection and analysis, sanctions, and damages. The proposed model can be used as a guideline fordesigning and constructing self-organizing virtual communities.KEYWORDSSelf-organizing, virtual community, enforcement, norm, sanction, damage.1. INTRODUCTIONA community is an association of people, called members who are oriented by individual motivations andcooperate in order to achieve a common objective (Lenhard, 1988). When the relationship among membersand the cooperation itself takes place over the <strong>Internet</strong>, the community is known as virtual community(Rheingold, 1998). The term virtual is applied because the members are not in contact personally, but they areconnected through the <strong>Internet</strong>.Norms are established in order to discipline and organize the members in communities. A norm is a type ofprinciple or rule that states obligation, permission, power attribution or competence attribution (Palaia, 2005)(Lyons, 1984). As members’ interests and demands change over time, virtual communities are not fixed andconsequently norms evolve. Virtual communities that promote their own evolution are called self-organizingvirtual communities because they create, increment and adapt the norms that govern their relations andprocesses. The self-organization stimulates the participation and involvement of members, contributing to thepersistence of the community over time (Moe et al., 2008).Examples of self-organizing virtual communities are LinuxQuestions.org (Lattemann, 2005), Wikipedia(Goldspink et al., 2008) (Beschastnikh et al., 2008), NetBeans.org (Jensen and Scacchi, 2005) and Apache.org(Lattemann, 2005). In these communities members can change the norms by participating on theirenhancements. According to the above definition, virtual communities as Linkedin and Orkut are not selforganizingones, because norms are established by a board (that maintain the community) and not bymembers.The norms definition is essential for the community organization and the enforcement of such norms shallbe also addressed. As explained by Palaia (2005), a norm shall contain a coercion element in order to force themembers to follow it: if a member disregards a norm, he/she suffers a sanction effect, which is a punishmentfor the violation. It is important to mention that a sanction is not always a punishment. The punishment is anegative sanction. There can be also positive sanctions, as rewards (Palaia, 2005). The positive sanctions areuseful to instigate the effort of members in some direction, for example a reputation scheme to congratulate127
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISmembers that make relevant contributions to the community. In order to ease the understanding of the text, weuse the term sanction as a synonym of punishment.The enforcement of norms in self-organizing virtual communities has attracted interest. Nahon andNeumann (2005) study how virtual communities that share messages, specifically forums, regulate themselves.They explain that some members called managers are responsible to detect and disregard messages thatinfringe norms. Geiger and Ribes (2010) relate a case of banning a vandal in Wikipedia. They explain howsome members, the vandal fighters, work assisted by tools called bots (Geiger, 2009) in order to keep thecommunity harmonious by enforcing the norms. The article gives an overview about how Wikipedia enforcesits norms by combining people and bots. Forte and Bruckman (2008) identify in Wikipedia the designprinciples for self-organizing communities studied by Ostrom (2000) for physical communities that managenatural resources. The principles include concepts of monitoring, sanction, and enforcement. Other articlesFlynn (2001), Moe et al. (2008), and Lattemann and Stieglitz (2005) report on how the enforcement of normsis used in some specific communities. However the articles <strong>do</strong> not provide a general model for theenforcement of norms in self-organizing virtual communities.The enforcement of norms helps to assure that the norms are obeyed by members, contributing to keep theorder in the community. Keeping the order, members cooperate harmoniously and they are more confident onthe community ability to handle undesired situations. Therefore, community credibility and members’motivation increase. In this article, we propose an extended model of self-organizing virtual communitiesaddressing the enforcement of norms with specific norms and procedures. In order to accomplish theenforcement, we also propose an enforcement process taking into account norm infractions, sanctions anddamages.In Section 2 we discuss some aspects that lead to the existence of norm infractions and we address theconcepts related to a norm infraction. In Section 3, we propose the extended model to deal with enforcement invirtual communities. We identify the enforcement process and then we include it in the model of selforganizingvirtual communities. Section 4 provides some discussions with respect to the model. The lastsection concludes our work.2. NORM INFRACTIONS AND RELATED CONCEPTSIn this section, we discuss the cooperation and competition forces in communities and norm infractions.Besides we describe some concepts associated to a norm infraction.2.1 Norm InfractionsIn all communities, physical or virtual, there are forces that join and dissipate members. A force is calledcooperation, when members work together aiming a common objective. In virtual communities cooperation isaided by tools of computer supported cooperative work. In order to organize the cooperation, members areassigned to roles that define permissions on activities that they are allowed to perform (Lenhard, 1988). So theoperational norms are established in the community.Cooperation is a motivation for the existence of a community; however it is not the unique force in thecommunity. There is the competition motivated by opposite views between members. A competition is not justfor obtaining a scarce good or the best of the goods, but it may happen to conquer power, fame, status andpartners (Ogburg and Nimkoff, 1972).Competition sometimes contributes to incentive members in their activities. However, when competitionamplifies and the objective of a member becomes to win the other, a conflict arises (Lenhard, 1988). Norminfractions can appear during a conflict, because the opponents are involved in the dispute and may ignore theestablished norms that govern behaviors and relations. In this case, norm infractions are related to insult andpersonal attacks. In some virtual communities the possibility of occurrence of conflicts is reduced by the lackof cooperation, for example in communities whose objective is the social networking, such as Orkut andLinkedin. In this kind of community, a member maintains his goods and shares them only with desiredmembers. Members <strong>do</strong> not develop an activity together, so cooperation is almost inexistent as well as conflict.Other virtual communities can reduce conflicts even with the presence of active cooperation. It is the caseof JEMS (Journal and Event Management System), a community of researchers that submit and review papers128
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010for technical conferences. In JEMS the profiles of some members (reviewers) are kept in anonymity duringdiscussions, which may contribute to the reduction of personal attacks and offenses.Self-organizing virtual communities are more prone to conflicts, because the cooperation is required bothin the accomplishments of the community activities and in the definition of norms. In both cases, norminfraction may occur as consequence of conflicts, so the community has to resort to the enforcement of normsso that the order can be maintained.Norm infractions may arise during conflicts; nonetheless conflicts are not something that should beavoided in communities. Conflicts are useful because they generate distinct points of view, which can helpmembers to better analyze the topics being discussed. It should be noted that norms infractions are not onlyconsequence of conflicts, they can be caused by either vandalism (when a member intentionally desires tocorrupt community resources) or some misunderstanding during the interpretation of norms.2.2 Concepts related to Norm InfractionSanctions guide the behavior of the members so that norms established by the community are obeyed. Clearand unambiguous norms must be provided in order to reduce misunderstandings. We identify three conceptsrelated to norm infraction: sanction, damage and impact. Figure 1 shows the concepts and some of therelations.A norm infraction causes damages in the community, for example misuse of a page editor makes availablecontents with offenses. Damages have impact, such as the undesirable exposition and loss of members, and thedecrease of community credibility. A sanction, applied to a transgressor, should depend on the impact of thecaused damage, for example a sanction for writing nonsense phrases in content should be less severe than asanction for writing offenses. A sanction may also depend on the history of the transgressor, for instance amember that insists on vandalism has to be punished in a harder way in order to change his/her behavior.Figure 1. Concepts related to a norm infractionThe damages have to be recovered in order to minimize their impacts. In virtual communities based onforums, the damage is recovered by disregarding messages. Examples of damages in forums are: irrelevantmessages (the messages are not related to the community objective), messages that infringe community culture(offenses to members) or that contain commercial information (spam) (Nahon and Neumann, 2005).Priedhorsky et al. (2007) study types of damages in Wikipedia and their impact. Some reported damagesare misinformation (or false information), mass and partial delete (to delete article’s content), offenses (towrite text with obscenities, hate speech, and personal attacks), spam, and nonsense (text that is meaningless tothe readers). Some impacts of the damages are to confuse, offend or mislead readers. Besides, the impacts mayinclude the loss of members and the reduction of articles’ quality. A common technique to recover thedamages is the reversion of the contents to a valid version.Lattemann and Stieglitz (2005) explain that in open source communities the sanctions are not limited to theexclusion of the transgressor and the loss of reputation. Transgressors may be “flamed”, meaning they arepublicly named and judged by other community members. In this kind of community, the damages are mainlyconcerned about misconduct in the developed codes. The authors also comment that the threat of the sanctionsmay help to achieve quality assurance.Flynn (2001) relates the case of an adult-oriented forum that had norms stating that it was forbidden toshare child pornography and to practice spam. The community only recovered the damages caused bytransgressors by removing the inadequate messages. However no sanction was applied to the transgressors, sothere were no means to block them, because the members did not use login and password to access the system.As the number of vandals increased and the community did not find a way to stop them, the forum was closed.This case illustrates the need of sanctions to enforce norms in virtual communities.129
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADIS3. THE ENFORCEMENT OF NORMSIn this section, we extend the model of self-organizing virtual communities with the enforcement of norms.We also propose an enforcement process, detailing its activities and relations.3.1 Enforcement in the Community ModelBezerra and Hirata (2010) propose a model for self-organizing virtual communities. The model is composedby three main elements: Members, Norms and System. The Members belong to the community motivated bytheir personal goals. They define and improve Norms that possibly change how they work by imposingdiscipline. The System, by implementing the norms, provides the means for the members to work, interact, andachieve their goals. The System comprises Resources, Access Control policy model and Procedures.Resources encompasses all the goods developed in the community, such as messages in forums, articles inWikipedia, and <strong>do</strong>cuments and codes in open source communities. The permissions over the Resources arehandled by an Access Control policy model. Procedures are driven by the norms and detail the operationalparticipation of the members, for example a procedure to invite a member for the community, and a procedureto revise an article or code.In this article we extend the previous model with elements related to the enforcements of norms as shownin Figure 2. The norms and procedures related to the cooperation of members to develop their Resources arenow called, respectively, Work Norms and Work Procedures. There can be distinct kind of Work Norms, forexample in Wikipedia they are mainly divided in content-related and behavior-related norms (Geiger andRibes, 2010). The way that the enforcement is performed has to be also established using additional norms wecall Enforcement Norms. The Enforcement Norms regulate how the community detects violations in normsand deals with the concepts of sanctions and damages. Besides, the Enforcement Norms have associatedprocedures called Enforcement Procedures.Figure 2. Self-organizing virtual community model with enforcement of normsThe extended model also includes a new relation called “references” between system and norms, becauseduring the enforcement activities, the Enforcement Norms may be referenced to. Another consideration is thatthe Access Control can be seen as the primary mean of enforcement, because it assigns permissions tomembers manipulate resources according to the rights and duties established by norms.The model shown in Figure 2 divides the members into two classes: non-malicious members and maliciousmembers. In the former model proposed by Bezerra and Hirata (2010), all the members are considered nonmalicious.The non-malicious members use the system correctly obeying the defined norms. The maliciousmembers misuse the system by infracting the established norms. As a consequence of the malicious behavior,the mechanisms to enforce norms may make use of the system to restrict the transgressor activities.In order to know what the Enforcement Norms and Procedures should address, the next section identifiessome activities related to the enforcement of norms. In this article, the term activity is used to indicate an130
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010abstract task or set of tasks. The term procedure is a concrete and detailed way to accomplish the activity, i.e.its task or set of tasks, considering the specificities of the community established in norms.3.2 A Process for the Enforcement of NormsIn Figure 3 we propose a process for the enforcement of norms in self-organizing virtual communities. Theprocess is quite general and it is based on the Incident Response Life Cycle proposed by NIST (2008) tohandle computer security incidents. Besides, the process considers the concepts of sanction and damage. Theprocess identifies the following activities: Monitoring, Analyses, Sanction Application, Damage Recovery, andUnexpected Event Handling.In order to explain the activities we make use of a case study, reported by Geiger and Ribes (2010) thatdiscusses the banning of a vandal in Wikipedia. In the case study, a user committed several norm infractionsby vandalizing articles (music albums), such as “Before we Self Destruct”, “The Mirror” and “808 &Heartbreak”. The editors that are responsible for the enforcement of norms in Wikipedia are called vandalfighters.Figure 3. Process for the enforcement of norms in self-organizing virtual communitiesThe Monitoring activity allows identifying events over the Resources in order to detect norms’ infractions.It is related to some Work Norms. For example, assuming a Work Norm that forbids content with attacks an<strong>do</strong>ffenses to members, one can define a list of insulting words to be searched during the Monitoring.In Wikipedia, the Resources are articles, while the monitored events are the suspicious editions made inarticles. In the case study, the transgressor made an offending edition (for instance, using improper words) tothe album “Before we Self Destruct”. The edition triggered various vandalism-detection algorithms, forexample Huggle. Huggle is tool or bot that monitors automatically articles in Wikipedia. Other tools includethe popular Twinkle, and the less known, ClueBot and Lupin (that search obscene words and commonlymisspelled words). Although in the case study the monitoring was made automatically, members may beinvolved in the identification and reporting of a vandal.The purpose of Analyses activity is to examine the incident considering the community norms in order toclassify the incident as a norm infraction or not. In Wikipedia Huggle also helps in this phase, because theprovided rank of incidents already includes some decision criteria such as: the kind of the user who made theedit, if the user had already an edit reverted, and if the user has any warning about norm infraction.If the incident is a norm infraction, the Enforcement Norms may be used to determine the sanctions to beapplied to the transgressor, as well the recovery of the damages. In the case study, the incident was clearly anorm infraction, because of the use of obscenity words. The damage was un<strong>do</strong>ne by an editor who reverted thearticle using Huggle tool. No sanction was applied.Later the same transgressor vandalized “The Mirror” album which generated an incident. At that time, aneditor using Twinkle tool both reverted the article and sent a warning message to the transgressor. The warningmechanism makes use of user talk pages, which are public wiki pages created by the system for each user. Theuser talk pages have become a kind of database of norm infractions for particular users, which is useful duringthe Analysis phase.Regarding the warnings in Wikipedia, there are some templates specifically to inform the transgressor thatthe edit in question was not encyclopedic. They are divided into four levels of severity. For example, in thecase study the first warning was “One of your recent edits, such as the one you made to ‘The Mirror’ (album)did not appear to be constructive and has been reverted”. The fourth-level warning sent to the same131
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADIStransgressor was: “You will be blocked from editing the next time you vandalize a page, as you did with thisedit to 808s & Heartbreak”.In Wikipedia, the hardest sanction is the block of the transgressor. This sanction is only applied by theadministrators who have the technical and social authority to issue temporary blocks. However the editors thatanalyze the incidents have the possibility to make formal ban requests to administrators using the AIV(Wikipedia: Administrator intervention against vandalism) page. In the case study, the transgressor wasindicated to AIV and, after one more vandalism, he was blocked by an administrator.Tools, as Huggle and Twinkle, aid the vandal fighters during the enforcement process in Wikipedia. Thetools both monitor events and help to analyze the incidents considering the profile and history of transgressors.They also support the damage recovery and may suggest sanctions to be applied to the transgressor based onpredetermined list; however the decision is always made by the editors who operate the tools.Not always an incident characterizes a norm infraction. An incident can be generated due to an error orwrong configuration of some automatic components, for example components that support the Monitoringactivity. An incident can occur because a norm is ambiguous and a member did not understand it.Furthermore, an incident can occur because the subject is not addressed by any norm. In these cases, anincident is called an unexpected event and has to be managed. The Unexpected Event Handling activity dealswith unexpected events, for example, the procedure may include the correction of the faulty component andthe proposition or update of norms.In order to perform the enforcement activities, some roles in the Access Control of the community systemcan be identified. The Monitoring can be performed by resource administrators that are responsible toguarantee the integrity of the community resources. A committee of resource administrators can conduct theAnalyses activity. The Sanction Application activity can be executed by user administrators that configure thepermissions of the users over the resources. The Damage Recovery activity can be performed by resourceadministrators that recover the resource to a valid version. Depending on the damage severity, such as denialof service, the support of technical analysts can be needed to recover the corruption. Due to the unforeseennature of the Unexpected Event Handling activity, all the mentioned roles can participate: a resourceadministrator can update a resource configuration, a user administrator can correct a wrong member profile,and a technical analyst can improve an automatic component. Besides, in the Unexpected Event Handlingactivity, norm administrators can be necessary to coordinate the suggestions of new norms and the correctionsof established norms, by guaranteeing the community consensus.With respect to access control, for example, Wikipedia defines some roles related to enforcement:administrators, bureaucrats and stewards. There are specific permissions regarding sanction application, suchas block (to block an IP address, user name or range of IPS from editing) and userrights (to change the usergroups of a user). There are also permissions related to damage recovery, such as purge (to purge a page) androllback (to revert a bad editing).4. DISCUSSIONSThe enforcement activities are regulated by the Enforcement Norms and are implemented as detaile<strong>do</strong>perations using the Enforcement Procedures. The procedures are performed by members of the communityassigned to specific roles in the Access Control, in general known as managers or administrators. TheEnforcement Procedures can make use of tools to assist the managers. So, managers and tools work togetherto accomplish the whole enforcement process. In general managers are volunteers as all members in selforganizingvirtual communities. These managers use the system to perform the enforcement operations;therefore, they must be seen as non-malicious members in Figure 2. The process to become a manager can bevery rigorous, as occurs in Wikipedia (Forte and Bruckman, 2008).The Monitoring can be made manually by members of the community or it can be made automaticallyusing bots, as Wikipedia <strong>do</strong>es in some articles’ editions (Geiger, 2009). The choice between humans or botsdepends basically on the possibility of an automatic detection and its development cost. Priedhorsky et al.(2007) comment about the difficult to detect automatically some infractions in Wikipedia, for instance thedetection of misinformation (article with false information) is almost impossible, because it requiresunderstanding the article content.132
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010In both cases, manual or automatic Monitoring, an important concern is to not discriminate any kind ofmembers, avoiding the predisposition to suspect of the newcomers in community, for example by onlymonitoring the events made by the newcomers and not the ones made by the administrators. If a managerabuses of the power conferred to him/her, it configures a norm infraction and has to be submitted to theenforcement process too. In this case, the manager must be seen a malicious member in Figure 2.In some communities the Monitoring can be performed in a subset of events, and not in all events, forexample in LinuxQuestions.org the managers relate the impossibility to review all messages. In order to helpthe Monitoring, self-organizing virtual communities may specify a norm that confers all members the right toreport violations and abuses, so all the members become guards of the community.In open source communities, the code development process has embedded a test phase that is a kind ofMonitoring. During the test phase, the detected malfunctions in general are not consequence of norminfractions. It may occur because only authorized members have access to codes and the process to receivesuch an authorization can be much elaborated. For example, Apache.org uses meritocracy, which means thatthe member has first to be an active contributor, so he/she can be indicated by other member for assuming arole and finally submitted to community voting. Comparing to Wikipedia, where every member can alter thearticles, the possibility of article corruptions can be higher than code corruptions in open source communities.Due to its nature of decision making, the Analysis activity is mainly made by authorized members and notonly by bots. If it is required by the Enforcement Norms, the Analysis activity may also take into account thehistory of the incidents. In Wikipedia, for example, the history of a member is registered in his/her public usertalk page (Geiger and Ribes, 2010). Apache.org uses the called books and records to keep all the accounts andproceedings of the members, so any member has the right to examine its information.In virtual communities the kind of sanction may range from a simple warning to the expulsion of thecommunity. The warning is seen as an educative sanction, considering that transgressor is a member learninghow to work in the community. However, if the transgressor continues to violate the norms repeatedly, hardersanctions can be applied as the access denial to resources, which is implemented using the Access Control ofthe community system.The damages in the community resources can be in majority recovered: messages are removed fromforums, articles are reverted in Wikipedia and codes are fixed in open source communities. However damagescaused to other members, for example offenses, are more difficult to deal with and can require the definition ofcompensations, such as apologies.The proposed enforcement process shows the main enforcement activities in an ordered flux; howeversome feedbacks can occur in the activities execution. For instance, during the execution of the Analysisactivity, some specific information may be needed, so additional data may be required to be collected in theMonitoring activity.In general, the existing self-organizing virtual communities include some sort of enforcement procedures.However, the procedures are not organized and there is no model to place them, so it is not clear how toconsider the procedures and the relations in the context of members, norms, procedures, access control andresources.5. CONCLUSIONAs competition is an active force in communities, conflicts may arise between members or between amember and the whole community. In a self-organizing virtual community conflicts are more likely, becausemembers <strong>do</strong> not only cooperate to accomplish their work activities, but they cooperate to define and maintainthe norms that regulate the community. Conflicts may result in some norm infractions, when the involvedmembers <strong>do</strong> not obey the established norms that govern behavior and relations in community. Norminfractions can be also consequence of vandalism. Therefore the enforcement of norms is of relevance to beaddressed.In self-organizing virtual communities, norms have first to be well defined. The community shall alsodefine norms specifically to govern the enforcement, the Enforcement Norms. The Enforcement Norms areimplemented in the system using Access Control and Enforcement Procedures that detail the operationaltasks. So the procedures are performed by members assigned to administrative roles and possibly assisted bytools in the system.133
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISIn this article, we propose an extended model in order to guide self-organizing virtual communities toaddress the enforcement of norms. We also propose a process with enforcement activities. With the activitiesof the enforcement process, Monitoring, Analyses, Unexpected Event Handling, Sanction Application andDamage Recovery, the community is able to detect an incident and classify it as a norm infraction. In case of anorm infraction, a sanction is applied to the transgressor and the damage can be recovered. The occurrence ofan unexpected event is also dealt, which allows the enhancement of the enforcement process itself, by updatingtools, procedures, and norms.The proposed model can be used to analyze the enforcement performed by existing virtual communities, inorder to guarantee that norms are being followed and possibly suggest new directions to it. The proposedmodel can also be used to address enforcement of new communities, because its process outlines the basicactivities that help the definition of specific norms and procedures to achieve the desired enforcement.As future work, we intend to investigate how conflicts can be managed in self-organizing virtualcommunities, i.e. how they emerge and can be detected, and how to address them.REFERENCESApache.org. Bylaws of The Apache <strong>Software</strong> Foundation. http://www.apache.org/foundation/bylaws.html.Bezerra, J. M. and Hirata, C. M. 2010. Self-Organizing Virtual Communities Model. Submitted.Beschastnikh, I., Kriplean T. and McDonald, D. W. , 2008. Wikipedian Self-Governance in Action: Motivating thePolicy Lens. Proceedings of International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media.Flynn, T. R., 2001. Ethics, Law and Technology: A Case Study in Computer-Mediated Communication. Proceedings ofInternational Symposium on Technology and Society.Forte A. and Bruckman, A., 2008. Scaling Consensus: Increasing Decentralization in Wikipedia Governance.Proceedings of Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. IEEE.Geiger R. S. and Ribes, D., 2010. The Work of Sustaning Order in Wikipedia: The Banning of a Vandal. Proceedings ofComputer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW). ACM.Geiger, R.S., 2009. The Social Roles of Bots and Assisted Editing Programs. Proceedings of International Symposium onWikis and Open Collaboration (WikiSym). ACM.Goldspink, C., Edmonds, B. and Gilbert, N., 2008. Normative Behaviour in Wikipedia. Proceedings of 4 th InternationalConference on e-Social Science.JEMS. Journal and Event Management System. https://submissoes.sbc.org.br.Jensen, C. and Scacchi, W., 2005. Collaboration. Leadership. Control, and Conflict Negotiation and the Netbeans.orgOpen Source <strong>Software</strong> Development Community. Proceedings of Hawaii International Conference on SystemSciences. IEEE.Lattemann S. and Stieglitz, S., 2005. Framework for Governance in Open Source Communities. Proceedings of HawaiiInternational Conference on System Sciences. IEEE.Lenhard, R., 1988. Sociologia Geral. Livraria Pioneira Editora, São Paulo.LinuxQuestions.org. LQ Rules. http://www.linuxquestions.org/linux/rules.html.Lyons, D., 1984. Ethics and the rule of law. Cambridge University Press.Moe, N. B., Dingsøyr, T. and Dybå T. 2008. Understanding Self-organizing Teams in Agile <strong>Software</strong> Development.Proceedings of the 19th Australian Conference on <strong>Software</strong> Engineering. IEEE, pp 76-85.Nahon K. B. and Neumann, S. , 2005. Bounded in Cyberspace: As Empirical Model of Self-Regulation in VirtualCommunities. Proceedings of Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. IEEE.NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology), 2008. Scarfone, K., Grance, T. and Masone, K. ComputerSecurity Incident Handling Guide. Publication 800-61.Ogburg, F. and Nimkoff, M. K., 1972. Cooperação, competição e conflito, in Homem e Sociedade, F. H. Car<strong>do</strong>so and O.Ianni.Ostrom, E., 2000. Collective action and the evolution of the social norms. In Journal of Economic Perspectives, Vol 14,No 3, pp 137-158.Palaia, N., 2005. Essential Notions of Law. Saraiva Publisher.Priedhorsky R. et al., 2007. Creating, Destroying, and Restoring Value in Wikipedia. Proceedings of Conference onSupporting Group Work (GROUP). ACM.Rheingold, H., 1998. Virtual Communities, in The Community of the Future, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco.Wikipedia Rules. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/wikipedia:Rules.134
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010ORGANIZATIONAL WIKIPEDIADiogo Arantes Fonseca Gonçalves da Cunha * , Prof. Artur Ferreira da Silva *and Prof. José Figueire<strong>do</strong> ***Instituto Superior Técnico – Taguspark - Av. Prof. Dr. Aníbal Cavaco Silva — 2744-016 Porto Salvo, Portugal**Instituto Superior Técnico - CEG-ISTABSTRACTIn this paper we explore a strategy to implement an organizational wiki, using a Wikipedia model. We address models tocope with organizational change and organizational learning within a knowledge management strategy. The results werepositive as our wiki model is now integrated in the day-to-day routines of the company.KEYWORDSWiki, Wikipedia, knowledge management, organizational change, organizational learning.1. INTRODUCTIONAs the world evolves into a crescent connected space, where the virtual context is integrated with thephysical reality, organizations need to develop skills to take advantage of this evolution.On the organizational reality the issue of knowledge management is becoming more important, asmanagers try to retain the knowledge of the workers and these workers feel the need to continually improvetheir skills (Drucker, 1999). On the public social reality, knowledge sharing and knowledge creation evolvedtremen<strong>do</strong>usly in the last years and models have been created that can, and should, be used in other contexts.The Web 2.0 revolution brought new ways of communicating and working collaboratively, and the results ofthis revolution should be harvested to improve organizations.One of the most popular examples of a public model of knowledge sharing is Wikipedia. But its successon the public <strong>do</strong>main <strong>do</strong>esn’t necessarily imply that it would succeed on the much smaller and controlle<strong>do</strong>rganizational environment; probably some adaptations would need to be made to the model and to theorganization.Having that in mind, we set out to investigate if an organization with highly literate workers in ITtechnologies would be capable of assimilating a wiki model. More than that, would an internal Wikipediaavailable only to the workers, add value to the organization? Although this seems a simple question, theimplementation of such a task entails a considerable amount of unpredictability because the overall process isheavily dependent on human behaviour. A wiki is a voluntary system of content creation and, even thoughWikipedia quality standards apply to the organizational context, an organization is a complex set of manydifferent “wants” and participative patterns that cannot be assured by regulations, and maintaining Wikipediaquality needs investment in time and resources from the organization that wants to a<strong>do</strong>pt it.2. ORGANIZATIONAL LEARNINGAccording to Morgan (2006), our perception of an organization is a key factor in its functioning processes.He says we use metaphors to help our understanding and to better manage our companies, and thatrepresentation is a fundamental topic for an organization to thrive in the market.Let’s consider the metaphor of the living organism applied to the organization entity. A living organismneeds to adapt to its environment in order to survive and is composed of subsystems that interact together tosustain the survival of the larger system. True evolution is only possible with a correct alignment of all thesubsystems and the environment.135
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISFollowing this perspective, we present the Learning Organization’ integrated architecture of systemsthinking as explained by Senge (Senge, 1990). This concept <strong>do</strong>esn’t define the company that is just able tolearn, it defines the company that has learning processes as the foundation of its development, investing inareas like innovation, communication and colaboration. Nowadays, the organizational context changes veryquickly and agressively, and companies need to invest in these capabilities so they can keep up with marketevolution and the competition.After describing the five disciplines that need to be taken in consideration for an organization to become aLearning Organization (Mental Models, Personal Mastery, Team Learning, Shared Vision and SystemsThinking), Peter Senge also details which kind of learning disabilities may be causing difficulties in thechange process. These disabilities should be investigated carefully and attentiously, as they may be thereason why a transformation process takes more time than it should, or <strong>do</strong>esn’t happen at all. Usually thesedisabilities are associated with cultural characteristics of the organization, the department or group, as theyare referenced to human behaviour. But, althought identifying some of these disabilites may help, there areother disabilities that may not be listed and explained.Some time later, Peter Senge and other coleagues took a different approach to the same problem in(Senge et al, 1999). They kept standing with the systems thinking model but, instead of focusing on theintrinsic disabilities that could prevent an organization from changing they focused on the reinforcingprocesses that need to be adressed in order to sustain the emergence of change. These processes seemobvious after understanting their nature and are bound to the ideological perspective of the change, thedeepth of structural innovation needed and the methods and theories used to achieve the intended change.There are three reinforcing processes to a change model: the process of personal results, that refers to thepassion that a person puts into his job when he loves what he’s <strong>do</strong>ing resulting in a positive impact in his life;the process of networking of commited people, which is aligned with the concept of CoPs (Communities ofPractice) as it refers to the ability that any individual has to transcend himself when genuinely integrated in acolective; and the process of businness results, that is simply the fact that, good businness results boost upmorale and improve ongoing businness processes.Nonetheless, althought these reinforcing processes have the objective of sustaining change, they aren’tvery simple to sustain themselves. According to the author (Senge et al, 1999), there are many challenges thatprobably will appear when a change of this nature occurs, and he divides them into three type of challenges:initiating challenges, sustaining challenges and re-designing challenges. For example, the first challenge ofinitiating change is called “Not Enough Time” and it adresses the problem of the lack of time that most of theworkers have to create, participate or to develop change initiatives. In this project we found some of thesechallenges.2.1 LeadershipLeadership is a concept that in a colective perspective only started being used recently. It is not a singlecharacteristic of a person that makes him able to lead others. Certain characteristics, like confidence,adaptability, and practic inteligence seem to be valuable for this function. But, and more important,leadership is now seen as the fruit of an entaglement between context and the characteristics of a person. Aperson in a particular situation and for a certain group can be the best leader, in a different situation or groupmay be not good at all (Mann, 1959).As such, we need to change our perspective. We need put aside the mith of the hero CEO that saves thecompany and brings peace to the workplace (Senge et al, 1999) and embrace a more distributed and emergentapproach to the issue, where communities are made of several leaders, each one with its own situationalability in the group.Leadership drives organizational change processes and, organizational change only occurs when there isleadership supporting and sustaining the iniciatives. Thus, leaders are indispensable for a solid transformationwithin an organization.A functional evaluation of types of leaders is described in (Senge et al, 1999) three types of functionalleaders can be found on the organizational context:• Local line leader, refers to the leader that has the power, position or informal leadership to putchange in action in its practical sense and, that has the ability to assess its results on the making.136
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010• Network leader, also known as internal networker or community builder, is the leader that throughhis mobility within informal networks can help create new relationships, aliances or ideas, and helpdisseminate new mentalities and attitudes.• Executive leader, is the leader in charge of the administrative and strategic actions within anorganization, assuming the bottom-line responsability for it’s performance and development that can supportand leverage the change process when acting consistently as "champion" of it.There are three types of leader behaviours described by (Lewin, Lippitt, & White, 1939):• Authoritarian behaviour, when all decisions are centered on the leader in charge with little or noregard to group suggestions.• Democratic behavior, when decisions are made considering the thoughts and suggestions of thegroup.• “Laissez-Faire” behavior, which relates to the leader that <strong>do</strong>esn’t impose no control or protocol,leaving group members to individually decide upon their actions.We cannot say that a type of behavior is better than the other, but we can find a more suited beahavior toa specific environment or goal.3. ENTERPRISE 2.0The concept of Enterprise 2.0 relates to a use of Web 2.0 systems, such as social networks, wikis, blogs orother collaborative tools or platforms, within the organizational environment, focusing on the integration oftechnical and social facets of the organizational life.A company that <strong>do</strong>esn’t invest on Enterprise 2.0 systems risks becoming outdated and less competitive(McAfee, 2006). To support this view we need to clarify that Web 2.0 tools in order to work correctly mustbe considered as sociotechnical systems and not just as "tools". There are many types of 2.0 systems that maybe used and they serve different purposes, so there is a need to evaluate the system according to itsfunctionalities and assess if it is aligned with the company objectives.The SLATES mnemonic was coined by Prof. McAfee to help on acquisition or development of thesetypes of systems. Hinchcliffe (2007) wrote a blog post where he added a few characteristics to SLATES,transforming the mnemonic into FLATNESSES:• Free-form – the system must have a dynamic way of organizing content;• Links – content has to be linkable;• Authoring – user actions must be traceable;• Tags – content should be categorized using folksonomy;• Network-Oriented – the system must be oriented to a network environment;• Extensions – new information about the user needs should be achievable by crossing data;• Search – content must be searchable;• Signals – the system must provide a notification system, such as RSS or ATOM;• Emergence – the system architecture must make content emerge depending on users needs;• Social – the system must provide a way to create social relations between users.Although there are these specifications on Enterprise 2.0 system functionalities, implementing such asystem is not simple. These systems have a voluntary nature, so users are not forced to a<strong>do</strong>pt them. This way,implementation should be accompanied by a cultural adaptation to the new ways communicating.Communication, collaboration and integration are the keywords in Enterprise 2.0 initiatives, as workershave to develop these skills in order to fully align themselves with the philosophy of Enterprise 2.0 andgenerate organizational value.3.1 WikisThe wiki is a Web 2.0 system that suites the needs of collective authoring of content in a simple, straightforward process of edition and creation of html pages. The most common functions associated with wikis are:editing and creating html pages; internal linking between content; future linking to pages that haven’t beencreated; markup language to easily format html pages; version control system; and permission system.137
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISAlthough these functionalities may be common to most of the wiki platforms, there are other functionalitiesthat are also often used, like the discussion page or file galleries, extending the services the system provides.Consequently, the flexibility that a wiki provides is also a critical point in its usage because it can be likea Swiss army knife with many different services that can be applied to many different situations. So everywiki needs a metaphor in order to focus its users to defined ways within which to use the system. The mostpopular example is the Wikipedia model that is based on the encyclopedia metaphor to instill quality tocreated content.According to Mader (2008), the Wikipedia model is not the most used model within organizations, and itis also not the best. This view seems to be a consequence of the work that needs to be <strong>do</strong>ne in order tocultivate a community that cares for the content that is created and actively participates in its evaluation andmaintenance, like the one supporting Wikipedia. The Wikipedian community is the only reason Wikipediadeveloped the way it did and keeps on evolving.Analyzing the wikipatterns community, initiated by the author, where anyone may contribute with whathe calls Wiki Patterns, which may sooth the usage curve of a wiki, and Wiki Anti-Patterns, which maycontradict that goal. We concluded that some of the patterns and anti-patterns he presented are applicable toorganizational wikis using a Wikipedia model, although the author <strong>do</strong>esn’t give much credit to“organizational wikipedias”.4. SAFIRAPEDIAIn September 2009 project Safirapedia was initiated in a company called Safira, which supplies informationtechnology consulting services. The main purpose of this project is to have a concept repository with all therelevant information regarding processes, practices, services, etc.The project is a part of a plan called Safira 2.0 to turn Safira into a more Enterprise 2.0 organization,through a series of projects that face different objectives. The projects thought and proposed by Safira’s CEOwere: Safirapedia, an enterprise Wikipedia; Google Safira, a google search engine for Safira internalinformation; iSafira, a homepage for Safira workers similar to iGoogle; Safira News, a corporate social newsplatform; Safirabook, a social network like Facebook for Safira workers; and Knowledge and CollaborationPlatform, which is just what the name suggests.Using an Action Research metho<strong>do</strong>logy, we intended to discover if the use of an “organizationalWikipedia” is valuable to a company based on this wiki instance. Through different actions we tried toachieve practical results for Safira while validating our academic findings, thus, as it usually happens inAction Research, the researcher was also an actor in the process.4.1 Contextual AnalysisDuring the entire life cycle of the project, there were several different analyses to understand what would bethe bigger issues that would arise from the change that was going to happen.Using Senges’ Limits to Change perspective we defined the change frontiers: ideologically Safirapedia isa project that intends to help Safira becoming more close to an Enterprise 2.0; changes were made toprotocols and processes to increase Safirapedians participation; and the methods or tools used are the onesthat will be presented up front in conjunction with the actions taken.Safiras’ culture was analyzed through Edgar Schein framework (Schein, 2004) in three levels: (1)assumptions, the inner desires and needs of the company workers, which were inferred from questionnairesdriven by the researcher; (2) espoused values, the company explicit values; (3) artifacts, the objects thatmake up Safira, like chairs, computers or information systems. After this analysis we found that Safira wasindeed prepared for the transformation that had to be <strong>do</strong>ne, so we needed to focus on the changes that wouldhave most impact.Kurt Lewins Force Field analysis (Lewin K. , 1943) focuses on the forces that support or oppose a changeprocess. We built a table to help discover what where the main forces influencing participation onSafirapedia, and it showed that the forces opposing were more powerful than the forces supporting. The mainforces opposing were the lack of time and personal lack of confidence; as for the supporting forces they werethe centralization of knowledge and professional recognition. So we knew that time and confidence were two138
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010main issues to be improved and centralization of knowledge and professional recognition were two forcesthat needed to be motivated and increased.4.2 Cultivating ChangeUsing a narrative approach to validate our findings (Figueire<strong>do</strong>, 2010) the detail of the description of theseactions is proportional to the level of impact they had on the process. The researcher initiated these actionswhile he was searching for results. As the researcher became an integral part of Safira working at theheadquarters, it was based on direct observation and reflection that certain actions were taken.4.2.1 Selecting the WikiIn total alignment with the CEO we made a list of the functionalities the wiki needed to accomodate. Thiswas the first thing to be <strong>do</strong>ne in the project and it gave us the parameters that defined our search for the rightplatform. They had to be cross-browser compatible, to have robust enough a permissions system, to be easyto use and to insert contents, to have a space to discuss the articles, to have a friendly interface, to supportseveral languages, and finally to have integration with Safiras Active Directory. This permanent weeklyalignment with the CEO resulted in a critical analysis of the choices, improving the validation process.Therefore a comparison was made between several platforms, for instance MediaWiki, Drupal,Confluence, DokuWiki, that were found using Google search, a web site called Wikimatrix and a Gartnerreport (Drakos, Rozwell, Bradley, & Mann, 2009). The choice was made after experimenting the platformsand comparing, not only the functionalities and interface, but also the price, technical support and longevity.The platform chosen was Tiki-Wiki because it fits all the requirements listed above, has more built-infunctionalities than all the others, is open-source, and consequently, free of charge, has an active supportingcommunity and, finally, it has a very friendly configuration panel.4.2.2 Integrating the WikiWhen integrating a system like this one needs to consider two perspectives: the technical and the social.On the technical side we integrated it with other systems that already existed, in order to extendfunctionalities and avoid turning Safirapedia into an “island”. The first integration was with Safiras ActiveDirectory, so we could maintain a concept of single sign on, so workers wouldn’t need to know a differentusername and password to access Safirapedia, which means less barrieriers. This integration also implies amore tight security, consequently all logins from outside Safira's internal network were provided throughHTTPS protocol. The second technical integration was with Google Safira, which allows the contentsproduced on Safirapedia to be searchable through a Google internal search engine.On the other hand, the social integration meant that Safirapedia needed to be a part of the workers day-todayroutine. This was a difficult process: first, there was an initial injection of content that was consideredrelevant by the CEO so that Safirapedia wouldn’t go online like a blank sheet of paper. This way, thepressure of being the first content creator and the distance between thinking about writing and actuallywriting was diminished.With a little creativity and some luck with timing, an opportunity appeared in a form of another processthat already existed at Safira – the Global Communications Plan (GCP). The GCP was a way to motivateSafiras different levels of workers to, individually, share their knowledge in different forms. Through writtenreports and slideshows, managers, software engineers and software developers could choose what the subjectthey would focus on, and every month artifacts had to be created by each function (for instance, managersand software developers <strong>do</strong>n’t create the same reports on a content level).The partnership created with the GCP was only for software developers. The objective was to makearticles called Programming Tips&Tricks, with a specific focus on a technical issue, and this partnershipmade it possible, and motivated the writing of these GCP articles in Safirapedia. Consequently there was aboost on content creation, with 1 article created per week.Also on the social side of the integration, we created the “Safirapedia Experience” to motivate contentcreation in group. This initiative was a sort of framework that a group of workers with a common interest andsome shared knowledge could follow. The Safirapedia Experiences had the following conditions:1. Create a group of 7 people with knowledge about a certain relevant subject;139
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADIS2. An expert on the subject must be a part of the group participating in the creation of content or as ananalyst for the content created;3. Each member must give 1 hour of his week to participate in the Experience and can manage his timethe way that best suits him;4. Every participant must have information available to connect to the others members.Each Safirapedia Experience should follow the following steps:1) Define the subject to talk about and a time span to write it;2) Get voluntaries to join the group;3) Organize a list with topics and subtopics. The expert should give his praise to the list;4) Create teams to write contents. Each participant should choose at least 3 different topics orsubtopics, so teams can emerge from common interests;5) Create pages.This framework originated two Experiences: one dedicated to a beginners guide for a Safira technologynamed Quartz; and the other dedicated to Project Management at Safira. Unfortunately none of theseaccomplished 100% of their initial intent. The beginners guide group created about 40% and the ProjectManagement group created 0%. Anyhow, there was a good acceptance for the initiative and we believe that,with practice, people will start a<strong>do</strong>pting the framework.4.2.3 Promoting the WikiSince the beginning of the project Safirapedia that a blog was kept by the researcher under the name ofSafirapedia Blog, with notifications and news about the on going process of implementation of Safirapediaand with information that would help the readers reflect on their habits regarding knowledge sharing, teamworking and collective production. This way we would increase the visibility of the updates that were being<strong>do</strong>ne and contents that were created, motivating people to be a part of the process in their own ways.Each of the posts <strong>do</strong>ne in the blog would then be automatically put on Safiras News that had a votingsystem. This way every post could result in a feedback from the users, in terms of liking or disliking whatwas written, and pushing others to have a look at the post or referred wiki content. Consequently, there was abetter awareness of the existence of Safirapedia, eventually resulting in more visits.Promoting the wiki and its usage is a continuum process taking advantage of every opportunity thatappears. In February 2010 there was one more edition of Safira’s kickoff meeting to start Safira’s newfinancial year. This is a social event with some presentations about what was <strong>do</strong>ne that year, what would be<strong>do</strong>ne next year and integrates the Safira awards for workers and projects in different areas. There was aninitial intention to <strong>do</strong> a presentation about Safirapedia and its use, but it didn’t happen because there was notime; nonetheless in a presentation about “Accessibility at Safira” there was made a huge reference toSafirapedia, motivating its use. This happened for two reasons: the first, because a wiki is in fact a good toolto enhance accessibility; the second, because the person that made the presentation was a person with whomthe researcher talked for the most various reasons. This reflects the importance of promotion in every chancewe get, even the slight reference to the tool on a football game, on a water cooler conversation or at lunch canmake a difference.Another important way of promoting the wiki is <strong>do</strong>ing “publicity” to the content creators. If theyappreciate that publicity this increases the authors’ morale and, this motivates them to write more content.The most asked question was if the page visits were counted and if these values were publicly available, thusshowing the interest in statistical results that authors have, probably to evaluate the impact and visibility ofthe content they created.4.2.4 Supporting the WikiThe supporting actions that were taken to help Safirapedia were constant along the project and they evolvedwith the tool and the community building process.The researcher provided technical support to the users. When help was needed regarding any functionalityan explanation was given, but if the question indicated something in the tool was going to be a problem, ittriggered a concern to fix it and to improve its effectiveness. These requests for help were dealt through e-mail or in direct conversations, and usually they were more focused on behavioral attitudes, like how tocorrectly format a page or where to link it. The FAQ section on the wiki was also an important part of the140
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010support given to the community, as not only did it listed the answer to the most common questions asked, butit also had a functionality that permitted users to suggest new entries.Guidelines helping the users to interact with each other were also posted, where the process and templatesto create a page on the wiki were detailed, giving the wiki more stability as the creation of new pages wasstandardized. This kind of support was much more focused on the communitarian aspects of Safirapediabecause it was intended to solidify the community behaviors and attitudes without imposing rules. Asreferred, templates for pages existed so that users didn’t need to start from scratch every time they wanted towrite an article. This also prevented the users from worrying about formatting and gave them an idea aboutthe type of content that was expected.Regarding another kind of support, in one meeting the CEO confronted the researcher with his lowmorale about the project and the results the project was presenting. The results were appearing slowly and inan unpredictable rhythm justifying the feeling of the CEO, but any disbelief from the top could weaken theoverall project’s success. The researcher had to vehemently reaffirm to the CEO, who was the “father” of theproject, his own confidence on the success of the project, but that this success would only be visible in duetime, as it was an emergent process that was being cultivated, and if rigid time frames were imposed theycould kill the process.5. CONCLUSIONWe found in this investigation that a wiki can be useful to an organization. However it has to be accompaniedby a great deal of cultural adaptations and driven by a strong leadership.Strategic leadership was important for the success of the project. The acts of planning and directing were<strong>do</strong>ne by the CEO when he made Safira 2.0 plan and when he chose someone to take care of it. The projecthad strategic leadership and formal support from the administration. The weekly meetings that took placethrough the life cycle of the project were a clear sign of interest shown to the project. The CEO was alwayspresent giving advice and revealing information that would, otherwise, never be used.On another level, the local line leadership integrating the researcher’s work also made a difference in theprocess. First, the fact that the researcher was integrated on the daily Safira life with the workers had asignificant impact on the observation and quality of analysis of the environment. Second, the promotion andsupport given to the community has to be a part of any process of implementation of this sort, because peopleneed to be warned about the existence of new tools that may help their job and on the best way in which theycan use those tools. Although there’s a myth about the possible survival of these systems on a purecommunitarian good will, this wasn’t verified on this project; if there wasn’t a true investment on the projectby the leaders, it wouldn’t have enough strength to survive the first months.The small number of workers of the organization was also a barrier to the process of content creation.Although the results showed that workers were using Safirapedia the amount of created pages and page viewsis always a percentage of the number of users. Safira population is approximately 150 people which meansthe number of content creators and content viewers would be limited to a percentage of that. In the course ofthis project we only found two people that repeatedly added new content to the wiki, one started willingly towrite about the Information Systems Department processes and the other one wrote because he was a part ofa Safirapedia Experience. All other content that was created by the users was produced either by theProgramming Tips&Tricks initiative or, in a small scale, independent voluntary articles. Quantity is just asimportant as quality in this model, because the amount of content creation is directly related to the size anddegree of activity of the community that supports it.REFERENCESDrakos, N., Rozwell, C., Bradley, A., & Mann, J. (2009). Magic Quadrant for Social <strong>Software</strong> in the Workplace.Stamford: Gartner.Drucker, P. F. (1999). Knowledge-Worker Productivity: The Biggest Challenge. California Management Review , 79-94.Figueire<strong>do</strong>, J. (2010). Actor-networking engineering design, project management and education research: a knowledgemanagement approach. In P. V. Helander, Knowledge Management. INTECH.141
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISHinchcliffe, D. (2007, Outubro 22). The state of Enterprise 2.0. Retrieved Dezembro 2009, from ZDNet:http://www.zdnet.com/blog/hinchcliffe/the-state-of-enterprise-20/143Lewin, K. (1943, Maio). Defining the 'field at a given time'. Psychological Review , 292-310.Lewin, K., Lippitt, R., & White, R. (1939). Patterns of aggressive behavior in experimentally created social climates.Journal of Social Psychology , 271–301.Mader, S. (2008). Wikipatterns. Wiley Publishing.Mann, R. (1959). A review of the relationship between personality and performance in small groups. PsychologicalBulletin , 241-270.McAfee, A. P. (2006). Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration. MIT Sloan Management Review .Morgan, G. (2006). Images of Organization. California: Sage Publications.Schein, E. (2004). Organizational Culture and Leadership (3rd ed.). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.Senge, P. (1990). The Fifth Discipline: the art and practice of the learning organization. Michigan: Doubleday/Currency.Senge, P., Kleiner, A., Charlotte, R., Richard, R., George, R., & Brian, S. (1999). Dance of Change. DoubleDay.142
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010FOLKSONOMY: USING THE USERS’ FREEDOM TOORGANIZE TODAY’S WEB INFORMATION OVERLOADRoberto Pereira*, M. Cecília C. Baranauskas*, Sergio Roberto P. da Silva**,José Valderlei da Silva** and Filipe Roseiro Côgo***Institute of Computing (IC), University of Campinas (UNICAMP), Av. Albert Einstein, 1251, Campinas-SP, Brazil**Departament of Informatics (DIN), State University of Maringá (UEM), Av. Colombo, 5790, Maringá – PR, BrazilABSTRACTThe folksonomy technique represents an initiative for the organization of the information available on the Web. However,even systems that apply this technique suffer with problems of lack of quality and information overload when the numberof their users grows. Regardless of these problems, a wide range of systems became available allowing the categorizationof several distinct kinds of objects, but without any level of integration among them. In this paper, we present a criticalanalysis about the folksonomy technique, their nature, advantages, problems and challenges. We also propose twoapproaches for improving the results obtained with folksonomy. Indeed, we argue that the question now is how and whenassisting users when they are interacting with folksonomy-based systems, in order to make the use of folksonomy moreuseful in information organization and retrieval on the Web.KEYWORDSFolksonomy, social tagging, social categorization, folkauthority.1. INTRODUCTIONThe Web is suffering a quite big evolution, changing from a network that connects webpages, <strong>do</strong>cuments,and resources to a network that connects people, organizations and concepts (da Silva and Pereira, 2008;Freyne et al., 2007). It is becoming what is now called a Social Web. This new Web is characterized byfacilities for cooperation in contents production and sharing, and by facilities for communication and sprea<strong>do</strong>f ideas among people. Due to the huge amount of contents available on the Web, technical difficulties andhigh execution costs make unviable the existence of qualified professionals controlling and evaluatingeverything that is produced and published on it. This lack of mechanisms, or measures, to assure the qualityof the information and to organize them, results in a problem now called information overload (Himma,2007; Levy, 2008). This overload is directly related to the fact that the amount of data, contents andinformation is very superior to the human’s capacity to absorb, interpret and manage it in a productive way.The folksonomy technique represents an initiative for helping in the process of organization andattribution of meaning to the contents available on the Web (Mathes, 2005). In systems that applyfolksonomy, these processes are not restricted to professional editors. These systems a<strong>do</strong>pt the principle that,if someone is producing and publishing contents, s/he can also be apt to organize and to attribute meaning toit, labeling it with keywords (tags) in the way they judge more adequate. As a result, folksonomy becomes aninteresting and viable alternative for the open and highly changeable environment that is the Web.In folksonomy-based systems, the set of tags and objects of a user composes its personomy (da Silva andda Silva, 2008). This personomy reflects the users’ vocabularies, preferences, interests, and knowledge.When the individual personomies are made available and shared among all users of a system, we get thefolksonomy. Thus, a folksonomy is the structure that results from the sharing of all the users’ personomies(Mathes, 2005). The sharing and social aspects of folksonomy allow for the interaction among users, whatcontributes to the emergence and discovery of interesting knowledge and to the definition of a commonlanguage among them. However, despite these benefits, as the number of users in a folksonomy-based systemincreases and, thus, the information being categorized by them also increases, the problem of information143
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISoverload starts to undermine the system usefulness, as in the individual as in the collective (i.e., social) pointof view.In this paper we are concerned about what should be <strong>do</strong>ne for obtaining better results with the applicationof the folksonomy technique. We argue that it is necessary to focus on the three pivots of the folksonomyprocess (the object, the tag and the user) simultaneously with different views if we want to offer a betterassistance to users of folksonomy-based systems. Also, we should take into account the four tension points infolksonomy pointed by Smith (2008): i) the individual vs. collective; ii) control vs. free<strong>do</strong>m; iii) idiosyncraticvs. standardized and iv) amateurs vs. experts. To achieve this goal, we discuss the folksonomy techniquetrying to explain its operation. We give special attention to the four tension points presenting two mainapproaches. In the first one, a tag-focused approach, we present a system for centralizing and managing theusers’ vocabularies and for searching over a set of folksonomy-based systems at once. This systemcorresponds to a partial solution to the problem of users having to deal simultaneously with several systems.In the second one, a users-focused approach, we explain the folkauthority technique, a partial solution for theproblem of the information retrieval quality. Finally, we present some additional minor approaches forreinforcing our researches and expose our conclusions.2. THE FOLKSONOMY TECHNIQUEStarting from the middle of 2002, labels of texts grew a lot in popularity as many websites started allowingtheir users to accomplish annotations or to use simple words (i.e., tags) in the form of a non-structured text ina process called tagging (Smith, 2008). Initially these annotations were individual, allowing people to ascribesome “meaning” to the website contents by means of classifying its URLs, photos, blogs posts or any otherresource (i.e., object) susceptible to be referenced. The use of this technique creates a personomy―a set oftags created by a person to organize resources of his/her interest only. When personomies are made availableand shared among users of a system, we get what is called a folksonomy. Thus, a folksonomy is the structurethat results from the sharing of all the users’ personomies (Mathes, 2005), i.e., the collective/collaborativetagging. The whole folksonomy process is essentially based on three pivots (see Figure 1): the user―who<strong>do</strong>es the categorization, the object―which is categorized, and the tag―which makes the categorizationlabeling the object (Mathes, 2005; Riddle, 2005).Figure 1. The three pivots of Folksonomy.The usefulness of a tag is very wide (Riddle, 2005). When they are applied to the organization ofinformation on the Web, tags can aid in the personal information retrieval process, describing and structuringthis information and attributing order and meaning. Among the advantages of allowing users to <strong>do</strong> thecategorization process are the reductions of costs in time and with investments in specialized services(Mathes, 2005). To users, the costs are in the cognitive effort to carry out the categorization process and inthe time needed to <strong>do</strong> it. These costs, however, becomes small when compared to the investment necessary tomaintain an organization <strong>do</strong>ne by professionals or specialists, which is impracticable in an open and evolvingenvironment like the Web.Russell (2005) argues that folksonomy-based systems allow information to be found on which usersprobably would never be presented in another way. Mathes (2005) and Sturtz (2004) characterize this asserendipity. They assert that folksonomy favors the discovery of knowledge and of useful and interestinginformation. Moreover, according to them, perhaps, the most important benefit of the folksonomy techniqueis its capacity to reflect the users’ vocabulary. These systems reflect directly the actions executed by the144
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010users, their choices, terminologies, i.e., users build and choose the vocabulary that they will use. Mathes(2005) sustains that, with this non-controlled nature and an organic growth, a folksonomy has the capacity toadapt very quickly to the changes in the vocabulary and to the users’ needs, which <strong>do</strong>es not happen in anyother kind of system.In a folksonomy-based system, there are no formally pre-defined hierarchies for the vocabulary of tagsused in the categorizations. Thus, there is no direct specification of descendants or of a brotherhoodrelationship among the terms. The tags applied for the categorization are automatically related by cooccurrenceand group themselves into sets of tags based in common objects. In this way, the folksonomyprocess is very different from a formal taxonomy and from other classification schemes in which there aremultiple types of explicit relationships among terms.One important characteristic of the folksonomy technique, at least from the theoretical point of view, isthe free<strong>do</strong>m of choice in the quantity and type of words that can be applied to accomplish a categorization.This process is completely free, in other words, there is no control or scheme to be followed or respected insuch a way that users attribute the tags they want for categorizing an object. This free<strong>do</strong>m has seriousimplications over users’ cognitive effort to <strong>do</strong> the organization task, since this effort will be very inferiorwhen compared to the effort they need to <strong>do</strong> while selecting a specific classification in a hierarchicalstructure like a taxonomy. This is the main reason why such systems are easy to use. Regarding theinformation retrieval on the Web, traditional search engines (e.g., Google) uses complex algorithms for theindexation of Web contents, aiming to present better results for the users’ queries. Folksonomy-basedsystems have the advantage of representing exactly the users’ opinion, that is, it is not an algorithmattributing tags to objects, it is the users that are <strong>do</strong>ing that—users with different opinions and views, indifferent contexts and with different goals.It is important to differentiate two main stages in the process of the folksonomy technique use: thecategorization and the retrieval stages. In the first one, the lack of control results in a great easiness for thecategorization process and provides the benefits previously mentioned. However, the choice of the tags (i.e.,the category a resource should belong) that best represents an object is not a trivial process. Whencategorizing a new object, users will attribute terms they judge more adequate at the categorization time andin a specific context, but there is no way to foresee or to know if those terms will also be adequate at the timewhen users will retrieve the information previously categorized by them. Previous knowledge and evenrecent activities accomplished by the users can exercise a lot of influence during the categorization process,so that users can end up choosing terms that are not frequently used in their vocabulary, that are ambiguousor that <strong>do</strong> not have a great meaning in a long time. Moreover, in general, users <strong>do</strong> not have effectiveresources to help them recalling or identifying terms previously used for the categorization of similar objects,which makes difficult the maintenance of an organized, coherent and well-structured vocabulary. Thesequestions are stressed when we take into account the existence of several different systems that a user couldinteract with.In the second stage, the information retrieval process suffers with problems of ambiguities, polysemy,noises and lack of standardization of the terms used for the categorization. These problems are consequencesof the free<strong>do</strong>m that folksonomy-based systems offer and affect the information retrieval negatively, oncewith a chaotic vocabulary, users will have difficulties in finding the content categorized by them before.These problems are stressed when considered from the collective point of view, since the tags’ idiosyncrasycollaborates to found rarities, i.e., for the serendipity, but it also harms the users’ work in trying to identify anappropriate term for <strong>do</strong>ing a search. Further, it is necessary to question what the limits of the folksonomyusefulness are. The chaos originated from the lack of control provides interesting contributions to its easinessof use and allows the emergency of a bottom-up organization but, currently, it is not possible to determine thepoint from which the benefits of this disorganization are neutralized by its problems.Despite the problems generated by the heterogeneity of users’ tags, it <strong>do</strong>es not mean the users are wrongor they are not categorizing information correctly. What users are categorizing is adequate to them or to asmall group, but it will not always bring contributions to the collective or to everyone. There are areas inwhich users are more, or less, recommended as information sources and it depends on their capacity, on thebasis and competences on the subjects they are categorizing, i.e., in their cognitive authority (Wilson, 1983;Pereira and da Silva, 2008)―we will explore more on this subject latter in our user-focused approach.Ohmukai et al. (2005) discuss about the possibility of using a controlled folksonomy. However, asMathes (2005) and Riddle (2005) argue, a controlled vocabulary seems to be practically unviable in the caseof applications such as Delicious. On the other hand, several authors (da Silva and Pereira, 2008; Halpin,145
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADIS2007; Sturtz, 2004; Wu, 2006) defend the research and development of resources that allow a better use ofthe benefits provided by a folksonomy and that could contribute to the quality of the information produced infolksonomy-based systems. They argue that the main cause of the success of systems like Delicious andFlickr is the immediate feedback they can provide to users. Moreover, these systems make it visible theindividual and collective aspects related to the users’ behavior in the information organization process,something that cannot be obtained with such wealth of details in a system that apply a controlled vocabulary.The authors show the need of investments in additional resources for the improvement of folksonomy-basedsystems, because as we also believe, trying to control a folksonomy is the same as disfiguring it or passing toa<strong>do</strong>pt a more liberal taxonomy.In his discussions about tagging, Smith (2008) put focus in four tension points: i) Personal vs. Social, ii)Idiosyncratic vs. Standard, iii) Free<strong>do</strong>m vs. Control, and iv) Amateur vs. Expert, that exist in systems thatapply folksonomy.In Personal vs. Social: the issues here lead to questions like: What is the main goal behind the objectscategorization in tagging-based systems? What is the social nature of tagging? And, what is its greatcontribution: selfishness or altruism? Do users make categorizations for their own benefit or are theymotivated by the desire of sharing information, opinions, and knowledge, or to be seen as knowledgeable in acertain subject, or by other social factors?In Idiosyncratic vs. Standard: the issues here are related to information organization and retrieval process,leading to questions like: Should the tags used be unique and idiosyncratic or should they be standardized?The tags located in the long tail of the users’ vocabulary are noises or are useful details about users and theirsubjectivity? Can these tags be used for disambiguation or context identification, or any other process? Ourtag-focused approach concerns this tension point through the centralization and management of the users’vocabularies.In Free<strong>do</strong>m vs. Control: the issues here are related to how systems induce users’ activities, leading toquestions like: Do systems give users complete free<strong>do</strong>m or <strong>do</strong> they influence or control the users’ tags?When the system offers suggestions, is it changing the behavior that the users would have if no suggestionswere made? Moreover, what can bring more contributions in both information categorization and retrieval: tocontrol tagging or to keep its free<strong>do</strong>m nature? Both our approaches (user and tag-focused) keep this free<strong>do</strong>mreinforcing our arguments about the need of resources for assist the users instead of controlling the process.In Amateur vs. Expert: the issues here are related to the quality of the information made available bythese systems leading to questions: How qualified are the people tagging objects? Should the tags created andthe categorizations made by amateurs count as much as the ones made by experts? How <strong>do</strong>es the systemreconcile popular opinion with experts’ opinions when they disagree? And, How can it be known who areexperts and who are amateurs? Our user-focused approach addresses this question and, together with themanagement and centralization of the users’ vocabulary, aims at improving the quality of the informationretrieved in folksonomy-based systems.It must be pointed out that all questions raised in this section are emphasized when we consider that usershave to deal with different systems for categorizing different objects. In this context, in the next sections wepresent an approach focused on the tags used for categorizing objects, aiming at centralizing and managingthe users’ vocabularies, and another approach focused on users and directed at the question of the quality ofthe information retrieved through the folksonomy technique, preserving its open and evolving nature.2.1 Managing PersonomiesThe popularity of the folksonomy technique led to the existence of a wide range of systems. Usually, thesesystems focus on a specific kind of object, we can cite as examples: the Youtube, focusing on videos; theDelicious, focusing on bookmarks; the Flickr focusing on photos; the CiteULike, focusing on papers, etc. Themain goal of these systems is the organization and sharing of their specific objects, in a way that users canbuild a personomy and share it with other users―generating a folksonomy.However, once users have created an account in a folksonomy-based system, they <strong>do</strong> not have anyresource for reusing the vocabulary of tags applied in their categorizations when using another system. Itmeans that, for each system, users will have to create a different and independent personomy. This situationcontributes to several difficulties and problems in using folksonomy-based systems. To make it clear,consider the following example: a teacher giving a lecture in a conference desires to categorize and share146
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010with her/his students the slides of the lecture, the video of the presentation, the pictures that s/he took duringthe event, and the blog posts of other participants about the same conference. To <strong>do</strong> it, the teacher will haveto possess accounts in, at least, four different systems and, consequently, to deal with four different interfacesand to manage four distinct personomies. We highlight four points regarding this context:1) The complexity of learning how to use several different systems: As these systems have the objectiveof organize resources, it is natural that they have common similarity in terms of features available to theusers. However, the way the interface is designed affects users’ behavior, expectative and productivity,because they will have to apply some effort and spend some time in being familiarized with the system and inunderstanding it. 2) The categorizations coherence: Because users have to use a different system for <strong>do</strong>ingthe categorization of different objects, it is very difficult for them remembering the tags previously selectedwhen categorizing objects in other systems. Therefore, the coherence of the tags used to categorize objectsconcerning the same context can be compromised. Users can easily forget what tags they ascribed before;they also can be induced by the system interface (e.g., tags recommendation) or by their previous activities.3) The management of the users’ vocabularies: Having different personomies spread over multiple systemsincreases the chances of occurring problems in the users’ vocabularies, such as noises, unmeaning terms,synonym, polysemy, etc. Furthermore, the management of the vocabulary of tags is a complex activity. Ifusers need to rename, add, or remove a tag from a set of objects, they have to execute this task manually ineach categorization accomplished with that tag in each system, what is a tedious and easy to fail process. Thissituation contributes for the augment of the long tail in the users’ vocabulary (da Silva and da Silva, 2008).Tags belonging to the long tail can represent users’ particularity, knowledge, preferences, etc., but difficultiesin managing users’ vocabulary harms the benefits that could be obtained from this long tail by insertingnoises terms that will not be useful even to the user who created it. 4) The loss of the knowledgeemergence: A personomy can provide rich information about its creators representing the way they see theinformation, how they think about the world and create organizational schemes, what their preferences andinterests are, and so on. However, as the whole is quite different from the sum of its parts, we are losing theopportunity of studying the users’ behavior and identifying the users’ knowledge in a more complete way.Because their personomies are spread over several systems, we cannot analyze the users when they arecategorizing and retrieving information despite the object and system in use. Consequently, we <strong>do</strong> not knowif the information obtained when putting all these pieces together would be the same obtained whenanalyzing the whole as a unique personomy.According to our discussions, there are many problems and difficulties in using tags to categorizeinformation due to its lack of control and structures for the organization, and these problems and difficultiesare emphasized when we consider multiple systems and multiple personomies. The points we explainedabove show how this situation harms the maintenance of a consistent personomy and make it difficult fortaking advantages of folksonomy benefits even at the user-level (individual). Following, we present anddiscuss an approach for centralizing and managing the users’ vocabulary and for searching over a set oftagging-based systems. This approach is being implemented in a system called TagManager.3. TAGMANAGER: A TAG-FOCUSED APPROACHThe TagManager system (TM) is an initiative for allowing users to centralize and manage their vocabulariesand to retrieve information spread over a set of folksonomy-based systems (da Silva and da Silva, 2008). Itsmain idea is to provide an environment in which users can manage all their personomies without dealing withdifferent interfaces and using different vocabularies. Currently, the TM system allows users to synchronizeand manipulate data over four different systems: Delicious, SlideShare, YouTube and Flickr and are availablejust for testing. The system aims at reducing the impact caused by the lack of integration among folksonomybasedsystems, which is <strong>do</strong>ne by centralizing users’ vocabulary and by offering resources to organize andmaintain these vocabularies. On the other side, TM also makes it possible to retrieve information overmultiple systems. Thus, when users search for a certain tag, it is possible to retrieve objects categorized withthat tag in each one of these four systems according to the users’ preference, reducing users’ workload inaccessing and retrieving information in each one separately.The important difference between the TM system and other tagging/folksonomy-based systems is itscentral pivot. Usually, the central pivot of a tagging-based system is the “object” being labeled with tags by147
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISthe users. In the TM there is a paradigm shift where the central pivot is the “tag”―i.e., the system centralizes,organizes and manages tags, regardless of what the objects are and regardless the system in which they werecategorized. Our proposal for the TM system is to build a high-level layer of tags for the users, turning themanagement of their tags independent of the folksonomy-based systems and their objects. In agreement withseveral authors (Mathes, 2005; Riddle, 2005; Sturtz, 2004), we think that if the users maintain a morecoherent and organized vocabulary, they tend to <strong>do</strong> a more coherent and organized categorization. Hence,TM may improve tags usefulness for the organization of personal information, reducing the problems foundwhen a controlled vocabulary is not applied. Moreover, if users are creating better personomies in theindividual point of view, then a better folksonomy will be obtained when these personomies are shared acrossthe system, collaborating to the collective/social point of view.The centralization and management of the users’ personomies is a keystone for obtaining better resultswith the application of the folksonomy technique. Indeed, we argue that it is the first step in developingresources for assisting users and emerging the social knowledge generated in these systems. Centralizing theusers’ vocabulary and the personomy makes the reuse, correction and management of tags, as well as theinformation recommendation more effectively.There is another system, called MyTag (http://mytag.uni-koblenz.de), which offers resources for searchingover folksonomy-based systems (for the moment over Flickr, YouTube, Delicious, Connotea, BibSonomy andBibTex). However, this system has no features for centralizing the users’ vocabularies and for helping in theirmaintenance and organization, which is the main goal of the TM. The focus of the MyTag system is onsearching over other systems (i.e. information retrieval), while TM focuses in the centralization andmanagement of the users’ vocabulary and offers information retrieval.4. TAGMANAGER: A TAG-FOCUSED APPROACHThe problem of lack of quality in the information retrieval stage of folksonomy-based systems is partiallybecause those systems judge with equal importance categorizations <strong>do</strong>ne by any user. Consequently, theywill retrieve every object categorized with certain tag by every user that categorized it. There is no way offiltering or prioritizing categorizations <strong>do</strong>ne by people that really understand about the subjects which theyare categorizing (Pereira and da Silva, 2008). The tagging tension point of “Amateurs vs. Experts” is strongin folksonomy-based systems due to their intrinsic social nature (i.e., sharing and interaction) and results in agreat amount of irrelevant information whose quality cannot be easily verified.Wilson (1983) coined the term cognitive authority to explain the kind of authority that influences people’sthoughts and what they believe. The theory of the cognitive authority put up two important subjects: 1) what<strong>do</strong>es people resort to second-hand knowledge (coming from others)? And 2) <strong>do</strong> they resort to whom? Theanswer to the first question can be summarized in a word “need”; and for the second in the following way“people resort to whom they judge to know something that themselves <strong>do</strong> not know”.Therefore, given that we normally use second-hand knowledge in our lives, it is reasonable to think thatwe can also use it to improve the quality of the information retrieved on the Web. We propose to <strong>do</strong> it usingrecommendation about a subject/area from who knows about the subject. Folkauthority (folk + authority) is aneologism we proposed in (Pereira and da Silva, 2008) designating the authority granted through folksonomyto the entities that are sources of information on the Web. This concept represents our user-focused approachfor reducing the problems of information overload we explained in previous sections.To apply the folkauthority concept corresponds to allow users of a folksonomy-based system to ascribecognitive authority to the information sources with which the system works. This authority ascription isaccomplished through the attribution of tags that represent the competences, abilities or areas in whichinformation sources are considered references (i.e., an authority) by their categorizers (i.e., the authorityassigners). Russell (2005) was the first to mention the use of folksonomy for the cognitive authorityascription with the intention of identifying authorities in a community of users.The use of the folkauthority process in a folksonomy-based system is adequate for four reasons. First, afolksonomy is characterized by the free<strong>do</strong>m of users’ expression, and that is what users need, since nobodycan say who is a cognitive authority for other person: the person should conclude that. Second, an authoritypossesses peculiar characteristics (e.g., sphere of interest, values, etc.) which tags are capable of representingproperly. Third, in folksonomy-based systems categorizations of information are <strong>do</strong>ne by their own users,148
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010this facilitates the process of authority ascription since users are the more recommended ones to evaluate thecategorizers (because they already know them) and are already familiarized with the use of tags and with thefolksonomy technique operation. Fourth, a folksonomy allows to identify more of the context in which theauthority was granted than any other evaluation scheme could provide (a reputation scheme, for instance).Authorities are not identified based in a single weight/value determined by an algorithm with pre-definedcriteria; instead, they are identified based in people’s subjective opinion, in the diversity and in theunpredictability of those opinions.The fact that folksonomy-based systems have their users as categorizers of information makes them afavorable environment for the application of the folkauthority concept, because the authority ascription startsto happen over the group of users itself, spreading the authority from its users to their categorizations.Applying this concept in the TM system is still more suitable, because unifying our two approaches (the tagfocusedand the user-focused) allows recognizing/identifying authorities in different systems, as well as theirinformation—the authority ascribed in the TM system worth for all systems with which it synchronizes.Besides, the authority ascription can also take advantage of the more organized vocabularies that the TM canprovide. We can see a symbiosis relation here, where the folkauthority approach can improve the informationretrieval quality in the TM system, while the benefits generated from the centralization and management ofour tag-focused approach can improve the quality of the generated personomy and by consequence of theauthority definition.Using the folksonomy technique for the cognitive authority ascription in folksonomy-based systems iswhat can be called a meta-categorization. Since, unlike the conventional categorization process in whichusers attribute tags describing the content or meaning of an object, in the folkauthority process users attributetags to others users of the system (i.e., the source of information) describing their competences, abilities,knowledge or the areas in which those users are considered as reference. In this way, in a first level there is acategorization over the objects (information), and in a second level the categorization happens over theuser/sources; a categorization of the categorizers by the categorizers. Therefore, our approach of applying thefolkauthority concept in the TM system represents an initiative of using folksonomy to improve the processof information organization and retrieval in systems that already apply it.5. TAGMANAGER: A TAG-FOCUSED APPROACHIn this paper, we discuss about the folksonomy technique presenting their main benefits and disadvantages,and taking into account their two stages of use from the users’ interaction point of view: the informationcategorization and the information retrieval.Seeing folksonomy through the lenses of the three pivots (the tag, the object and the user) allowsresearches and designers to focus their attention in specific challenges while considering the whole dynamicof tags usage. It is possible to observe this in our two approaches: the TM system and the Folkauthority. Thediscussions exposed in this paper about folksonomy become even more critical when they are considere<strong>do</strong>ver multiple systems simultaneously (both challenges and opportunities are emphasized). The approachimplemented by the TM system is focused on the tag pivot (for the centralization and management of theusers’ vocabulary) aiming at building a better personomy and, consequently, a more structured and organizedfolksonomy without controlling the used vocabulary. On the other hand, the folkauthority approach isfocused on the user pivot aiming at identifying users that are cognitive authorities for improving the qualityand relevance in the information retrieval. This approach represents a distinct strategy in which we propose ameta-categorization that uses the own folksonomy technique to the reduction of problems found in systemsthat already apply it.Both the tag and the user-focused approaches can help in obtaining better results in atagging/folksonomy-based system. However, great advantages are only obtained if these approaches areemployed together, once they can create a symbiotic relation in assisting users during the use of a system. Forinstance, with the management of users’ vocabularies we could assist users when they are categorizingobjects as well as ascribing cognitive authority, and with the centralization of users’ personomies we canidentify every piece of information categorized by the users who are authorities in a certain subject. Hence,when we apply these two approaches together we are also directing efforts to the object pivot, helping inquestions of information quality, relevance, organization and findability. Indeed, we argue that it is only149
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISpossible to make the use of the tagging/folksonomy technique more effective and more productive if weconsider the three pivots simultaneously.During the development of our research, we understood folksonomy as a technique that has a lot tocontribute to the information organization on the Web and to social and behavioral studies about users. Thereis still a lack of analyses and results about the behavior of folksonomy-based systems and about socialsoftware in general. There are no defined metrics allowing us to affirm whether a social software (especiallythe folksonomy-based ones) will obtain success and reach their objective. We are normally induced to such aconclusion based on the number of users and on the volume of information produced in such systems, but wecannot say that this is enough. Moreover, there is also a lack of basis for the designers to understand and toknow how to design social software. The complexity of this activity is high due to the users’ heterogeneity,and current methods <strong>do</strong> not support this task efficiently.As future researches, we see as a challenge the development of approaches and resources forrecommending tags, users and objects. In addition, the development of new schemes of interaction and datavisualization is key for involving and encouraging the users’ participation, besides allowing them to be moreproductive in front the information overload on the WebACKNOWLEDGEMENTThe authors would like to express their gratitude to FAPESP (#2009/11888-7), Proesp/CAPES and IC-UNICAMP for partially supporting this research, and to colleagues from InterHad and GSII.REFERENCESda Silva, J.V. and da Silva, S.R.P., 2008. Gerenciamento <strong>do</strong> Vocabulário das Tags <strong>do</strong>s Usuários de Sistemas Basea<strong>do</strong>sem Folksonomia. Proc. of the Workshop de Teses e Dissertações – Webmedia'08, Vitória, ES, Brazil, pp. 201-204.da Silva, S.R.P. and Pereira, R., 2008. Aspectos da Interação Humano-Computa<strong>do</strong>r na Web Social. Proc. of the VIIISimpósio <strong>Brasileiro</strong> de Fatores Humanos em Sistemas Computacionais. Porto Alegre, RS, Brazil, pp. 350-351.Freyne, J. et al., 2007. Collecting Community Wis<strong>do</strong>m: Integrating Social Search & Social Navigation”. Proc. of theInternational Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces. Honolulu, Hawaii, USA, pp. 52-61.Halpin, H., Robu, V. & Sheperd, Hana. The Complex Dynamics of Collaborative Tagging. <strong>WWW</strong>2007. Alberta.IW3C2-ACM. 2007.Himma, K. E., 2007. The Concept of Information Overload: A Preliminary Step in Understanding the Nature of aHarmful Information-Related Condition. In Ethics and Information Technology, pp. 259-272.Levy, D. M., 2008. To Grow in Wis<strong>do</strong>m: Vannevar Bush, Information Overload, and the Life of Leisure. Proc. of theJCDL’05, Denver, CO, USA, pp. 281-286.Mathes, A., 2005. Folksonomies - Cooperative Classification and Communication through Shared Metadata. TechnicalReport available on http://blog.namics.com/archives/2005/ Folksonomies_Cooperative_Classification.pdf, 2005.Ohmukai, I., Hamasaki, M. and Takeda, H., 2005. A Proposal of Community-based Folksonomy with RDF Metadata.Proc. of the Workshop on End User Semantic Web Interaction, Galway, Ireland.Pereira, R. and da Silva, S.R.P., 2008a. The Use of Cognitive Authority for Information Retrieval in Folksonomy-BasedSystems. Proc. of the International Conference of Web Engineering (ICWE08), New York, USA, pp. 327-331..Riddle, P., 2005. Tags: What are They Good For? School of Information Technical Report available onhttp://www.ischool.utexas.edu/~i385q/archive/riddle_p/riddle-2005-tags.pdf, 2005.Russell, T., 2005. Contextual Authority Tagging: Cognitive Authority Through Folksonomy. Technical Report availableon http://www.terrellrussell.com/projects/ contextualauthority tagging/conauthtag200505.pdf, 2005.Smith, G., 2008. Tagging: People-Powered Metadata for the Social Web. New Riders, Berkeley.Sturtz, D. N., 2004. Communal Categorization: The Folksonomy. Proc. INFO622: Content Representation, 1-8, 2004.Wilson, P., 1983. Second-hand Knowledge: An Inquiry into Cognitive Authority, Greenwood Press, 1983.Wu, Harris. Harvesting Social Knowledge from Folksonomies. 17th conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia. 2006.150
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010CREATING DECOMPOSABLE WEB APPLICATIONSON HIGH-RESOLUTION TILED DISPLAY WALLSShohei Yokoyama and Hiroshi IshikawaShizuoka University3-5-1 Johoku Naka-ku Hamamatsu 432-8011, JapanABSTRACTAs described in this paper, we explain how to implement ultra-high-resolution Web applications executed on the tileddisplay walls. Although tiled display walls can accommodate contents of various types, they cannot easily handlestandard web contents. Using our new web application design, supporting high-resolution web contents decompositionfor distributed rendering on a tiled display wall. We also describe a design for low-cost tiled display wall using a"Nettop" computer, and demonstrate our middleware for creating decomposable web applications.KEYWORDSTiled Display Wall, High-resolution, Web Application, Mashups.1. INTRODUCTIONRecently, much high-resolution data exists around us. For example, Google Maps provides various resolutionsatellite images of the whole Earth's surface and atmosphere. Flickr provides high-resolution image hostingfor users to share and embed personal photographs. Such services are provided via the Web; users accessthem using a web browser.However, the scope of information that a user can browse depends on the number of pixels of the user'sscreen, irrespective of the data resolution. That is, Google Maps' satellite images might display clearly the carin front of your house, but the neighbor's car is probably off of the screen. On the other hand, if one zoomsout on the map, then both cars become too "small" to see.Photographs taken using 1 megapixel digital camera have 3680 pixel width and 2735 pixel height (E-3;Olympus Corp.), but the consumer display monitor resolutions are insufficient to show all pixels of thephotographs. Therefore, we can view only a small fraction of available data.Generally speaking, for visualization of ultra-high-resolution data, a "tiled display wall" is used. The tileddisplay wall is a technique to build a virtual ultra-high-resolution display comprising multiple displaymonitors. Many studies have investigated high-resolution display, but the aims of most proposals are forscientific and medical visualization (Ni et. al., 2006). Therefore, these show high performance but very highcost. Moreover, standard middleware for tiled display walls <strong>do</strong>es not exist: developers must have deepknowledge of programming and networking.As described in this paper, we present a design of a low-cost tiled display wall based only on webtechnologies and propose middleware to develop high-resolution web contents to display on the tiled displaywall. The population of web developers is growing at a tremen<strong>do</strong>us pace. Web browsers are used on variousoperating systems and involve many standards. Many web services such as Google Maps API and Flickr APIare available nowadays on the internet. We propose a method to use a high-resolution web application that isexecuted on a tiled display wall based on the web standards that include HTML, JavaScript, PHP, and so on.We also present designs of low-cost tiled display walls.The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 presents the design of our tiled display walland Section 3 explains our "Decomposable Web Application" concept. Examples of an application arediscussed in Section 4. Middleware for the web-based tiled display wall is also presented in Section 5.Section 6 describes related works. Finally, Section 7 concludes the paper.151
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADIS2. DESIGN OF LOW-COST WEB BASED TILED DISPLAY WALL2.1 OverviewFigure 1 presents our tiled display wall named Wall Display in Mosaic (WDiM). The WDiM system consistsof 16 Full HD (1920 × 1080) LCD monitors and 16 ”Nettop” PCs(The Player) which have Atom (IntelCorp.) processors. Consequently, the system is very simple because one PC connects to one LCD monitor. Inaddition, WDiM has a game console (The Conductor, Wii; Ninten<strong>do</strong> Co. Ltd.) as the user interface for webapplication on the WDiM, and a web server (The Coordinator) to conduct monitor synchronization 1 . That is,WDiM is a distributed model-view-controller model that consists of the Coordinator, the Players, and theConductor.An overview of WDiM is presented in Figure 2. Each Player, Coordinator, and Conductor is connectedvia LAN and connects to the internet through the gate-way. Therefore, WDiM can access to the third partyweb services and contents on the internet. An external machine, e.g. a cellular telephone, can access toWDiM via the internet.The feature of WDiM is in comparison with the existing tiled display walls that the rendering engine isbuilt on a web browser. The Players display web browser, which is Kiosk Mode. Kiosk Mode isfundamentally a full screen mode with no toolbars. For example, <strong>Internet</strong> Explorer in the Kiosk Mode isavailable with -k as a command line argument when starting up <strong>Internet</strong> Explorer.The Players are fundamentally computers with simple factory settings be-cause a web browser is preinstalle<strong>do</strong>n a new computer; no extra program is necessary to build WDiM, the tiled display wall system.The Players must be equal to the number of LCD Panels. Consequently, the installation cost of thePlayers might be the single largest component of the WDiM construction cost. For that reason, we mustspecifically examine reduction of the installation cost of Players. In fact, no application aside from a webbrowser is needed for PlayersThe Conductor is a web browser too. For this implementation, we choose Wii (Ninten<strong>do</strong>), which has anOpera web browser (Opera <strong>Software</strong> ASA) as Conductor. The Wii is a home video game console; anintuitive control is available -- the Wii Remote.The Coordinator is a simple web server; we use Apache2 HTTP daemon on Fe<strong>do</strong>ra Linux distribution(Red Hat Inc.).2.2 HardwareThe WDiM system consists of low-end consumer-grade computers. Players are Aspire Revo (Acer Inc.)which has Atom processors (Intel Corp.) and NVIDIA Ion graphics processors (NVIDIA Corp.). The AspireRevo performance is worse than that of ordinary computers because the Atom processor (Intel) is designedFigure 1. Wall Display in MosaicFigure 2. Overview of WDiM1 See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYGCTgrySIc152
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010for low-end PCs. However, the Aspire Revo is sufficient to browse the Web and process mail. Therefore, it iscalled a ”Nettop” computer. Browsing the web is the one and only one task for each Player. For that reason,we chose Nettop computers as WDiMs Players.Coordinator is a middle range computer. The specifications for the Coordinator are the following: CPU,Core2Duo T9300 (Intel Corp.); Memory, 2 GB; HDD, 250 GB/ 5400 rpm.Generally speaking, tiled display walls such as WDiM are bottlenecked by the performance of theCoordinator computer because Coordinator must orchestrate all Players. Although network traffic and theload average are directly related to the number of Players and LCD panels, they <strong>do</strong> not present an importantproblem because the WDiM system described herein has only 16 LCD panels. In addition, much knowledgeand technology of load balancing exists, e.g., web server clustering, web proxy, and so on. The measurementof scalability remains as a subject for future work.The four vertical LCD panels and four Player PCs are installed to the same aluminum frames with VESALCD monitor arms. Each frame has casters; thereby, WDiM is movable.As explained herein, WDiM consists of low-cost electronics. We spent less than fifteen thousand <strong>do</strong>llarsto build WDiM, although it has more than 16 LCDs tiled on a display wall.2.3 NetworkAll of the Coordinator, Player, Conductor, and a gateway components connect to the network, whichsupports Gigabit Ethernet; the WDiM is connected to the internet via the gateway. Therefore, internal devicesof the WDiM cannot access only the external web services; external devices can also access to the internaldevices of the WDiM. In other words, an iPhone and laptop computer can control a web application on theWDiM.In actuality, WDiM, which is based only on web technology, uses no network protocol except HTTP,which is an application-layer protocol. Consequently, Players cannot send and receive data to each other andthe Coordinator cannot call Players. The web browsers from (Players and the Conductor) send requests tothe web server (Coordinator) and receive responses. This is an HTTP specification.Consequently, all Players and the Conductor poll the web server on the Coordinator using Ajax behindweb application on WDiM. The flow described above is hidden from WDiM application developers becauseWDiM middle-ware provides an overlay network and its access methods over the troublesome HTTP/Ajaxmessaging (Figure 3).3. WEB, COMPOSABLE WEB, AND DECOMPOSABLE WEBOnce it was believed that web browsers were useful merely to display static pages that web servers wouldprovide one after another. However, web pages are no longer static; a good example is Google Maps, whichFigure 3. WDiM messagingFigure 4. Model-View-Controller (MVC) of WDiM153
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISuses dynamic HTML and Asynchronous JavaScript + XML (Ajax). Using JavaScript, web pages can accessthird party web services, <strong>do</strong>wnload data, and update pages independently Therefore, web applications areimplemented to compose multiple external data resources. In other words, recent data resources, e.g.RESTful Web services and Web APIs, must be composable.We return now to a consideration of the tiled display wall. The tiled display wall renders high-resolutioncontents in parallel. That is, web applications on WDiM must be decomposable. WDiM is intended toprovide a method that decomposes high-resolution web applications that are implemented to composedistributed web services and APIs.Let us consider drawing high-resolution images to multiple web browsers on monitors of the WDiMsystem. For example, if the high-resolution image is a 5 MB digital photograph taken by a megapixel digitalcamera, then six Full HD monitors are necessary to display every pixel of the image. In this case, at least sixPlayers send HTTP request and fetch the same 5 MB file. Consequently, 30 MB data are sent for visualizinga 5 MB image, which is plainly not efficient.Although multicasting or broadcasting modes that are not supported by web browser might solve thisproblem, our challenge in this research is drawing a high-resolution web application based only on webbrowsers. Therefore, the Players must each draw a fragment of the high-resolution image on a web browser.Such a technique is well known. It is a web mapping service application. For example, Google Mapsdraws a fragment of the huge satellite image on a web browser. In this case, it is apparent that the imageshown on the web browser consists of many small images (256 pixels×256 pixels). Therefore, Google Mapsneed not request images that are outside the bounds of the desired image. Actually, WDiM uses such a tilingmethod to draw raster images.A question that remains is whether each Player can draw correct bounds of a big image. TheCoordinator and WDiM middleware help WDiM application developers to resolve this issue. Put simply,WDiM middleware manages messaging between application logic on the Coordinator and web browsers onall Players. The WDiM middleware and messaging are described in section 5.Next, distributed character strings are not supported in this version of WDiM. If a developer <strong>do</strong>es notdeclare a bounding box, then strings are sent to all Players whether it draws the string on the monitor or not.Lastly, drawing a vector image is a subject for future work. We tackle distributed rendering using A<strong>do</strong>beFlash. In this way, distributed rendering on multiple monitors is realized using a combination of existingtechnologies.4. HIGH-RESOLUTION WEB APPLICATIONS ON WDIMTo sum up the salient characteristics, The WDiM system consists of a Coordinator(httpd), multiplePlayers(Nettop computer), and Conductor(Ninten<strong>do</strong> Wii). A Coordinator is responsible for the messagingand application logic, Players draw high-resolution web application to monitors, and the Conductor receiveuser interaction. Therefore, the WDiM is logically a kind of Model-View-Controller (MVC) architecture(Figure 4).Before describing WDiM middleware, we present two high-resolution web applications of WDiM in thissection to provide an overview of decomposable web application as a mashup of composable web services.4.1 PhotoMosaic: Using Flickr APIPhotomosaic (Silvers R. and Hawley M., 1997 and Finkelstein A. and Range M., 1998) is a technique whichtransforms an input image into a rectangular grid of thumbnail images. WDiM PhotoMosaic applicationcreates Photomosaic images using the large image set of Flickr, the public image hosting service. Aphotographic mosaic is a photograph that has been divided into small sections, each of which is replaced withanother photograph having the appropriate average color of the section. While viewing a photographicmosaic from a distance, it appears as a large photograph, but small photographs can be observed if oneapproaches the photographic mosaic. This application aims to demonstrate WDiM, which is not merely alarge display, but also a high-resolution display.154
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010Figure 5. PhotoMosaicFigure 6. PhotoMosaic SystemFigure 7. PhotoMapFigure 8. PhotoMap SystemPhotoMosaic (Figure 5) creates a photographic mosaic consisting of many small photographs from aphotograph that a user gives voluntarily. A large-scale photograph repository is necessary for creation ofphotographic mosaic, but PhotoMosaic <strong>do</strong>es not prepare such a repository. PhotoMosaic uses an imagehosting service, Flickr, instead of local photographs, <strong>do</strong>wnloading photographs which have average color of asmall section of a given photograph. The PhotoMosaic system is shown in Figure 6. PhotoMosaic uses 75 ×75 pixels thumbnail images which Flickr generates. No Flickr service exists to search photographs by color;we extract feature values of color from crawled Flickr images. PhotoMosaic divides the thumbnail into ninesections, calculates the average color of each section, then saves the feature vector to a metadata databasewith thumbnail’s URL.An original photograph is given via e-mail by a user along with a notice to PhotoMosaic. The originalphotograph is divided and compared in each section with feature vectors of metadata database and get a URLof closest image. That is to say, PhotoMosaic generates a list of URLs from a given photograph and creates aphotographic mosaic. Then the photograph is appended to list on the Conductor’s display. The photographicmosaic that is displayed on WDiM is pointed by Wii remote. A user tilts the Wii remote and scrolls the list oforiginal photographs, then chooses one photograph from the list. If a user chooses one from list, then thephotographic mosaic is shown in WDiM.When a photograph is chosen, Coordinator divides the URL list for each Players and sends a subset ofthe URLs to corresponding Players. Then each Player <strong>do</strong>wnloads thumbnail images in parallel and draws acorresponding part of the photographic mosaic 2 .2 See also http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9vJ-umQLok155
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADIS4.2 PhotoMap: Using Google Maps APIFigure 7 portrays PhotoMap, a WDiM application, which shows high-resolution Google Maps and posts thegeotagged photographs on the map. Geotags are location metadata assigned to the photograph. Theyrepresent a set of latitude and longitude. Geotagging is supported on most cellular telephones and handy GPSsystems.Services showing geotagged images on the map are not novel: Google Maps and Flickr provide suchservices. We must emphasize distributed parallel rendering on web browsers on 16 Players. Each Playerdraws a different part of the high-resolution map, constituting part of the image of the composite large-scalemap.The PhotoMap system is portrayed in Figure 8. PhotoMap hosts geotagged photographs; one is shown inWDiM with a vicinity map of shooting location. A user can change the displayed photograph from the hostedphotographs using a Wii remote and scroll to a new location in which the next photograph is taken coincidentwith changing photographs. PhotoMap, in short, is a high-resolution digital photograph frame application.Registration of photographs to PhotoMap is to upload to Coordinator via FTP and e-mail.Visualization of earth science data, especially high-resolution satellite images, is a major part ofapplications of expensive existing tiled display wall. PhotoMaps shows WDiM, which consists of low-endconsumer machines and which is based only on web technologies, can apply to visualization for earth science.5. MIDDLEWARE FOR WDIM5.1 ComponentsIn this section, we describe middleware that draws a high-resolution web application with user interaction.The middleware components are depicted in Figure 9. The middleware consists of a distributed webapplicationrendering engine and some third-party JavaScript library components including Ext.Js andFREDDY (Yokoyama et. al. 2009). The TileCongifuration file includes the number of monitors, size of thedisplay, and other useful information. WrapperCommander and WrapperReceiver are simple wrapperprograms of PHP; they load TileConfiguration and call Commander and Receiver of a user-developed WDiMapplication. The WDiM application consists of Commander, which is executed on the Conductor (Ninten<strong>do</strong>Wii/Opera), and Receiver which is executed on the Players. In addition, RESTful Web Services and AjaxProxy are placed on Coordinator as necessary.Commander is an HTML file that includes JavaScript code for Conductor and draws GUI on the monitor,receives user interaction using Wii Remote and sends commands to Receiver on Players. Receivers hascommand handlers, which are defined by the application developer and which await commands fromCommander. When Receivers receive a command from Commander, the corresponding handler is calledwith arguments.We provide abstract classes of Commander and Receiver to application developer. To develop WDiMapplications, the developer writes the subclasses of both Commander and Receiver and extends the abstractclasses to define the application logic.Figure 9. WDiM middleware componentsFigure 10. Messaging Mechanism of WDiM156
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010The WDiM application start-up procedure is the following:1. Conductor and Players respectively send HTTP requests to the URL of WrapperCommander andWrapperReceiver.2. Both Wrappers load the TileConfiguration of the WDiM.3. WrapperCommander sends Commander to Conductor and Wrapper-Receiver sends Receiver to allPlayers.4. Commander is a web application displayed on the web browser of the Conductor;Receivers is a web application displayed on the web browser of the Players.5. Finally, Commander and distributed Receivers is executed cooperatively and shows high-resolutionweb application on the tiled displays of WDiM.5.2 MessagingThe messaging between Commander and Receiver is based on Ajax over HTTP. However, as describedabove, Commander on the Coordinator can not communicate directly to Receiver on the Players becauseHTTP <strong>do</strong>es not allow browser-to-browser connection. Therefore, all Players and the Conductor poll the webserver on the Coordinator. Actually, WDiM has messaging of two kinds: Command and SyncData (Figure10). SyncData is a method used to synchronize data between Commander and all Receivers. If a JSON objectthat is declared as SyncData is changed on the Commander, then the object is sent immediately to all Playersto inform Receivers. Command is a method to sending JSON object from Commander to Receivers onspecified Players. The Commander publishes Command and SyncData via methods of WDiM middlewareand the Receiver receives Command and SyncData via a handler for which the user is defined. The WDiMmiddleware manages the exchange information between Commander and Receivers.5.3 Tile ConfigurationCommander and Receiver get the TileConfiguration when starting a WDiM application. Figure 11 showsproperties for our 16-monitor WDiM tiled display wall. User only defines the width and height of LCDmonitor and its bezel and Number of LCD monitors of the Tiled Display Wall. In addition, some usefulproperties, e.g. distance from the center and bounds of the LCD monitor draw, calculated. The WDiMapplication can use the properties to draw the high-resolution contents.The WDiM middleware and applications can correspond to various sizes of tiled display walls bychanging the TileConfiguration. For example, it is possible to build a tiled display wall made of two laptopcomputers arranged side-by-side on the desk.Figure 11. Tile configuration157
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADIS6. RELATED WORKSMany proposed approaches are used for building tiled display wall systems. NASA’s Hyperwall (Sandstromet. al., 2003) has a 64-megapixel Tiled Display Wall comprising 49 monitors (7 monitors horizontal × 7monitors vertical). LambdaVision uses 55 monitors (11 monitors horizontal × 5 monitors vertical) and buildsa 100 megapixel high-resolution tiled display wall system. They also propose middleware for tiled displaywalls called SAGE (Renambot et. al., 2003) An extremely large tiled display wall is HIPerSpace (DeFantiet.al. 2009) used at the University of California, San Diego. Altogether, it has a 225-megapixel display.Details of existing tiled display wall systems were surveyed by Ni et. al.(2006).Those systems aim at performance and resolution for application to scientific visualization for life sciencedata and ultra-high-resolution satellite images. Apparently, research issues related to tiled display wall havebypassed consumer applications in favor of improving scientific high-performance computing. Consequently,such applications require the use of expensive high-end machines, complex settings and elaborateprogramming. However, in explosive growth of web technologies, ultra-high-resolution satellite images, e.g.Google Maps, via web browser are becoming increasingly available, and are valued by many users.In other words, high-resolution visualization is no longer for scientists only: ordinary people can haveaccess to it. For that reason, we propose a low-cost tiled display wall, WDiM, which consists of low-endmachines and which is based solely on web technologies.Additionally, we must point out that WDiM uses only web programming language. Numerous skillfulweb developers and programmers are working today who can create WDiM applications.7. CONCLUSIONSAs described in this paper, we propose WDiM, a method to display high-resolution web applications on atiled display wall. We also express the design of low-cost tiled display wall made of low-end consumerdevices. Additionally, we presented an example of a high-resolution web application which renders to thetiled display wall. This paper explained how to decompose high-resolution web applications implemented tocompose distributed web services and APIs.Future research in this area will be undertaken to attempt browser-to-browser communication using a newversion of the Opera browser and vector rendering using HTML5. We believe that decomposable highresolutionweb applications are a novel model of next-generation web usage.REFERENCESDeFanti T. et al, 2009. The optip1ortal, a scalable visualization, storage, and computing interface device for the optiputer.Future Generation Computer Systems, The International Journal of Grid Computing and eScience. 25(2), pp.114-123.Finkelstein A. and Range M., 1998. Image Mosaics. In Roger D. Hersch, Jacquesl André, and Heather Brown, Ed.,Artistic Imaging and Digital Typography. LNCS, No. 1375, Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag.Ni T. et al, 2006. A survey on large high-resolution display technologies, techniques, and applications. In Proceedings ofVirtual Reality Conference. pp. 223-236.Renambot L. et al, 2004. Sage: the scalable adaptive graphics environment. In Workshop on AdvancedCollaborativeEnvironments (WACE04).Sandstrom T. A. et al, 2003. The hyperwall. In Proceedings of International Conference on Coordinated and MultipleViews in Exploratory Visualization. pp. 124-133.Silvers R. and Hawley M., 1997. Photomosaics. Henry Holt, New York.Yokoyama S. et al, 2009. Freddy: A web browser-friendly lightweight data-interchange method suitable for composingcontinuous data streams. In Proceedings of First International Workshop on Lightweight Integration on the Web(ComposableWeb'09). In conjunction with ICWE 2009, pp. 39-50.158
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010WIKLANG – A DEFINITION ENVIRONMENT FORMONOLINGUAL AND BILINGUAL DICTIONARIES TOSHALLOW-TRANSFER MACHINE TRANSLATIONAléssio Miranda Júnior and Laura S. GarcíaC3SL, Computer Department, Federal University of Paraná – UFPR, Curitiba-Pr, BrazilABSTRACTIn a time when the most successful development efforts in Machines Translation (MT) are based on closed software,Apertium has become an alternative mature, interesting and open source. However, one of the main obstacles for theimprovement of its results and popularization is the absence of a specific interface to manage its linguistic knowledge,which, because of the imposed difficulty, reduces the number of potential collaborators to the development of thelanguage pairs. In the present paper, we propose an interaction-interface environment that can abstract the concepts of thesystem and the textual process available for the development of bi or monolingual dictionaries. In addition to that, it hasthe ability to capture and organize knowledge in a simple manner for non-experts in Computing, leading to the growthand development of new language pairs for the MT.KEYWORDSApertium, Machine Translation Systems, WiKLaTS, interfaces, knowledge management, WiKLang.1. INTRODUCTIONMachine Translation (MT) (Hutchins, 1992) is the traditional term used to refer to the semi or fullyautomatedprocess whereby a text or utterance in a natural language (so-called source-language) is translatedinto another natural language (so-called target-language), resulting in an intelligible text which, in turn,preserves certain features of the source-text, such as style, cohesion and meaning.In recent years, we can see that the successful instances of Machines Translation (MT) are always a set ofclosed software and knowledge base, distributed as static products and with a commercial purpose. Thismodel comes with a big disadvantage, namely the difficulty imposed to the architecture and techniqueimprovement studies and even to the development of language pairs without a financial incentive.This situation hinders the development of open-source software able to transform this technology insomething open and democratic. In this sense, creating opportunities for the community to contribute evenmore to the evolution and the development of this interdisciplinary area that involves Computer Science andLinguistic has become a relevant challenge.Among the different types of MT software that have appeared following the open-source software modeland focusing on the abovementioned objectives, we have chosen the “Opentrad Apertium Project”(Apertium) (Forcada, 2008) as a consolidated free/open-source MT platform which is in constant evolutionand with expressive results in literature (Tyers, 2009 and Forcada, 2006).Apertium is a shallow-transfer Machine Translator based on superficial syntactic rules that use its ownknowledge (data) base, with an open and flexible structure in XML standard. It provides an engine andtoolbox that allow users to build their own machine translation systems by writing only the data. The dataconsists, on a basic level, of three dictionaries and transfer rules.Shallow transfer systems, such as Apertium, based on superficial syntactic rules, use superficialinformation based on the structure of the sentence, avoiding the in-depth semantic details within thatstructure. In general, this type of MT is more efficient and can substitute a complete syntactic analysis withsatisfactory results.159
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISAlthough Apertium has technical advantages widely recognized and praised by the international scientificcommunity, and despite its structured and open knowledge base, its popularization has been facing a numberof obstacles. The development of language pairs for Apertium is perceived as complex, based on lengthyXML files without interface alternatives that allow for the development and maintenance of linguisticknowledge bases. Therefore, all efforts are based on textual tools.This fact is a hindrance to the evolution of the available language pairs precisely because the number ofusers able to develop knowledge for the tool is strictly limited to experts and/or trained users.2. OBJECTIVESWhen new users are interested in contributing to the development of a given language pair, they must gothrough a period of identification and learning about structures, command line tools and processes, whichmight be extremely complex for a layman in Computing. Indeed, this learning period may become ratherlong and complicated due to the lack of formalization and tools, thus discouraging countless potentialcollaborators. In this light, the main objective of the present work is to minimize this negative factor.Among the aspects that must be lightened and simplified within the interaction-interface environment, wewould like to mention the following: the marking of XML files, the compilation of XML bases in Apertium,as well as the organization, the acronyms and the internal structure of the knowledge base. Furthermore, withthe ever-growing knowledge about language pairs, the direct manipulation of these files has also becomeintricate from a human point of view.In the present paper, we present a formalization proposal of a part of the process of a language paircreation and development for translation, which we describe through interfaces and stages of knowledgespecification. This study has allowed for the dissemination of a set of interfaces which, in turn, make up amore adequate and efficient alternative to the current process. We named this set WiKLang, and its mainobjectives are the following: Standardize both the understanding and the process, and make them less dependent on textualscripts; Reduce to a minimum the Computing knowledge needed for a new collaborator to understand howto create and develop language pairs; Allow for the manipulation of the knowledge bases in a reliable, generic fashion, includingmanagement functions; Stimulate both translation improvement between existing language pairs and the development ofnew pairs, thus making MTs, such as Apertium, more reliable and with a bulkier knowledge base.3. METHODOLOGYIn order to achieve the previously mentioned objectives, we have followed the steps described below: Interaction with the Apertium team so as to understand the interface and its architecture; Identification of problems and aspects that could be improved in the interaction with Apertiumdeveloper-users; Formalization of the knowledge specification process used in Apertium; Creation of a project of an interaction-interface environment (WiKLang) using concepts similar toApertium’s, as a more adequate alternative to the linguistic knowledge specification needed to translatelanguage pairs; Development of a non-functional prototype to be assessed by the Apertium team.4. DATA DEVELOPMENT ON THE APERTIUM PROJECTApertium is an open-source platform for creating rule-based machine translation systems. It was initiallydesigned for closely-related languages, but has also been adapted to work better for less related languages.160
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010The original shallow-transfer Apertium system consists of a de-formatter, a morphological analyzer, acategorical disambiguator, a structural and lexical transfer module, a morphological generator, a postgenerator and a reformatter (Tyers, 2009).Inserting a new language pair to be translated by Apertium is a challenging task that requires advancedknowledge of Linguistics in addition to specific Computing knowledge. A researcher or user that may wishto develop translation pairs for Apertium relies on non-specific tools and very few interface resources andscripts, which in turn are fully textual and detail parts of the process only.The architecture of Apertium consists of a generic translation machine that may be used in associationwith different knowledge bases, such as dictionaries and rules of shallow-transfer between languages. It is thecombination of these elements that <strong>do</strong>es the translation of text through a process of shallow-transfer, whosemain distinctive feature is the fact that it <strong>do</strong>es not carry out a full syntactic analysis, but rather operates overlexical units.Therefore, one must master certain key concepts so as to understand both the knowledge model and thebasic structure of the XML files to be created.Some of these key concepts are lexemes, symbols and paradigms. A “lexeme” is the fundamental unit ofthe lexicon of a language (word). A “symbol” refers to a classifying tag, which may be either grammatical orlinked to the execution stages of the machine. A “paradigm” is a script containing morphological flexions fora given group of words.Moreover, there are three stages one must go through in order to insert new language pairs into Apertium,stages which, in turn, give rise to XML files. It is important to stress that the entire process is based ontextual files, and that the references among the tags, for example, must be kept correctly and manually(human).Table 1 shows these three defining stages, namely the development of a monolingual dictionary, abilingual dictionary and translation rules. We have developed solutions for the first two stages.In order to create and manage the files that make up the dictionaries and rules, one must necessarily knowand understand the syntax, the labels, the internal structure and the tagging hierarchy. Typical monolingualdictionaries, for example, currently comprise more than 10 thousand lexemes spread through 150 thousandlines of XML information, which makes knowledge management a task too complex to be carried outmanually and without specific techniques and support tools.In order to make terminology clear, in the present paper we will refer to fixed XML Apertium tags as“elements”, leaving the concept of “tag” to flexible language features. We will present below examples ofexcerpts of Apertium files, including the meanings of the elements mentioned whenever necessary. Theinformation presented here is largely based on tutorials provided by the platform.Table 1. Data for the apertium platform: development stagesDevelopment StageContentMonolingual Dictionary of language “xx” and “yy” Contains the rules of how words in language are inflected.Bilingual Dictionary for each direction “xx to yy” Contains correspondences between words and symbols in the twoand “yy to xx”languages in the direction defined.Transfer Rules for each directionContains rules for how language xx will be changed into languageyy.4.1 Dictionary FormatBoth monolingual and bilingual dictionaries share the same XML specifications. We shall now present anoverview of the standard structure of these files.The element “dictionary” comprises the entire content of the file and is basically divided into four partsisolated by tags and their respective content, as follows: alphabet: set of characters used to perform tokenization; sdefs: markings that can be applied to structures during the process; pardefs: flexion paradigms applied to the lexemes; section: lexeme definition and special symbols belonging to the language, possibly involvingparadigms.Example of the Basic Schema of an XML Dictionary:161
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADIS4.2 Monolingual DictionaryMonolingual dictionaries contain lexemes, flexions and all other elements needed to morphologically classifya sentence, expression or word in the language in question. There may even be ambiguities in thisclassification, but they are cleared in subsequent translation steps, which we will not discuss here. Theplatform works with parts of the language, hence the need to work with two morphological dictionaries inorder to carry out translations.Say we wish to translate the noun “livro”, in Portuguese, which corresponds to “book” in English. Inorder to <strong>do</strong> so, we need to create a monolingual dictionary in English as well as one in Portuguese. We willnow describe the development of a small monolingual Portuguese dictionary. Figure 1 shows the result of theanalysis process of the word “livro”.Figure 1. Analysis process of the word “livro”.The first stage is the definition of the alphabet, i.e. the set of characters used in given language (expressedby the equally named element “alphabet”).Example of “alphabet” tagÀÁÂÃÇÈÉÊÌÍÎÒÓÔÕÙÚÛáâãäçèéêëìíîòóôõùúûüABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzAfter that, all symbols that may be used in the translation process must be registered, and they may eitherhave grammatical semantics or be part of the internal treatment of the process. The element “sdefs”comprises this content.Example of “sdefs” tag. Next, one must define a section of paradigms comprised by the element “pardefs”, to which the paradigmused by nouns as “livro” is added. In Portuguese, the lexeme for nouns is always male and singular. Thesingular form of this noun is “livro” and the plural is “livros”.Example of “paradefs” tag:s162
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISgenders), different resources are used in different translation stages – which, in turn, we will not discuss inthe present paper.Example Fragment of word mapping in a bilingual dictionary.livro4.4 Translation ProcessFigure 2 depicts the translation process of the source word “livro”, in Portuguese, and its correspondent inEnglish, “book”. Firstly, the input element is analyzed taking the respective monolingual dictionary intoaccount. Next, possible manipulations of the translation rules may take place. Finally, the bilingual dictionarygenerates the new concept in the target language.Figure 2. Simple translation process.5. WIKLANGThe main objective of WiKLang is to import and export the XML files of monolingual and bilingualdictionaries, allowing for their management to take place through an interaction-interface environmentwhich, in turn, makes the process more objective and transparent. This way, our aim is to offer an alternativeto the current Apertium process of file creation in the stages of mono and bilingual dictionary development.The fact that the proposed interface must be generic enough to allow for the creation of mono and bilingualdictionaries in any pair of languages is what we find particularly challenging in our project.The strategy we a<strong>do</strong>pted in the present study consisted of the development of a prototype, which was thensubmitted to the assessment of potential users. Finally, we analyzed the feedback obtained, aiming atimproving the environment. Indeed, it was an interactive process of assessment and improvement. We wouldlike to mention that, even though we have paid special attention to the requirements of interface design, wedid not begin the initial stages of prototype development by revising HCI literature.5.1 The EnvironmentFigure 4 shows the five main elements of the interface, as follows:1. A tab bar displaying the three functions, namely monolingual dictionary, bilingual dictionary andtransfer rules;2. A context bar showing important information about the current status of the process underway;3. A bar showing the contextualized sub-processes according to the process chosen;4. An action panel, or the main work point of the user, where the actions of system orientation andinformation input takes place;5. An instruction panel, or guidelines to support users during the process.164
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 20105.2 Monolingual DictionaryFigure 4. WikLang Statistics and informationWe divided the development of the monolingual dictionary into four sub-processes, which in turn refer to thestructural distribution of the resulting XML files.The first of such sub-processes is the definition of the monolingual dictionary in terms of basic attributesand statistics. Attributes such as the universal language code, description and version are merely informative,but the alphabet, on the other hand, influences the translator platform. The environment also counts on basicstatistics to help control the development of knowledge about the language (see Figure 4).5.3 Symbol DefinitionThe symbols must manage all tags that may be used to identify lexemes. In Apertium there is no hierarchyamong the tags of monolingual dictionaries. However, such hierarchical classification is an important tool forthe linguist-user. Therefore, we have decided to include this kind of symbol classification even though it isnot used by the MT, being useful only for the orientation in knowledge construction.For each symbol, we propose a code definition, as well as a description in the source language. Inaddition to that, we present statistics about the relation among the symbols in the category in question.Therefore, the interface allows for the hierarchical association among symbols based on the grammaticalclassification or concept groups (see Figure 5).5.4 Paradigm DefinitionThe definition of paradigms is certainly one of the most complex parts of the management process ofbilingual dictionaries.Users may either choose an existing paradigm or create a new one. Next, they must name the paradigmand choose an example word having its radical highlighted, using the standard Apertium terminology.This sub-process was subdivided into two smaller stages. The objective of the first is analysis, displayingall flexions provided by the paradigm and interacting with dynamically inserted lexemes, so that users canhave a good overview of their behavior and flexions.The second stage, on the other hand, aims at editing elements of the paradigm. Among the support tools,we have an expression editor that may take the right-hand side of the element, as well as word definitions andsymbol chains that define the classification in question. These chains, in turn, are built through “drag anddrop” resources in searchable lists, eliminating typos and making rules clearer (Figure 6).Figure 5. Symbol Definition InterfaceFigure 6. Paradigm definition165
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADIS5.5 Lexeme DefinitionOne of the most common tasks in lexeme definition consists of consistently connecting lexemes to theparadigms that generate their flexions. In order to make this process easier, we have created a wizard tolocate lexemes and establish these connections, as well as to choose the most adequate paradigm.To define a lexeme, users must enter a word and highlight its radical, and provide four example flexions.An initial analysis phase checks the available paradigms and suggests those that suit the flexions given. It isthen up to users to choose the most adequate options, and they are also free to complement or create newparadigms. For those lexemes that have a specific flexion, such as compound nouns, one can create anembedded paradigm, exclusive to that lexeme (Figure 7).5.6 Bilingual DictionaryWe divided the present stage into two sub-processes, namely: definition and management of correspondencesbetween lexemes and expressions.In the first sub-process, users select two monolingual dictionaries to be related, and the system preparesthe definitions of the bilingual dictionary automatically, with the alphabet and a grid of symbols derived fromthe relation between the languages. Additionally, both statistics about the monolingual dictionaries andinformation about the relations are available.A grid of the unified symbols displays the following information in columns: the code, the descriptionand the morphological dictionary to which the symbol belongs. These pieces of information are important forthe orientation within the interface, and must also be included in the resulting XML file.The second sub-process manages the relations between lexemes and expressions, and indentifies therelations that truly define the bilingual dictionary. Building these relations is a rather peculiar task, since theprocess takes place on lexeme level, simulating relations word by word; in other words, the system buildsrelations based on the partial interlingua generated.Figure 8 shows the interface and the existing relations for a given lexeme. In the lateral bar, users maychoose options to filter and search definitions related to a certain lexeme both in the “A language” (i.e. thesource language) and in the “B language” (i.e. the target language). Once they have chosen a lexeme, theyhave two grids with information about it.Figure 7. Lexeme definitionsFigure 8. Bilingual dictionary and the relations betweenlexemes and expressionsThe first of such grids contains all the possible flexions of the lexeme chosen, as well as itscorrespondences from the analysis phase – based on the morphological dictionary. The second grid, on theother hand, displays the rules associated to the lexeme, which in turn are organized in three columns, asfollows: the first column displays the standard accepted by rule; the second displays the output to begenerated; and the third shows the valid orientation for that rule.The definition displayed in the first column follows the principle of pattern matching – with the mostspecific rule or the most complete standard. It refers to the root of the lexeme, followed by its morphologicalclassification generated by analysis.The content of the second column will substitute the standard found, so as to prepare the phase ofgeneration into the target language. Finally, the third column displays the direction into which the rule isvalid – considering that certain rules are valid solely in one direction within the language pair.166
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 20106. CONCLUSIONSWe believe that the Apertium platform is an important open-source initiative within MT; nevertheless, it stillneeds bulkier tools to support it in its ambitious task of matching traditional commercial software.By analyzing one part of the process, namely the development of both mono and bilingual dictionaries,we noticed that there is a lot of difficulty due to the lack of tools to assist in knowledge input andmanagement. For this reason, we proposed an interaction-interface environment, named WikLang, to makethis process of knowledge specification easier.We feel that the WikLang interface and cycles proposed here indeed help in the development of larger,bulkier dictionaries for the Apertium platform. Without special systems as the one introduced here and froma strictly human point of view, this task would be rather difficultAs far as future works are concerned, we would like to suggest the following: A thorough analysis of the HCI concepts related to the environment; The implementation of new requirements pointed out by users after their first trial of the functionalprototype; The extension of the interface so as to contemplate relations between translation rules as well; The analysis of the generalities of the interfaces, so that they allow for the development of anydictionary; The reflection about other modules to be integrated – seeing as WikLang is the first implementedmodule from the WiKLaTS project.ACKNOWLEDGEMENTThis work was supported by National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq/Brazil)and National Council for the Improvement of Higher Education (CAPES/Brazil).REFERENCESForcada, M. L. 2006. Open-source machine translation: an opportunity for minor languages. Strategies for developingmachine translation for minority languages. 5th SALTMIL workshop on Minority Languages.pp. 1–7Forcada, M. L. and B. Ivanov Bonev and S. Ortiz Rojas and J. A. Pérez Ortiz and G. Ramírez Sánchez and F. SánchezMartínez and C. Armentano-Oller and M. A. Montava and F. M. Tyers. 2008. Documentation of the Open- SourceShallow-Transfer Machine Translation Platform Apertium. http://xixona.dlsi.ua.es/~fran/apertium2-<strong>do</strong>cumentation.pdfHutchins, W. John, and Harold L. Somers. 1992. An Introduction to Machine Translation. Lon<strong>do</strong>n, Academic Press.ISBN 0-12-362830-X. http://www.hutchinsweb.me.uk/IntroMT-TOC.htm.Ramírez-Sánchez, G., F. Sánchez-Martínez, S. Ortiz-Rojas, J. A. Pérez-Ortiz, M. L. Forcada, 2006. "Opentrad Apertiumopen-source machine translation system: an opportunity for business and research", in Proceedings of Translatingand the Computer 28 Conference, Lon<strong>do</strong>n.Tyers, F. M., L. Wiechetek and T. Trosterud. 2009 "Developing prototypes for machine translation between two Sámilanguages". Proceedings of the 13th Annual Conference of the European Association of Machine Translation,EAMT09.167
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISE- COMMERCE CUSTOMISED GUIDELINES VS.GENERAL HEURISTIC EVALUATION: A COMPARATIVESTUDY ON EVALUATING E-COMMERCE WEBSITESMrs. Ghada Aldehim * , Dr. Pam Mayhew * and Mr. Majed Alshamari *School of Computing Sciences in the University of East Anglia - Norwich- United King<strong>do</strong>mABSTRACTRecently, the growth of the <strong>Internet</strong> has led to an explosion of website content, and therefore research into usability isextremely important. The heuristic evaluation method is one of the usability inspection methods that is employed toevaluate <strong>Internet</strong> websites in order to assess and improve their usability. However, heuristic evaluation suffers from anumber of drawbacks; therefore, we are exploring a customised guidelines method designed especially for e-shops. Thismethod is compared with the traditional heuristic evaluation method by employing both methods to compare whichmethod is able to offer more efficient support to the evaluators, and hence to generate effective feedback. In order toachieve this aim, two electronic shops are chosen and used to carry out the evaluation process. Eight expert evaluators areengaged in this study, divided into two groups of four. Each group evaluates two electronic websites. The analysis andfindings of this study clearly show that the customised guidelines method is able to offer better results than the traditionalheuristic evaluation method.KEYWORDSHeuristic evaluation, evaluators, usability, customised guidelines, website evaluation.1. INTRODUCTIONResearchers need to focus on the usability of <strong>Internet</strong> websites as it is one of the fastest-growing areas. Thiscan be clearly reasoned because of a number of critical factors such as the number of the <strong>Internet</strong> users, thenumber of websites, the efforts of designers and developers, and the services offered via the <strong>Internet</strong> (ScottHenninger, 2001). Several evaluation methods can be applied and used in order to measure website usability;one of these methods is the inspection method, which includes: heuristic evaluation, cognitive walkthrough,and feature inspection (Jacobsen Nielsen, 1992). Among these techniques, heuristic evaluation isrecommended as the fastest, cheapest, most flexible and effective way for identifying usability problems in auser interface (Saul Greenberg et al., 2000). This form of evaluation is “a method for finding usabilityproblems in a user interface design by having a small set of evaluators examine the interface and judge itscompliance with recognized usability principles (the 'heuristics')” (Jakob Nielsen and Rolf Molich, 1990).This paper starts by exploring the current literature on heuristic evaluation, its pros and cons, and then howthe customised guidelines method was derived. This is followed by the paper’s objectives and the approachtaken in order to achieve the paper’s aim. It concludes with data analysis.2. LITERATURE REVIEWThis section discusses the heuristic evaluation method, how it is employed and the number of evaluatorsneeded. It also explores its advantages and disadvantages. It then presents the need for a customised methodand how it was proposed.168
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 20102.1 Heuristic Evaluation MethodHeuristic evaluation involves having a small set of evaluators examine an interface and judge its compliancewith recognized usability principles (the 'heuristics'). This method was developed by Nielsen and hiscolleagues in 1990, guided by a set of usability principles, to evaluate whether a user interface conforms tothese principles (Jacobsen Nielsen, 1992) (Hix et al., 2004). These principles or criteria are referred to asguidelines or general rules that can guide a design decision or be used to critique a decision that has alreadybeen made. In general, heuristic evaluation is difficult for a single individual to <strong>do</strong> because one person willnever be able to find all the usability problems in an interface. Moreover, many different projects have shownthat different people find different usability problems (Morten Hertzum and Nielsen Jacobsen, 2001). As aresult, to improve the effectiveness of the method significantly, it should involve multiple evaluators.According to a number of researchers, such as Jakob Nielsen, a single evaluator is able to identify only 35%of all the usability problems in an interface, which is the result of averaging more than six of his projects.However, since different evaluators tend to find different problems, it is possible to achieve a betterperformance by increasing the number of evaluators. Figure 1, clearly shows that there is profit frominvolving many evaluators. Nevertheless, there is no agreement about the number of evaluators that areenough to identify a sufficient number of usability problems. According to Jakob Nielsen (1994), three tofive evaluators typically identify about 75-80% of all usability problems. Koyani (2003) asserted that two tofive is enough.Figure 1. The relationship between the number of evaluators and the number of the found problems (Jakob Nielsen,2005).2.2 Advantages and Disadvantages of Heuristic EvaluationHeuristic evaluation is recommended as the fastest, cheapest, most flexible and effective way for identifyingusability problems (Saul Greenberg et al., 2000). Also, heuristic evaluation is especially valuable when timeand resources are short (Laurie Kantner and Stephanie Rosenbaum, 1997). Jeffries and his colleaguescompared four different techniques used to evaluate a user interface. These were heuristic evaluation,software guidelines, cognitive walkthroughs and user testing. Overall, the heuristic evaluation techniqueidentified the most usability problems (Jeffries, 1991). In addition, heuristic evaluation has a number of othermore specific advantages, such as low cost relative to other evaluation methods, advanced planning notrequired, can be used early in the development process, may be used throughout the development process,effective identification of major and minor problems, during a short session, a small number of experts canidentify a range of usability problems, and because of their experience with many system interfaces, it is easyfor evaluators to suggest solutions to the usability problems (Nielsen, 1990) (Holzinger, 2005) (Jenny Preeceet al., 1993).In contrast, there are a number of major drawbacks to heuristic evaluation, such as: it is highly dependenton the skills and experience of the evaluators, the evaluators only emulate users (they are not actually usersthemselves), user feedback can only be obtained from laboratory testing, and it <strong>do</strong>es not essentially evaluatethe whole design because there is no mechanism to ensure the whole design is explored (evaluators can focustoo much on one section). Also, it <strong>do</strong>es not include end users, and thus is unable to specifically identify users’needs. Furthermore, it produces a large number of false positives that are not usability problems, which169
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISrequires evaluators to spent extra time in elimination, and it has also been criticised as being too abstract(Laurie Kantner and Stephanie Rosenbaum, 1997) (Holzinger, 2005) (Jacob Nielsen, 1992) (Jeffries, 1991).Therefore, there have been a number of attempts to avoid these heuristic evaluation weaknesses, and thesewill be discussed in the following section.2.3 The Need for a Customised Guidelines MethodThe need for customised guidelines appeared when a number of studies, such as Chen and Gavriel or Chenand Macredie, extended the traditional heuristic evaluation method, in different ways, to match theirevaluation needs for different computing systems (as some systems may have more priorities for someusability criteria than other systems), and to avoid the drawbacks of the heuristic evaluation method. Themodifications occurred in one of three ways: extending the heuristic set, extending the heuristic evaluationmethod by modifying the evaluation procedure, and extending the heuristic evaluation method with aconformance rating scale (Chen and Gavriel, 2005) (Chen and Macredie, 2005).2.4 Proposing the Customised GuidelinesThe customised guidelines method is a combination of two methods; heuristic evaluation method plus plus(HE++) and heuristic evaluation plus (HE+). HE++ is one of the proven methods of extending the heuristicset. A number of studies have shown that HE++, an emerging variant of the original HE, outperforms HE inboth effectiveness and reliability (Jarinee and Gitte, 2008) (Jarinee and Jaqueline, 2004). HE+ includes anextra feature for aiding the evaluation process, called a ‘usability problem profile’ (Jarinee and Jaqueline,2004) (Jarinee and Gitte, 2008), which is designed to address the fact that many of the problems found byevaluators are common to certain types of products or applications. The proposed method targets commercialwebsites, although it will employ the same technique of heuristic evaluation in terms of using guidelines andevaluators only, and <strong>do</strong>es not involve any extra resources. Thus, it can be now stated that the customisedguidelines method consists of combination of the HE++ and HE+; the first component is the HE++, whichhas the following criteria derived from Jarinee and Gitte (2008):1. Visibility, distinguishability, and timeliness2. Match between system and the real world3. User control and free<strong>do</strong>m4. Consistency and standards5. Error prevention and recovery6. Recognition rather than recall7. Flexibility and efficiency of use8. Aesthetic and minimalist design9. Supports user tasks and avoids difficult concepts10. Supports modification and progress evaluation11. Relevant, correct, and adequate information (Jarinee and Gitte, 2008).The second component is the HE+ method, which includes a ‘usability problem profile’ that can befruitfully used in many instances. Moreover, several researchers have discussed the components that shouldbe included in the usability problem profile for e-commerce websites. Chattratichart and Lindgaard reportedthat the most recent profile now consists of seven problem areas: content, navigation, graphics, systemefficiency and functionality, formatting and layout, wording, and help and error messages (Jarinee and Gitte,2008). However, Chattratichart and Brodie state that e-commerce websites should include only six problemareas: content, graphics, navigation, layout, terminology, and matches with user’s tasks (Chattratichart andBrodie, 2002) (Chattratichart and Brodie, 2004). In addition, Van der Merwe and Bekker said that when anevaluator evaluates an e-commerce website, the criteria or areas should include: content, graphics,navigation, reliability, and security and privacy (Rian Van der Merwe and James Bekker, 2003). Afterstudying all of these, the researchers here decided to choose the components for the usability problem profile(in e-commerce websites) based on those criteria that are present in the majority of these studies. The finalusability problem profile in this research contains Content, Graphics, Navigation, Layout and Formatting,Reliability, and Privacy and Security.170
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 20103. RESEARCH OBJECTIVES AND THE APPROACH TAKEN:The primary aim of this research is to compare specific customised guidelines with the more traditionalheuristic method; the Nielsen heuristic set is chosen to establish which method can offer better results. Inorder to achieve this aim, there are some objectives that need to be achieved as well. The following is adescription of the research objectives.1. To propose a customised guidelines method for measuring the usability of commercial websites.2. To apply the customised guidelines and the Nielsen heuristic set to targeted websites.3. To compare the customised guidelines vs. heuristic evaluation for commercial websites in order toreveal each method’s performance.Two main experiments were undertaken in order to achieve the research objectives. The first experimentwas to apply heuristic evaluation on two commercial website by using two different groups of evaluators;each group performed HE on a website. The second experiment was to apply the new customised guidelinesmethod upon the same two commercial websites by the same two groups. The group G1 performed HE firston Website A, and then performed the customised guidelines on Website B. The group G2 performed thecustomised guidelines on Website A, and then performed HE on Website B. In more detail, each groupstarted with a different website in order to further control the experiment, rather than performing one methodat the beginning of both studies. Each evaluator had a questionnaire at the end of each evaluation to answersome questions with regard to the method he had used.3.1 Website SelectionThe targeted websites should be live, dynamic, have a number of features, and be of reasonable content size.This selection has only targeted commercial websites because of the limitation of the study. Therefore, theresearchers decided to choose two electronic shopping websites to be the targeted websites that meet theabove conditions.3.2 Number of EvaluatorsSection 2.1 discussed the number of evaluators needed to conduct a usability study. In this research, 8evaluators were needed, where each group had 4 evaluators and they were divided evenly in terms ofexperience and other factors. Therefore, each website has been evaluated by the 8 evaluators but each fourused a different method.3.3 Severity AssessmentUsability evaluation methods depend on evaluator’s judgment when they rate a usability problem. Here inthis study, the rating of usability problems was based on the average rating of all the evaluators. Theirassessment is based on three factors, which are the problem impact upon business goal, its frequency and itspersistence. This should eliminate any deviation or personal judgment, and it is suggested by several studies,such as (Chen and Macredie, 2005) and (Morten Hertzum, 2006).4. DATA ANALYSISThis section presents the data analysis from this experiment. It discusses how well the two groups performedwhile they were evaluating Website A. It then also discusses the results from the second website (B) after itwas evaluated by both groups.171
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADIS4.1 Website A Evaluation Results and AnalysisGroup G1 used the Nielsen heuristic set whereas group G2 used the customised guidelines. Each evaluator inG1 found a number of problems in Website A by using HE. The final list consists of 10 problems, which aresummarised in Table 1; the ‘Total Problems by group G1’ column refers to the total number of problemsidentified by the four evaluators together. They were able to identify 5 major problems and the remainingproblems were minor or superficial problems. In general, group G1 was able to reveal less than a quarter ofthe identified usability problems by both groups in this study. The evaluators agreed from their questionnaireresponses that the website is highly usable and has taken into account usability guidelines.HETable 1. Number and percentage of usability problems uncovered on Website A by group G1.Evaluator1Evaluator2Evaluator3Evaluator4Total Problemsby group G1Total problemsdiscovered by bothgroups (G1, G2)Total 10 2 5 3 10 42% ofTotalProblems23.80% 4.76% 11.90% 7.14% 23.80% 100%Group G2, who performed the customised guidelines method, were able to identify 40 usability problems(summarised in Table 2), which was significantly more than the number of the problems identified by groupG1. The results from Table 2 show the percentages of the identified problems, which range from 35.71% to61.90%. As a result, this evaluation, which is based on the customised guidelines, obtained percentages thatare in line with findings of similar studies (Jakob Nielsen, 1994, 1990), which show that a single evaluatorusually finds 20% to 50% of the problems in a system. All the evaluators in group G2 were pleased to beusing the customised guidelines method as this method reminds them of a number of usability aspects theymight have forgotten to think about during the evaluation. Also, according to the evaluators’ answers in thequestionnaire, they believe that the customised guidelines method encourages them to be thorough in theevaluation, which is seen as a drawback of HE, providing more opportunities for finding usability issues. Theevaluators’ answers in group G1 state that HE did not help much as it is so general, <strong>do</strong>es not cover all theusability aspects, and <strong>do</strong>es not offer any clues for the evaluation. Although, the website was claimed to be ahighly usable, group G2 was able to uncover different usability problems, including 8 major problems and 25minor problems.CustomisedGuidelinesTable 2. Number and percentage of usability problems uncovered on Website A by group G2.Evaluator5Evaluator6Evaluator7Evaluator8Total Problemsby group G2Total problemsdiscovered by bothgroups (G1, G2)Total 21 26 15 19 40 42% of Total 50% 61.90% 35.71% 45.23% 95.23% 100%Problems4.2 Website B Evaluation Results and AnalysisGroup G1, who used the Nielsen heuristics in the first study, used the customised guidelines method in thisstudy to offer more validity to the study. Each evaluator in group G1 found a number of problems in WebsiteB. The final list of the identified usability problems consists of 38 problems, which are summarised in Table3. The results from Table 3 show the percentages of the identified problems, which range from 39.47% to74.47%. As a result, this evaluation, which is based on the customised guidelines, obtained percentageswhich are in line with and even higher than the findings of similar studies (Nielsen, 1990), which show that asingle evaluator usually finds 20% to 50% of the problems in a system. They discovered 5 major usabilityproblems and 20 minor usability problems. The evaluators attributed this to the usage of the customisedguidelines method as they preferred to use it rather than to use the HE method. They justified this as theformer method clearly specifies what should be evaluated and it is also a useful technique of building a172
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010checklist; they also liked the idea of the usability problem profile as it seems to work as a <strong>do</strong>uble-check forthe identified usability problems.Table 3. Number and percentage of usability problems uncovered on Website B by group G1.CustomisedGuidelinesEvaluator1Evaluator2Evaluator3Evaluator4Total Problemsby group G1Total problems discoveredby both groups (G1, G2)Total 28 22 15 20 34 38% of TotalProblems74.47% 57.89% 39.47% 52.63% 89.47% 100%Group G2, who used the customised guidelines in the first study, then used the HE method to evaluateWebsite B. Each evaluator in this group was able to reveal a number of problems in Website B. The resultsare summarised in Table4. They were able to reveal more than 21% of the total of the identified usabilityproblems. The results ranged from 10% to 21% of the total number of the problems. Comparing these resultsto group G1 using the same tool in the previous results, there is not a huge difference as both of them werenot able to identify more than 23% of total number of the identified usability problems.Table 4. Number and percentage of usability problems uncovered on Website B by group G2.HE Evaluator5Evaluator6Evaluator7Evaluator8Total Problemsby group G2Total problems discoveredby both groups (G1, G2)Total 5 8 4 5 12 38% of TotalProblems13.15% 21.05% 10.52% 13.15% 31.57% 100%In addition, 7 out of the 8 evaluators stated that they would prefer to use the customised guidelinesmethod in future evaluations rather than the HE method. The given reasons for this were that the customisedguidelines method is easier to understand and use than HE. They also stated that the customised methodseems to encourage them to be more through. On the other hand, evaluators spent less time when they usedHE for both websites, they spent 40 and 37.5 minutes for A and B websites respectively. The time spent on Aand B websites by the evaluators while they used the customised method were 72.5 and 50 minutesrespectively. Therefore HE seems to be faster than the customised guidelines method. Both of the methodsperformed well in discovering major problems. HE has been criticised as being an abstract method, which<strong>do</strong>es not provide guidelines for a specific <strong>do</strong>main, for example education or government websites.Generally, it can be seen that specific guidelines are preferred to the general guidelines as they can helpevaluators to focus on those criteria that are important to a particular type of a website in order to integrate allthe most suitable usability considerations. For instance, in this research, the customised guidelines forelectronic shopping emphasise graphics and security, which may be less important in, for example,educational websites. Moreover, using a checklist in the guidelines maximises the number of usabilityproblems that can be identified for each interface. Furthermore, the use of specific guidelines can break <strong>do</strong>wnthe usability problems identified to the lowest level of detail. Also, specific guidelines can provide a morecomprehensive analysis of the interface usability problems.5. CONCLUSIONSIt can be seen clearly from the literature and from the findings of this paper that there is a clear need to havecustomised guidelines for specific <strong>do</strong>mains such as commercial, education or government websites. In thispaper, the customised guidelines for commercial websites performed better and were preferred by most of theevaluators. There are a number of advantages to the customised guidelines method: it is a comprehensive anddetailed method at the same time, and it seems to work as a checklist for the usability guidelines. However, ithas a number of drawbacks: it is limited to commercial websites, and it seems to lead the evaluators to thewebsite aspects rather than leaving them to look over the site in general and think out of the box.173
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISREFERENCESChen, L. & Gavriel, S. (2005). Extension of heuristic evaluation method: a review and reappraisal. Ergonomia IJE\&HF27: pp.179-197.Chen, S. & Macredie, R. (2005). The assessment of usability of electronic shopping: A heuristic evaluation. Internationaljournal of Information Management 25: pp.516-532.Hix, D., Swan, JL., Hollerer, M., Julier, T., Baillot, S., Brown, Y., Center, D. and Blacksburg, V. (2004) A cost-effectiveusability evaluation progression for novel interactive systems. the 37th Annual Hawaii International Conference onSystem Sciences. IEEE Computer Society, Washington, USA.Holzinger, A. (2005). Usability engineering methods for software developers. Communications of the ACM 48: pp.71–74.Jakob Nielsen & Rolf Molich (1990) Heuristic evaluation of user interfaces. Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference onHuman factors in computing systems: Empowering people. ACM, Seattle, Washington, United States.Jakob Nielsen (1994) Guerrilla HCI: using discount usability engineering to penetrate the intimidation barrier. Costjustifyingusability. Orlan<strong>do</strong>, FL, USA. pp. 245--272.Jakob Nielsen (2005) Heuristic Evaluation. In: useit.com.Jacobsen Nielsen (1992) Finding usability problems through heuristic evaluation. the SIGCHI conference on Humanfactors in computing systems. ACM, NY, USA, pp. 373–380.Jarinee, C. & Gitte, L. (2008) A comparative evaluation of heuristic-based usability inspection methods. CHI '08extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems. ACM, Florence, Italy.Jarinee, C. & Jaqueline, B. (2002) Extending the heuristic evaluation method through contextualisation. Human Factorsand Ergonomics Society 46 th Annual Meeting, pp. 641-645.Jeffries, R., Miller, J., Wharton, C., and Uyeda, K. (1991) User interface evaluation in the real world: a comparison offour techniques. The SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems. ACM, NY, USA, pp. 119-124.Jenny Preece, Gor<strong>do</strong>n Davies, David Benyon, Laurie Keller & David Benyon (1993). A guide to usability: Humanfactors in computing MA, USA: Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co.Koyani, S., Bailey, R., Nall, J., Allison, S., Mulligan, C., Bailey, K., Tolson, M., (2003) Research-based web design &usability guidelines.Laurie Kantner & Stephanie Rosenbaum (1997) Usability studies of <strong>WWW</strong> sites: Heuristic evaluation vs. laboratorytesting. The 15th annual international conference on Computer <strong>do</strong>cumentation, ACM NY, USA, pp. 153-160.Morten Hertzum (2006). Problem Prioritization in usability Evalution: From severity assessments toward impact ondesign. International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction 21: pp.125-146.Morten Hertzum & Nielsen Ebbe Jacobsen (2001). The Evaluator Effect: A Chilling Fact About Usability EvaluationMethods. International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction 15: pp.183-204.Rian van der Merwe & James Bekker (2003). A framework and metho<strong>do</strong>logy for evaluating e-commerce web sites,<strong>Internet</strong> Research: Electronic Networking Applications and Policy 13: pp.330-341.Saul Greenberg, Geraldine Fitzpatrick, Carl Gutwin & Simon Kaplan (2000). Adapting the locales framework forheuristic evaluation of groupware. Australian Journal of Information Systems 7: pp.102–108.Scott Henninger (2001) An Organizational Learning Method for Applying Usability Guidelines and Patterns.Proceedings of the 8th IFIP International Conference on Engineering for Human-Computer Interaction. Springer-Verlag.174
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010A DESCRIPTION LANGUAGE FOR USER INTERFACESERVICESGerald Hübsch, Christian Liebing, Josef Spillner and Alexander SchillTechnische Universität Dresden, Institute for Systems Architecture, Chair of Computer NetworksABSTRACTIn this paper, we present the User Interface Service Description Language (UISDL) for the description of UI Services. UIServices allow UI component implementations to be globally distributed, flexibly integrated and dynamically bound intointeractive applications including, but not limited to, Rich <strong>Internet</strong> Applications. We present abstraction concepts,motivate design decisions, and discuss analogies between UISDL and WSDL as a classical service description language.KEYWORDSUI component, UISDL, user interface services, WSDL, XML Schema1. INTRODUCTIONWhile the service-based provisioning of business logic and data has reached a high degree of maturity andacceptance in the industry, the advantages of service-orientation for other building blocks of Rich <strong>Internet</strong>applications (RIAs), especially their user interface (UI), have not yet been sufficiently addressed. Applicationdevelopers are today confronted with the need to choose one out of a large number of UI frameworkproviders, which in many cases may be already compromise. Due to a lack of standardization, they then facea 'ven<strong>do</strong>r lock-in' which makes it difficult to flexibly integrate or exchange complex user interfacecomponents like maps, tables, calendars, or chart viewers, from third parties. Equally, providers of UIcomponents face difficulties in providing them 'as-a-service' i.e. in a standardized self-descriptive way thatenables their flexible integration, distribution and retrieval. We therefore believe that novel concepts arenecessary that make UI components available as UI Services. These concepts must address challenges thatrelate to the self-description of UI components that abstract from ven<strong>do</strong>r- and implementation-specificdetails, mechanisms for their flexible integration into RIAs and their distribution on a global scale.The CRUISe project (Composition of Rich User Interface Services) addresses the challenges namedabove. The key idea is to enable UI components to be described and distributed as UI Services that can beflexibly composed into user interfaces for RIAs. The main benefit of UI Services is that UIs of RIAs candynamically bind the most suitable UI component implementation at runtime based on context, e.g. theplatform type or user preferences. In this paper, we present the User Interface Service Description Language(UISDL) as a central technological result of the project. UISDL is an XML format for describing UIcomponents as a set of abstract events, operations, and properties that define UI component interfaces in animplementation- and platform-independent way. UISDL supports the binding of these abstract interfacedefinitions to alternative component implementations provided by different ven<strong>do</strong>rs and for multipleplatforms, e.g. special versions for desktops and mobile phones. UISDL includes metadata for themanagement and distribution of UISDL descriptions through a UI Service repository. This paper is structuredas follows. Section 2 discusses related work. Section 3 presents UISDL together with the related concepts.Our runtime architecture for UI Services based on UISDL and sample applications built on top of UIServices are presented in section 4. We conclude our work and outline future work in section 5. To facilitateunderstanding, we will use an electronic map as an exemplary UI component throughout this paper.175
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADIS2. RELATED WORKThe analysis of related approaches shows that little research has been <strong>do</strong>ne to facilitate service-basedprovision and dynamic integration of UI components using description languages like UISDL. The Mixupapproach (Yu et al. 2007) introduces a development and runtime environment to compose web applications atthe presentation layer based on existing UI components. The abstract UI-only component model enablesintegration into existing composite applications and defines the presentation state, properties to represent theappearance, events to signal state changes and operations to react to state changes triggered by other UIcomponents. To describe UI components, the approach uses XPIL (Extensible Presentation IntegrationLanguage) as a declarative description language that solely contains a small set of elements describing theabstract component model similar to WSDL. Unlike UISDL, XPIL solely describes the interface of UIcomponents and <strong>do</strong>es not distinguish between an abstract and concrete part to enable the distribution andflexible integration of different component implementations. Furthermore, component metadata is notdescribed, making the registration and discovery in a repository complicated. We will show that especiallythe consideration of these two aspects is vital for the realization of UI Services.Since the Mixup approach only provides a UI-only component model, the authors introduced a platformfor universal composition called mashArt (Daniel et al. 2009). The universal component model extends themodel presented in (Yu et al. 2007) and encapsulates UI, application and data components by defining theirstate, properties, events and operations. The specification of a component has the form of an abstractcomponent descriptor as a main part of the mashArt Description Language (MDL), which has a very similarstructure to XPIL, but aims at a universal component description. However, MDL <strong>do</strong>es not provide metadatato enable its registration and discovery in a repository. Furthermore, it lacks a separation into abstract andconcrete parts, leading to the above-mentioned drawback.The Service-Oriented User Interface Modelling and Composition (SOAUI) approach (Tsai et al. 2008)proposes the discovery and dynamic integration of UI components into a system design process of serviceorientedapplications at runtime. The specification is based on proprietary Microsoft XAML (Microsoft2010) and describes the offered functionality of a UI component. The authors intend to establish a unified UIspecification standard to share components between heterogeneous systems and platforms. They mainlyfocus on the management and retrieval of UI components, while our work explicitly includes their servicebasedprovision and dynamic integration. Widgets (Cáceres 2009) or gadgets (Google 2008) are artifacts thatstatically combine a piece of application logic with a UI component to a small application. They couldbenefit from UI Services described with UISDL, since the choice of the concrete UI componentimplementation to be used for the widget can be left open until runtime, leaving it up to personal preferencesof the user or the technical context in which the widget/gadget is used.In summary, only very few approaches exist that use a declarative description language for UIcomponents. Unlike UISDL, these approaches <strong>do</strong> not sufficiently address the service-based provision anddynamic integration of UI components through UI Service regarding the separation of concrete and abstractparts, explicit support for metadata, and for dynamic integration at runtime.3. USER INTERFACE SERVICE DESCRIPTION LANGUAGEThis section presents the UISDL in detail. Starting with the introduction of our UI component model and adiscussion of requirements for the language, design decisions and language concepts are presented. We alsomention language concepts that are inherited from WSDL as a classical service description language.3.1 UI Component ModelThe basis for UI Services, and thereby for UISDL, is the specification of a generic UI component model. OurUI component model abstracts from implementation details by defining UI components as a set of abstractproperties, events, and operations.Properties represent the externally visible UI component state. Common properties of an electronic mapare, for example, the geographic coordinate of its center or its type (normal, satellite, hybrid). Events aretriggered by UI components to publish state changes to other components, usually in response to user176
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010interaction. In the electronic map, a centerChange event is triggered in response to the respective action ofthe user. The functionality of a UI component is represented by operations that consume input parametersand produce at most one return parameter. A sample operation of the electronic map is addSimpleMarker. Itadds a Point-of-Interest marker at the geo-coordinate supplied as an input parameter.3.2 RequirementsThe purpose of UISDL is to define an XML-based description language for UI Services. UISDL thereforehas to provide means to describe the interfaces of UI components that follow the UI component modelpresented in section 3.1, including the data types they use to communicate with the application that integratesthem in an abstract, i.e. implementation- and programming language independent, way.To distribute component implementations, UISDL must support the binding of componentimplementations to an abstract interface description. Implementation bindings must (a) enable the life cyclemanagement of UI components, (b) provide access to properties, (c) enable the invocation of componentoperations, and (d) allow the (de-)registration of event listeners. Furthermore, libraries that must be includedto use the component implementation must be specified as part of the implementation binding.To fully exploit the flexibility offered by UI Services, it must be possible to implement runtimemechanisms on top of the implementation bindings that support a dynamic binding of UI Services. Dynamicbinding enables the selection and exchange of a concrete UI service implementation at runtime, for examplebased on the context of use, including user preferences and platform properties. For the same reason, abstractinterface definitions and implementation bindings must be separated since multiple UI componentimplementations, e.g. Google Map, Yahoo Map, OpenStreetMap, offered by different providers can exist forone abstract Map interface. It is clear that their common abstract interface can only cover the common set offunctionalities offered by the implementations. However, we have found that existing componentimplementations often extend this common set with additional functionalities. For example, some existingimplementations of the abstract Map interface, like Google Maps, allow to drag-and-drop of Point-of-Interestmarkers and produce a corresponding event in response. This requires the specification of an abstractinterface specifically for these implementations that extends the Map interface with the additional event.Otherwise, the additional functionality would either not be accessible or applications using the Map UIService could not detect the compatibility of the extended interface with Map UI. UISDL must thereforesupport the declaration of functional extensions between abstract interfaces.Finally, we have found inline metadata in the form of keywords, screenshots of UI componentimplementations, license information, pricing, suitability, and human-readable <strong>do</strong>cumentation to be necessaryfor the management of UISDL descriptions in a UI Service repository (see sect. 4) and their integration incomposition tools.3.3 Language Concepts and Design DecisionsThe language concepts and design decisions for UISDL are guided by the requirements in sect. 3.2.Interestingly, the requirements that have to be fulfilled by UISDL regarding abstraction, binding andintegration into applications are quite similar to those addressed by WSDL. The major difference seems to bethat web services are executed remotely on a server, while UI components provided by UI Services areexecuted locally in the scope of the application that integrates them. For UI Services, the need to provide anexecution environment on the client that manages the UI components' life-cycle replaces the need for remoteservice invocation mechanisms required for web service integration. As we will show in the following,concepts developed for classical web services that have shown to be reusable for our approach.WSDL is structured into an abstract part and a concrete part. Its abstract part specifies the web serviceinterface, i.e. the operations offered by the service, and the data type definitions they use in a platform-,protocol- and programming language independent way against which applications can be developed. Itsconcrete part contains protocol binding information and endpoint definitions that allow applications to invokea specific implementation of the web service. UISDL a<strong>do</strong>pts these abstraction and structuring concepts bydefining two different <strong>do</strong>cument types, namely UISDL-Class (UISDL-C) for the abstract part and UISDL-Binding (UISDL-B) for the concrete part. By defining two different <strong>do</strong>cument types for both parts, we go onestep beyond WSDL. Their physical separation was chosen to provide the organizational means for a central177
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISmanagement and distribution of abstract UI component interface definitions that can be referenced byproviders of compatible UI component implementations. It thereby allows providers of UI componentimplementations as well as developers that integrate UI Services to ensure compatibility on a global scale.UISDL-C is used to define abstract UI component interfaces: properties, operations, events, and datatypes in an implementation- and programming language independent way similar to WSDL. It fully reflectsour UI component model. Syntax details are presented in sect. 3.4. Applications that use UI Services areprogrammed against the abstract interfaces defined with UISDL-C.UISDL-C also a<strong>do</strong>pts the data type definition based on XML Schema as an abstraction concept fromWSDL. XML Schema was chosen due to its programming language independence. Like in WSDL, XMLSchema definitions are utilized to specify the data types required for the abstract interface definition, i.e.properties, invocation and result parameters of operations, and events. Furthermore, instances of XMLSchema data types can easily be serialized in XML. We have therefore decided to use XML as a commonand implementation-independent data exchange format between UI component implementations to maintainimplementation independence at runtime. This is the prerequisite that UI component implementations mustfulfill to be distributable as UI Services. It is the responsibility of each component implementation to convertbetween the XML representation and internal data representations. Since the data exchange with webservices via SOAP uses the same strategy, our approach also simplifies the integration between UI Servicesand web services, since UI component data can be directly wrapped in SOAP messages.With UISDL-B, implementation bindings for concrete UI component implementations are specified anddistributed. They are created by UI component providers and bind the abstract interface defined in UISDL-Cto implementation-specific component operations for life cycle management (constructor, destructor), forshowing and hiding the UI component, accessors for properties, component operations, and for(un)registering event handlers. Analogous to WSDL, references from UISDL-B to constituents of the abstractinterface being bound are based on names. Also, UISDL-B includes elements to specify the libraries to beincluded before the component can be instantiated. Syntax details and realizations for bindings are presentedin sect. 3.5. The abstract interface implemented by a UISDL-B description is denoted by a reference thecorresponding UISDL-C. Inverse references from UISDL-C descriptions to UISDL-B implementationbindings are avoided since the number of component providers that can vary over time, which imposes therisk of invalid references and would require frequent updates of UISDL-C descriptions. Instead, the UIService repository (sect. 4) stores and updates these references.The possibility to dynamically select, bind, and even exchange component implementations delivered byUI Services <strong>do</strong>es not require them to be compatible on the technical interface level, which is ensured by theabstract interface definitions. However, interface compatibility alone <strong>do</strong>es mean that all implementationsprovide the same functionality. Therefore, also the functional equivalence of different componentimplementations for one abstract interface must additionally be considered. Since this is hardly possible toguarantee from a technical point of view, UISDL-C supports an organizational model based on a functionalclassification which allows component providers to express functional equivalence. A detailed discussion ofour functional classification approach and their definition goes beyond the focus of this paper. Briefly, wedefine one class per abstract interface definition, i.e. UISDL-C <strong>do</strong>cument that specifies the functionality to beprovided by its implementations. UISDL-C supports this classification through a mandatory reference to itsclass. For the same reason, the name of the abstract part of UISDL was chosen to be UISDL-Class.As motivated in the requirements, it is also necessary to provide means to declare functional extensionrelationships between two abstract interfaces as part of UISDL-C descriptions. In the drag-and-dropextension example, it is obvious that the Google Map implementation (which supports drag-and-drop), isfunctionally equivalent to the Yahoo Map (which <strong>do</strong>es not feature drag-and-drop support) in applicationsimplemented against the abstract Map UI interface. The presence of a functional extension is based on twocriteria: interface compatibility and functional equivalence of the extending interface's class to the class ofthe extended interface. Informally, by declaring an abstract component interface B to be a functionalextension of an abstract UI component interface A, it is expressed that B adds at least one element to the setI A of operations, properties, events, or data types defined in A, without redefining other elements in I A . I.e. Btechnically remains interface compatible with A. The second criterion of functional extension requiresimplementations of B to implement equivalent functionality for all elements in I A , i.e. to adhere to A's class,its superclass. Through this concept, we can specify that any implementation of B can be used as analternative for an implementation of A, thereby increasing the number of alternatives for the dynamicbinding. UISDL-C therefore features an optional superclass reference.178
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010Metadata for management, retrieval and <strong>do</strong>cumentation purposes can be added to UISDL-C and UISDL-B descriptions. Both support a keyword list for keyword-based indexing in the UI Service repository andglobal <strong>do</strong>cumentation. UISDL-C descriptions additionally allow <strong>do</strong>cumentation of each constituent of theabstract interface. UISDL-B supports hyperlinks to screenshots of the UI component, e.g. for its presentationby a UI Service repository browser, a list of devices that are supported by the component implementationincluding a suitability value to simplify context-aware UI Service selection. Furthermore, basic servicepricing information and a license text can be added for commercial purposes.3.4 UISDL-classThe syntax of UISDL-C is presented by the Map abstract interface description example in listing 1. Forreasons of brevity, only one example per element is shown. The attribute class of the root element denotes thefunctional classification of the abstract interface description. Furthermore, global <strong>do</strong>cumentation (line 2),metadata (lines 3-5), XML Schema data type definitions (lines 6-17), and the interface (lines 18-30)1 2 A UI Service class for map components3 4 map, maps, geo, orientation, directions, POI5 6 7 9 ...10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 The GeoCoordinates of the center of the map.21 22 ...23 24 25 26 ...27 28 29 30 31 Listing 1. UISDL-class examplespecifying the properties (lines 19-22), events (lines 23-25), and operations (lines 27-29) are defined in theUISDL-C. Properties, events, operations, and parameters are identified by unique names (name attributes).Properties and parameters are typed by XML Schema data type. When used as child elements of operation,parameter elements specify the operation's invocation and result parameters. As child elements of event, theyspecify data belonging to the event, e.g. the map center's geographic coordinate after its adjustment by theuser (centerChange event).3.5 UISDL-bindingThe syntax of UISDL-B is presented by a UI component implementation that uses the Google Map API toimplement the Map abstract interface description presented in sect. 3.4 in listing 2. The <strong>do</strong>cument iscomposed of global <strong>do</strong>cumentation (line 2), a reference to the implemented class (line 3, cp. sect. 3.4),metadata (lines 4-18): component screenshots, device classes the implementation supports, including s179
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISsuitability attribute to support the selection process for dynamic binding at runtime, keywords, licenseinformation, and pricing. The interface binding element (lines 19-49) specifies information necessary tointegrate, access, and manage the component life cycle at runtime for the specific implementation beingbound. The language attribute holds the programming language of the component implementation. Thebinding type attribute denotes the type of implementation binding used.The dependencies element (lines 20-23) specifies the libraries that must be included to use thecomponent. The elements constructor and destructor are utilized for component life-cycle management, therendering element specfies how the component is set visible. An accessor element exists for each componentproperty specified in the UISDL-C and specifies read and write access. For each event element in UISDL-C,the eventsink element specifies how event listeners are registered and unregistered. For each operation in theUISDL-C, the invocation element specifies how the operation is invoked. The attributes property, event, an<strong>do</strong>peration are references from UISDL-B to UISDL-C. They are generally based on the interface elementnames specified in the corresponding UISDL-C. Therefore, applications can be implemented against theabstract interface specification.By now, we have identified the two binding types code template and convention as being suitable forUISDL-B. The example in listing 2 uses code templates, which are applicable for script languages likeJavascript that support execution of code generated at runtime. Briefly, in the code templates, placeholdersenclosed by '@' symbols represent application-specific parts that must be replaced with application-specificvalues (constants, variables, pointers) before the code can be executed. Placeholder types to refer to events,properties, and parameters specified in the UISDL-C (e.g. @paramater:center@), or to the componentinstance (@:instance@) have been defined. This enables an application to pass these values to a codetemplate processor using the names in the UISDL-C. We have found these placeholder types to be sufficient.Code templates are enclosed in code elements (cp. fig. 2). The convention binding type directly maps theabstract interface specified in UISDL-C to a concrete implementation skeleton, e.g. through XSLT. Thecomponent implementation can in this case be managed and accessed with knowledge about the mappingrules. The mapping rules used must therefore be identifiable from the interface binding's binding typeattribute.4. RUNTIME ENVIRONMENT AND IMPLEMENTATIONA client-side thin server runtime (TSR) that provides the runtime mechanisms required to support integrationand dynamic binding of UI Services has been implemented for web browsers (Pietschmann et al. 2010). Itprovides RIAs with the necessary runtime mechanisms to dynamically bind UI component implementationsdescribed in UISDL-B, to manage their life-cycle, and to access them from client-side business logic. TheTSR supports the binding types code templates and convention. Furthermore, we realized a repository toregister, manage and retrieve UI components and to enable their global distribution.For UI component implementations described in UISDL-B, the TSR provides means to create, render,and destroy UI component instances, to access their properties, to add and remove event handlers, and toinvoke their operations in a uniform way. The selection of the UI Service to be bound is either <strong>do</strong>ne bypassing a UISDL-C class name or the URL of a UISDL-B to the TSR. It queries the repository to retrieve aUISDL-B <strong>do</strong>cument using AJAX. If a class name is used, the selection of an appropriate UISDL-B isdelegated to the repository and performed based on information about requesting device that is passed withthe query, including an option to preselect a concrete component implementation. Upon receiving theUISDL-B, the TSR creates the UI component instance.Application-specific information required by the Integration Manager, i.e. variables, constants, andpointers to event handler functions, are passed from the business logic via API calls programmed against theabstract UISDL-C interface specification, e.g. the name of the property to be set together with the new value,and an identifier by which the component instance is registered by the Integration Manager.To conveniently integrate and initialize UI component implementations, we have defined UI componentplaceholders that allow service selection information together with application-specific information bespecified as part of HTML <strong>do</strong>cuments which we term composition <strong>do</strong>cuments. The TSR is able to processcomposition <strong>do</strong>cuments, making the integration of UI Services without programming particularly easy.Details of the composition <strong>do</strong>cument are beyond the scope of this paper.180
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010The UIS repository is implemented as a Web Service that offers operations to register, search, anddistribute UISDL-C and UISDL-B descriptions. UISDL-C descriptions are registered based on their metainformation and classification, including the class/subclass relationship (cp. sect. 3). The repository alsostores UISDL-B descriptions. In the repository, they are associated with registered UISDL-C descriptionsbased on the class references they contain. When queried by the Integration Manager using a UISDL-C classname and device information, the repository is able to the select and return an appropriate UISDL-B<strong>do</strong>cument in response, or an error if no appropriate implementation binding was found.Another possibility is to use the repository to find UISDL-C or UISDL-B descriptions during theimplementation of RIAs that use UI Services. In this case, the possibility for a keyword-based search and theintegration of screenshots in UISDL-B have shown to be useful for browsing the repository.1 2 Google Map UI Service implementation3 /geo/map4 5 6 7 Google Map Component Preview8 http://uisprovider.org/maps/screenshots/Googlemap.png9 10 11 12 13 ...14 15 map, maps, geo, orientation, directions, Google16 Text of the license agreement.17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 @:instance@ = new GMap({width: @property:property.width@, height:26 @property:property.height@, title: @property:property.title@, center:27 @property:property.center@, zoomLevel: @property:property.zoomLevel@,28 mapType:@property:property.mapType@})29 30 @:instance@.destruct()31 32 @:instance@.render(@property:property.rendertargetid@)33 34 35 @:instance@.getWidth()36 37 ...38 39 40 @:instance@.on('centerChange', @event:event.centerChange@)41 42 43 @:instance@.un('centerChange', @event:event.centerChange@)44 45 46 47 @:instance@.addCustomMarker(@parameter:gLatLong@, @parameter:image@,48 @parameter:imageSize@, @parameter:sha<strong>do</strong>w@)49 50 Listing 2. UISDL-binding exampleTo validate our approach, two RIAs have been successfully implemented based on UISDL and the TSR: atravel planner application for public transport that retrieves timetable information from a web service backend and a real estate management application. Their UIs are built using UI Services that deliver tables, maps,181
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISchart viewers, and timetable query input UI components. Their application logic is implemented inJavaScript. Code templates and convention-based bindings are utilized in the UISDL-B <strong>do</strong>cuments of the UIServices. The implementation of these applications has shown that our concepts and design decisions forUISDL are sound and applicable for the description and distribution of the complex UI components used inthe prototypes. Also, we were able to verify that complex user interfaces for RIAs can be built based on UIServices and that UI Services can be easily integrated with client-side logic implemented in JavaScript aswell as web service based on the mechanisms provided by the TSR. Open issues are discussed in the nextsection.5. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORKIn this paper, we presented UISDL as a building block for UI Services. Furthermore, a runtime environmenthas been implemented that supports the proposed approach. The presented abstraction concepts and designdecisions, specifically the physical separation of abstract and concrete parts, have shown to be sound, suitableand complete for the description of UI Services. The binding concepts based on code templates andconventions have shown to work in practice. The data exchange between UI component implementationsbased on XML Schema instances allows for a maximum of programming language independence, but causesprocessing overhead and additional effort for data adapters, especially when existing UI components aremade available as UI service implementations. JSON may be an alternative as soon as schemata for JSONhave reached a level of maturity.Performance tests, semantic annotations, and details of the context-dependent selection of UI Serviceswill be subject to future work. Furthermore, the generalization of UISDL towards a unified language for logiccomponents and context access are under discussion in the CRUISe project.ACKNOWLEDGEMENTSThe CRUISe project is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research underpromotional reference number 01IS08034.REFERENCESDaniel, F. et al., 2009. Hosted Universal Composition: Models, Languages and Infrastructure in mashArt. In Laender,A.H.F., Castano, S., Dayal, U., Casati, F. & Oliverira, J.P.M. (eds), Conceptual Modeling - ER. Volume 5829/2009 ofLNCS. Berlin: Springer, pp. 428-443.Tsai, W.T. et al., 2008, Service-oriented user interface modeling and composition. Proceedings of the IEEE InternationalConference on e-Business Engineering (ICBE '08). Xi’an, China, pp. 21-28.Yu, J. et al., 2007, Mixup: A development and runtime environment for integration at the presentation layer.Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Web Engineering (ICWE'07). Como, Italy, pp. 479-484.Pietschmann, S. et al., 2010, A Thin-Server Runtime Platform for Composite Web Applications. Proceedings of the 5thInternational Conference on <strong>Internet</strong> and Web Applications and Services (ICIW 2010). Barcelona, Spain, pp. 390-395.Google, 2008, Google Gadgets Specification. Google Inc. [online] available at http://code.google.com/intl/en-EN/apis/gadgets/<strong>do</strong>cs/spec.html.Microsoft, 2010, XAML in WPF. Microsoft Corporation [online] available at http://msdn.microsoft.com/enus/library/ms747122.aspx.Cáceres, M., 2009, Widget Packaging and Configuration. W3C [online] available at http://www.w3.org/TR/widgets/.182
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010MAKING SENSE OF THE AFFORDANCE CONCEPT INTHE 3 RD HCI PARADIGMLara Schibelsky Go<strong>do</strong>y Piccolo* and Maria Cecília Calani Baranauskas***Fundação CPqD / IC - UNICAMP**IC/NIED - UNICAMPABSTRACTSince Norman’s appropriation of Gibson’s conception of affordance to explain the design of products and technologies,this mainstream HCI concept has changed to reflect the evolution in the artifacts we interact with. This paper sheds lighton how the concept of affordance has been transformed in keeping with the changes in the HCI field. An observationalstudy was conducted aiming at identifying physical, perceived, social, and motivational affordances of the iPad ® and of aTablet-PC. The study clarified how the different types of affordances can explain the relation between human andtechnology in this new technical and social scenario named 3 rd HCI paradigm.KEYWORDSPhysical affordances, social affordances, Human-Computer Interaction, HCI paradigms.1. INTRODUCTIONThe field of Human Computer Interaction (HCI) has developed along its last 30 years motivated by the nee<strong>do</strong>f understanding our relationship with computers and artifacts of technology in general. This relationship haschanged dramatically along that time, as a consequence of the technology design, which extrapolated thelimits of work environments, now being part of our life in almost all aspects of it. As a consequence,mainstream concepts should be rethought, as user and technology are part of a larger system - or set ofsystems. This movement of understanding design as a systemic issue has raised several debates withimplications on the fundamentals, methods and goals both for research and practice in the discipline.As Sellen et al. (2009) suggest in redefining the “H”, the “C”, and the “I” in face of the transformationsthe field has passed through, several levels of interaction should be taken into account: interactions on and inthe body, among people, between people and objects in the spaces of kiosks, rooms, buildings, streets an<strong>do</strong>ther public areas. Central to the understanding of interaction in all these levels are the physical and social“affordances” that technology can potentially enable.Since that Norman (1988) appropriated the concept of affordance from Gibson’s (1979) definition andapplied it to the design of products and technologies, this concept has been transformed and has fed a debateabout its meaning and use. This discussion originated a number of publications that explore the differencesbetween approaches, such as McGrenere & Ho (2000) which compared Gibson’s and Norman’s concepts andexpanded it in a framework, and O’Neill (2008) which elucidated how Gibson’s affordance works, aiming atemphasizing what he considered some author’s misappropriation of the original definition.The purpose of this paper is not to create a new comparison, but to shed light on how this term has beentransformed in keeping with the evolution in the way the human has been related to technology and thechanges in the HCI field. It is organized as follows: Section 2 presents a panorama of HCI evolution throughthe three paradigms and relates it to the transformations of the concept of affordance. Section 3 discusses fourdifferent categories of affordance considered in an observational study, described in Section 4. Discussion onresults is presented in Section 5, and, Section 6 concludes and points out future works.183
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADIS2. A PANORAMA OF HCI EVOLUTIONThe HCI history has been reviewed through three main <strong>do</strong>minant paradigms built in continuous transitions,motivated by the technology available at the time, the influence from related science fields and models andtheories used to explain those realities.The relation between humans and computers started in the 60’s, within the scenario provided bymainframes. As the computer graphics emerged, some usability requirements were recognized as necessaryto improve the relationship of the computer with its many users (Harper et al., 2008). This technical scenariohad hardly changed in the 80’s, when the Personal Computer was launched, bringing to HCI aspects ofengineering associated with human factors. All this period constituted what Harrison et al. (2007) named theHCI 1 st paradigm, whose main goal was to optimize the fit between humans and machines, developingpragmatic solutions in coupling them.In the 90’s, computer networks and mobility were part of the technological <strong>do</strong>main, moving the focus togroups working together, which constituted the focus of a 2 nd paradigm. “Theory focused on work settingsand interaction within well-established communities of practice. Situated action, distributed cognition andactivity theory were important sources of theoretical reflection, and concepts like context came into focus ofthe analysis and design of HCI. Rigid guidelines, formal methods, and systematic testing were mostlyaban<strong>do</strong>ned for proactive methods such as a variety of participatory design workshops, prototyping andcontextual inquiries.” (Bødker, 2006).Many questions related to the 2 nd paradigm, as well as its models and theories are still current issues inthe HCI field, as Bødker (2006) argues, while a 3 rd paradigm started to emerge: “technology spreads fromthe workplace to our homes and everyday life and culture.” (Harper et al., 2008).Current phenomena related to the use of technology are transforming the society: the hyper-connectivity –by keeping people closer to the others, it may mobilize crowds in a global way; the techno-dependency inany kind of activity; the desire to be in touch and capture information about everything; and the creativeengagement, building a society where everybody can be a content producer. People are increasinglyappropriating new digital tools, including illiterate and impaired users (Harper et. al, 2008).Towards 2020, the technology will also be changing, according to ITEA (2009): proliferation ofembedding technology in multiple devices; sensors as input; 3D or 4D as output; augmented (AR) and virtualreality (VR) applications; and physical machines sometimes replacing humans in interaction and decisionmaking. Some consequences of these changes are that “new elements of human life will be included in thehuman-computer interactions such as culture, emotion and experience.” (Bødker, 2006) (Harrison et al.,2007). Emotions are going to be part of context or input (ITEA, 2009); meaning is already constructedcollaboratively and interaction is influenced or perhaps even constructed by its varying physical and socialsituations (Harrison et al., 2007).In a different scientific research scenario, by the end of the 70’s, the concept of affordance was created byGibson (1979), in his ecological theory of perception. Once it was applied to HCI, it has been transformedfollowing the main trends represented by the three paradigms. Nowadays, the concept of affordance has beenapplied to other <strong>do</strong>mains such as cognitive robotics, supporting strategies when robots are interacting withobjects (Tekkotsu, 2010). This evolution in the concept is represented in Table 1, which summarizes the mainchanges in HCI field from the 70’s to what has been expected by the year of 2020 in terms of technologyavailable, construction of meaning, pre<strong>do</strong>minant influence from other fields, the main question that directsHCI researches, pre<strong>do</strong>minant models and theories.Starting from the original definition of affordance, the next section describes some of the main authors’views of the concept to improve our understanding on the relationship between humans and computers.3. TRANSFORMATIONS ON THE AFFORDANCE DEFINITIONGibson (1979) defined the concept of affordances in the ecological context to mean “[…] a direct result ofthe relationship between the objective physical properties of the environment and the subjective experience ofthe perceiving actor within that environment”. What we usually pay attention to is what an object affords us.Based upon Gestalt theories, Gibson states that affordances are perceived with no cognitive processing, and itis the highlight of his definition when comparing it to derived approaches.184
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010According to Gibson (1979), an affordance is unique for one person or animal, which makes it differentfrom a simple physical measure that is an object property. Affordances are objective, real and physical in away that "the affordance of something <strong>do</strong>es not change as the need of the observer changes"; we <strong>do</strong> not needto classify and label things in order to perceive what they afford.To O’Neill (2008), “Gibson is attempting to describe an affordance as an emergent property of theperceptual process consisting of the properties of the object itself and the perceptual capacities of theperceiver”. Different layouts afford different behaviors for different animals; a terrestrial surface, forexample, is climb-on-able, fall-off-able, get-underneath-able or bump-into-able relative to a specific animal.Gibson also defined the term social significance to describe what one person affords to other: “whatother persons afford comprises the whole realm of social significance for human beings. We pay the closestattention to the optical and acoustic information that specifies what the other person is, invites, threatens,and <strong>do</strong>es." (Gibson, 1979).Many authors appropriated Gibson’s original term for their own uses with significant differences in theconceptualization. The next section briefly explains some different author’s perspectives on the concept.3.1 Affordances in DesignTable 1. Synthesis of the evolution of HCI field and the concept of affordance60-70’s 80’s 90’s 2000’s 2010’s ...HCI Paradigm 1 1 st 2 nd 3 rdTechnology 2,3,4 Mainframes Personal computers Network MobilityConstruction ofmeaning 1Pre<strong>do</strong>minantinfluence 1Main questionModels andTheories 1Concept ofaffordanceUsers wereprofessionalsNon-functionalrequirements (e.g.usability)Computer graphicsemergedPragmatic approach.Ignore it unless itcauses a problemEngineeringHuman FactorsHow to optimize user’sinteraction with themachine? 1,5Systematic methods of testingEcological approach,independent of cognition(Gibson, 1977)Applied todesign, part ofperception(Norman,1988)Meaning interpretation in termsof information flowsCognitive scienceHow users might interactwith each other? 2Situated action, Distributed Cognition,Activity Theory, Ethno metho<strong>do</strong>logy,Qualitative approach, Action TheoryCan be associatedwith perception(Gaver, 1991)1 (Harrison et al., 2007); 2 (Harper et al., 2008); 3 (Bødker, 2006); 4 (ITEA, 2009); 5 (Sellen, 2009);Social affordance,cultural context(Stamper, 2001)Ubiquitous computing,Web 2.0, VR, AR,Interaction based ongestures, sensors, 3DIt is the focus,constructed on the fly,collaboratively, differentcontexts. Machinesreplacing humansEmbodied interaction,Meaning makingHow to address humanvalues into research anddesign? 2Emotion, Aesthetics,Pragmatic/culturalfocus on experienceSocial signifier(Norman,2008)Motivational affordance(Zhang, 2008)When Norman first applied the concept of affordance in design, he stated that his conceptualization “refers tothe perceived and actual properties of the thing” (Norman, 1988). Those properties determine how the thingcould possibly be used. Taking advantage of it, no labels or instructions are needed. Norman (2004) proposeda distinction between real affordances, those related to the physical properties of the world – which is closeto Gibson’s definition – and perceived affordances which are subjective representations in the mind.To Norman, the computer system, with its keyboard, display screen, pointing device affords pointing,touching, looking, and clicking on every pixel of the display screen – that is the real or physical affordance.E.g.: Figure 1a: a portable computer by Sony® that suggests movement and to handling with both hands.All that the user interface designer has available in graphical, screen-based interfaces are related toperceived affordances (Neris & Baranauskas, 2010). Affordance is not the simple presence of an element onscreen, but a suggestion or a clue about how to use it. Figure 1b illustrates a perceived affordancehighlighting a <strong>do</strong>nation button in a web interface. As Norman (2008) explains: “[…] To Gibson, affordancesdid not have to be perceivable or even knowable – they simply existed. When I introduced the term into185
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISdesign in 1988 I was referring to perceivable affordances. […].”. Other distinctions between theseapproaches are listed in Table 2 (McGrenere & Ho, 2009).Norman brought the concept to HCI in theTable 2. Comparison of Gibson’s x Norman’s affordancestransition of the 1 st and 2 nd paradigms, when theinfluence of human factors (and cognitivepsychology) and the goal to fit the relationshipbetween the human and computer were <strong>do</strong>minant.The example of Figure 1c shows that in the 3 rdparadigm, when technologies such as augmented andvirtual reality are present, the distinction betweenphysical and perceived affordances is not so clearanymore. In this example, an interface may beprojected anywhere, but the affordance to touch thedial with one finger is preserved.Gibson’s AffordanceOfferings or action possibilities inthe environment in relation to theaction capabilities of an actorIndependent of the actor’sexperience, knowledge, culture,or ability to perceiveExistence is binary – it exists or it<strong>do</strong>es not existNorman’s AffordancePerceived properties that mayor may not actually existSuggestions or clues as tohow to use the propertiesCan be dependent on theexperience, knowledge, orculture of the actorCan make an action difficultor easySince Norman’s view, Hartson (2003), Vyas et al. (2006), Gaver (1991), Stamper (2001), Zhang (2006)among others considered cognitive aspects in their understanding of affordance and continued to expand theconcept including human aspects such as experience, knowledge, culture, and the social characteristic.Gaver (1991), for instance, proposes that a combination of affordance with the perceptual information aperson has about it suggests potentials for action, making interaction easy to learn and use. According to him,“affordances are properties of the world that are compatible with and relevant for the actors’ interaction,which, when perceptible, offer a link between the actors’ perception and action.”. Figure 1d is an example ofan affordance oriented by a particular situation: a washing machine was used to build a <strong>do</strong>g house, anunusual application that would hardly be afforded without an external motivation. Gaver’s proposal is also inthe transition between the 1 st and 2 nd paradigms, still applied to optimize the human–computer interaction.After years of confusion and misuse of the term by designers as Norman himself states (Norman, 1999),in 2008 he suggested replacing affordance with the term signifier. He argues that “the perceivable part of anaffordance is a signifier, and if deliberately placed by a designer, it is a social signifier” and asks to “forgetthe term affordances: what people need, and what design must provide, are signifiers. Because most actionswe <strong>do</strong> are social, the most important class of these are social signifiers. […] Social signifiers replaceaffordances, for they are broader and richer, allowing for accidental signifiers as well as deliberate ones,and even for items that signify by their absence.”. To exemplify, Norman (2008) describes the situationwhere the absence of people on a train platform may be a social signifier indicating that the train has alreadyleft. The social signifier includes culture and experiences, similarly to Stamper’s social affordance idea.Figure 1a. Physicalaffordance of a portablecomputerFigure 1b. Perceivedaffordance: highlight of abutton (www.paypal.com)3.2 Stamper’s Social AffordanceFigure 1c. Ex. of a gesture andaugmented reality UI (MITMedia Lab, 2010)Figure 1d. Example ofspecific perceivedaffordance (Street use,2010)To Stamper (2004), “All organisms, including human agents construct their perceptions of the only worldthey can know through their actions; they have to discover (or be taught, or inherit by instinct) whatinvariant repertoires of behaviour the world affords them (= the affordances); then they populate theirreality with those affordances that help them to survive”. Stamper associates the physical affordances withGibson's definition – linked to properties of the physical environment. They are social in nature, because theyare dependent on the knowledge that has been built up and handed <strong>do</strong>wn from generation to generation in asociety. Social affordances are repertories of behavior tuned to the social environment, valid for a certaincommunity, with a start and finish time, and a starting and finishing authority (Gazendam & Liu, 2005).186
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010The photos in Figure 2 illustrate the idea of a social affordance. Once aperson is seen pointing to a map as in Fig 2a, it is clear that this person islocalizing himself/herself or indicating to someone else a specific point inthe map; on the other hand, when a person is pointing to a map with anelectronic device (Fig 2b), it is not clear what the social affordance iswhile this behavior is not part of the repertory of the community yet. Inthis specific situation, one could guess that he is taking a picture, but hecould be (actually is) using an augmented reality application on the map.Social affordance is also related to the idea of how an artifact canstimulate individual or group usage. Figure 3 is a picture of people using anaugmented reality application, which displays on the mobile overlaid information related to the printed map.Morisson et al. (2009) compared this solution based on the physical map with another application runningstrictly on the electronic device and verified that the physical solution had a great potential to group peopleand to engage a collaborative work due to the social affordance of the big printedmap.Stamper’s Social Affordance and Norman’s Social signifiers appeared atdifferent times, but both under the 2 nd paradigm influence, when culture,context, experience and life in society started to be taken into consideration byHCI.3.3 Affordance and MotivationMotivation is an important aspect of human being, when analyzing perception and action; it explains whatcauses behavior and why behavior varies in its intensity (Zhang, 2008). Considering that, Zhang (2008)suggested the term motivational affordance that comprises the properties of an object that determine whetherand how it can support one’s motivational needs. She classified some of the most important human’smotivational sources and needs to be considered in design to evoke motivational affordances: a)Psychological and social needs: autonomy and the self, which refers to the representation of self-identity;relatedness, leadership and followship, considering social and community life. b) Cognitive motives (beliefsand expectations): in respect to the user’s competence and opportunities for achievement. c) Affects andemotions, which orchestrate human reaction.The Piano Stair (Volkswagem, 2009) shown in Figure 4 is an exampleof exploring humans’ motivation to stimulate a behavior. By playingsounds like piano keys, people feel invited to create their own song, whichinvolves challenge, identity and also social interaction. These featuresattract people to choose this stair instead of the escalator most of thetimes.Involving social, cultural and personal aspects together with affect oninteraction, Zhang’s definition of affordance goes beyond the 2 ndparadigm, and may be important to address concepts related to the 3 rdparadigm.3.4 Relating Different ApproachesFigure 2a. and 2b. Social affordancein pointing to a mapFigure 3. Collaborativeuse of an AR applicationFigure 4. Motivational affordancesin the Piano stairGibson (1979) first defined affordance as a property of the relationship between the actor and the object.Gaver (1991) concurs with it, but he disconnects affordances from the perceptual information the person hasabout them. Both Norman (1988), with his concept of physical and perceived affordance, and Zhang (2008),consider affordances as properties of the object. To Stamper (2001) and Norman, with his concept of socialsignifier (2008), the social affordances are part of the culture of a society.Aiming at understanding how these different concepts may be useful in design and taking into account thecurrent HCI needs and paradigms, an observational study was conducted as described in the next section.187
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADIS4. AN EXPLORATORY STUDY ON AFFORDANCESAs part of an activity in an HCI class, 26 subjects were invited to identify the affordances of two differentartifacts: a Tablet-PC (in tablet mode) and the Apple iPad®,both known but still uncommon artifacts. The study happenedfew days after the launch day of the iPad in the United States,providing a single opportunity to observe the first timeinteraction with the device. The students were already familiarwith Norman’s and Gibson’s concept of affordance.The classroom was split into 2 groups: the first one with 14students analyzed the iPad first; and the second group with 12students analyzed first the Tablet-PC.Both groups first explored individually the artifact, passingit to each other in the same group; then they were asked towrite <strong>do</strong>wn an adjective that expressed their first impressionabout the artifact. The first impressions were collected only forthe first analyzed device to avoid a comparative opinion. After exploring the first device they interact with,they were asked to identify affordances classifying them according to the criteria described in Table 3. In thesecond moment, they changed the devices to repeat the analysis and to identify affordances of the secondartifact.4.1 Preliminary ResultsTable 3. Criteria to observe the four typesof affordancesType ofaffordancePhysicalPerceivedSocialMotivationalCriteria to observePhysical properties of the objectMental representation, designRelated to life in societySatisfaction of motivational needs:autonomy, identity, challenge,feedback, social relations, to influenceand to be influenced by someone,emotions.The identified affordances of both groups were compiled according to its category. A summary of the mostfrequent mentions is presented in Table 4 ordered by number of occurrence and illustrated in Figure 5.Negative aspects are preceded by the symbol (-).Clearly, the students considered other devices as reference in their first interaction. Both artifacts werecompared with a traditional Laptop ou PC ( 1 ) and the iPad with a mobile phone ( 2 ) – referred to as “a bigiPhone” by some students – on identifyind affordances and also on declaring their first impressions (i.e., big,light and agile for the iPad and heavy, malleable, and flexible for the Tablet-PC).The interaction with the iPad created expectations and curiosity. It may explain why the iPad had astronger influence in the Tablet PC analysis than the opposite ( 3 ). Some affordances of the Tablet-PC wereobserved to be more frequent when the iPad was analyzed first. This fact, in addition to the number ofidentified affordances of the Tablet-PC that explicitly compared it with the iPad, was not noticed on the iPadanalysis when the Tablet-PC was analyzed first.188
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010The novelty aspect of iPad was pre<strong>do</strong>minant in declaring the first impressions of it, and most adjectivescould be classified as motivational or social (strange, stylish, fresh, modern, discovery, motivating, funny). Itis interesting to notice that the novelty sometimes was referred to as “strangeness”, which can be explainedby the fact that both artifacts were taken as a working tool by some participants( 4 ).4.2 DiscussionTable 4. Summary of identified affordancesAffordance iPAD Tablet PCPhysicalPerceivedSocialMotivationalTouch screen (Fig 5a), hold with both hands (Fig 5b),fragile, weight that suggests strength/value/complexity,look for buttons 1 , handwriting 5 , big 2 , button – sensor orpress? (Fig 5c), different 1,2 .Pen, on table using 3 (Fig 5d), heavy 3 , swivel screen, like alaptop 1 , excessive number of buttons 3 , drawing (Fig 5e), lesslight and practical than iPad 3 , save space hiding the keyboard 1 ,cannot be used like a book or notebook 3 .Apple’s mental model, unique button (Fig 5c), inviting Keyboard/touchpad 1 (Fig 5e), size of icons <strong>do</strong>es not suggesticons (Fig 5f), lack of information 1 , more options than touch screen 1 , notes in presentations 4 , screen swivel only to oneiPhone ® because it is bigger 5 , missing references or side (Fig 5h), work 4 , cannot be touched with another objectsinteraction standards 1,2 , feedback of movements, look for (Fig 5i), less strange compared with PCs 3 .a keyboard 1, photos (Fig 5g).Multiple users, symbol of social status (and segregation), Using in classroom 4 , its physical aspects <strong>do</strong> not invite to amore powerful than iPhone 2 and more restrictive than a shared interaction - although it is bigger than iPad 3 , swivelPC 1 , inhibitor to be used on public (fear of being stolen), screen allows to share information (Fig 5h), experience withscreen rotation to share content (like a paper) (Fig 5b), pen and touch screen, can be touched by multiple usersshare personal stuff (Fig 5g).(Fig 5j), work/study 4 , photos/videos/music like iPad 3 .(-)indifference, portable 1 , toy, novelty, Apple’s prestige, Good to draw (Fig 5e), work activities 4 , (-)artificial writing, (-)(-)missing control of applications and operating frustration: it’s not possible to use on the table as a tabletsystem 1,4 , challenging when discovering its because the angle of view, a little bit more than a laptop 1 , touchfunctionalities, motivates touch screen (Fig 5f), showing screen makes it different 1 , pen attracts curiosity 1 , fragile, (-)personal stuff (Fig 5g), (-)limited to some tasks 1 , (-)no no-Linux friendly 1 , good to avoid repetitive stress injury 1,4 .software to communicate 2 .Although they have some similarities, such as the multi-touch mechanism, these artifacts have completelydifferent purpose: the tablet-PC is a laptop with some drawing functionality, while the iPad is neither a laptopnor a mobile phone, it has a new concept originally designed for ebook reading and experiencing the Web.Figure 5. Examples of identified affordances in the exploratory studyThis physical affordance of the iPad clearly influenced the identification of the perceived andmotivational affordances (which includes expectations): because it is bigger than the iPhone, people tend toexpect more features on it − considered a motivational affordance in a negative way. On the other hand, theaesthetic of iPad was the first most present positive motivational affordance and the natural interaction(feedback of moviment) observed in the perceived affordances also influenced the motivational aspects.The Tablet PC was more associated to their pen based experience (from drawing and writing on paper).Seen as a working tool, it was referred to as “a laptop with something else”. Although considered heavy alsoon first impressions declarations, aspects of fragility appeared as physical affordances. Physical aspects189
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADIScreated limitations on social affordances: even being bigger than the iPad, it <strong>do</strong>es not suggest sharinginteraction, mainly because of the angle of screen viewing that is restrictive. The size of icons suggested theuse of the pen in the laptop mode (instead of tablet mode) on perceived affordances. The subjects alsoconsidered it “less strange than the iPad” taking into account its similarity with a tradicional laptop.The social affordance of iPad was mostly associated with the brand and social status. Some physicalaspects reinforce the idea of a valuable device. Recent phenomena like hyper-connectivity and technodependency,which can be still more present into the group of participants − Computer Science students −,were taken into account on social affordance and, once again, reflected on motivational affordances.Besides drawing, the tablet’s social and motivational affordances are repeatedly related to its formal andwork-related uses in classrooms, presentations and in taking notes. Relating it with the declared firstimpressions, the device can be seen as a more versatile laptop.The identified motivational affordances suggested that this concept should not be taken in isolation; itmay have direct consequences of the other three concepts of affordance, as exemplified below:• Physical: related to attractiveness and affection. Aesthetic, flexibility, portability (weight and size);• Perceived: associated to challenging, feedback: Invitation to use touch screen (or the pen), naturalinteraction, friendly user interface.• Social: related to identity, autonomy and social relations: prestige associated to the device or thebrand, identification of being a technical or digital arts working tool, sharing or not information.The current trends like using portable devices and ubiquitous technologies highlights the importance ofphysical affordances that the desktops <strong>do</strong> not have. Aspects like how to handle, carry or manipulate artifactsare critical to the technology acceptation and appropriation. The iPhone 4 ® is an example of the importanceto consider the physical affordance on design process. Holding the iPhone at the bottom left-hand cornercauses signal reception problem. This constraint frustrated users and compelled Apple to offer a special caseand to advise users to hold it in a different way.According to this analysis, the four different views of affordances were seen as important andcomplementary to understand and evaluate the first impression a person may have on exploring a newtechnology. Physical and social affordances are central to understand the main aspects that were noticed andperceived by the person, and as Sellen (2009) states, to understand several levels of interactions. Theperceived affordance is a warranty of understandability of the user interface. And the motivationalaffordances can help aggregating them, making it possible to understand how these affordances cancontribute to interaction being part of each person’s motivations and social interaction in the 3 rd paradigm .5. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORKThe 3 rd HCI paradigm brings a set of new challenges to the field, such as aggregating human values to theuser interface, but some aspects of the 1 st and 2 nd paradigms still need to be considered when designinginteractions. The perceived affordance is strongly related to some aspects of the 1 st and 2 nd HCI paradigmsthat must be preserved in designing interaction that makes sense to its target audience, creating technologiesthat are easy to use and easy to learn. The concept of motivational affordance seems to be suitable to the 3 rdHCI paradigm, once it is associated with human values and their desires and concerns, in a social, economic,and political ecology (Sellen, 2009).The concept of affordance has been applied to the interaction design in different ways since Norman’sfirst appropriation, and it has been transformed according to the technical and social contexts of usingtechnology in daily life. The observational study made it clear that different views of affordance may coexist,such as physical, perceived, social, and motivational affordances, and their correlation can beespecially useful to understand how the main aspects of a technology can be associated to each human’smotivation, an important mechanisms that drives humans’ choices.In continuity to this work, we intend to focus on motivational affordances, the way they correlate to theothers, how they might explain humans’ affective reactions, impacting on interface design and evaluation.190
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010REFERENCESBødker, S. 2006. When second wave HCI meets third wave challenges. Proc. of the 4th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer interaction: Changing Roles. ACM, New York, NY, 1-8.Gaver, W. 1991. Technology affordances. Proc. of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems:Reaching Through Technology. CHI '91. ACM, New York, NY, 79-84.Gazendam, M., Liu, K. 2005. The evolution of organisational semiotics: A brief review of the contribution of RonaldStamper. Studies in organisational semiotics. Dordrecht. Kluwer Academic Publishers.Gibson, J.J. 1979. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.Harper, R. et al. 2008. Being Human: Human-Computer Interaction in the Year 2020. Microsoft Research.Harrison, S. et al. 2007. The Three Paradigms of HCI. Extended Abstracts CHI 2007.Hartson, H. 2003. Cognitive, physical, sensory, and functional affordances in interaction design. Behaviour & IT , 22(5).ITEA. Roadmap for <strong>Software</strong>-Intensive Systems and Services, 3 rd edition, 2009.Sellen, A. et al. 2009. Reflecting human values in the digital age. Communications. ACM 52, 3 (Mar. 2009), 58-66.McGrenere, J., Ho, W. 2000. Affordances: Clarifying and Evolving a Concept. Proc. of Graphics Interface 2000.MIT Media Lab. 2010. Sixth Sense. http://www.media.mit.edu/research/highlights/sixthsense-wearable-gesturalinterface-augment-our-world.Accessed in 31/08/2010.Morrison, A. et al. 2009. Like bees around the hive: a comparative study of a mobile augmented reality map. Proc. of the27th Int. Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems CHI '09. ACM, New York, NY, 1889-1898.Neris, V., Baranauskas, C. 2010. User Interface Design informed by Affordances and Norms Concepts. Proc. of The 12thInt.Conference on Informatics and Semiotics in Organisations (ICISO 2010).Norman, D. 1988. The Design of Everyday Things. New York, Doubleday.Norman, D. 1999. Affordance, conventions, and design. Interactions 6, 3 (May. 1999), 38-43.Norman, D. 2004. Emotional design: why we love (or hate) everyday things. New York: Basic Books.Norman, D. 2008. Simplicity is not the answer. Interactions, 15 (5). 45-46.O'Neill, S. 2008. Interactive media: the semiotics of embodied interaction. Lon<strong>do</strong>n: Springer.Stamper, R. K. 2001. Organisational semiotics: Informatics without the computer? Information, organisation andtechnology: Studies in organisational semiotics. Boston, MA: Kluwer Academic Publishers. 115-171.Stamper, R., et al. 2004 Semiotic Methods for Enterprise Design and IT Applications. Proc. of the 7th Int. Workshop onOrganisational Semiotics, 190-213.Street Use. http://www.kk.org/streetuse/. Accessed in 10/08/2010.Tekkotsu. 2010. Cognitive Robotics. http://www.tekkotsu.org/education.html. Accessed in 10/08/2010.Volkswagen .2009. The fun theory. http://www.thefuntheory.com/piano-staircase. Accessed in 10/08/2010.Vyas, D., et al. 2006. Affordance in interaction. Proc. of the 13th European Conference on Cognitive Ergonomics: Trustand Control in Complex Socio-Technical Systems. 92-99.Zhang, P. 2007. Toward a Positive Design Theory: Principles for Designing Motivating Information and CommunicationTechnology. Designing Information and Organizations with a Positive Lens. Elsevier.191
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISDEVELOPING A MODEL TO FACILITATE SEARCHENGINE OPTIMIZATION OF WEBSITES BYNON-IT PROFESSIONALSDaniel Kappler* and Paul Darbyshire***University of Liverpool, Laureate Online Education*Laureate Online Education, B.V., De Entree 59-67 1101 BH Amsterdam Z.O, The Netherlands**School of Management and Information Systems, Victoria University**PO. Box 14428 Melbourne City MC, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, 8001ABSTRACTSearch Engine optimization attempts to optimize website content in order to get to the top position of the Search EngineResults Page (SERP). Over the years search engine algorithms have had to be changed as spamming attempts such askeyword stuffing, or the use of link farms eroded the importance of relevant content to favor the content offered byindividuals using these procedures. For enterprises which are operating websites, the promotion of their presence is avital part of successful marketing. For the average website owner or manager it seems very difficult to decide whatprocedures have to be applied to make a website’s presence more successful. Out-dated procedures are still widely used,so enterprises have a very low chance to reach the <strong>Internet</strong> users through standard searches who are looking for theproducts or services they offer. This paper discusses the development of a model to facilitate non-IT professionals (inparticular SME's), in gaining an understanding of the details of Search Engine Optimization and equip them with theskills for performing these tasks. The model is constructed with feedback loops to allow for the ongoing optimizationrequired in a continual changing environment. We evaluate the model with three company websites which will beanalyzed and recommendations will be given to improve the content and source code of selected pages. The websiteowners or managers will be given instructions to implement the recommended optimization over a specific period. Thefeedback loops will help show if the suggested procedures have been implemented, and how these were handled.KEYWORDSSearch Engine Optimization, Model, SME's. Keyword Search1. INTRODUCTIONWithin the last decade the way that consumers have been searching for products and services has changedprofoundly. For a typical online shop, operating a website has been always essential, but not for enterpriseswhich have been used to acquiring new customers in the traditional way (Georgiou.and Stefaneas 2002). Inhighly developed technology areas of the world the PC is the main instrument for finding information. Thebig players have learned to cope with the changing search engine algorithms and made their websites visible,but smaller enterprises are often left behind. Yet, he average website owner believe that having an onlinepresence is enough to attract new customers. There is still a common misconception that it is sufficient tohave a few Meta tags in the source code which describe the company’s products and services., however, thatthere are still an alarming number of web pages which <strong>do</strong> not even have a title.For companies who want to improve their websites it is often difficult to know where to start. Oftendubious Search Engine Optimization(SEO) providers take advantage of the website owner’s lack of basicknowledge. There have been cases where enterprises bought an SEO package, hoping to get a top ranking onthe Search Engine Results Page (SERP) of the major search engines. This might only work for a short period,until search engine algorithms recognize the spamming attempts, and then punish the site by <strong>do</strong>wngrading itsrank, or in worst case banning the site from the indexes at all (Ross 2008). Generally, the website owners ormanagers who are non-IT professional need to be provided with clear step by step instructions how tooptimize their web presence. An enterprise which has neglected the optimization of its website first needs to192
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010recognize the necessity of improvement. Once the enterprise is aware of the potentials it needs to beinstructed how SEO best practices have to be implemented.In the following sections we discuss the development of a model to aid in the facilitation of non-ITprofessionals (in particular SME's), in gaining an understanding of the details of Search Engine Optimizationand equip them with the skills for performing these tasks. This will help improve the overall penetration oftheir Web sites. The model is constructed with feedback loops to allow for the ongoing optimization requiredin a continual changing environment. We evaluate the model by applying its techniques to three selectedcases where an optimization promises to improve a website's ranking, and therefore increase the website'straffic. Evaluating the results will show if the implemented improvements will lead to a more successful webpresence of these selected enterprises. It is equally important to find out if procedures for optimizing websitescan be reproduced, and if they can be applied the same way in the near future. These evolving technologieswill be also critically evaluated.2. BRIEF LITERATURE REVIEWWebmasters, developers, programmers and SEO experts have been learning to live with the way searchengines absorb and present the available information on <strong>Internet</strong>, but the website owner often remainsdisoriented. Usually website owners and webmasters have to work together to make an enterprise's websitevisible. Scanlan (2008) clearly demonstrates that when someone searches for products or services and yoursite <strong>do</strong>es not appear on the first page of search results, than your site is considered to be invisible. This is aharsh reality as usually there are only 10 places available per page. Ghose and Yang (2008) declare that“SEO refers to the process of tailoring a website to optimize its unpaid (or ‘organic’) ranking for a given setof keywords or phrases”. Organic optimization means that no advertisement campaigns have been used. Thesuccess depends fully on the optimization of the content, site structure, and external and inbound links.Generally, non-organic optimization falls under the definition of Search Engine Marketing (SEM). SearchEngine Optimization is all about making the pages of a website visible for search engine spiders. To startwith the optimization the actual performance of the website has to be analyzed. Important factors are thenumber of indexed pages, inbound links and PageRank. The latter factor depends on the popularity and ageof the pages. Scanlan (2008) recommended that the goal of the optimization is to be at least two units ahea<strong>do</strong>f the PageRank of your closest competitor. According to Brin and Page (1998) PageRank was a newapproach how the web pages were ranked.Much of Search Engine Optimization is centered on the selection of popular keywords and phrases.Usually the web page content already provides keywords which can be used for optimization. Once a list ofkeyword has been created it can be expanded by brainstorming. King (2008, p.13) recommendedbenchmarking competitor’s websites to see which keywords they use, and also to include plurals, splits,stems, synonyms and common misspellings. For the website owner or manager there are various free onlinetools available for the keyword research. King (2008) mentions that these free tools are limited compared topaid services like Wordtracker. For ambitious website operators and SEO professionals he recommendedusing Wordtracker for streamlining the process of key phrase discovery. The ultimate goal in SEO is “todiscover the primary key phrase that accurately describes the overall business, product, or service but whichstill has adequate search demand” (King 2008, p.15).Keywords which are placed in the URL and title of a web page have the highest impact on search enginespiders. Also keywords should be also included in the Meta section of the source code. Experience has shownthat keywords placed in Meta description have more value then those in the Meta keywords. The reason forthis is that in recent years many webmasters were abusing this section of the source code by keywordstuffing. Therefore search engine algorithms had to be changed to disregard such spamming attempts. Searchengines today <strong>do</strong>n't put too much emphasis on the keyword Meta tag, as it is largely ignored. Thereforecritical keywords and phrases should embedded within bold tags and heading tags. Also the use of keywordsis recommended in anchor text and hyperlinks. Using these tags puts more emphasizes on the selectedkeywords and phrases, and improves the chance to be indexed by search engines.(Rognerud 2008)While, SEO is largely focused on the selection of keywords, and link building, any gains in these areascan be degraded by an unfavorable site design, and overloaded source code. A site design which is userfriendly is not always search engine robot friendly. Graphical enhanced websites using JavaScript or Flash193
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADIStechnology can be a barrier for search engine spiders. In such cases challenge is then to change the sourcecode to make the site more discoverable (Walter 2008).. The optimization of the source code is usuallydifficult to understand by a website owner or manager who is not an IT professional. One way to check if asite structure <strong>do</strong>es not oppose any barriers to search engines is by disabling the JavaScript and CSS functionsto see if all content is still available. When designing or optimizing a website a progressive enhancement isrecommended. By keeping the structure (HTML), presentation (CSS), and behavior (JavaScript) separate thecontent remains accessible to search engine spiders (Walter 2008).If an enterprise hires a SEO specialist for optimizing its Web presences, or tries to get the job <strong>do</strong>ne byitself, then it is vital to specify Web metrics. To assist in analyzing online traffic, indexed pages, linkpopularity and PageRank, various software packages and online tools are available. With their standardizedreports typically user sessions and details, and the quality of the website’s source code can be determined.For marketing strategies it is important to know how users access the pages, and from where they come. Butsome limitations have to be taken into account when interpreting data from server log files. Among theselimitations are cached pages which are not logged by the server, search engine robots requests or the truelocation of the visitors. (Weischedel and Huizingh 2006). Even though the website owner has to anticipateimprecise results, the general trend of the performance should be observed. Some pages might perform betterthan others. By monitoring the entering and the exit pages, and keeping an eye how long visitors spend oneach page will give an idea what keeps the visitors interested, and what might cause them to leave your site(Rognerud 2008).3. MODEL FOR SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATIONThe model for Search Engine Optimization was developed from the literature and involves the stepwiseprocess of search engine optimization, to be undertaken by following a number of stages. The actual modelitself consists of five stages which have been adapted from the classic 'Waterfall Model' of softwaredevelopment (Royce 1970). The classic stages have been renamed somewhat to reflect their roles in thecontext of the model, see Figure 1, with descriptions below. The selection of the modified waterfall modelseemed natural as a framework for an SEO model due to the iterative, sequential and compartmentalizednature of the task. The iterative nature of Search Engine Optimization is very well represented by thefeedback loop contained in the modified waterfall model to that originally proposed by Royce.Figure 1. Adapted Waterfall Model for SEO• Requirements – data needs to be collected to find out how SEO has been handled by SMEs, and howsearch engines in general weight online content. Here it will be also described what tools andsoftware will be required to achieve the objectives.• Specification – the competition and the actual current state of the website performance will beanalyzed before the objectives can be specified. Here the keywords matching the content will bespecified which will be the basis for a successful implementation.194
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010• Source Code Optimization – This stage incorporates the implementation of the defined keywordsand phrases from the previous stage, and the widely neglected optimization of the source codeeffectiveness. The same program which was used for defining the enterprise’s market position willbe also useful for analyzing the website performance with regard to source code effectiveness andeliminating errors• Offsite Optimization – At this stage of the optimization the persons involved in the process will beasked to actively popularize the presence oft their website. This will be achieved by bookmarkingthe web pages in various social bookmark services, registering the site to online indexes, andrequests to webmasters of partner-sites to place back links.• Testing – To measure the effectiveness of the suggested implementation website operators need tobe provided with tools. To facilitate the introduction of testing the performance, these tools need tobe readily obtainable. In this case it is recommend using the Web CEO program, and selected onlineservices. Before and after the optimization the same tools will be used to receive results which willbe based on the same measurement.The data required to start the optimization process will be provided by a preliminary questionnaire whichis supplied to company owners and managers who are interested in optimizing their websites. This data willbe necessary to analyze how the Search Engine Optimization has been handled in the past, if any, and if thewebsite operators are aware of the importance of their online presence and competition. To measure theeffectiveness of the suggested implementation website operators need to be provided with tools. To facilitatethe introduction of testing the performance, these tools need to be readily obtainable. In this case it isrecommend using the Web CEO program, and selected online services. Before and after the optimization thesame tools will be used to receive results which will be based on the same measurement.SEO InventoryPerformance testAnalysecompetitionKeyword researchand selectionRestart processOptimizing sourcecodeOff-siteoptimizationAcceptance testand evaluationFigure 2. Iterative nature of the Model and Optimization ProcessFigure 2 Shows the high-level flow of the steps in application of the the model, indicating that the modelis an iterative one which reflects the nature of the SEO process. Thus optimization may need to be performedagain over time. The feedback loop in Figure 2 from the final stages of acceptance testing and evaluation ofthe recent optimizations, feed back into the initial performance testing before optimization.4. TESTING THE MODELThe model was tested against three SME websites which showed a possibility for improvement during theoptimization phase. The SME's chosen were similar companies in that they all dealt in language training.195
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADIS• FSTS Sprachreisen (Language Trip Courses). The website, www.fsts.at had been online since May2000. The website already had a Google PageRank of 5.• Deutschinstitut (German Language Institute). The company website is www.deutschinstitut.at whichhas been online since May January 2004. The website had a Google PageRank of 4.• SALT Pro Skills and Language Training. The company’s website is at website www.salt-pro.comand has been online for 2 years. The website had a Google PageRank of 3All three companies had a potential for improvement by applying optimization techniques. The detailedsteps taken during the optimization process, by applying the Model discussed in the previous section were:Installation of the Tools: The website owners were instructed how to install Google Analytics and WebCEO. At the end of the SEO Inventory stage, the website operators were required to answer questionsregarding the installation process. These questions were be included in the SEO Inventory feedback.SEO Inventory: For monitoring the progress of the optimization and noting changes in the websiteperformance, basic data was be required: number of visitors per day; average time visitors spend to look atpages; percentage of new accesses; percentage of visits through search engines; number of indexed pages;number of inbound links; PageRank.SEO Inventory Feedback: It was important to learn if website owners or managers were able to install therequired programs and tools to benchmark their website, and compare the performance to their competitors.Additionally, it was a learning process in how to deal with the SEO process.Keyword Research: The website operators were instructed how to research for suitable keywords. Thefirst step was to select the appropriate tools which gave valuable information about a website's current stateregarding the keyword selection. For the 3 case studies different online services and the program Web CEOwere used. One important factor of a successful optimization is the density of keywords used on a web page.Among web designers and SEO experts a value of 2 to 5 percent is accepted. If the density of a keyword isbelow 2 percent of the content, then web page <strong>do</strong>es not seem relevant enough to be listed on a Search EngineResults Page (SERP). A value over 5 percent can be already classified as spam attempt, and be <strong>do</strong>wngradedby search engines.Analyzing Competitors: After popular keywords and phrases have been defined, the website operatorshave to define their closest competitors. Here the enterprises will be confronted with the reality. It isimportant that popular keyword combinations will be tested for determining the web page’s ranking on theSearch Engine Results Page (SERP).Selecting and Placing the Keywords: Website owners or managers learned the importance of selectingand placing the appropriate keyword in the pages content. In some cases the website operator was not be ableto edit the page source code which was necessary to optimize the title and Meta tags. In such cases the taskwas given to an IT professional who was instructed to edit the section of the page(s).Finalizing the Keyword Research and Implementation Stage : The process will be evaluated afterrecommendations were given to the website owners or managers how to use appropriate keywords toimprove the SERP. The participants will have to answer questions like:• what were the prominent keywords on the main page• what online tools were used to find popular keywords and phrases• what programs and tools were used to benchmark their competitors websites• what pages of their website were optimized• what keywords and phrase were used for optimization• how keywords were emphasized in the pages source code• how many pages were optimized• who participated in the keyword research• who implemented the keyword optimizationOptimizing Source Code: An optimized source code is one of the major preconditions for being indexedby search engine spiders, and to get a good ranking on a Search Engine Results Page (SERP). For the non-ITprofessional not familiar with (X)HTML it can be difficult to identify source code which could be optimized.The selection and placing of the keywords might be already challenging for the average website owner ormanager. For that reason the cooperation with IT professionals is needed. The person who designed andprogrammed the website has to analyse, and if necessary optimize the source code.196
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010• The website owner can use a check-list to verify everything possible has been <strong>do</strong>ne to make surethat all the pages have been made visible for search engine spiders, and load faster. [20] Thiswill include that:• everything unnecessary has been removed like gif, java or flash animations• that there are no nested tables (browsers need more time to parse them and search engine robotsare limited to find relevant information)• CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) are used to separate the content from the presentation• images are optimized by reducing their file size, and inform the browser about their dimensions• the code has be cleaned up by removing unnecessary spaces between tags, empty tags andcomments in the source code• the cleaned-up code has been validated to meet W3C recommendationsThere are programs and online tools available, so the website owner can compare his or her website tocompetitor websites. The following programs and online tools will be incorporated in the optimizationprocess: Web CEO, linkven<strong>do</strong>r.com, selfseo.com and http://validator.w3.org.Locating further Sources of Errors: It is important that further errors can be located. To achieve this it isrecommended to use a computer program like Web CEO which shows more details rather than an onlineservice. According to Web CEO Auditor function the code optimization will be focused on:• errors: problem pages; broken internal links; broken external links; broken anchors• usability: page size; slow pages; deep pages• maintenance: redirects; missing / invalid titles and meta data; new pages ; old pages; small pages;missing ALT attributes or images; missing WIDTH / HEIGHT attributes of images; orphaned filesThe website owner and his or her webmaster should be able to get a report about the site quality. Theobjective of this procedure will be that the criticized points need to be fixed by the person who has theappropriate knowledge and access to the source code, either the website owner or webmaster. Forbenchmarking the website and those of the closest competitors, online tools can be used.Finalizing the Source Code Optimization Stage: The participants will be provided with an onlinequestionnaire where these questions will be answered:• on how many pages broken links were fixed• on how many pages the file size was reduced• how many pages <strong>do</strong> still have missing Meta descriptions• if website source code was validated with the W3C.org validator• if CSS were applied and optimized• what persons were involved in the source code optimizationLink Building: At this stage the optimization of the keywords and source code should to be completed.The website owner will be instructed to place links of his or her web pages on social bookmark services, an<strong>do</strong>nline indexes like dmoz.at. Also the website owner can start to investigate if partner sites will be willing toplace links on their sites.Link Building Feedback: Website owners or managers might not enough emphasize the link buildingprocess. One reason can be that the process of finding link partners or registering the web pages to socialbookmark services and indexes is considered time consuming, and not delivering the expected results. Inpractise it has been experienced that the chance of being registered to dmoz.at is very small, and that only afew social bookmark services show a link. Nevertheless, it will be interesting to learn how website owner ormanagers implement the link building. In an online questionnaire the following questions were requested:• Which social bookmark services did you use?• Did you submit your website to dmoz.at?• Did you try to find link partners?• Has your request for placing a link at a partner site been accepted or refused?Outcome: At the end of the first optimization cycle all answers and analysis reports will be summarized,and critically evaluated. At this stage the participants can explain if the implemented procedures have led to abetter website performance. Even more important is to learn how companies complied with therecommended procedures, and if they will continue SEO for their websites.197
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADIS5. BRIEF SUMMARY OF RESULTSWhile there are a number of indicators of improvement to look at after the application of the model, theparticipants were focused on the more quantifiable metrics of: maximum number of visitors per day; averagetime visitors spend to look at the pages; percentage of new accesses; percentage of visits through searchengines.The changes in the values of these metrics can be seen in the tables below. Table 1 Shows the summaryof the Google Analytics report which details a number of metrics, including the Total Visitors, Time spentlooking at pages, New accesses, and percentage of visits through search engines.Table 1. Summary of the Google Analytics ReportWeb Site First report Second ReportTotal visitorsFSTS 2244 3235Deutschinstutut 1167 1194SALT Pro 89 80Max. number of visitors per dayFSTS 194 305Deutschinstitut 129 92SALT Pro 13 18Average time visitors spend to look at the pages (in minutes)FSTS 02:52 02:18Deutschinstitut 01:14 01:22SALT Pro 05:04 02.58Percentage of new accessesFSTS 87.45 83.31Deutschinstitut 65.16 62.07SALT Pro 46.05 60.36Percentage of visits through search enginesFSTS 64.26 43.97Deutschinstitut 36.58 39.96SALT Pro 28.95 15.32As can be seen in Table 1, the results were mixed, though the figures alone <strong>do</strong>n't tell the entire story. Theresults in Table 2 show the increase/ decrease in the number of index page links. These numbers were takenfrom the Web CEO report and alternatively the results were verified by Google directly. On 04 May 2009FSTS had 783, Deutschinstitut had 695, and SALT Pro had 70. The differences indicate that the results arenot very accurate. To diagnose a trend the number of indexed pages should be monitored over a longer periodby using the same measurement tools. The number of links from external web pages depend on the websiteowner’s or manager’s efforts to popularize their website.Table 2. Increase/decrease of indexed pages by GoogleFebruary/March 2009 April 2009FSTS 751 745Deutschinstitut 785 733SALT Pro 63 77The number of indexed pages and link popularity helps to increase the PageRank. The link popularitychanges are shown in Table 3. In the first and third case the link popularity has not changed. The differencecould be caused by inaccuracy. Deutschinstitut showed a distinctive raise. To verify the numbers it wasrecommended to use the Google ‘link:<strong>do</strong>main.com’ command. On 04 May 2009 FSTS had 41,Deutschinstitut had 52, and SALT Pro had 0.198
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010Table 3. Link popularity of the tested websites by GoogleFebruary/March AprilFSTS 40 41Deutschinstitut 56 66SALT Pro 1 -In the preliminary questionnaire the website operators were asked about their websites PageRank. It canbe regarded as common criteria for an overall improvement of a particular page, and has to be considered asone factor which is widely accepted. Gaining on 1 unit of 10 available can be regarded as a positive trend.The differences after optimization were:FSTS: from 5 to 6Deutschinstitut: from 5 to 5SALT Pro: stayed at 36. CONCLUSIONThe results of the research indicated that there is a great potential of facilitating search engine optimizationsof website by non-IT professionals. Working together with 3 selected enterprises shed some light on theproblems which exist. In a perfect world a website owner or manager would search the <strong>Internet</strong> for allavailable information about SEO, and tell their web master to implement it. But we live in a world whereonly a very small fraction of website operators know what SEO stands for, and how it is implemented in theweb design and editing process. It should be the duty of every IT professional involved in web design andprogramming to educate the sponsors. But even the professionals often ‘forget’ the most important part of thedesign, making the website visible for search engines and users. This responsibly is left to the enterpriserunning the website. How to address all of them is a question which can not be easily answered.In the beginning of the project it was important to motivate the website owners, and not to give tasks thatwould overwhelm the persons involved in the process. The preliminary questionnaire had questions that weredifficult to answer. It was too early to ask the participants to find out the SERP of a certain keywordcombination. Making the introduction to SEO as easy as possible would increase the quality of the feedback,and facilitate the access for the participants. The use of website analyzing programs like Web CEO gives thetester a variety of testing and benchmarking options. For the average website owner installing andconfiguring such a tool seemed difficult. To further test and benchmark websites, the use of online toolswithout sophisticated configuration would be preferable.The time available for implementing the recommend procedures was very short. To be able to quantify adistinct improvement in website performance it would be necessary to monitor the website performancebeyond the scheduled period allowed by this research. In the results section above, while there were gains insome areas, others lost ground. Thus, overall performance of the tested websites did not significantly change.The positive aspects of the project were that the basic SEO procedures were very well implemented, and thewebsite operators indicated that they will continue the application of the model. This in itself is a positiveresult.ACKNOWLEDGEMENTThis research project was undertaken as part of a Master of Science degree with University of Liverpool andLaureate Online Education.199
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISREFERENCESBrin, S.and Page, L. 1998, The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine,. [Online] Available from:http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html (Accessed: 19 March 2009)Dawson, C. 2005, Projects in Computing and Information Systems: A Student's Guide,. Harlow: Pearson Education LtdGeorgiou, C.and Stefaneas, P. 2002, Strategies for Accelerating the Worldwide A<strong>do</strong>ption of E-commerce, [Online]Available from: http://<strong>do</strong>i.acm.org/10.1145/505248.506003 (Accessed: 16 March 2009)Ghose, A and Yang, S. 2008, Comparing Performance Metrics in Organic Search with Sponsored Search Advertising,[Online] Available from: http://<strong>do</strong>i.acm.org/10.1145/1517472.1517475 (Accessed: 21 March 2009)King, A. 2008, Website Optimization: Speed Search Engine & Conversion Rate Secrets. Ten Steps to Higher SearchEngine Rankings,. Sebastopol: O'Reilly, pp.11-16.Rognerud, J. 2008, Ultimate Guide to Search Engine Optimization,. Madison: CWL Publishing Enterprises, Inc.Ross, M. 2008, Worst Practices in Search Engine Optimization,. [Online] Available from:http://<strong>do</strong>i.acm.org/10.1145/1409360.1409388 (Accessed: 21 March 2009)Royce, W. W. 1970, Managing the development of large software systems. In Proceedings of IEEE WESCON, pp. 1–9.Scanlan, L. 2008, The 12 Habits of Highly Effective Websites: A Primer on Search Engine Optimization for non-technicalExecutives,. Seatlle: Liam Scanlan.Walter, A. 2008, Building Findable Websites: Web Standards, SEO and Beyond,. Berkeley: New Riders.Weischedel, B.and Huizingh, E. 2006, Website optimization with web metrics: a case study,. [Online] Available from:http://<strong>do</strong>i.acm.org/10.1145/1151454.1151525 (Accessed: 19 March 2009)200
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010A HIERARCHICAL ARCHITECTURE FOR ON-LINECONTROL OF PRIVATE CLOUD-BASED SYSTEMSMauro Andreolini, Sara Casolari and Stefania TosiUniversity of Modena and Reggio EmiliaVia Vignolese, 905/b – 41100 Modena, ItalyABSTRACTSeveral enterprise data centers are a<strong>do</strong>pting the private cloud computing paradigm as a scalable, cost-effective, robustway to provide services to their end users. The management and control of the underlying hw/sw infrastructure poseseveral interesting problems. In this paper we are interested to evidence that the monitoring process needs to scale tothousands of heterogeneous resources at different levels (system, network, storage, application) and at different timescales; it has to cope with missing data and detect anomalies in the performance samples; it has to transform all data intomeaningful information and pass it to the decision process (possibly through different, ad-hoc algorithms for differentresources). In most cases of interest for this paper, the control management system must operate under real-timeconstraints.We propose a hierarchical architecture that is able to support the efficient orchestration of an on-line managementmechanism for a private cloud-based infrastructure. This architecture integrates a framework that collects samples frommonitors, validates and aggregates them. We motivate the choice of a hierarchical scheme and show some datamanipulation, orchestration and control strategies at different time scales. We then focus on a specific context referring tomid-term management objectives.We have applied the proposed hierarchical architecture successfully to data centers made of a large number of nodes thatrequire short to mid-term control and in our experience we can conclude that it is a viable approach for the control ofprivate cloud-based systems.KEYWORDSCloud computing, architecture, design, statistical models, anomaly detection, hierarchical.1. INTRODUCTIONThe design of a data center has come at an evolutionary crossroad. The increasing variety and complexity ofend-user applications, the massive data growth, the challenging economic conditions, and the physicallimitations of power, heat, and space are all issues which must be accounted for modern hardware andsoftware infrastructure. Finding architectures that can take cost, complexity, and associated risk out of thedata center while improving service levels has become a major objective for most enterprises (Armbrust, S. etal, 2009; Wood, T. et al, 2009; Meisner, D. and Gold, B. T. and Wenisch, T., 2009). In this scenario, theprivate cloud computing model is starting to be seen as an ideal paradigm for a service hosting platform. Aprivate cloud applies the main concepts of cloud computing, such as on-demand resources, accounting,service oriented architectures, and the appearance of infinite scalability (Vaquero, L. M. et al, 2009;Armbrust, S. et al, 2009) to resources owned by the enterprise. Enhancing existing infrastructure with cloudcomputing capabilities leads to a reduction in operating costs, provides a scalable and robust executionenvironment and, ultimately, allows the a<strong>do</strong>ption of an economy of scale through the <strong>Software</strong>-As-A-Serviceparadigm.The a<strong>do</strong>ption of a private cloud paradigm opens several issues at the level of system governance at realtimeand off-line. In this paper, we focus on the former context. Enterprise data centers based on privateclouds are characterized by a high number of heterogeneous hardware and software components (processors,memories, storage elements, virtual machines, applications, business enforcement modules) that operate atdifferent time scales (spanning from seconds to entire weeks), interact in possibly unpredictable ways, can besubject to prompt reconfiguration due to changes in system, security, and business policies. In these201
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISconditions, it is impossible to take critical decisions by simply looking at the output of the performance andutilization measures provided by the cloud infrastructure monitors. There are too many distinct data flows(literally, thousands per second) to analyze; many of them may contain missing or faulty measures; often, inorder to gain a meaningful insight into the state of a system, it is necessary to correlate and aggregate severalflows. All these decisions must be taken in real-time. To make matters worse, the same algorithm thatoperates well at a given time scale may fail at a different one. Thus it is not immediately clear whichalgorithms are more appropriate at different time scales. For these reasons, we are witnessing a shift frombasic resource monitoring and management (allocation, activation, deactivation based on direct performancemeasures) to service orchestration, which shares the following goals: extract from a multitude of available raw performance measures those that are really relevant for agiven business, security, or system objective; correlate and aggregate (both temporally and spatially that is, across different components) the mostrelevant time series in order to acquire an information about the internal system state.In this paper, we propose a hierarchical architecture that supports models and metho<strong>do</strong>logies for theefficient resource management of an on-line control enforcement mechanism operating on a private cloudbasedinfrastructure. Our design addresses the scalability challenge (related to the huge number of monitoredinformation available from monitors) in several ways. The system is logically divided into severalsubsystems according to the different management time spans (short, medium, long term). A significantsubset of the data processed by the monitoring framework at shorter time spans is made available to theruntime management modules operating at longer time spans. In this way, the duplication of preliminaryoperations such as data filtering is avoided. Furthermore, the modules operating at longer time scales identifyfrom the myriad of available measures those that are really critical for the system. The goal is avoid theunnecessary and often computationally infeasible of storing, monitoring and processing all the measuresavailable from shorter time spans. Hierarchical architectures for distributed monitoring of large systems havealready proposed in literature (Newman, H.B. et al, 2003; Massie, M. L. and Chun, B. N. and Culler, D. E,2004). However, these architectures are not capable of enforcing service orchestration. Our proposalrepresent a further step in this direction.In the final part of the paper, we show an example of the difficulties behind on-line control enforcementat medium-term time scales.The paper is organized as follows. Section 2 details the reference architecture based on private clouds,explains the available measurements and the control enforcement operations, and formalizes the problem ofservice orchestration. Section 3 introduces the on-line analysis framework and its main components. Section4 provides an analysis of different linear and non linear models to resources operating at medium-term timescales. Finally, Section 5 concludes the paper with some final remarks.2. ARCHITECTUREFigure 1 describes our model of an enterprise data center driven by business and system policies. The systemis split into several layers, whose components (technologies, mechanisms and algorithms) are typicallyspread across the private cloud infrastructure. The System Infrastructure Layer is responsible for the fruitionof the information stored in the data center. This information may have different origins; for example, it maypertain to user applications, or it may refer to system resources performance data. All the components aremonitored and tested continuously; a control enforcement module makes sure that the proper system policiesare operated correctly. The Business Layer hosts all the components responsible for the enforcement ofproper business policies, such as ERP, supply chain management, Finance, Sales. The Governance Layer isresponsible for the orchestration of the entire infrastructure at the system and business level. In this layer, theinformation coming from the system and the business layers is processed in order to detect policy violationsor anomalies. The Governance Layer also produces reports and dashboards which the corporate managementuses to define the business, system and security policies (Kaliski, B. S., 2010).202
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010Figure 1. High level architecture of a private cloud-based data centerIn this paper, we focus on the architectural supports operating at the System infrastructure layer. Thesemodels support the on-line management tasks that are executed at different temporal scales (ranging fromseconds up to a few hours). In a private cloud-based architecture, these management tasks use several controlactions available to the underlying architecture to enforce control, including: admission control, dispatchingand scheduling, load (re)balancing, addition and removal of a physical host from the pool of availableresources, (live) migration of virtual machines, resource limitation through traffic shaping and containerbasedtechniques, resource reallocation (to accommodate high priority tasks, to reduce power consumption).The control actions are executed as a reaction to different events at different time scales. For example, arequest enters the system, or an anomaly has been detected in the last hour, or a daily forecasting analysissuggests the re-configuration of a whole subsystem. To enforce control, the management tasks require somemeasurement from performance monitoring tools operating at different levels (physical hosts, virtualmachines, applications), including CPU utilization, memory utilization, network throughput, powerconsumption, storage-related metrics such as read and write throughput and disk utilization, application-leveldata (application throughput, response times, failure rates). We can assume that these performancemonitoring samples are available periodically. Previous literature (Andreolini, M. and Casolari, S. andColajanni, M., 2008), shows how the collection of several performance samples in distinct time series canprovide the basis for efficient monitoring and prediction of system resource behavior. Thus, we will alsoassume to have a reasonably small amount of past sample history, in the form of fixed-win<strong>do</strong>w time series.Unfortunately, choosing the right sampling interval is a challenging task, because different management tasksrun at different time scales and may not need (or, worse, not operate properly in presence of) frequentmonitored data streams. It is therefore also necessary to place the management tasks at the “right” time scale.In this paper, we distinguish three different time scales: short time scale; medium (mid-term) time scale; long time scale.Tasks operating at short time scales must take decisions and enforce them in the range of seconds,typically under a minute. These decisions allow the system to serve user requests in a best-effort fashion,given the actual configuration. Common control actions include admission control, resource reallocation dueto the execution of some high priority application, dispatching of a request to the proper subsystem or server.Short time scales are critical for two reasons. First, there is typically no time for complex analyses on themonitoring data obtained from the probes. Experience shows that only data filtering is viable. As a203
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISconsequence, the decisions taken by a short time task must be taken using the data as-is, cannot be optimal,and must focus on avoiding disasters rather than on achieving optimal performance. Second, the volume ofmonitoring data can be very high. Thus, even the storage of the performance samples in a database for lateranalysis can be a problem due to the high computational overhead and to the disk space consumptioninvolved (Ousterhout, J. et al, 2010). Algorithms operating at short time spans must often treat the monitoringdata as a stream of numbers.Tasks operating at mid-term time scale must take decisions and enforce them in the minute range(typically, under a hour). These decisions aim to adapt and improve the configuration of the system accordingto changed operating conditions. Common control actions include dynamic load balancing, virtual machinemigration, node activation, dynamic resource allocation. These tasks have the time to process the monitoreddata, but, in order to optimize the execution of short-time tasks, they often have to aggregate different piecesof information both in time (through time series smoothing techniques) and in space (across different systemcomponents).Tasks operating at long time scale must take decisions and enforce them in the hours range. Thesedecisions share the goal of optimizing the system at real-time but in a longer horizon. Common controlactions include resource reallocation due to some optimization (a typical goal is to pack the applications intothe smallest number of nodes to minimize power consumption), and capacity planning activities. At this timescale, tasks have the time to fully analyze their raw data, produce reports and store the relevant results (sincethe required disk space is not an issue). However, the complexity of the decision process increases as, besidestime and space aggregations, these tasks also need to compute predictions, analyze what-if scenarios,encompassing the whole system.Any infrastructure for the on-line control enforcement of a private cloud-based architecture must supportthese operations in a scalable way. Scalability can be achieved by reducing the number of nodes handled byeach management task and by reducing the overhead due to storage and processing to a minimum. Thistranslates to the following architectural requirements: make sure that any task (in particular, a short-time task) is responsible for a reasonable number ofsystem components; support persistent storage only at longer time scales; make the results of shorter analyses available as a starting point for longer analyses support more sophisticated aggregation techniques (time and space) only at longer time scales.In the next section, we propose a hierarchical architecture that can integrate solutions for most real-timemanagement problems.3. A HIERARCHICAL ARCHITECTURE FOR RESOURCEMANAGEMENTIn Figure 2 we propose our hierarchical architecture for the support of on-line management tasks. (We notethat the hierarchy is logical, but each layer can be implemented through several servers and databases). Inthis scheme, the system consists of different, smaller, manageable subsystems, each of which is controlled bya set of management tasks operating at different time spans. At the lowest level, we have subsets of hardwareand software resources which can be associated to subnets, racks, distinct production areas, and the like. Eachsubset is governed through the control actions operated by a control enforcement module. Every controlenforcement module is driven by an orchestration module, which is at the heart of every management task.The main purpose of the orchestration module is to take the “right” decisions based on some measure of thesubsystem's internal state. Depending on the chosen time scale, the nature of the monitored data varies. Atshort time scales, a task has at most grossly filtered performance measures available (to avoid out-of-scalevalues, outliers and missing data). At longer time scales, tasks usually perform more sophisticated statisticaloperations based on time and space aggregations, anomaly detection, predictions. In these architectures,scalability represents a crucial issue. We address it through a combination of solutions: architectural solutions , oriented to avoid single points of failure; data management solutions, oriented to the efficient storage and manipulation of measures(including data compression and the use of lightweight database to shorten data access times);204
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010 algorithmic solutions, oriented to the efficient extraction of server status information from manyservers.In our experience, scalability at the network traffic level is not an issue comparable to the aforementionedproblems. In order to keep the control enforcement process scalable, each management task must orchestratethe control using the least amount of resources available. This implies the monitoring and control of only alimited subset of the entire system (this holds particularly true for short-time tasks). We decide not topermanently store each raw performance measure obtained from the subset, since this would be unfeasible,given the literally hundreds of time series that would need to be monitored. Instead, we treat each monitor asa stream of data which is filtered in a basic fashion and made directly available to the orchestrator. Thisoperation is straightforward, since low-level system monitors such vmstat and sar can be easily instrumentedto pipe their output to different processes. For some proprietary systems, it is possible to exploit the SNMPquerying capabilities offered by more sophisticated tools such as Cacti, Nagios, Zenoss, to extract the sameinformation from several system components.Since longer tasks tend often to use the results of shorter tasks, we instrument the orchestrator to extractproper subsets of the filtered data (typically, the last n performance measures coming from the mostimportant monitor probes) and to store them in a lightweight database. In this way, we reduce considerablythe set of monitored data available to the mid-term and long-term tasks, and we provide a persistent datastorage which is necessary to hold data spanning in longer ranges. A RAM database such as Firebird wouldfit perfectly, since it provides excellent performance over a moderately high volume of stored data. Ourexperience shows that this approach allows to monitor tens of hardware and software resources per node, in asubsystem consisting of a few hundreds nodes.The mid-term management tasks take the filtered data, aggregate it, detect (and possibly correct)anomalies, and produce a meaningful representation of a subsystem's internal state, which is used to enforcecontrol decisions aimed at improving the performance and optimizing the present behavior relevantsubsystems. These operations can be implemented through any standard math environment (Matlab, ROctave) or through mathematical libraries available for the most popular general purpose languages (Scipy,Numpy in Python). With respect to the whole set of time series available from the monitors, therepresentations produced by mid-term management tasks are much more compact in terms of size and arecomputed less often; thus, they can be stored into a DBMS, such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle.Finally, the long-term management tasks also perform more sophisticated tasks oriented improve theperformance and optimize the behavior of the whole system in the future. To this purpose, they retrieve thestate representations computed by the mid-term management tasks and perform sophisticated computationsinvolving long-term predictions, what-if analysis, capacity planning. The resulting models drive the decisionsof the orchestration modules.Our architecture is designed in such a way that the control actions can be implemented through off-theshelfhardware and software components. For example, request dispatching and load balancing can beoperated through standard setups based on Apache2 (through the mod_rewrite and mod_proxy modules),Tomcat (through AJP connectors in a clustered setup) and, more recently, on nginx. There are several viablealternatives for the virtualization of services; the most popular are Xen (version 3.0 and above) and KVM(the hypervisor officially a<strong>do</strong>pted by the Linux community). All these solutions support (live) migrations,dynamic resource re-allocation, ballooning, paravirtualized device drivers for close-to-native performance.Another alternative is the use of resource containers (OpenVZ), which provide native performance at theexpense of executing a shared operating system kernel for all running services.205
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISFigure 2. A hierarchical architecture for on-line management of cloud-based systems206
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 20104. MID-TERM ANALYSISIn this section, we show several examples pointing out different problems related to on-line management ofcloud-based architectures. Due to space constraints, we focus on the mid-term temporal scale. At this level,control enforcement is pursued through some very specific control actions, such as virtual machinemigrations, load balancing, resource reallocation, node activation. The decisions leading to these actions aretaken by the proper orchestration module, which has at its disposal a subset of the data filtered by shortertermmanagement tasks and available efficiently through RAM databases. Unfortunately, the monitored dataavailable to the orchestrator cannot be used to fulfill the management goals; it must be first transformed intoa higher level representation of a subsystem through data manipulation and anomaly detection techniques.For example, let us consider a set performance metrics commonly available through off-the-shelf monitoringtools. Figure 3 shows the behavior of CPU utilization performance samples (obtained at intervals of 5minutes) of a server node. The samples have been filtered to exclude outliers and out-of-scale values.Figure 3. Available monitored dataFigure 4. Time aggregation (EWMA)A first problem with this data set is its marked oscillatory behavior, which makes it very difficult (if notimpossible) to deduct a clear representation of the server load conditions. If this data were to be used by theorchestrator module to enforce load balancing across different servers, the result would likely be an unstablesubsystem where the load balancer constantly bounces process from one server node to another, in an endlesseffort to even the load. Hence, at the mid-term level our architecture must support the extraction of a moreclean trend from the available data. This is possible through the a<strong>do</strong>ption of time aggregation models. If weconsider the subset of performance data as a fixed-win<strong>do</strong>w time series, we can apply aggregation models to itin order to retrieve a synthetic representation of the resource behavior. In the considered mid-term context,time aggregation is generally pursued through the a<strong>do</strong>ption of linear smoothing that is, moving-averagetechniques, such as exponential moving average (D. J. Lilja, 2000), through regression and auto-regressivemodels (P. Dinda et al, 2000), and through interpolation techniques, such as the cubic spline (D. J. Poirier,1973). These models have been shown to provide a good level of precision at reasonable computational costsand in reasonable time (Andreolini, M. and Casolari, S. and Colajanni, M., 2008, Dinda, P. et al, 2000),compatible with the constraints imposed by mid-term management (usually, under one hour). Our experienceshows that the majority of time aggregation functions require a CPU processing time well below 1 ms. Thisimplies that, in one minute, a mid-term management task can aggregate at least 60000 time series. Ourhierarchical architecture is capable of handling up to 300000 aggregations per minute by a<strong>do</strong>pting a simpleExponential Weighted Movie Average (EWMA) model based on short, fixed win<strong>do</strong>ws. Figure 4 shows atime aggregation of the CPU utilization shown in Figure 3, based on the Exponential Weighed MovingAverage of the last 30 measures. The smoothing effect of the EWMA makes it easier to detect an oscillatingserver load and lowers the risk of unnecessary control enforcement.In a complex system made up of several thousands of hardware and software components, evenidentifying the failing nodes may become a computationally intensive task. Thus, a scalable monitoringframework needs to reduce the number of relevant system state information made available to theorchestration module. This goal can be achieved by distinguishing the components that are critical for theperformance of the entire systems from those that are not. To make matters worse, it is very difficult if not207
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISimpossible to infer the internal conditions of a subsystem from several, distinct internal state representationsof (albeit relevant)a single components. We may not understand the reasons behind the failure, and we couldsimply not tell whether that failure is about to cause further misbehavior in the system. Hence, ourmonitoring framework must also aggregate different, heterogeneous, time-aggregated series in order toproduce a higher level view of a subsystem, which allows to tell whether a subsystem is performingsuboptimally and why. To these purposes, spatial aggregation models are often used to analyze and combinemultiple heterogeneous data sources into a single, coherent view of a system. Techniques such as the multivariateanalysis (K.V. Mardia et al, 1979) and the Principal Component Analysis (PCA) (H. Hotelling, 1933)are effective in capturing the salient features of a subsystem's internal state, thus drastically cutting theamount of data used to perform decisions. Our experience shows that the PCA fits well in a hierarchicalarchitecture where each subsystem can be efficiently handled by a subset of tasks and can providemeaningful insight to the longer-term tasks. We have handled the reduction of more than one million samplespertaining to 1050 different components (21 hardware and software resources of 50 nodes) to a subset of 12principal components in less than a minute. A simple weighted aggregation model applied on the selectedprincipal features allows to estimate a reliable representation of the system's internal state. Figure 5 shows,on the left, 2 out of the 12 principal components characterizing an entire subsystem. The 12 principalcomponents are aggregated through a weighed regression model, shown on the right of Figure 5. Ultimately,the status of an entire subsystem can be represented through a single time series, available to the mid-termorchestrator and to the longer-term management tasks. Spatial aggregation of different resources in an thecontext of an on-line management system for distributed systems is still an open research problem, due to thethe high number of time series available and to the heterogeneity of business-level and system-level measures(Zhu, X. et al, 2009).Figure 5. Spatial aggregationControl enforcement is applied as a reaction to events that perturb the normal operating conditions of thesystem: anomalies in the workloads, changes in the offered load, events that normally <strong>do</strong> not occur. Theorchestrator must be able to detect these events timely through the a<strong>do</strong>ption of on-line anomaly detection,state change detection and event detection models. We have evaluated and integrate several on-line detectorsin our hierarchical architecture. The models relying on a prior knowledge of all the possible states of aprocess (Lu, D. et al. 2004) are completely inadequate both statistically due to the non deterministic behaviorof the resource measures and for their unfeasible computational costs. Other widely a<strong>do</strong>pted methods that useone or more load thresholds for detecting relevant state changes (Ramanathan, P. 1999.) seem unsuitable tothe highly variable context of interest for this paper. In the private cloud-based architectures that arecharacterized by high variability of the measures, by non stationary and by unpredictable behavior, a goodstate change detection model that is able to guarantee adequate solutions while respecting the time constraintsof the mid-term management, is based on the Cumulative Sum (Cusum) statistics (Montgomery, D. C., 2008;Basseville, M. et al, 1993). Figure 6 and Figure 7 illustrate the behavior of the threshold-based and theCusum-based state change detection models, respectively. Filtered and non-filtered data is overlaid point out208
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010relevant state changes; true and false positives are depicted with crosses and circles at the bottom of thefigures.Figure 6. Threshold-based modelFigure 7. Cusum-based modelFor our evaluation purposes we consider the data aggregation generated by the data manipulation of theCPU utilization of the subsystem nodes. An off-line analysis allows us to determine that relevant state changeto be signaled to the control-enforcement management system occurs at times 50, 125, 200, 275, 350, 400,475, and 550, as shown by the horizontal/vertical lines in the figures. This scenario characterized by multiplestate changes can be considered a good benchmark for on-line detection models. Traditional threshold-baseddetection models are capable of detecting all state changes, but their precision decreases, resulting in a highnumber of false detections during the stable states. This is a consequence of the inability of threshold-basedmodels to guarantee reliable detections in highly variable contexts. On the other hand, the Cusum-baseddetection model exhibits a high detection quality. The proposed model detects timely the state change and itis affected by just one false detection at sample 540. Because of the computational cost of the consideredmodel is able to provide reliable detections in the range of milliseconds it can be completely integrate in ourhierarchical architecture.5. CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORKThe private cloud computing model is a viable paradigm for a service hosting platform, capable of keepingup with the challenging requirements behind complex end-user applications, massive data growth,sophisticated business models and the physical limitations of power, heat, and space. In this paper, we haveproposed an architecture that supports models and metho<strong>do</strong>logies for the efficient resource management of anon-line control enforcement mechanism operating on a private cloud-based infrastructure. The design of thearchitecture addresses several interesting challenges: it is modular, easy expandable through off-the-shelf hardware and software components; it integrates an on-line monitor and analyzer, suitable for run-time decisional tasks at differenttemporal scales (short, mid-term, long); it is hierarchical, allowing for scalable monitoring and control enforcement of subsystems madeof up to hundreds of components.We have also outlined the difficulties of on-line management and control enforcement at a given temporalscale (mid-term). In particular, the monitored time series available to the orchestrator must be subject to timeand spatial aggregations (in order to derive a clear view of the controlled subsystem). Furthermore, on-linedetection algorithms are necessary to identify anomalies in an otherwise normally operating subsystem.Control enforcement is typically pursued as a reaction to these anomalies. Our experience shows thatmanagement can happen efficiently even at different time scales. In particular, in the time span of one minuteour architecture can seamlessly aggregate several tens of thousands time series over time (producing a clearview for every component) and identify the most relevant components of a system made up of one thousandcomponents.As a next step, we plan to enrich our on-line management task with supports oriented to powerconsumption (Raghavendra, R. et al, 2008), for example to place the incoming workload in areas at lower209
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADIStemperature or with higher cooling capacity. We will also try to scale our testbed to larger sizes to evaluatethe scalability limits of the proposed architecture.ACKNOWLEDGEMENTThe authors acknowledge the support of the MIUR-PRIN project AUTOSEC “Autonomic Security”.REFERENCESArmbrust, S. et al, 2009. Above the Clouds: A Berkeley View of Cloud Computing. UC Berkeley Reliable AdaptiveDistributed Systems Laboratory.Wood, T. et al, 2009. The Case for Enterprise-Ready Virtual Private Clouds. Proceedings of the Workshop on Hot Topicsin Cloud Computing. San Diego, CA, pp. 10-15.Zhu, X. et al, 2009. 1000 islands: An integrated approach to resource management for virtualized data centers. ClusterComputing, Special Issue on Autonomic Computing, Volume 12, Number 1, pp. 172-181.Clark, C. et al, 2005. Live migration of virtual machines. Proceedings of the 2nd Symposium on Networked SystemsDesign and Implementation (NSDI’05). Boston, MA, pp. 273-286.Andreolini, M. and Casolari, S. and Colajanni, M., 2008. M. Models and framework for supporting run-time decisions inWeb-based systems. In ACM Transactions on the Web. Vol. 2, no. 3, Aug. 2008.Meisner, D. and Gold, B. T. and Wenisch, T., 2009. PowerNap: eliminating server idle power. In ACM SIGPLANNotices. Vol. 44, Number 3, pp. 205-216.Vaquero, L. M. et al, 2009. A break in the clouds: towards a cloud definition. In ACM SIGCOMM ComputerCommunication Review. Vol. 39, Number 1, pp. 50-55.Kaliski, B. S., 2010. Towards Risk Assessment as a Service in Cloud Environments. Proceedings of the 2nd USENIXWorkshop on Hot Topics in Cloud Computing (HotCloud'10). Boston, MA, pp. 20-29.Ousterhout, J. et al, 2010. The case for RAMClouds: scalable high-performance storage entirely in DRAM. In ACMSIGOPS Operating Systems Review. Vol. 43, Number 4, pp. 92-105.Hotelling, H. 1933. Analysis of a complex statistical variables into principal components. J. Educ, Psy.Lilja, D. J. 2000. Measuring computer performance. A practitioner's guide. Cambridge University Press.Dinda, P. et al, 2000. Host load prediction using linear models. Cluster Computing. Vol. 3, Number 4, pp. 265-280.Poirier, D. J. 1973. Piecewise regression using cubic spline. Journal of the American Statistical Association. Vol. 68Number 343, pp. 515-524.Mardia, K.V. et al, 1979. Multivariate Analysis. Academic Press.Montgomery, D. C., 2008, Introduction to Statistical Quality Control. John Wiley and Sons.Basseville, M. et al, 1993. Detection of Abrupt Changes:Theory and Application. Prentice-Hall.Lu, D. et al. 2004. Change detection techniques. In Int. Journal of Remote Sensing. Vol. 25, Number 12, pp. 2365-2347.Ramanathan, P. 1999. Overload management in real-time control applications using (m,k)-firm guarantee. PerformanceEvaluation Review. Vol. 10, Number 6, pp. 549-559.Raghavendra, R. et al, 2008. No power struggles: Coordinated multi-level power management for the data center. InProceedings of the 13th International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages(ASPLOS'08). New York, NY, pp. 48-59.Newman, H.B. et al, 2003. MonALISA: A distributed monitoring service architecture. In Proceedings of the Conferencefor Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP'03). La Jolla, California.Massie, M. L. and Chun, B. N. and Culler, D. E, 2004. The Ganglia distributed monitoring system: design,implementation, and experience. Parallel Computing, Vol. 30, No. 7, pp. 817-840.210
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010A PERFORMANCE COMPARISON OF DCCP, CTCP, ANDCUBIC, USING VOIP AND CBR TRAFFIC PATTERNSPriscila Doria and Marco Aurélio SpohnFederal University of Campina GrandeAv. Aprígio Veloso, 882, Bo<strong>do</strong>congó, Campina Grande-PB, BrazilABSTRACTDCCP is a prominent transport protocol that has attracted the attention of the scientific community for its rapid progressand good results. Previous works have compared the performance of DCCP with standard transport protocols, mostlythrough simulation, assuming a single protocol per link and only using the constant bit rate traffic pattern. In this paper,we evaluate the performance of two DCCP variants with highly representative TCP variants: CTCP and CUBIC. The firstone is the TCP variant a<strong>do</strong>pted in the Microsoft Win<strong>do</strong>ws Server 2008, and the second one is the TCP variant a<strong>do</strong>pted inthe Linux kernel. In the proposed scenarios, the protocols fight for the same link in contention. Results show that DCCPCCID2 performs better than DCCP CCID3 in scenarios with contention, due to the significantly better fairness of DCCPCCID3. In addition to that, even though CUBIC has been shown to have an aggressive congestion control performingbetter with CBR traffic, results show that CUBIC suffers with the on/off traffic pattern of VoIP applications. Meanwhile,CTCP is outperformed by DCCP and CUBIC in most scenarios.KEYWORDSDCCP, CTCP, CUBIC, Congestion Control, <strong>Internet</strong>, VoIP.1. INTRODUCTIONMultimedia streaming (e.g., audio streaming, video streaming, VoIP, interactive video) is being consideredan important service in modern networks. This requires that the network protocols used to transmitmultimedia cooperate in harmony with the protocols used for data services. Many real time multimediaapplications prefer UDP as their transport protocol instead of TCP when they need to favor performance overreliability. However, UDP transmissions flow in a fixed rate regardless of the available link bandwidth. Theimpact of the congestion caused by multimedia transmissions that a<strong>do</strong>pt UDP has motivated the <strong>Internet</strong>Engineering Task Force (IETF) to propose a new <strong>Internet</strong> standard: the Datagram Congestion ControlProtocol (DCCP). The novelty of DCCP is to prioritize performance, like UDP, but also being able toperform congestion control, like TCP. DCCP is a prominent protocol, gaining the attention of the scientificcommunity, due to its fast development and good results (Kohler et al., 2006).The standard TCP congestion avoidance algorithm employs an additive increase and multiplicativedecrease (AIMD) scheme, which follows a conservative linear growth function for increasing the congestionwin<strong>do</strong>w and multiplicative decrease function in case of packet losses. For a high-speed and long delaynetwork, it takes standard TCP an unreasonably long time to recover the sending rate after a single packetloss event. One straightforward way to overcome this limitation is to modify TCP's increase/decrease rule inits congestion avoidance mechanism, so that the sender increases congestion win<strong>do</strong>w more quickly anddecreases it more gently upon a packet loss. This aggressive behavior of such an approach may severelydegrade the performance of regular TCP flows whenever the network path is already highly utilized.However, when an aggressive high-speed variant flow traverses the bottleneck link with other standard TCPflows, it may increase its own share of bandwidth by reducing the throughput of other competing TCP flows.While the delay-based flows respond to increases in RTT, reducing its sending rate, the loss-based flowscontinue to increase their sending rate. Hence, a delay-based flow obtains less bandwidth than its fair share.To circumvent the low utilization problem on high-speed and long delay networks, two novel variants ofTCP were recently proposed: Compound TCP (CTCP) (Tan et al., 2006) and CUBIC (Ha et al., 2005).211
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISCTCP is a novel TCP congestion control algorithm proposed by Microsoft to optimize TCP for use withconnections with large congestion win<strong>do</strong>ws. The main idea behind CTCP is to add a scalable delay-basedcomponent to the standard TCP's loss-based congestion control. The sending rate of CTCP is controlled byboth loss and delay components. It has become a highly relevant protocol due to its worldwide a<strong>do</strong>ption, aspart of Win<strong>do</strong>ws 2008 Server and Win<strong>do</strong>ws Vista. CTCP is a relatively new proposal and, to the best of ourknowledge, there is no extensive evaluation of this protocol. The most relevant performance evaluation ofCTCP was carried out by the authors on their test-bed. CUBIC is a novel TCP congestion control algorithmthat a<strong>do</strong>pts a cubic function for congestion win<strong>do</strong>w increase in the sender’s side, with the inflection point setto the win<strong>do</strong>w prior to the congestion event, instead of a linear function. The authors of CUBIC argue that itimproves scalability and stability under fast and long distance networks. CUBIC has become a highlyrelevant protocol due to its a<strong>do</strong>ption worldwide as the current Linux kernel TCP stack implementation.Prior works (Mattsson, 2004) have compared DCCP with standard transport protocols, using discreteevent simulations. However, such works have drawbacks, so that they have measured a single protocol perlink, using errorless links and constant bit rate traffic. Through simulations, Takeuchi et al. (2005) havecompared the fairness of UDP, DCCP CCID2, TCP SACK, TCP Reno, and TCP New Reno. Similarly,Bhatti et al. (2008) have compared the fairness of TCP New Reno, BIC-TCP, CUBIC, and DCCP CCID2.Sales et al. (2008) have conducted experiments on a wireless network to measure performance, delay, andfairness of multimedia traffic on UDP, DCCP CCID2, DCCP CCID3, and CUBIC.This paper belongs to a line of research that attempts to evaluate DCCP protocol in an effort to measurehow the congestion control mechanisms perform in several scenarios using distinct traffic patterns. In thispaper, we compare the performance of DCCP variants CCID2 (Floyd & Kohler, 2006) and CCID3 (Floyd etal., 2006), CTCP, and CUBIC, based on VoIP and CBR traffic patterns. We consider a topology where theprotocols are grouped in pairs and contention occurs as data packets traverse bottleneck links, so that eachpair of protocols must fight for the link bandwidth. Hence, in addition to performance, it is possible tomeasure the fairness of the protocols along the simulations.The remainder of this paper is organizes as follows. Section 2 presents a brief description of the protocolsthat we consider in this work. Section 3 details the metho<strong>do</strong>logy to carry out the performance comparison,and presents the simulation results. Finally, Section 4 presents our conclusions.2. PROTOCOL DESCRIPTION2.1 DCCPThe Datagram Congestion Control Protocol (DCCP) (Kohler, et al., 2006) is a transport protocol thatprovides bidirectional unicast connections of congestion-controlled unreliable datagrams. DCCP is suitablefor applications that transfer fairly large amounts of data and that can benefit from control over the tradeoffbetween timeliness and reliability. DCCP is easily extensible to other forms of unicast congestion control.Two congestion control mechanisms are currently specified: TCP-like Congestion Control (CCID2) (Floyd& Kohler, 2006) and TCP-Friendly Rate Control (TFRC) (CCID3) (Floyd et al., 2006). TCP-like CongestionControl CCID2 sends data using a close variant of TCP's congestion control mechanisms, incorporatingselective acknowledgements (SACK). CCID 2 is suitable for senders which can adapt to the abrupt changesin congestion win<strong>do</strong>w typical of TCP's Additive Increase Multiplicative Decrease (AIMD) congestioncontrol and particularly useful for senders which would like to take advantage of the available bandwidth inan environment with rapidly changing conditions. CCID3 is a receiver-based congestion control mechanismthat provides a TCP-friendly sending rate while minimizing the abrupt rate changes characteristic of TCP orof TCP-like congestion control. The sender's allowed sending rate is set in response to the loss event rate,which is typically reported by the receiver to the sender. TCP-Friendly Rate Control for Small Packets(TFRC-SP) (CCID4) (Floyd & Kohler, 2009) is currently specified, but still incipient and it is not included inthis work.To support timeliness packet delivery, DCCP has a feature called late data choice, where the applicationcan change what's sent very late in the process, even if the application data is <strong>do</strong>wnwards in the networkstack. This feature is advantageous depending on the contention, because some late packets may be irrelevantafter a deadline.212
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 20102.2 Compound TCPMicrosoft has proposed a new variant of TCP called Compound TCP (CTCP). CTCP is part of Win<strong>do</strong>wsVista, Win<strong>do</strong>ws 7 and Win<strong>do</strong>ws 2008 Server and modifies standard TCP's loss-based congestion avoidancealgorithm, incorporating a scalable delay-based component (Tan et al., 2006). To <strong>do</strong> so, a new state variableis introduced in current TCP Control Block (TCB), namely dwnd (Delay Win<strong>do</strong>w), which controls thedelay-based component in CTCP. The conventional congestion win<strong>do</strong>w ( cwnd ) remains untouched, whichcontrols the loss-based component. Thus, the CTCP sending win<strong>do</strong>w now is controlled byboth cwnd and dwnd . Specifically, the TCP sending win<strong>do</strong>w ( wnd ) is now calculated as follows:1cwnd = cwnd +cwnd + dwnd( cwnd dwnd awnd )(1)wnd = min + ,(2)CTCP increments the congestion win<strong>do</strong>w upon receiving an ACK, using Equation 1. Using Equation 2,CTCP computes the transmission win<strong>do</strong>w ( wnd ) based on the Delay Win<strong>do</strong>w ( dwnd ), the congestionwin<strong>do</strong>w ( cwnd ), and the reported receiver win<strong>do</strong>w ( awnd ).2.3 CUBICCUBIC is a modification to the congestion control mechanism of standard TCP, in particular, to the win<strong>do</strong>wincrease function of standard TCP senders, to remedy the low utilization problem of TCP in fast longdistancenetworks. It uses a cubic increase function in terms of the elapsed time from the last congestionevent. Unlike most TCP variants use a convex increase function after a packet loss event, CUBIC uses boththe concave and convex profiles of a cubic function for win<strong>do</strong>w growth. After a win<strong>do</strong>w reduction followinga loss event, CUBIC records the win<strong>do</strong>w size where it got the loss event asW_ max and performs amultiplicative decrease of congestion win<strong>do</strong>w, and following the standard fast recovery and retransmit ofTCP. Once it enters congestion avoidance after fast recovery, it starts to increase the transmission win<strong>do</strong>wusing the concave profile of the cubic function. The cubic function is set to have its plateau at W _ max , sothat the concave growth continues until the win<strong>do</strong>w size becomes W _ max . After that, the cubic functionturns into a convex profile and the convex win<strong>do</strong>w growth begins. This style of win<strong>do</strong>w adjustment(concave and then convex) improves protocol and network stability while maintaining high networkutilization. This is because the win<strong>do</strong>w size remains almost constant, forming a plateauaroundW_ max where network utilization is deemed highest. Under steady state, most CUBIC win<strong>do</strong>w sizesamples are close toW_ max ; thus promoting high network utilization and protocol stability. The TCPsending win<strong>do</strong>w (W ) is now calculated as shown in Equation 3, where C is a CUBIC parameter, t is theelapsed time from the last win<strong>do</strong>w reduction, and K is the time period that the above function takes toincreaseW toW_ max when there is no further loss event and it is calculated by Equation 4, where β is themultiplication decrease factor:W ( t)= C(t − K)³+ W _ max(3)3W _ max βK = (4)C3. COMPARING DCCP, CTCP, AND CUBIC WITH VOIP TRAFFICWe perform discrete event simulations on Network Simulator 2 (Fall & Varadhan, 2007) to carryperformance comparisons of the following transport protocols: (i) DCCP CCID2, (ii) DCCP CCID3, (iii)CTCP, and (iv) CUBIC using VoIP traffic patterns. Additionally, we include CBR traffic in the comparison213
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISfor better understanding the impact caused by traffic pattern. The topology is detailed in the Section 0. Theprotocols are grouped in distinct pairs for the simulation turns, for a better perception of the fairness propertyof each protocol, as follows: (i) CTCP versus DCCP CCID2, (ii) CTCP versus DCCP CCID3, (iii) CUBICversus DCCP CCID2, (iv) CUBIC versus DCCP CCID3, (v) CUVIC versus CTCP, and (vi) DCCP CCID2versus DCCP CCID3.3.1 Simulation ScenariosWe consider a topology (see Figure 1) in which 4 local area networks (LAN) are interconnected by theirR1 , R2,R3,R4L = L1 , L2,L3,L4, in a typical corporative scenariorespective routers R = { } and adjacent links { }of a set of subsidiaries. In each local area network, we dispose sending nodes, i N : Si = { S1 , S 2,...,S 48}target (i.e., receiving) nodes, i Ν : Ti = { T1 , T 2,...,T 48}∈ and∈ in sufficient quantity and individual throughput sothat the links L 1 , L2,L3,L4are saturated, and contention occurs forthwith. Hence, for each simulation turn,the respective protocol pair fights for the shared link bandwidth.Figure 1. Simulation topologyLANs are configured with internal bandwidth links of 10 Mbps with a latency of 1 ms. L1 , L2,L3,L4have1 Mbps of bandwidth with a latency of 20 ms. VoIP transmissions occupy a small amount of bandwidth,therefore we place 96 nodes uniformly spread over the 4 LANs, with 12 sending nodes and 12 target nodesper local area network. Each sending node in a LAN has a corresponding target node in the opposite LAN.Let S 1 be the sender node 1 of the LAN connected to R 1 , S 1 will send packets towards T1in the LANconnected to R3 (i.e., opposite LAN). Similarly, as S 48 is placed in the LAN connected to R 4 , T 48 is placedin the LAN connected to R 2 . As a result, packets generated in a LAN must traverse two links and anintermediate router to reach the target LAN. The packet queues among routers have the sizes adjusted to 300packets and DropTail policy. The protocols are arranged in pairs for each simulation turn, as follows: (a)CTCP versus DCCP CCID2, (b) CTCP versus DCCP CCID3, (c) CUBIC versus DCCP CCID2, (d) CUBICversus DCCP CCID3, (e) CUBIC versus CTCP, and (f) DCCP CCID2 versus DCCP CCID3.VoIP traffic is simulated by the Exponential Traffic Application (NS-2). As recommended by ITU-T(1993) and Bouras et al. (2007) for a simulated VoIP traffic, the mean ON-time (i.e., talking time) of 1.004 s,the mean OFF-time (i.e., silence time) of 1.587 s, sending rate of 80 Kbps, and packet size of 160 bytes. TheVoIP ON/OFF time ratio is relevant because we have spread many sender nodes among LANs. The expectedbehavior is that not all the senders are talking at same time. CBR packet size is configured to 1,000 bytes andthe sending rate of 800 Kbps, for each sender. CBR senders may generate data packets in a configurablesending rate, therefore in the simulations with traffic pattern CBR we employ only 8 nodes, with 1 sendingnode and 1 target node per LAN. To avoid the phase effect, CBR senders start at timet ∈ Ν, δ ∈R : t = 0 + δ ,0 ≤ δ ≤ 75 , whereδ is ran<strong>do</strong>m. The a<strong>do</strong>pted simulation time for a turn is 900 s.3.2 Simulation ResultsPlotted results represent the mean value of 10 rounds of simulation. The values in parenthesis represent theconfidence interval, with confidence of 95%. Metrics are represented by a mean value of the transmissionsfor a simulation turn.214
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010A main characteristic that distinguishes a VoIP sender of a CBR sender is not occupying the link all thetime, due to silence periods. Hence, different protocols have different responses to this variation. Table 1presents CUBIC versus DCCP CCID 2, with VoIP traffic. DCCP CCID2 achieves better average throughputand delivery rate, with less dropped packets. As the congestion control of CUBIC is more aggressive, it isexpected that CUBIC achieve better throughput values. However, with VoIP traffic CUBIC suffers with theconstant interruptions in the packet generation, due to the poor growth of the W _ max , forcing the major useof the convex (i.e., slow) part of the growing cubic function. As a result, the opponent protocol can grab abigger share of link bandwidth. Average delay differences are negligible (i.e., 6 % ).Table 1. CUBIC versus DCCP CCID2 with VoIP TrafficDelivery Rate(%)Sent Packets(packets)Dropped Packets(packets)AverageThroughput (Kbps)Average End toEnd Delay (s)CUBIC 90.76 (0.00) 21892.20 (105.01) 2015.24 (55.88) 28.26 (0.15) 0.48 (0.00)DCCP CCID2 98.19 (0.00) 21372.10 (105.67) 379.69 (5.26) 29.85 (0.15) 0.50 (0.00)Similarly, in this scenario, CTCP outperforms CUBIC, as shown in Table 2:Table 2. CUBIC versus Compound TCP with VoIP TrafficDelivery Rate(%)Sent Packets(packets)Dropped Packets(packets)AverageThroughput (Kbps)Average End toEnd Delay (s)CUBIC 91.22 (0.00) 19966.50 (186.72) 1748.96 (44.02) 25.91 (0.22) 0.46 (0.00)CTCP 97.12 (0.00) 20638.80 (143.09) 573.55 (8.18) 28.53 (0.20) 0.49 (0.00)As shown in Table 3 and Table 4, when using VoIP traffic, DCCP CCID2 outperforms CTCP and DCCPCCID3. DCCP CCID2 achieves better average throughput, delivery rate, and dropping less packets. Averagedelay differences are negligible (i.e., ≈ 6%).Table 3. Compound TCP versus DCCP CCID2 with VoIP TrafficDelivery Rate(%)Sent Packets(packets)Dropped Packets(packets)AverageThroughput (Kbps)Average End toEnd Delay (s)CTCP 95.11 (0.00) 19467.70 (144.10) 919.43 (12.22) 26.37 (0.21) 0.46 (0.00)DCCP CCID2 98.70 (0.00) 21608.80 (199.82) 277.87 (4.02) 30.33 (0.28) 0.47 (0.00)Table 4. DCCP CCID2 versus DCCP CCID3 with VoIP TrafficDelivery Rate(%)Sent Packets(packets)Dropped Packets(packets)AverageThroughput (Kbps)Average End toEnd Delay (s)DCCP CCID2 99.98 (0.00) 21807.90 (80.80) 2.51 (0.42) 31.01 (0.12) 0.12 (0.00)DCCP CCID3 99.89 (0.00) 7698.68 (376.15) 0.37 (0.06) 10.95 (0.54) 0.12 (0.00)In simulations with DCCP CCID3 there are low delay values and low dropped packets, independently ofthe opponent protocol. This fact is due to the very precise CCID3 congestion control mechanism, where tothe slightest sign of congestion, a rigorous reduction of the sending rate is performed. As a result, theopponent protocol may expand its share of the link bandwidth, and the fair equilibrium is never reached. Thisis clear also in Table 5 and Table 6, where DCCP CCID3 is compared to CTCP and CUBIC, respectively.Table 5. Compound TCP versus DCCP CCID3 with VoIP TrafficDelivery Rate(%)Sent Packets(packets)Dropped Packets(packets)AverageThroughput (Kbps)Average End toEnd Delay (s)CTCP 99.97 (0.00) 21878.70 (143.95) 5.21 (1.00) 31.11 (0.20) 0.13 (0.00)DCCP CCID3 99.89 (0.00) 7391.94 (207.49) 0.33 (0.04) 10.51 (0.30) 0.12 (0.00)Table 6. CUBIC versus DCCP CCID3 with VoIP TrafficDelivery Rate(%)Sent Packets(packets)Dropped Packets(packets)Average Throughput(Kbps)Average End toEnd Delay (s)CUBIC 99.96 (0.00) 21910.50 (148.36) 6.49 (1.08) 31.15 (0.21) 0.13 (0.00)DCCP CCID3 99.89 (0.00) 6635.50 (259.73) 0.42 (0.04) 9.44 (0.37) 0.12 (0.00)215
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADIS3.2.1 CBR Traffic PatternIn the CBR scenarios, DCCP CCID2 has achieved good results when compared with protocols with moreresponsive and accurate congestion control, like DCCP CCID3 and CTCP, which reduce their sending ratesat the slightest sign of congestion. As shown in Figure 2, sender 37 (DCCP CCID3) has suffered with thecongestion, reducing its sending rate. Also, one may note a slow resumption of throughput, due to aconservative increase function in DCCP CCID3. However, in simulations with DCCP CCID3, sender nodeshave demonstrated high throughput stability, low delay and all the transmissions have fewer dropped packets,due to the rigorous congestion control. In contrast, it is possible to see in Figure 3 many oscillations in theinstant throughput, what denotes a low stability of the congestion control of CTCP when fighting with DCCPCCID2 in a network scenario with contention. Also, the congestion controls of both protocols are moreaggressive than DCCP CCID3, what is evidenced with sender25 (DCCP CCID2) in the time interval of 180s-220s and with sender13 (CTCP) in time interval of 20s-110s.Figure 2. Instant throughput.Figure 3. Instant throughput.Table 7, Table 8 and Table 9 present results showing that DCCP CCID2 has achieved better throughputthan DCCP CCID3 and CTCP, but with worse stability (see Figure 2 and Figure 3), and longer delay thanDCCP CCID3. In addition to that, CTCP has dropped more packets, achieving lower throughput than DCCPCCID2.Table 7. DCCP CCID2 versus DCCP CCID3 with CBR TrafficDelivery Rate (%) Sent Packets(packets)Dropped Packets(packets)AverageThroughput (Kbps)Average End toEnd DelayDCCP CCID2 99.84 (0.00) 53694.30 (1654.49) 28.70 (11.86) 476.50 (14.72) 0.18 (0.01)DCCP CCID3 99.86 (0.00) 40449.00 (2813.26) 6.45 (1.79) 358.94 (25.03) 0.19 (0.01)Table 8. Compound TCP versus DCCP CCID2 with CBR TrafficDelivery Rate (%) Sent Packets(packets)Dropped Packets(packets)AverageThroughput (Kbps)Average End toEnd Delay (s)DCCP CCID2 99.75 (0.00) 51609.80 (3108.63) 74.75 (9.38) 457.62 (27.64) 0.17 (0.00)CTCP 99.24 (0.00) 32270.00 (1807.87) 208.10 (27.16) 284.68 (16.08) 0.15 (0.01)Table 9. Compound TCP versus DCCP CCID3 with Application CBRDelivery Rate (%) Sent Packets(packets)Dropped Packets(packets)AverageThroughput (Kbps)Average End toEnd Delay (s)CTCP 99.41 (0.00) 54090.80 (2770.72) 241.70 (13.80) 478.25 (24.58) 0.15 (0.01)DCCP CCID3 99.60 (0.00) 40856.20 (4057.67) 113.00 (9.95) 361.73 (36.06) 0.15 (0.00)DCCP’ variants have also been compared with CUBIC and the results point to a better performance ofCUBIC, due to its more aggressive congestion control. Specifically, CUBIC has shown much faster reactionto dropped packet events, what is evidenced in Figure 4 and Figure 5. Queue Size chart presents a high linkoccupation, with the queue size achieving 300 packets many times. Win<strong>do</strong>w Size chart presents a high216
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010pre<strong>do</strong>minance of CUBIC protocol throughout the simulation time. As a result, CUBIC has a highpre<strong>do</strong>minance in the instant throughput chart. Note that DCCP CCID3 has no win<strong>do</strong>w mechanism.Figure 4. Queue size x win<strong>do</strong>w size.Figure 5. Instant throughput.However, as presented in the Table 10, Table 11, and Table 12, CUBIC has dropped much more packetsthan DCCP variants, what reflects negatively in the delivery rate. Note that CUBIC needs to ensure reliabilitywith packet retransmissions. Such a situation may not be suitable for some streaming applications.Table 10. CUBIC versus DCCP CCID2 with CBR TrafficDelivery Rate(%)Sent Packets(packets)Dropped Packets(packets)AverageThroughput (Kbps)Average End toEnd Delay (s)CUBIC 85.57 (0.03) 91769.80 (4288.40) 13224.00 (3994.18) 697.56 (10.39) 0.15 (0.00)DCCP CCID2 98.48 (0.00) 12749.00 (1338.22) 181.95 (7.32) 111.64 (11.89) 0.15 (0.01)Table 11. CUBIC versus DCCP CCID3 with CBR TrafficDelivery Rate(%)Sent Packets(packets)Dropped Packets(packets)AverageThroughput (Kbps)Average End toEnd Delay (s)CUBIC 85.53 (0.04) 98492.90 (3724.37) 14512.50 (3124.35) 745.78 (13.61) 0.14 (0.00)DCCP CCID3 97.84 (0.01) 11841.60 (1655.01) 230.00 (19.51) 103.17 (14.80) 0.14 (0.01)Table 12. CUBIC versus Compound TCP with CBR TrafficDelivery Rate(%)Sent Packets(packets)Dropped Packets(packets)AverageThroughput (Kbps)Average End toEnd Delay (s)CUBIC 92.07 (0.03) 57587.80 (9011.43) 4621.80 (1546.94) 470.43 (74.31) 0.15 (0.01)CTCP 99.32 (0.00) 29643.80 (4752.92) 138.30 (30.26) 261.93 (42.20) 0.18 (0.02)Figure 6. Queue size x win<strong>do</strong>w size.Figure 7. Instant throughput.217
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISAlthough CUBIC has also achieved better results when compared with CTCP, the pre<strong>do</strong>minance ofCUBIC was inconstant, as shown in Figure 6 and Figure 7. Win<strong>do</strong>w size chart shows a significant alternationamong protocols, with CTCP win<strong>do</strong>w growth performing better in the end of simulation time. Similarly, after450 s, CTCP senders perform better throughput and, specifically for sender37, with higher instant throughputthen CUBIC sender nodes, in the end of simulation time.4. CONCLUSIONIn this work, we have conducted a performance comparison of two variants of DCCP (CCID2 and CCID3),CTCP and CUBIC with VoIP and CBR traffic patterns. The four protocols have different approaches forcongestion control, and both traffic patterns impact protocols’ behavior in a different way.The results have pointed to a much better throughput of CUBIC in mostly CBR simulations and to abetter delay, fairness and throughput stability of DCCP CCID3, using both traffic patterns. Results haveshown that DCCP CCID3 a<strong>do</strong>pts a conservative win<strong>do</strong>w increase algorithm.The throughput performance of CUBIC was dramatically reduced when using VoIP traffic, due to thecharacteristics of ON/OFF intervals which impact in the packet transmission pattern. DCCP CCID2 andCTCP have achieved intermediate results and they were less susceptible to the a<strong>do</strong>pted traffic pattern. DCCPCCID2 has achieved better results when using CBR and CTCP has achieved better results when using VoIP.This work points to new investigation paths, as follows. The traffic pattern has shown a significant impactin the protocol behavior, hence new patterns may be tested (e.g., real-time multimedia streaming, interactivevideo). The impact of constant disconnections, as in mobile ad hoc networks, should be investigated. Finally,we intend to investigate the impact of network infrastructures with large delays, as satellite networks.REFERENCESBhatti, S. and Bateman, M., 2009. Transport Protocol Throughput Fairness. Journal of Networks, Vol. 4, No. 9, 881-894.Bhatti, S. et al, 2008. Revisiting inter-flow fairness. Proceedings of International Conference on BroadbandCommunications, Networks and Systems. Lon<strong>do</strong>n, United King<strong>do</strong>m, pp 585-592.Bouras, C. et al 2007. Enhancing ns-2 with DiffServ QoS features. Spring Simulaiton Multiconference - Volume 1. SpringSimulation Multiconference. Society for Computer Simulation International, San Diego, CA, 117-124.Fall, K. and Varadhan, K., 2007. The network simulator ns-2: Documentation. Available athttp://www.isi.edu/nsnam/ns/ns-<strong>do</strong>cumentation.html.Floyd, S. and Kohler, E., 2006. Profile for Datagram Congestion Control Protocol (DCCP) Congestion Control ID 2:TCP-like Congestion Control. RFC 4341. Available at http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4341.txt.Floyd, S., Kohler, E., Padhye, J., 2006. Profile for Datagram Congestion Control Protocol (DCCP) Congestion ID 3:TCP-Friendly Rate Control (TFRC). RFC 4342. Available at http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4342.txt.Floyd, S. and Kohler, E., 2009. Profile for Datagram Congestion Control Protocol (DCCP) Congestion ID 4: TCP-Friendly Rate Control for Small Packets (TFRC-SP). RFC 5622. Available at http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc5622.txt.Ha, S., Rhee, I., Xu, L., 2005. CUBIC: A new TCP-Friendly high-speed TCP variant. In Third International Workshopon Protocols for Fast Long-Distance Networks.ITU-T Recommendation P.59, 1993. Telephone Transmission Quality Objective Measuring Apparatus: Artificial.Available in http://www.itu.int/rec/T-REC-P.59-199303-IKohler, E., Handley, M., Floyd, S., 2006. Datagram Congestion Control Protocol (DCCP). RFC 4340. Available inhttp://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4340.txt, updated by RFCs 5595, 5596.Mattsson, N.-E. 2004. A dccp module for ns-2. Master’s thesis, Luleå Tekniska Universitet.Sridharan, M., Bansal, D., Thaler, D. 2006. Compound TCP: A New TCP Congestion Control for High-Speed and LongDistance Networks. <strong>Internet</strong> Draft, version 02. URL http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-sridharan-tcpm-ctcp-02.Tan, K. et al, 2006. A Compound TCP approach for high-speed and long distance networks. Proceedings IEEEINFOCOM 2006, Barcelona, Spain.Xu, L. et al, 2004. Binary increase congestion control for fast long-distance networks. In Proceedings of IEEEINFOCOM, Hong Kong, Korea.218
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010DISCOURAGING ROGUE PEERS IN A MULTICASTCONTENT DISTRIBUTION PROTOCOL FOR MANETSSidney Doria and Marco Aurélio SpohnFederal University of Campina GrandeAv. Aprígio Veloso, 882, Bo<strong>do</strong>congó, Paraíba-PB, BrazilABSTRACTRogue peers are a concern because they decrease the utility of the resource-sharing systems, potentially towards to thesystem collapse. We are currently deploying Peer-to-MANET, a multicast peer-to-peer approach to distribute contents onmobile ad hoc networks. This work presents our efforts to improve trust and fairness, avoiding rogue and selfish peers, inPeer-to-MANET. We employ a modified version of the Network of Favors as a decentralized reputation system to punishrogue peers activities. Through simulations in NS-2, we show that our solution minimizes <strong>do</strong>wnload success rate byrogue peers and avoid that maliciously peers cause resource depletion of other peers.KEYWORDS<strong>Internet</strong>, Peer-to-Peer Networks, MANETs, BitTorrent, multicast, Reputation Systems.1. INTRODUCTION<strong>Internet</strong> is currently defined as a global group of interconnected networks (e.g., <strong>do</strong>mestic, corporative).Recently, users are become more empowered by mobile technology advances and increasing availability ofmobile services, in such a way that the usage pattern is varying and some might envision a future where<strong>Internet</strong> will be ubiquitous by the interconnection of many mobile networks. In this path, cellular systems andmobile networks are supposed to be the future of infrastructure (Stuckmann & Zimmermann, 2009).A mobile ad hoc network (MANET) consists on a set of peers which want to get connected wirelessly butwithout relying on any fixed communication infrastructure. The mobile nature of nodes imply that they mightact as routers to others when communicating peers are two or more hops distant from each other. One can saythat most applications running on a MANET are essentially peer-to-peer (P2P) by nature. Probably the mosttargeted problem in P2P networks concerns the content distribution among peers. Recent works show effortsto adapt popular P2P protocols, especially BitTorrent (Cohen, 2003), to share data on MANETs. AlthoughBitTorrent and other protocols are known for their efficiency and popularity on the <strong>Internet</strong>, they have a setof drawbacks when running on MANETs. P2P protocols usually work in the application layer, applyingunicast transmissions, with no concerns to node mobility. On the other hand, MANETs usually make use ofunreliable broadcasts over a shared radio channel, while nodes are let to move freely. These contrasts havechallenged the research on optimizing P2P networks over MANETs.We are currently deploying Peer-to-MANET (P2MAN) (Doria & Spohn, 2009), a multicast P2P protocolfor content distribution on MANETs. The novelty of P2MAN is its holistic approach, addressing manyMANETs problems (e.g., dynamic environment, unreliable transmissions, multi-hop packet forwarding,content localization) and at the same time trying to profit from MANETs’ peculiarities (e.g., multicast meshrouting, shared radio transmissions). We have found that P2MAN is scalable and efficient on MANETs andthe preliminary performance results are encouraging.Despite the potential benefits of P2P systems like P2MAN, rogue peers are a concern because theydecrease the system utility, potentially towards to the collapse. This paper addresses the problem ofdiscouraging rogue peers activities that slow <strong>do</strong>wn the data distribution process by: (a) flooding other peerswith bogus data, (b) performing free riding. We propose a variant of the Network of Favors (NoF) (Andradeet al., 2004), which was originally designed to P2P CPU-sharing grids, as a decentralized reputation scheme219
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISfor P2MAN. Through simulations in NS-2 (Fall & Varadhan), we show that our solution minimizes roguepeers activities.The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. In Section 2 we confront the state of the art with ourapproach. In Section 3 we detail our solution. In Section 4 we describe our simulation-based study andpresent our results. We conclude this work in Section 5, where we also point out future work.2. RELATED WORKS2.1 P2P Content Distribution on MANETsDistribute contents on MANETs is a difficult problem and some proposals employ a sort of peer-to-peerprotocols to accomplish content distribution. Prior works are basically adaptations of standard P2Palgorithms to MANETs (Kortuem et al., 2001; Klemm et al., 2003; Androutsellis-Theotokis & Spinellis,2004). We highlight the recent efforts to deal with BitTorrent on MANETs (Rajagopalan et al, 2006; Sbai &Barakat, 2009; Krifa, et al., 2009). Implement a popular protocol like BitTorrent on MANETs may result inimmediate acceptance and there would be fewer efforts to educate users. However, many P2P contentdistribution protocols present known drawbacks when running on MANETs, as follows.Popular P2P protocols have the <strong>Internet</strong> as their native habitat, contrasting with a MANET scale of just<strong>do</strong>zens to hundreds nodes. Regarding the scale, some works (Ding & Bhargava, 2004; Pucha et al., 2004)have adapted the Distributed Hash Table and other P2P location technologies to MANETs. Also, MANETshave intrinsic infrastructure problems that those P2P systems are not concerned with. For instance, BitTorrentemploy unicast, which is costly in MANETs due to the handshake efforts, disregards potential security issuesdue to a shared radio channel infrastructure, and assumes that if a node can achieve a good throughput withits neighbor, there is no other metric cost to be considered. In a MANET, due to the mobility and thecooperative hop by hop nature, a peer transmission may cost too much (i.e., excessive collision, contention)for the entire network, since each P2P transmission may have an undesired impact in neighboringtransmissions. Due to the dynamic nature of a MANET, P2P content distribution protocols need to beadapted to be trackerless.Moreover, it has been shown that TCP like protocols (Holland & Vaidya, 1999) perform poorly inmultihop wireless networks (i.e., packet losses due to link failures are misunderstood as congestion). Inefforts to solve that problem, Anastasi et al. (2009) have developed a new cross-layer transport protocol (i.e.,TPA) to be an efficient reliable protocol for MANETs. In fact, recent P2P solutions to distribute contents onMANETs leverage mostly on cross-layer approaches, which are basically protocols of one layer exchanginginformation with a protocol from another layer. For instance, there are some works that employ crosslayeringon overlay unicast and multicast routing at the application layer (Lee et al., 2006; Passarela et al.,2006; Yi et al., 2008). This practice is becoming usual, but it violates the OSI standard model. This is themain reason why we have not developed P2MAN as a cross-layer approach.2.1.1 Peer-to-MANETPeer-to-MANET (P2MAN) is a multicast based content distribution protocol for mobile ad hoc networks.P2MAN is designed to mitigate MANET’s constraints, achieving good performance by taking advantage ofP2P concepts and MANETs’ capabilities. Since MANETs usually employ unreliable broadcasts on a sharedradio channel, in P2MAN we propose the application of unreliable multicast transmissions instead of reliableunicast transmissions to distribute contents on MANETs. Likewise, we have not considered a reliabletransport protocol. Instead, we a<strong>do</strong>pted UDP as transport protocol. P2MAN uses multicast groups to delivercontents, and a special multicast group, called Public Channel (PC), to accomplish all control functions.When a P2MAN node starts, it joins the PC for exchanging control messages. All nodes willing to shareany content are PC members. Content location is not cached at any node. Instead, to search for any content, anode queries the PC without the need for a network-wide flooding of control messages. In case any activepeer has the content, the peer is reachable through the PC group, and a reply is propagated back through thePC group. The reply also carries metadata generated by the content owner, having detailed information aboutthe file.220
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010Like in most P2P networks, P2MAN slices content for delivery. The owner user decides how the objectwill be splitted in pieces. The owner represents a file using a bitmap (where each bit represents a file slice).The owner also decides which multicast group will be used for transmitting the object. The metadata iscreated by the owner, containing the necessary information for guiding the requesting nodes. After receivingthe reply, the requesting node reads the metadata, joins the respective multicast group and sends anauthorization message to the PC. By receiving the authorization message, the content owner can initiate theobject transmission. Considering that we assume an unreliable routing multicast protocol (i.e., with notransport layer multicast protocol), reliability is granted at the application layer by employing aretransmission mechanism provided by the Repair Mode. On Repair Mode, a receiver node can claim forpieces not received yet. The owner then retries the transmission of the remaining pieces. While there aremissing pieces, new claims and retransmissions will take place until the receiver gets all the pieces. In thiswork, security issues are not addressed at any layer. Table I summarizes our choices, confronting them withthe common approaches in the literature and showing the advantages.Table 1. P2MAN design choicesLiterature P2MAN AdvantagesAdapted DHT Public Channel Native, lightweight, well suited to the scaleUnicast with an incentive mechanism Multicast Native Simple, low need for incentive, low handshake overheadTCP UDP Less overhead, low transport performance degradationTCP retransmissions Repair Mode Less overhead, opportunistic reliability repairing2.2 P2P Reputation SchemesReputation scheme for a peer-to-peer system is a way of recording information about past behavior of peers,for use as a guide to other peers. A challenging issue that a retrieval protocol must deal with is guaranteeingthat the information gathered about peers is reliable, as malicious peers may tamper with the information theystore. Aberer and Despo<strong>do</strong>vič (2001) early presented their reputation scheme specifically designed for P2Pnetworks. Eigen algorithm (Kamvar et al., 2003) maintains a global score for each peer i computed of thescore of i given by all other peers weighted by their own global score. Some replicated mother peers computeand store a global reputation value for a peer. The mother peers find the peers they must keep track of, andare found by peers who need information, through a distributed hash table. However, collusion attacks mayoccur, where rogue peers collude in order to reduce the reputation of honest peers. Chun et al. (2003)proposed architecture for secure resource peering based on ticket exchange. This architecture, however,assumes a shared cryptographic infrastructure and the establishment of relations of trust between peers toallow resource access. In P2PRep (Cornelli et. al., 2002), each peer stores information about their owninteractions with other peers. To assure the reliability of this information, P2PRep relies on voting forgathering opinions about a peer, heuristics to find clusters of potential malicious voters, and on a sharedcryptographic infrastructure to verify the identities of the peers involved in a transaction.2.2.1 The Network of FavorsThe central idea of the Network of Favors is that the users who are greater net contributors of resourcesshould get higher priority access to the spare resources. This principle acts as a guide to the balanceddistribution of the available resources among the users and, thus, as an incentive for collaboration. Itcircumvents the need to provide the reliability of the collected information by not aggregating a globalreputation value for a peer. Instead, peers only use reputation information involving peer-to-peer interactionsin which they themselves have participated. This information is stored locally by the peer. Maliciousstrategies based on lying about the behavior of third parties (e.g., collusion attacks) cannot be applied.In the Network of Favors, allocating a resource to a peer that requests it is a favor, and the value of thatfavor is the value of the work <strong>do</strong>ne for the requesting peer. Each peer keeps a local record of the total valueof favors it has given to and received from each known peer in the past. Every time it <strong>do</strong>es a favor or receivesone, it updates the appropriate number. The peer calculates a local reputation for each peer based on thesenumbers, such that a peer who has given many favors and received few will have a high reputation. The peeruses the current reputations to decide to whom to offer a favor when it has to arbitrate between more than onerequester. Thus, whenever there is a resource contention, requesters with higher reputation get priority.221
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISLet v( A,B)be the total value of the resources <strong>do</strong>nated from peer A to peer B over the past history of thesystem, peer A calculates rA (B), the reputation of peer B , using the following Equation:rΑ{ 0,v( B,A) − v( A,B) log( v( Β,Α))}(Β) = max+(1)Using (1), a peer A calculates the reputation of peer B with the value of favors that A has receivedfrom B , decreased by the value of favors that B has received from A . Using a non-negative reputationfunction makes it possible to avoid prioritizing malicious ID-changing peers over collaborating peers whohave consumed more resources than they have contributed. The sub linear term log( v ( B,A)) has beenintroduced in the equation to distinguish between a malicious ID-changing peer who never <strong>do</strong>nates anyresources and a collaborating peer B that has <strong>do</strong>nated resources to A in the past, but consumed at least thesame amount of resources from A . Also, it is possible to identify a collaborator even if the collaborator hasconsumed more resources than it has <strong>do</strong>nated, provided that it has <strong>do</strong>nated enough in the past.3. IMPROVING TRUST IN PEER-TO-MANETWe a<strong>do</strong>pt a variant of the Network of Favors to compute reputation scores, based on interaction among peersto identify and discourage rogue peers activities in a P2MAN system. We combine the NoF score mechanismwith a new blacklist feature, and the sending node selection mechanism of P2MAN to improve robustness,systematically avoiding that rogue peers receive content pieces from their neighbors. As previous works, weassume that if the system has some mechanism by which it can identify collaborators with sufficientaccuracy, and known collaborators get priority in resources, it pays to be a collaborator. As an expectedconsequence, nodes will change their strategy to collaborating and the system evolves to a state where thereare no rogue peers. Our approach works as follows.3.1 Adapting Network of Favors to P2MANSimilarly to the NoF, a P2MAN node assigns a score to each neighbor node it interacts with, and storeslocally the information, according to the favors it receives and gives. In P2MAN, transmitting a content pieceto a node that requests it is a favor. However, a P2MAN owner node must decide if it will reply contentrequests or not. This decision is based on its health. Health is a P2MAN metaphor which represents theintuitive notion of the availability of the combined node resources. For instance, as a wireless mobile node isconstrained by a limited power source, it must save energy, and so the transmissions are costly. A node witha full energy source is more suitable to transmit contents than a node with an exhausted power source.Let ρ ∈R: 0 ≤ ρ ≤1be the probability of which a P2MAN owner node A will share contents when requested,θ A be the health threshold of node A and rA(max)the maximum node reputation recorded in A . Wedefine ρ in the Equation (2), as follows.rA(B)ρ = min( 1,( θA+ θA.)) :0≤θ ≤ 1rA(max)(2)Hence, when a P2MAN node A is healthy, θ A will be 1. Otherwise, when A has exhausted all of itsresources, θ A will be 0. The second term in the Equation is to compare the reputation of a requesting nodewith the best reputation recorded in the node A . The aim of this term is to improve the probability of a goodcollaborator receiving pieces. Hence, when a newcomer (i.e., with reputation zero) requests a content for thenode A , the probability of node A replying depends only from the health threshold of A (i.e., θ A ). If at somepoint node A is fully healthy, it will share contents, even to newcomers. However, when the best collaborator(i.e., r A(max)) requests a content for the node A , the probability of the node A replying is twice of a222
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010newcomer (i.e., max( 1,2θA)). This approach captures the idea of a node effort to reciprocate favors of the bestcollaborators.The original NoF <strong>do</strong> not address malicious attacks by rogue peers that desire to slow <strong>do</strong>wn the system bysending bogus pieces of data to their neighbors. Furthermore, we highlight the impact of transmitting a boguspiece to peers of a P2P content distribution system might be orders of magnitude worse, if the P2P systemrelies on a MANET, due to the hop by hop nature of a MANET. As the bogus piece traverses a MANET,many nodes may be requested to forward the t from the sender node to the receiver node. In case of acollusion attack, a few rogue nodes can saturate the entire network sending bogus pieces to diametricallyopposed nodes.To circumvent this problem, we modify the original NoF, adding a blacklist feature. The aim of theblacklist is punishing immediately any P2MAN sending node that sends a bogus piece to the requesting node.Hence, as soon as a bogus piece is <strong>do</strong>wnloaded by P2MAN requesting nodes, they lay the sending node inblacklist, avoiding answer its requests (e.g., reply to content requests, send pieces) for a penalty period. Thepenalty period can be tuned appropriately by system user. In order to calculate rA (B), we assume that aP2MAN node has reliable information about v ( B, A)and v ( A,B), the value of favors received from andprovided to another P2MAN node. Specifically, we assume that a generic P2MAN node can both: (i)measure the value of a favor <strong>do</strong>ne by another P2MAN node, and (ii) verify that the favor delivered was vali<strong>do</strong>r not, (i.e. that the sent data was not bogus). These assumptions are no stronger than the assumptions madefor another decentralized reputation schemes.3.2 Avoiding Rogue Peer ActivitiesAs a multicast-based P2P content distribution protocol designed for MANETs, one strategy of P2MAN isavoiding multiple one-to-one peer traffic of content distribution, reducing network transmission saturation.Instead, P2MAN enforces the selection of a single sending node for each content transmission by a processnamed owner node selection. Recall that, as part of P2MAN design, a requesting node which desires aspecific content must asking for it by sending a message to the Public Channel (i.e., a special multicastgroup). By receiving a requesting message, owner nodes can reply to the Public Channel, if they want to <strong>do</strong>so, informing that possesses the content and giving metadata having detailed information about the content(e.g., how it is divided in pieces, multicast group to be used in the transmission). All owner nodes can reply arequest in the Public Channel, if they own the requested content. After analyze the possible multiple replies,the requesting node choose a unique sending node to be authorized in the Public Channel, by sending anauthorization message. In particular, the owner node selection and authorization procedures are relevant toavoid the rogue peer activities in P2MAN, as following explained.Suppose that a rogue peer wants to send bogus pieces for dishonestly profiting favors, or to slowing <strong>do</strong>wnthe system. Hence, the rogue node may respond to any content request, as an owner node. To complete theattack, a rogue node must wait for an authorization, because if a requesting node receives a piece from anunauthorized owner node, it rejects (i.e., discards) the piece. When a rogue node is authorized, it maycomplete the attack, sending bogus pieces in a specific multicast address. As the first bogus piece is<strong>do</strong>wnloaded by the receiving nodes in the target multicast group, the sending node is inserted in the blacklistof each receiving node, that will leave that multicast group immediately. For the penalty period, the attackedreceiving nodes will ignore further replies, pieces and requests from the blacklisted nodes. We argue that thisapproach is sufficient to minimize rogue peer activities, by avoiding that rogue peers receive pieces theyrequest, and receive authorization messages. Free riding is also minimized, due to the low reputation of noncollaborators, as follows.Suppose now that a rogue peer desires to be a free rider, not replying to any content requests. Hence, itsreputation will not increase in the course of time. Even in the event of an ID-changing attack, the rogue peerstays in the zero favors landing, just as any newcomer.3.3 LimitationsWe assume that P2MAN is intended to distribute digital contents in a MANET, which by definition, isassembled for a known beneficial purpose. Hence, this work <strong>do</strong>es not address the possibility of byzantine223
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISattacks, where radio interference attacks may happen to confuse transmissions or malicious colluded nodescan attack the entire network by indefinitely flooding useless broadcasts.This work focuses on the possibility of system nodes which can eventually be used selfishly to profitmore network resources without collaborating with its own resources.We assume that a P2MAN node knows how to measure its internal state and so its health.4. EVALUATIONIn this Section we assess the performance of our approach, describing the results of simulations that showthat our variant of Network of Favors avoid that rogue peers lead the P2MAN system to collapse.4.1 Simulation ScenarioWe have performed simulations using MANET typical scenarios, in the Network Simulator 2.34. We modela network with 100 homogeneous mobile nodes. In our model, it is possible to tuning the penalty period, thenumber of rogue peers which try to send bogus pieces, and the number of free riders. For each scenario andconfiguration, results are represented by the average over ten rounds, considering a 95% confidence interval.Nodes are ran<strong>do</strong>mly spread over the terrain and they move around according to Ran<strong>do</strong>m Waypoint mobilitymodel (excluding minimum speed of zero). Shared contents are sliced into pieces of 1000 Bytes, followingthe recommendations of Lee et al. (2002) regarding packet sizes. The content size is 100 KBytes.We have considered 70 <strong>do</strong>wnloading nodes. 25 nodes as free riders, 25 nodes are rogue peers and 20 arehonest nodes. Table shows the configured P2MAN parameters. We have setθ to be high, since a low valuemay disturb the effective <strong>do</strong>wnload rate from honest peers and difficult the results interpretation.Table 2. P2MAN Simulation parametersParameterDescriptionSimulator NS-2 Release 2.34Number of Rounds 10Terrain Size1000x1000Mobility ModelRan<strong>do</strong>m WaypointPause Time0 sRadio Range250 mBandwidth2 MbpsMAC Protocol802.11 DCF ModeMobility Maximum Speed5 m/sContent Piece Size1000 BytesContent Size100 KBytesPenalty Period300 sNumber of Nodes 100Number of Owner Nodes 30Number of Requesting Nodes 70Number of Free Riders (i.e., which <strong>do</strong> not collaborate) 25Number of Rogue Peers (i.e., which send bogus data) 25Number of Honest Nodes (i.e., collaborators) 20Health Threshold (θ ) 0.8When the simulation begins all nodes have zero favors and, at some point, requesting nodes (i.e., honest,free riders, and rogue peers) start the content discovery process. When the first honest nodes perform contentrequests, owner nodes respond with replies, if their healths are sufficient. Hence, healthy and authorize<strong>do</strong>wner nodes start to send pieces to the requesting nodes. By receiving pieces, each request node increment itsrespective owner nodes’ reputation entry in table.Similarly, when the first free riders perform content requests, healthy owner nodes also respond withreplies, due to the impossibility to determine which nodes are free rider, before a set of interactions. Hence,the expected result is which both honest peers and free riders get content pieces in the first interactions, and224
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010after a period of time, collaborators will achieve better reputation with owner nodes and free riders will staywith reputation zero.When rogue peers start to reply content requests and send bogus pieces, all involved requesting nodesmust blacklist the rogue nodes. Hence, the expected result is that after a short time, rogue peers are unable tosend bogus pieces and their reputation must stay zero for all the system, since they <strong>do</strong> not collaborate.The simulation rounds run for 5000 s. A requesting node asks for contents one by one and when itfinishes a <strong>do</strong>wnload, a new <strong>do</strong>wnload is engaged immediately, such that the system is in constant activity.Figure 1 shows the results of the simulations, with the <strong>do</strong>wnload success rate of honest peers, rogue peers andfree riders collected every 500 s of simulation. We assume that, in our simulations, nodes <strong>do</strong> not change theirstrategies, such that an honest peer remains honest for the entire simulation.Figure 1. Successful <strong>do</strong>wnload rate of honest peers, rogue peers, and free ridersNote that, even with honest peers, there is no full <strong>do</strong>wnload success rate, since some pieces fail to be<strong>do</strong>wnloaded, due to the link failures caused by node mobility and collisions.Figure 1 shows a substantial reduction on the success of rogue peers <strong>do</strong>wnload rate. Also free riding isminimized, after a period. In the simulations, we have used a small content to be <strong>do</strong>wnloaded. Recall thatwhen a content <strong>do</strong>wnload finishes, a new <strong>do</strong>wnload starts. Hence, for new contents, potentially new ownersare requested and so free riders keep receiving some pieces, which explain the smoothly declined chart, untilfinally be detected by a sufficient quantity of nodes to be fully restrained.5. CONCLUSIONIn this paper we have addressed the problem of discouraging rogue peers in P2MAN, which is a multicastP2P content distribution for MANETs. We have a<strong>do</strong>pted a modified version of the Network of Favors toP2MAN, as a lightweight decentralized reputation scheme. In the modified version we have incorporated ablacklist feature to help NoF fighting against rogue peers in P2MAN. Also, we have defined the concept ofP2MAN node health, in efforts to model resource constraints of mobile wireless nodes in the context ofcontent distribution on MANETs. Through simulations using NS-2, we have shown that our approach issufficient to minimize rogue peer activities, reducing the success rate of rogue peers to almost zero.225
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISWe intend to extend this work, to include node energy information and other constrained resources in thesimulations and performing extensive analysis to measure the impact of node health in the P2MAN ability todistribute contents in MANETs.REFERENCESAguiar, R., Einsiedler, H. and Moreno, J. (2009). An Operacional Conceptual Model for Global CommunicationInfrastructures. Springer Wireless Personal Communications,vol. 49, no. 3, pp. 335-351.Anastasi, G. et al., (2009). Design and performance evaluation of a transport protocol for ad hoc networks. The ComputerJournal Advance. vol. 52, pp. 186-209.Andrade, N., <strong>Brasileiro</strong>, F., Cirne, W. and Mowbray, W. (2004). Discouraging free riding in a peer-to-peer cpu-sharinggrid. International Symposium on High-Performance Distributed Computing, pp. 129-137.Androutsellis-Theotokis, S. and Spinellis, D., (2004). A survey of peer-to-peer content distribution technologies. ACMComputer Surveys, vol. 36, no. 4, pp. 335-371.Chun, B., Fu, Y., and Vahdat A., (2003). Bootstrapping a distributed computational economy with peer-to-peer bartering.Proceedings of 1st Workshop on Economics of Peer-to-Peer Systems.Cohen, B. (2003). Incentives build robustness in bittorrent. Workshop on Economics of Peer-to-Peer Systems, CA, EUA.Cornelli, F., Damiani, E., De Capitani di Vimercati, S., Paraboschi, S. and Samarati, P., (2002).Choosing reputableservents in a P2P network. In Proceedings of the Eleventh International World Wide Web Conference. Honolulu,Hawaii.Ding, G. and Bhargava, B., (2004). Peer-to-peer file-sharing over mobile ad hoc networks. Proceedings of the SecondIEEE Annual Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications Workshops, p. 104.Doria, S. and Spohn, M. (2009). A Multicast Approach for Peer-to-Peer Content Distribution in Mobile Ad HocNetworks. Proceedings of IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference. Budapest, Hungary, pp.1-6.Fall, K. and Varadhan, K., 2007. The network simulator ns-2: Documentation. Available athttp://www.isi.edu/nsnam/ns/ns-<strong>do</strong>cumentation.html.Holland, G. and Vaidya, N., (1999). Analysis of tcp performance over mobile ad hoc networks. Proceedings of the 5thAnnual ACM/IEEE International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking. pp. 219-230.Klemm, A. et al., (2003). A special-purpose peer-to-peer file sharing system for mobile ad hoc networks. IEEE 58thVehicular Technology Conference, vol. 4, pp. 2758-2763.Krifa, A. et al., (2009). Bithoc: A content sharing application for wireless ad hoc networks. IEEE InternationalConference on Pervasive Computing and Communications. vol. 0, pp. 1-3.Kortuem, G. et al., (2001). When peer-to-peer comes face-to-face: Collaborative peer-to-peer computing in mobile ad hocnetworks. Proceedings of the First International Conference on Peer-to-Peer Computing, p. 75.Lee, U. et al., (2006). Code torrent: content distribution using network coding in vanet. MobiShare ’06: Proceedings ofthe 1st international workshop on Decentralized resource sharing in mobile computing and networking. pp. 1-5.Lee, J., Kim, G., Park, S., 2002. Optimum UDP Packet Sizes in Ad Hoc Networks, in: Workshop on High PerformanceSwitching and Routing: Merging Optical and IP Technologies, Seoul, South Korea, 214-218.Passarella, A. et al., (2006). Xscribe: a stateless, crosslayer approach to p2p multicast in multi-hop ad hoc networks.MobiShare ’06: Proceedings of the 1st international workshop on Decentralized resource sharing in mobilecomputing and networking. New York, NY, USA. pp. 6-11.Pucha, H. et al., (2004). Ekta: An efficient dht substrate for distributed applications in mobile ad hoc networks. IEEEWorkshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications, vol. 0, pp. 163-173.Rajagopalan, S. et al., (2006). A cross-layer decentralized bittorrent for mobile ad hoc networks. Third AnnualInternational Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Systems: Networking & Services. pp. 1-10.Sbai, M. and Barakat, C., (2009). Revisiting p2p content sharing in wireless ad hoc networks. Lecture Notes in ComputerScience. vol. 5918, pp. 13-25.Stuckmann, P. and Zimmermann, R., (2009). European Research on Future <strong>Internet</strong> Design. IEEE WirelessCommunications, vol.16, no.5, pp.14-22.Yi, Y. et al., (2008). Cora: Collaborative opportunistic recovery algorithm for loss controlled, delay bounded ad hocmulticast. Computer Communications. vol. 31, no. 15, pp. 3672-3682.226
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010ORDINARY WEB PAGES AS A SOURCE FOR METADATAACQUISITION FOR OPEN CORPUS USER MODELINGMichal Barla and Mária BielikováInstitute of Informatics and <strong>Software</strong> Engineering, Faculty of Informaticsand Information Technologies, Slovak University of TechnologyIlkovičova 3, 842 16 Bratislava, SlovakiaABSTRACTPersonalization and adaptivity of the Web as we know of today is often “closed” within a particular web-based system.As a result there are only a few “personalized islands” within the whole Web. Spreading the personalization to the wholeWeb either via an enhanced proxy server or using an agent residing on a client-side brings a challenge how to determinemetadata within an open corpus Web <strong>do</strong>main, which would allow for an efficient creation of overlayed user model. Inthis paper we present our approach to metadata acquisition for open corpus user modeling applicable on the “wild” Web,where we decided to take into account metadata in the form of keywords representing the visited web pages. We presentthe user modeling process (which is thus keyword-based) built on the top of an enhanced proxy server, capable ofpersonalizing user browsing sessions via pluggable modules. The paper focuses on comparison of algorithms and thirdpartyservices which allow for extraction of required keywords from ordinary web pages, which is a crucial step of ouruser modeling approach.KEYWORDSKeyword extraction, user modeling, proxy.1. INTRODUCTIONThe field of adaptive web-based systems is nowadays well established and pretty mature(Brusilovsky, et al., 2007). However, most of the proposed approaches are concentrating on personalizationof one particular system, either by incorporating user modeling and adaptive features into a web applicationor by creating an adaptive layer on the top of an existing application. As a result, there are only a few“personalized islands” within the whole Web, where majority of content and information services areprovided using a failing “one-size-fits-all” paradigm.The reason why the majority of adaptive approaches is built on the top of a closed corpus <strong>do</strong>main is thatevery adaptive system must track user's attitudes (such as knowledge or interest) towards <strong>do</strong>main elementsoften realized in the form of an overlayed user model. Closed corpus <strong>do</strong>main can provide a detailed, oftenmanually prepared and non-changing conceptualization, which is easily used for user modeling purposes. Inthe case of an open corpus or vast and dynamic <strong>do</strong>main, we cannot track user's relations to all <strong>do</strong>cuments orother pieces of information which exist within the <strong>do</strong>main. The solution is to incorporate and use externalmodels that exist beyond the hyperspace of interlinked <strong>do</strong>cuments and provide a meaningful abstraction ofthe <strong>do</strong>main (Brusilovsky & Henze, 2007), i.e., to provide a metadata model and a mapping between <strong>do</strong>mainitems and this metadata model, which serves also as a bottom layer for an overlayed user model. An exampleof such an approach, which maps user's interests to a set of metadata, can be seen in (Barla, et al., 2009).When considering the whole Web as our <strong>do</strong>main of interest, it seems that we can leverage the SemanticWeb as both a source of metadata and mapping inherently present within it. However, when consideringfindings from (Sabou, et al., 2008; Fernandez, et al., 2008) that• existing semantic systems are restricted to a limited set of <strong>do</strong>mains – they use a set of a prioridefined ontologies covering one specific <strong>do</strong>main without proper linking to other ontologies,• the overall Semantic Web <strong>do</strong>es not adequately cover specific terminology and227
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADIS• many online ontologies have a weak internal structure – few online ontologies contain synonyms ornon-taxonomic relations,we come to conclusions that we must find additional sources of metadata, which would provide goodenoughresults for user modeling purposes.In this paper we present our approach to metadata acquisition for open corpus user modeling applicableon the “wild” Web, where we decided to take into account metadata in the form of keywords representing thevisited web pages. We present briefly the user modeling process (which is thus keyword-based) and focus oncomparison of algorithms and third-party services which allows for extraction of required keywords fromordinary web pages.The paper is organized as follows. Section 2 discusses related works, in section 3 we present briefly ourapproach to user modeling using a proxy server. In section 4 we describe algorithms and services currentlyemployed for metadata acquisition. In section 5 we present an evaluation of selected algorithms' behavior ondifferent web pages in terms of content language and writing style. Finally we give our conclusions.2. RELATED WORKSThe related works can be seen either from the point of view of keyword- (or tag-) based user modeling or ofthe actual extraction of keywords from the plain text (i.e., content of web pages).Tags and keywords gained interest of user modeling community very quickly. Already in 2001,the (Shepherd, et al., 2001) proposed an approach, which was combining keywords extracted from web pageswith user's explicit rating of the page in order to build a keyword-based user profile.An approach to user interest recognition applicable in open information space was presentedin (Badi, et al., 2006). The authors defined user interest as either a term, <strong>do</strong>cument or their abstractions suchas term vector and metadata. Next, they focused on implicit interest indicators and their mutual comparison.The real boom came with the rise of Web 2.0, when users started to tag and organize content on the Webto alleviate themselves its later retrieval. In (Schwarzkopf, et al., 2007) as well as in (Zhang & Feng, 2008),the authors proposed a user model resulting in analysis of user's tag space within a web-based tagging systemand thus a closed information space. Approach proposed in (Carmagnola, et al., 2007) <strong>do</strong>es not rely only onreasoning of specific tags semantics but considers also user dimensions which could be inferred from theaction of tagging, such as user's interactivity level or interest. It seems that majority of research oriented onkeyword-based user models are built in a manner that it is the user herself who provides the keywords to hermodel by annotating web content with tags. In our approach, we acquire keywords automatically from thevisited pages, similarly to (Shepherd, et al., 2001).The actual extraction of keywords or terms from the plain text (called also ATR – automatic termrecognition) has evolved from pure research task into a mature application <strong>do</strong>main, with various availableservices and libraries devoted to this task, serving for various purposes in various <strong>do</strong>main from informationretrieval to automated <strong>do</strong>main model construction for personalized systems (Šimko & Bieliková,2009). Theyare based on linguistic processing (e.g., part-of-speech tagging) and statistical models used to select relevantterms from the text (Zhang, et al., 2008).However, the main drawback of linguistic and statistical approaches is that they often require a corpusincluding all <strong>do</strong>cuments of the <strong>do</strong>main and are thus applicable only on closed and not-ever-changinginformation spaces. If we want to extract relevant keywords from ordinary web pages, we need to employand combine other techniques such as named-entity recognition leveraging linked data and other semanticknowledge.3. KEYWORD-BASED USER MODELING FOR THE WEB SEARCHDOMAINA keyword-based user modeling, albeit being a rather simple approach is giving satisfactory results andseems to be good enough for capturing user interests (Kramár, et al., 2010). If we want to employ such modelfor the purpose of “wild” web personalization, we need an ability to acquire keywords from <strong>do</strong>cuments228
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010visited by the users. Because the Web is an open information space, we need to track <strong>do</strong>wn and process everypage a user has visited in order to update her model appropriately.To achieve this, we developed an enhanced proxy server, which allows for realization of advance<strong>do</strong>perations on the top of requests flowing from user and responses coming back from the web servers all overthe <strong>Internet</strong> (Barla & Bieliková, 2009). Figure 1 depicts the user modeling flow supported by our platform.When a web server returns a web page as a response for a user's request, the proxy injects a specializedtracking javascript into it and passes the page to the client user agent. At the same time, it initializes a processof metadata extraction from the acquired page.Figure 1. User Modeling process based on an enhanced proxy platform.First, HTML page is processed by a readability module 1 which strips-off the HTML markup and leavesonly a main textual content, omitting navigational parts, banners etc. Second, the text is translated intoEnglish (if it is not already in this language) using Google's translate service. This step is required as majorityof metadata extraction algorithms and services (which are fired after the translation) work correctly only withEnglish language. Extracted metadata are stored in a user model altogether with corresponding URL andtimestamp. The tracking javascript, which was inserted to the response and passed to the user, suppliesadditional information about the user's activity within the page and thus adds an implicit feedback whichdetermines a weight of contribution of just-discovered metadata to the whole user model.The aforementioned process gathers metadata for every requested web page and creates a basic(evidence) layer of a user model. Naturally, as the time flows, the keywords which represent long-term userinterests occur more often than the others. Therefore, by considering only top K most occurring keywords,we get a user model which can be further analyzed and serves as a basis for adaptation and personalization.4. SERVICES FOR KEYWORD EXTRACTIONIn order to allow for combination of different approaches to keyword extraction, we developed an extensiblesoftware library JKeyExtractor, which wraps several different metadata extractors and is able to provideresults, which are composed of different extractors. These extractors could be either online web servicesavailable through different kinds of API (usually REST-based) or locally invoked algorithms and libraries.Our platform is currently able to use several following metadata extractors.1 reimplemented solution available at http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/229
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISJATR libraryJava Automatic Term Recognition Toolkit 2 is a Java implementation of several term extraction algorithms(e.g., CValue, TermEx, GlossEx, Weirdness, TF-IDF – their comparison can be found in(Zhang, et al., 2008). The library comes with a simple corpus for determining term frequency and a pack ofNLP resources from OpenNLP 3 which serves as a basis for sentence detection, tokenization, pos-tagging,chunking and parsing.DeliciousWe are taking advantage of Delicious API and its tag suggestion feature to determine tags for the givenpage (if any). Advantage of this metadata extractor (or rather provider) is that it provides metadata (tags)filled-in by humans, which might bring an added value, as not all of the acquired tags must be present in thetext itself.OpenCalaisOpenCalais 4 is a web service which automatically creates rich semantic metadata for the submittedcontent. It resolves named entities (such as persons, companies, cities, countries etc.), facts and events. WhileATR-based approaches <strong>do</strong> not distinguish between a name and any other noun within the text and mighteasily declare a name as non-relevant, OpenCalais <strong>do</strong>es recognize them, so we can use them to statisticallytrack user's interest.tagthe.nettagthe.net is a simple REST web service that returns a set of tags based on a posted textual content.Similarly to OpenCalais, it tries to distinguish retrieved tags into categories such as topics, persons orlocations.AlchemyAlchemy 5 is yet another web-based API which provides named entity extraction, term extraction, topiccategorization and automatic language identification services. Apart from the language identification service,the three remaining services are highly relevant to our work as they provide different kinds of metadataextracted from the given text.dmozdmoz 6 is an open directory project – the largest human-edited directory of the Web maintained byvolunteers from all over the world. Visitors having interest in a particular category can find pages relevant tothis category by navigating through the created hierarchy. However, dmoz provide also RDF dump of theirdatabase, which can be easily used for an inverse search (page → category). Similarly to delicious, if we finda page in dmoz, we get an added-value of man-made categorization (which, in this case is even hierarchicallyorganized) ideal for modeling of user interests.5. EVALUATIONWe have conducted an experiment on a small dataset of English and other language (slovak and czech) webpages(having a representative of technical and non-technical texts and different writing styles) to evaluateefficiency of some of aforementioned extractors. We compared the extracted metadata with those which weredefined manually prior to the automated extraction. In order to distinguish between closely related resultsand those which were totally different, we compared the results (each term from manually prepared setagainst each term from automatically acquired set) using Wordnet-based similarity provided byWordnet::Similarity module 7 . Only in case when we have found that one term is a substring of another wedid not employ the wordnet similarity measure. In such a case, we declared them as similar. Whencomparing the terms, we penalized those terms, which had similarity of 0 (no similarity at all) with all termsfrom the other set.2 JATR, available at http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/~ziqizhang/#tool3 OpenNLP Models, http://opennlp.sourceforge.net/models.html4 Open Calais, http://www.opencalais.com5 Alchemy, http://www.alchemyapi.com/6 dmoz, http://www.dmoz.org7 Wordnet::Similarity project, http://wn-similarity.sourceforge.net230
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010Apart from comparison of automatically extracted keywords against manually prepared ones, we alsocompared (following the same principles) two sets of manually prepared keywords, each coming from adifferent evaluator, in order to acquire a natural baseline for further interpretation of our apriori evaluation.The results (Table 1) show us that algorithms and services were able to find an overlap with humanannotator in every case, even if the achieved similarity was very low in quite a few cases. However, byexamining the results for different types of web pages, we can identify the strengths and weaknesses of usedalgorithms and services.Table 1. Comparison of selected metadata extractors against manually chosen metadata by normalized wordnet similarityDomain JATR OpenCalais tagthe.net alchemy Another humanevaluatorinstitution homepage in Slovak (fiit.stuba.sk) 0.26 0.24 0.32 0.15 0.17institution homepage in English (l3s.de) 0.09 0.14 0.12 0.08 0.03news article in Slovak (sme.sk) 0.03 0.09 0.07 0.03 0.15news article in English (bbc.co.uk) 0.02 0.16 0.15 0.02 0.22technically-oriented text in Czech (root.cz) 0.25 0.21 0.41 0.46 0.35technically-oriented blog in English (railstips.org) 0.13 0.0 0.17 0.003 0.17The most accurate results (according to human annotator) were achieved on technical texts, the best oneon the case of a tutorial-like article on root.cz, which was very specialized in particular technology andcontained many acronyms relevant to that technology. The second technical text which was in English gainedworse results, where, for instance, OpenCalais did not manage to get any meaningful term. We can explainthis by the fact that the article was devoted to very new technologies and their usage, which were probablyhard to distinguish in the text.The worst results were achieved on complex news articles, especially the one which was translatedautomatically from Slovak to English. In the one coming from bbc.co.uk, at least OpenCalais and tagthe.netwere able to achieve a similarity of more than 10%. In addition, news articles were the only case, where twohuman annotators achieved significantly higher level of agreement on keywords than a human annotator withany other algorithmic approach. The biggest difference is in the case of the text, which was machinetranslatedinto English prior to further processing.There is no clear winner among the evaluated approaches and it seems that they are, in effect, mutuallyeliminating their weakness, which means that they could be effectively used in a combination. For instance,when pure NLP oriented JATR fails, the semantically-enhanced services such as OpenCalais or tagthe.net areable to achieve fair results and vice versa.Apart from the mentioned experiment, we also deployed the combination of OpenCalais and tagthe.netextractors to the enhanced proxy platform described in Section 3 to determine the efficiency of the solution inreal-world usage. As the proxy solution can be, apart from logging, easily used to improve user experiencewith ordinary web sites, we used the on-the-fly created keyword-based user models to optimize anddisambiguate queries given to a web search engine and to improve navigation within our faculty website.More, we provided users with a wordle-based 8 visualization of their user profiles and collected a preciousfeedback, which helped us to determine “web stop-words”, i.e., words which occur often on web pages but<strong>do</strong> not make any sense from the user's interests point of view. An example of such a user profile is displayedin Figure 1.8 Wordle tag cloud generator, http://www.wordle.net/231
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISFigure 2. A wordle visualization of a keyword-based user profile collected by our enhanced proxy platformThe already mentioned improvement of navigation is based on combining behavioral analysis for derivinguser’s interest in a web page he currently visits with collaborative filtering used for actual contentrecommendation (Holub & Bieliková, 2010). User's interest is derived from data acquired by trackingjavascript inserted by the proxy server. An experiment with visitors of our faculty website proved that we areable to estimate correctly user's interest in a particular page by considering time spent actively on page alongwith additional implicit feedback indicators (i.e., scrolling, clipboard usage) and their comparison againstvalues coming from other users.User's of proxy server also benefited from an enhanced googling experience, as our proxy server wasproposing (apart from ordinary search results) also results coming from optimized and disambiguatedqueries. This time, we used metadata acquired from visited web pages to automatically construct usermodels, which served as a basis for construction of social networks and virtual communities within them.These communities, along with user's current context (metadata acquired from web pages visited in currentsession), are used to infer new keywords which would optimize and disambiguate search queries(Kramár, et al., 2010). We observed that users clicked and stayed on the results coming out from theextended queries in 54.7% of cases, which is a significant improvement against normal googling pattern ofour users without any recommendations, where they stayed only on 27.4% of all clicked results, which meanthat our recommendations were meaningful. As the whole search optimization was driven by automaticallyconstructed open corpus user model using metadata extracted from the visited web-pages, we can concludethat our approach is able to extract useful metadata from the web pages and to produce a good enough usermodels.6. CONCLUSIONSIn this paper, we presented an approach to metadata extraction based on a combination of various methods.Key advantage and contribution is a move towards the “wild web” where personalization based on manuallycreated <strong>do</strong>main models is impossible. Presented metadata extraction is a base for our new approach to opencorpus user modeling. Experiments show that a user model constructed in this way can perform similarly totag-based models constructed from user's tag space within a particular tagging system.We described our platform of an enhanced proxy server, focusing on a way how it supports our usermodeling process, which itself is highly dependent on extraction of metadata. The enhanced proxy server isan ideal way of experimenting with web applications, as we can log all relevant data along with overallbrowsing context (i.e., what was a user browsing in parallel to using our web application) without forcing theuser to change his or her browsing behavior (such as using a proprietary browser). The basic evaluation offew of such services against a manually annotated dataset did not show a clear success (the best achievedscore was 46%). However, we must emphasize that we were performing a strict apriori evaluation withstrong penalization of any mismatched terms. Manual posteriori inspection of acquired results showed that232
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010most of the extracted keywords are meaningful and would definitely yield (after a proper statisticalprocessing) a suitable user model.However, only the usage within retrieval, recommendation or adaptation engines can really proveviability of this approach. We deployed our solution to automatic user model construction based on availablemetadata to our proxy platform, used for everyday web browsing and built different personalization serviceson the top of it (site-specific navigation recommendation and search query disambiguation). Bothpersonalization services were evaluated as successful, which means that the underlying user modeling part isable to collect adequate information related to interests of particular users.ACKNOWLEDGEMENTThis work was supported by the Scientific Grant Agency of SR, grant No. VG1/0508/09, the Cultural andEducational Grant Agency of SR, grant No. 345-032STU-4/2010, and it is a partial result of the Research &Development Operational Program for the project Support of Center of Excellence for Smart Technologies,Systems and Services II, ITMS 25240120029, co-funded by ERDF.REFERENCESBadi, R. et al., 2006. Recognizing User Interest and Document Value from Reading and Organizing Activities inDocument Triage. Int. Conf on Intelligent User Interfaces IUI 2006. ACM, pp. 218–225.Brusilovsky, P. et al., 2007. The Adaptive Web, LNCS 4321. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.Brusilovsky, P. & Henze, N., 2007, Open Corpus Adaptive Educational Hypermedia. The Adaptive Web, LNCS 4321.Springer, pp.671–696.Barla, M et al, 2009. Rule-Based User Characteristics Acquisition from Logs With Semantics for Personalized WebbasedSystems. Computing and Informatics, vol. 28, no. 4, pp. 399–427.Barla, M. and Bieliková, M., 2009. “Wild” Web Personalization: Adaptive Proxy Server, Workshop on Intelligent andKnowledge oriented Technologies, WIKT 2009. Equilibria, Košice, pp. 48–51, (in Slovak).Carmagnola, F. et al., 2007. Towards a Tag-Based User Model: How Can User Model Benefit from Tags? User Modeling2007, LNCS 4511.Springer, pp. 445–449.Fernandez, M. et al., 2008. Semantic Search Meets the Web, Int. Conf. on Semantic Computing, pp. 253–260.Holub, M.. and Bieliková, M., 2010. Estimation of User Interest in Visited Web Page, <strong>WWW</strong> 2010. ACM, pp. 1111-1112.Kramár, T. et al, 2010, Disambiguating Search by Leveraging the Social Network Context. User Modeling, Adaptationand Personalization, UMAP 2010, LNCS 6075, Springer, pp. 387-392Sabou, M. et al., 2008. Evaluating the Semantic Web: A Task-Based Approach. The Semantic Web, LNCS 4825.Springer, pp. 423–437.Schwarzkopf, D. et al., 2007. Mining the Structure of Tag Spaces for User Modeling. Data Mining for User ModelingOn-line Proceedings of Workshop held at the Int. Conf. on User Modeling UM2007, Corfu, Greece, pp. 63–75.Shepherd, M. et al., 2001. Browsing and Keyword-based Profiles: A Cautionary Tale. Int. Conf. on System SciencesHICSS 2001, Volume 4. IEEE Computer Society, pp. 4011.Šimko, M. and Bieliková, M., 2009. Automated Educational Course Metadata Generation Based on SemanticsDiscovery. Technology Enhanced Learning, EC-TEL 2009, LNCS 5794. Springer, pp. 99-105.Zhang, Y. and Feng, B., 2008. Tag-based User Modeling Using Formal Concept Analysis, Int. Conf. on Computer andInformation Technology. IEEE, pp. 485–490.Zhang, Z: et al. 2008, A Comparative Evaluation of Term Recognition Algorithms, Int. Conf. on Language Resourcesand Evaluation LREC 2008. pp. 2108–2113.233
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISQUERYCLOUD: AUTOMATICALLY LINKING RELATEDDOCUMENTS VIA SEARCH QUERY (TAG) CLOUDSChristoph TrattnerInstitute for Information Systems and Computer MediaGraz University of TechnologyInffeldgasse 16c, 8010 Graz, AustriaABSTRACTIn this paper we presented a tool called QueryCloud for exploring related resources in Web encyclopedias. Typically,users come to an encyclopedia from a search engine such as Google, Yahoo! or Bing and upon reading the first page onthe site they leave it immediately thereafter. To tackle this problem in systems such as Web shops, additional browsingtools for easy finding of related content are provided. Thus, in this paper, we present a novel tool called QueryCloud thatlinks related content in an encyclopedia in a usable and visually appealing manner. The tool combines two promisingapproaches – tag clouds and historic search queries – into a new single one. Hence, each <strong>do</strong>cument in the system isenriched with a tag cloud containing collections of related concepts populated from historic search queries. To test theidea, a prototypical implementation tool has been implemented and integrated within a Web encyclopedia called Austria-Forum. To evaluate the system, a theoretical framework was invented to conduct the potentials and limitations of the tool.KEYWORDSSearch query tag clouds, tag clouds, query tags, tags, linking, web encyclopedia1. INTRODUCTIONNowadays, content in Web encyclopedias such as Wikipedia are mainly accessed through search engines(Wikimedia 2010). Typically, users with a certain interest in mind go to a search engine such as Google,Yahoo! or Bing, define a search query there and click on a link from the result list from which they arereferred to an article within Wikipedia. Upon reading the <strong>do</strong>cument they decide to either go back to thesearch engine to refine their search, or close their browser if they have already found the information theyneeded. Such a user behavior on encyclopedia sites is traceable through a typical high bounce rate (Alexa2010, Gleich et al. 2010). Essentially, users <strong>do</strong> not “really” browse in online encyclopedia systems such asWikipedia to find further relevant <strong>do</strong>cuments (Gleich et al. 2010) - they rather use search engines such asGoogle, Yahoo! or Bing for that purpose. It is our opinion that Web encyclopedias simply lack usable toolsthat support users in explorative browsing or searching. For example, in Web based systems such as Webshops, different approaches have been applied to tackle this situation. Amazon for instance offers the userrelated information through collaborative filtering techniques for each product. Google or Yahoo! apply asimilar approach by offering related content (e.g. sponsored links) to the user by taking the users’ searchquery history into account (Mehta et al. 2007).On the other hand, social bookmarking systems such as Delicious, CiteULike or BibSonomy haveemerged as an interesting alternative to find relevant content in the Web (Heymann et al. 2010). Thesesystems apply the concept of social navigation (Millen and Feinberg 2006) i.e. users browse by means of tagclouds, which are collections of keywords assigned to different online resources by different users (Heymannet al. 2010) driven by different motivations (Nov and Ye 2010, Ames and Naaman 2007).In this paper we introduce a novel tool called QueryCloud to offer related content to users of Webencyclopedias. Essentially, the tool is based on the simple idea of integrating a tagging system into a Webencyclopedia and offering related content to users via the so-called resource specific tag clouds byautomatically linking related <strong>do</strong>cuments over the users search query tags/terms. In this way two promisingapproaches are successfully combined into a new single one - tag clouds and historic search queries.234
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010To test the idea a prototypical implementation tool has been implemented and integrated within a Webencyclopedia called Austria-Forum. To evaluate the system, a theoretical framework was invented to conductthe tools potentials and limitations.Thus, the paper is structured as follows: Section 2 presents the basic idea of this new approach. Section 3shortly discusses the implementation of the idea. Section 4 provides an analysis of the potentials andlimitations of this novel tool by integrating it into a large Web based encyclopedia system called Austria-Forum and by evaluating it with a theoretical framework. Finally, Section 5 concludes the paper and providesan outlook for future work in this area.2. APPROACHThe basic idea of QueryCloud is to offer related content to users via the so-called resource-specific tag cloudby automatically linking related <strong>do</strong>cuments via the search query terms of the users. On the one hand, tagclouds represent an interesting alternative navigation tool in modern Web-based systems (Helic et al. 2010,Trattner et al. 2010b). Moreover, they are very close to the idea of explorative browsing (Sinclair andCardew-Hall 2008), i.e. they capture nicely the intent of users coming to a system from a search engine -users have searched in e.g. Google, Yahoo! or Bing and now they click on a concept in a tag cloud thatreflects their original search intent. On the other hand, search query history, i.e. queries that are “referrers” tofound <strong>do</strong>cuments are an invaluable source of information for refining user search in the system. It is ourbelief that an integration of such a tool online encyclopedia systems would greatly contribute to leading usersto related <strong>do</strong>cuments.In order to make the idea work the users search query history needs to be obtained in a resource specificway. This is achieved by collecting the HTTP-Referrer information from a user coming from a search engineto a particular website (resource) within a Web based encyclopedia system such as Austria-Forum.Austria-Forum 1 (Trattner et al. 2010) is basically a wiki-based online encyclopedia containing articlesrelated to Austria. The system comprises a very large repository of articles, where new articles are easilypublished, edited, checked, assessed, and certified, and where the correctness and quality of each of thesearticles is assured by a person that is accepted as an expert in a particular field. Currently, the system containsnearly more than 130,000 information items.Figure 1. Example of resource-specific query term/tag cloud and resource list of a tag within Austria-Forum rendered byQueryCloud system.For example, suppose users go to Google and search for “Elfride Jellinek Biographie” and select the link from the results1 http://www.austria-lexikon.at/235
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISlist. QueryCloud is then able to obtain the user’s search query terms “Elfride”, “Jellinek”, “Biographien” forthe particular website by extracting the terms simply from HTTP-Referrer information of the users. Thus, in order tocalculate the resource-specific tags clouds of the system QueryCloud aggregates all obtained query terms fora particular site to the so-called resource-specific term/tag clouds (see Figure 1).Thus, two pages (or even more) are linked with each other by this approach, if they have the same querytag in common. Upon clicking on a particular query tag in a resource-specific tag cloud the user is providedwith a list of links of the resources which have this query tag in common (see Figure 1). By clicking on aparticular link in the resource list the user is then forwarded to the resource she was searching for (see Figure2).Figure 2. Example of tag cloud driven navigation within Austria-Forum using QueryCloud system.3. IMPLEMENTATIONThe first prototypical implementation (cf. Trattner and Helic 2010) consists basically of four independentdifferent modules (cf. Figure 1 and Figure 2).• Tag Collection Module: The tag collection module is the first module within QueryCloud system.Basically, this module consists of a simple client part module which retrieves HTTP-Referrer information,time information and target page of a user coming from a search engine such as Google, Yahoo! or Bing to awebsite. The tag collection module is implemented in JavaScript and can easily be integrated into anywebsite with only one line of code:where the ref.js file contains the following code (cf. Antonellis 2009):<strong>do</strong>cument.write('');• Tag Storage Module: This module is the actual heart peace of QueryCloud system. It provides acouple of interface routines for storing and deleting data from the database back-end module which isactually implemented by using Apache Lucene 2 search engine. Due to reasons of performance two index filesare generated: One for expressing the tag resource-relations (t n |r i ,…,r j ) and one for expressing the resourcetagrelations (r n |t i ,…,t j ). With such a database design it is also possible to search resources and tags2 http://lucene.apache.org/236
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010independently. Furthermore it allows to profit from the MoreLikeThis-similarity 3 function provided byApache Lucene.• Tag (Cloud) Generation Module: To provide the access to related <strong>do</strong>cuments a resource-specificsearch query term/tag cloud is calculated by this module. This tag cloud is of the form TC r = (t 1 ,..., t n , r 1 ,...,r m ), where r 1 ,..., r m are the resources which have any of the query tags t 1 ,..., t n in common. The calculatedresource-specific query tag clouds are serialized to disk on the server-side to improve the performance of thesystem. For retrieving the query tags and the corresponding resources (cf. Figure 1), this module provides asimple HTTP interface using the following two functions:o GetTagCloud(,) generates a XML representation of a query tag clou<strong>do</strong> GetResources(,,) generates a XML representation of theresource list for a particular query tag.• Tag Cloud Presentation Module: This module is a client-side AJAX module implemented inJavaScript. It retrieves the XML representation of a query term/tag cloud or an XML representation of aresource list of a particular query term/tag from the tag cloud generation module and renders a tag cloud in avisually appealing fashion (cf. Trattner and Helic 2009).Figure 3. QueryCloud system - structural diagram.4. EXPERIMENTAL SETUP AND EVALUATION FRAMEWORKTo investigate the feasibility of the tool before actually deploying it we integrated the QueryCloud tagcollection module into Austria-Forum life system and collected the search queries of the users coming from asearch engine such as Google, Yahoo! and Bing to Austria-Forum for a period of 6 months.In order to evaluate the potentials and limitations of the tool we implemented a theoretical framework thatmeasures tag quantity, link quality, network quality and information retrieval quality of the system. Tagquality by means of “tag semantic” is not investigated since we assume that the approach produces goodquality tags as shown by (Antonellis et al. 2009, Carman et al. 2009). Since Austria-Forum offers a built-intagging system, we used this human generated tag corpus (further referred as AF dataset) as our almost“golden standard” to compare it with the tags collected by QueryCloud system within Austria-Forum in ourtheoretical framework.3 http://lucene.apache.org/java/3_0_1/api/all/org/apache/lucene/search/Similarity.html237
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADIS4.1 Measuring Tag QuantitySince the success of the whole concept depends on automatically applying tags to the resources of a Webbased encyclopedia system we first conducted an experiment measuring tag quantity, i.e. we measured: Thenumber of tagged resources (#r) over time, the number of newly tagged resources over time (#r new ), thenumber of generated tags (#t) over time and the number of newly generated tags over time (#t new ).Essentially, we could observe that QueryCloud annotates in general nearly 150 resources every day whichis actually 3 times as many resources as the human taggers <strong>do</strong> annotate within Austria-Forum in the sameperiod of time. Regarding the number of generated tags, we could observe that QueryCloud produces inaverage nearly 4 times as many tags as the human taggers <strong>do</strong> (see Figure 4) which is at least 266 generatedtags a day.Figure 4. Number of tagged resources and number of generated tags over time for Austria-Forum: QC dataset (blue lines)vs. AF dataset (red lines).4.2 Measuring Link QualityAfter measuring the quantity of the tags produced by QueryCloud system we had a closer look at the actual“link quality” of the produced tags by QueryCloud system. Since the success of the whole concepts isdepended on linking related <strong>do</strong>cuments over tags that share more than one resource with each other, weconducted an experiment measuring the number orphan tags produced by QueryCloud system. Orphan tags(cf. Körner et al. 2010) are basically tags which are applied to only one resource within a tagging system, i.e.they <strong>do</strong> not connect any resources with each other. Again, we could observe that QueryCloud systemperforms really well by actually producing 7% less orphan tags than the human taggers (AF) <strong>do</strong> withinAustria-Forum (see Table 1).Table1. Number of tags (#tags) and number of orphan tags (#orphans): QC dataset vs. AF dataset#tags#orphansQC dataset 49,416 34,962 (70%)AF dataset 11,479 8,845 (77%)4.3 Measuring Network QualityAnother metric we were interested in was the so-called “network quality” of QueryCloud system. In order tomeasure this property we first modeled QueryCloud resource-specific tag cloud network as a simple tagresourcebipartite graph system of the form V = R∪T, where R is the resource set and T is the query tag set(Helic et al. 2010). Since the “link quality” experiment only showed us how many actual useful tags thesystems generates (by means of connecting two or more resources) we conducted an additional experiment to238
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010measure the number of connected resources over the resource-specific query tag clouds generated byQueryCloud system.To measure this metric, we calculated the (strongly) connected components (Levine 1965) for the wholeQueryCloud resource-specific tag cloud network (cf. Strohmaier et al. 2010). Essentially, we could observethat 98.58% of all resources within Austria-Forum are reachable via a resource-specific query tag cloudgenerated by QueryCloud system (cf. Trattner et al. 2010c). Contrary to this, the Austria-Forum taggersgenerate a resource-specific tag cloud network which is to 93.97% connected (cf. Trattner et al. 2010c).Figure 5. Number of network components: QC dataset(blue line) vs. AF dataset (red line).Figure 6. Distribution of shortest path pair lengths: QCdataset (blue line) vs. AF dataset (red line).4.4 Measuring Retrieval QualityLast but not least we measured the retrieval quality of QueryCloud system, i.e. we examined theeffectiveness of the tool to navigate related <strong>do</strong>cuments within a Web based encyclopedia system (cf. Helic etal. 2010). In (Helic et al. 2010) we have shown that navigable tag cloud networks have certain properties. Cf.Kleinberg (Kleinberg 2000a, Kleinberg 200b and Kleinberg 2001) a navigable network can be formallydefined as network with a low diameter (Newman 2003) bounded polylogarithmically, i.e. by a polynomial inlog(N), where N is the number of nodes in the network, and an existing giant component, i.e. a stronglyconnected component containing almost all nodes. Additionally, Kleinberg defined an “efficiently” navigablenetwork as a network possessing certain structural properties so that it is possible to design efficientdecentralized search algorithms (algorithms that only have local knowledge of the network) (Kleinberg2000a, Kleinberg 200b and Kleinberg 2001). The delivery time (the expected number of steps to reach anarbitrary target node) of such algorithms is polylogarithmic or at most sub-linear in N.Thus, as a first step, we examined the structural properties defined by the resource-specific tag cloudnetwork of QueryCloud system. First, we investigated the tag cloud networks “connected component”distribution. As shown in Figure 5 QueryCloud generates a resource-specific tag cloud network whose largestconnected component contains almost all nodes (99%) of the network. Contrary to this, the AF datasetgenerates a resource-specific tag cloud network which is “only” connected to 93.97%.Thereafter, we calculated the number of short path pairs within QueryCloud’s resource-specific tag cloudnetwork. As Figure 6 shows, QueryCloud generates a resource-specific tag cloud network whose effectivediameter is around 6.3 hops while the AF dataset generates a resource-specific tag cloud network with aneffective diameter of around 9.9 hops. Putting the results of these two experiments together we can say thatQueryCloud produces a navigable tag cloud network (Helic et al. 2010, Kleinberg 2000a, Kleinberg 2000b,Kleinberg 2001).Now, since we have shown that the resource-specific tag cloud network of QueryCloud system isnavigable (cf. Kleinberg 2001), we implemented a decentralized searcher (see Algorithm 1) based on the239
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISideas of (Adamic and Adar 2005) to evaluate the actual efficiency of the system to retrieve related <strong>do</strong>cumentsusing tag cloud driven navigation. In order to support efficient search, the searcher uses a hierarchicalconcept model as background knowledge (in our case a tag – taxonomy = tagonomy) to find related contentwithin a tag cloud network (see Algorithm 1).Searcher(, ,)T ← GetTagonomy(∞, G)currentNode ← STARTwhile currentNode != TARGET <strong>do</strong>neighbors ← get all adjacent nodes ∈ G from currentNode// finds closest node according to dist = min, where dist(A,B) = h(A)+h(B)-2h(A,B)-1currentNode ← findClosestNode (neighbors, T)end while// generates a tag – Taxonomy using cosine similarityGetTagonomy(, )tagonomy ← nulltags ← GetMostImportantTags(G) //returns a tag list sorted in desc. order using tag frequencyroot ← tags[0]visitedList ← rootfor each parent ∈ tags and not contained in visitedList <strong>do</strong>childTags ← getSimTags() // returns a list of similar tags using cosine similarity measuresvisitedList ← childTagsfor each child ∈ childTags
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010(a)Figure 7. Figure (a) shows an example of a tag – taxonomy (=tagonomy) generated for AF dataset. In Figure (b) anexample of a resource-specific tag cloud network and a search through it for the same dataset is provided.(b)Figure 8. Hops distribution for hierarchical decentralized searcher: QC dataset (blue line) vs. AF dataset (red line).5. CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORKIn this paper we presented a novel tool called QueryCloud for exploring related resources in Webencyclopedias. The tool aims at offering additional navigational paths to related resources for users of suchsystems in general, and for users who come to these systems from a search engine such as Google, Yahoo! orBing. Furthermore we introduced a theoretical framework to evaluate potentials and limitations of the toolfrom a “network” perspective. As the experiments showed, QueryCloud system provides a great alternativeto traditional forms of tagging to automatically linking related <strong>do</strong>cuments via resource-specific query tagclouds in Web cyclopedia systems. The approach showed that the system is able to produce a good amount oftags which are of good “link” quality and tag cloud networks with are of good “network” quality. Moreover,the tool showed that the tag cloud network produced by QueryCloud system is efficiently navigable, i.e.related <strong>do</strong>cument are retrievable in an efficient way.Future work will include evaluation of QueryCloud system with real users. Thus, we plan to deployQueryCloud system on Austria-Forum life server to track and evaluate the users’ click paths to compare it241
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISwith the simulated data. Furthermore, we are working on a test plan to evaluate the usability of the system insupporting the users to find related content in Web encyclopedia systems.ACKNOWLEDGEMENTWe would like to thank Univ.-Doz. Dr. DI Denis Helic for supporting us with discussions, valuable inputs,and comments during this work. The research is funded by Institute for Information Systems and ComputerMedia (IICM) - Graz University of Technology, Graz, Austria.REFERENCESAdamic, L. and Adar. E. 2005. How to search a social network. Social Networks, 27(3):187-203, July 2005.Ames, M. and Naaman, M. 2007. Why we tag: motivations for annotation in mobile and online media. In Proceedings ofthe SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (San Jose, California, USA, April 28 - May 03,2007). CHI '07. ACM, New York, NY, 971-980. DOI= http://<strong>do</strong>i.acm.org/10.1145/1240624.1240772Antonellis I., Garcia-Molina H., Karim, J. 2009. Tagging with queries: How and why. In Second ACM InternationalConference on Web Search and Data Mining, Late breaking Results,WSDM 2009, Barcelona, Spain - February 9-12,2009. URL=http://wsdm2009.org/wsdm2009_antonellis.pdf (last visited 12. July 2010).Alexa 2010. Wikipedia.org – Bounce %, URL=http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/wikipedia.org (last visited 12. July 2010).Carman, M. J., Baillie, M., Gwadera, R., and Crestani, F. 2009. A statistical comparison of tag and query logs. InProceedings of the 32nd international ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in informationRetrieval (Boston, MA, USA, July 19 - 23, 2009). SIGIR '09. ACM, New York, NY, 123-130. DOI=http://<strong>do</strong>i.acm.org/10.1145/1571941.1571965Gleich, D. F., Constantine, P. G., Flaxman, A. D., and Gunawardana, A. 2010. Tracking the ran<strong>do</strong>m surfer: empiricallymeasured teleportation parameters in PageRank. In Proceedings of the 19th international Conference on World WideWeb (Raleigh, North Carolina, USA, April 26 - 30, 2010). <strong>WWW</strong> '10. ACM, New York, NY, 381-390. DOI=http://<strong>do</strong>i.acm.org/10.1145/1772690.1772730Helic, D., Trattner, C., Strohmaier, M., Andrews, K. 2010. On the Navigability of Social Tagging Systems, The SecondIEEE International Conference on Social Computing, SocialCom2010, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA, 2010.Nov, O. and Ye, C. 2010. Why <strong>do</strong> people tag?: motivations for photo tagging. Commun. ACM 53, 7 (Jul. 2010), 128-131.DOI= http://<strong>do</strong>i.acm.org/10.1145/1785414.1785450Heymann, P., Paepcke, A., and Garcia-Molina, H. 2010. Tagging human knowledge. In Proceedings of the Third ACMinternational Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (New York, New York, USA, February 04 - 06, 2010).WSDM '10. ACM, New York, NY, 51-60. DOI= http://<strong>do</strong>i.acm.org/10.1145/1718487.1718495Körner, C., Benz, D., Hotho, A., Strohmaier, M., and Stumme, G. 2010. Stop thinking, start tagging: tag semanticsemerge from collaborative verbosity. In Proceedings of the 19th international Conference on World Wide Web(Raleigh, North Carolina, USA, April 26 - 30, 2010). <strong>WWW</strong> '10. ACM, New York, NY, 521-530. DOI=http://<strong>do</strong>i.acm.org/10.1145/1772690.1772744Levine, N. 1965. Strongly connected sets in topology. In The American Mathematical Monthly, Vol. 72, No. 10 (Dec.,1965), pages 1098–1101.Kleinberg, J. M. 2000a. “Navigation in a small world,” Nature, vol. 406, no. 6798, August 2000.Kleinberg, J. 2000b. The small-world phenomenon: an algorithm perspective. In Proceedings of the Thirty-SecondAnnual ACM Symposium on theory of Computing (Portland, Oregon, United States, May 21 - 23, 2000). STOC '00.ACM, New York, NY, 163-170. DOI= http://<strong>do</strong>i.acm.org/10.1145/335305.335325Kleinberg, J. M. 2001. Small-World Phenomena and the Dynamics of Information. In Advances in Neural InformationProcessing Systems (NIPS) 14, 2001.Mehta, A., Saberi, A., Vazirani, U., and Vazirani, V. 2007. AdWords and generalized online matching. J. ACM 54, 5(Oct. 2007), 22. DOI= http://<strong>do</strong>i.acm.org/10.1145/1284320.1284321Millen, D. and Feinberg, J. 2006. Using social tagging to improve social navigation. In Workshop on the SocialNavigation and Community Based Adaptation Technologies, Dublin, Ireland, 2006.Newman, M. E. J. 2003. The structure and function of complex networks. SIAM Review, 45(2):167–256.Sinclair, J. and Cardew-Hall, M. 2008. The folksonomy tag cloud: when is it useful? Journal of Information Science, 34–15, 2008.242
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010Trattner, C., Hasani-Mavriqi, I., Helic, D., and Leitner, H. 2010a. The Austrian way of Wiki(pedia)!: development of astructured Wiki-based encyclopedia within a local Austrian context. In Proceedings of the 6th internationalSymposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration (Gdansk, Poland, July 07 - 09, 2010). WikiSym '10. ACM, New York,NY, 1-10. DOI= http://<strong>do</strong>i.acm.org/10.1145/1832772.1832785Trattner, C., Helic, D., Strohmaier, M. 2010b. Improving Navigability of Hierarchically-Structured Encyclopediasthrough Effective Tag Cloud Construction. In Proceedings of 10th International Conference on KnowledgeManagement and Knowledge Technologies, I-KNOW 2010, Graz, Austria, 1-3 September, 2010 (to be published).Trattner, C., Helic, D. and Maglajlic, S. 2010c. Enriching Tagging Systems with Google Query Tags, In Proceedings of32nd International Conference on Information Technology Interfaces - ITI2010, IEEE, Cavtat / Dubrovnik, Croatia,205 - 210, 2010.Trattner, C. and Helic, D. 2010. Linking Related Documents: Combining Tag Clouds and Search Queries, In Proceedingsof 10th International Conference on Web Engineering - ICWE 2010, Vienna, Austria, 486 - 489, 2010.Trattner, C. and Helic, D. 2009. In Proceedings of IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2009 (2009), IADISInternational Conference on <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong>, Rom, 76 - 83, 2009.Wikimedia 2010. Wikimedia Visitor Log Analysis Report - Requests by origin,URL=http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/squids/SquidReportOrigins.htm (last visited: 12. July 2010).243
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISPREDICTING SELF DISCLOSURE ON PUBLIC BLOGSChyng-Yang Jang* and Michael A. Stefanone***Department of Communication, University of Texas at Arlington, Arlington, TX, USA**Department of Communication, University at Buffalo, Buffalo, New York, USAABSTRACTThe majority of blogs are personal in nature and open to the public. While self disclosure is essential for relationshipdevelopment, people who publicly post intimate information may incur privacy risks. This study aims to explore howpersonality traits and communication context influence the level of self disclosure on personal blogs. The analyses ofsurvey data from 148 bloggers suggest that offline self disclosure tendencies persist online in the blogosphere. Inaddition, extraverted bloggers, surprisingly, disclosed less personal information than their introverted peers. Finally,contrary to the prediction of social disinhibition theory, bloggers who thought they could be identified by their readersreported higher levels of self disclosure.KEYWORDSBlog, Self disclosure, Computer-mediated communication.1. INTRODUCTIONReading and authoring blogs have become increasingly popular activities among <strong>Internet</strong> users (PEW, 2006).Previous studies found that the majority of blogs are personal in nature as they <strong>do</strong>cument bloggers’ dailyevents, thoughts and experiences. (Herring et al., 2005; PEW, 2006; Schiano et al., 2004; Viégas, 2005). Forthese personal-journal style bloggers, Web blogs have been a<strong>do</strong>pted as a channel for often intimate selfdisclosure to audiences of close friends and family.Self disclosure is the "process of making the self known to others" (Jourard and Lasakow, 1958, p. 91) byrevealing personal feelings, reflections, and/or needs (Archer, 1980; Johnson, 1981). It has been recognizedas an important communication practice that facilitates personal growth (Jourard, 1971), relationshipdevelopment (Fehr, 2004), group acceptance (Galegher et al., 1998), and social integration (Pennebaker,1997). However, revealing intimate, personal information to others may present risks as well. Serious andnegative outcomes such as embarrassment, disapproval, rejection, or even discrimination can result from selfdisclosure (Derlega et al., 1993). This range of possible personal and interpersonal consequences makedisclosers potentially vulnerable and require them to carefully choose message recipients, the information todisclose, and the appropriate level of intimacy.While self disclosure is a delicate communication act on its own, engaging in such sharing behavior viablogs forces people to consider additional variables. Web blogs present a very different medium for selfdisclosure opposed to conventional contexts like face-to-face or telephone conversations. On the one hand,posting private matters publicly online can subject the disclosers to greater danger because this informationcan be accessed by potentially global audiences. For example, when personal reflections on friends orcolleagues are read by unintended others, it can lead to severe consequences including damaginginterpersonal relationships and even job loss (Viégas, 2005). In addition, unlike in face-to-face gatherings,there is no real-time correspondence between bloggers and their readers. Bloggers are not able to adjust thecontent of their disclosure in real time based on receivers’ responses. In face-to-face communication, thesekinds of adjustments are made to avoid some of the unpleasant responses.On the other hand, the broadcast and asynchronous nature of blogs may provide distinct advantages thatare not available in traditional interpersonal communication channels. By allowing large numbers of readersto access the content of bloggers’ self disclosure at their own convenience, Web blogs can be an efficientway to disseminate personal information for a variety of goals including initiating new relationships (Baker244
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010& Moore, 2008) and maintaining existing social networks (Stefanone & Jang, 2007). Indeed, self disclosurevia blogs was found to directly contribute to bloggers’ subjective psychological well-being (Ko & Kuo,2009).With their increasing popularity, blogs have been gathering more attention from researchers as well.Prior studies on diary-style blogs have reported on the topics of blogs, motivations of bloggers, andconsequences of blogging as mentioned above. In this study, we aim to contribute to the understanding ofpeople’s blogging behavior by exploring factors across demographical, personal trait, and contextualdimensions. Specifically, we examined the relationships between gender, self disclosure tendency,extraversion, perceived identifiability, and perceived vulnerability. The relationships between these factorswith online self disclosure via blogs are discussed below to formulate formal research questions andhypotheses presented herein.2. LITERATURE REVIEW2.1 Gender and Self DisclosurePrior research suggests men and women communicate in different styles and for different social objectives(Eakins & Eakins, 1978, Tannen, 1990). Gender differences have long been observed particularly in terms ofself disclosure (Dindia & Allen, 1992, Morgan, 1976). Females were found to have a higher tendency todisclose their emotions than males, particularly to their spouses and loved ones (Snell et al., 1988). Dindiaand Allen's (1992) meta analyses concluded that females talked about themselves with their close socialnetworks more than males did. These differences suggest that gender should be taken into considerationwhen studying diary-style blogging.Recent research on self disclosure via computer-mediated channels, however, has mixed findings. Incomparison between paper and computer-mediated communication, Weisband and Kiesler (1996) did notfind statistically significant differences between men and women. Similarly, Barak and Gluck-Ofri’s (2007)study in online forums reported that overall there was no gender disparity in self disclosure level, althoughfemale respondents were more reciprocal than their male counterparts. In the context of blogs, the effects ofgender are also inconclusive overall. For example, Chiou and Wan (2006) reported gender differencesamong Taiwanese teenage bloggers when discussing sex-related topics. A content analysis by Herring et al.(2005) also found that women were more likely to create personal blogs. However, Huffaker and Calvert(2005) reported same percentages of bloggers of both genders to discuss romantic relationships in their blogs.Given the range of gender differences in communications offline and in computer-mediated media discussedabove, the following research question is proposed:RQ1: Is there a gender difference in perceived level of self disclosure on blogs?2.2 Personal Traits and Self DisclosureOne central issue in studying self disclose is the effect of individual differences, or the “actor” (discloser)effect. (Berger & Derlega, 1987). The actor effect has been <strong>do</strong>cumented by various studies (Miller & Kenny,1986). For example, Levesque et al. (2002) reported in their study of college students that some individualsconsistently disclose more than others across partners and topics. This actor effect has been observed acrossonline and offline worlds, too. Chiou and Wan’s (2006) study on a<strong>do</strong>lescents showed that real-life selfdisclosure tendency persisted in cyberspace. Accordingly, we propose a general actor effect such thatH1: Face-to-face self disclosure tendencies are positively related to perceived levels of self disclosure onblogs.In addition, we explore whether or not personality plays a role in bloggers’ decisions to post personalinformation online. Personality is a widely studied aspect of individual differences along which people varysystematically. In particular, we focus on the trait of extraversion, which is one of the most widely studiedpersonality dimensions and is included in many measures of personality (Watson & Clark, 1997).Extraverted persons are typically characterized by sociability, gregariousness, and assertion (Barrick &Mount, 1991). They are enthusiastic about establishing social connections. Following the discussion above245
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISrelated to self disclosure and relationship development, extraverted people should be more comfortableinitiating self disclosure for the purpose of developing relationships. Accordingly, extraverted people shouldhave increasingly relaxed boundaries of privacy and may be more willing to offer personal informationonline. By contrast, as past studies suggest, introverted individuals tend to have greater concerns for personalprivacy (Webster, 1998, Zweig & Webster, 2003). Past studies have also demonstrated a positive associationbetween extraversion and self disclosure (Archer, 1979, Levesque et al., 2002) and we expected thisrelationship will be manifested in the blogosphere, too. Thus,H2: Extraversion is positively related to perceived levels of self disclosure on blogs.2.3 Perceived Context and Self DisclosureIn addition to individual traits, the decision to reveal personal thoughts and feelings is also affected bycontextual factors, such as the intended audience and the intimacy level of particular relationships (Berger &Derlega, 1987), as well as characteristics of the media in which disclosure occurs (Joinson & Paine, 2007).As more and more human communication is conducted on the <strong>Internet</strong>, self-disclosure in cyberspace hasbecome a focal point of research. Prior studies have found high levels of self disclosure using computermediatedchannels (Rosson, 1999, Ben-Ze'ev, 2003; Tidwell & Walther, 2002). This phenomenon is oftenlinked to the anonymity, or the lack of identifiability, afforded by the communication media (McKenna,2007). When <strong>Internet</strong> users withhold information regarding who they are in the real world, their onlinebehaviors are detached from their offline identity. The result is an disinhibition effect (Suler, 2004) in thatsocial norms and expectations that embedded in real-world identities and relationships no longer inhibitpeople from revealing their “important inner or ‘true’ aspects of self”(McKenna, 2007, p. 205). At the sametime, if bloggers cannot be identified by their readers, it reduces the likelihood of suffering from the negativeconsequences discussed above since the content of the disclosure cannot be associated with bloggers’ reallifeidentities. In the context of blogs, blog authors in general are in control regarding how much identityrelatedinformation they would like to provide on their profile pages or blog posts. Accordingly, they shouldhave a pretty good idea regarding the degree to which they can be recognized by their readers. Thisperception of identifiability should then play a role in their decisions to reveal personal or intimateinformation about themselves online. In light of the evidence summarized above, the following hypothesis isproposed:H3: Perceived identifiability is negatively related to perceived levels of self disclosure on blogs.As discussed above, there are a variety of psychological and relational risks associated with interpersonalself disclosure. The perception of these risks typically functions to restrain people from revealing too muchpersonal information. For diary-style bloggers who give public access to their posts, these risks areheightened. Due to the potentially enormous size of audiences, the authors of public blogs are more likely tobe exploited than those bloggers who restrict access. Although prior studies suggest that bloggers are awareof the sensitive nature of posting intimate personal information online, they also pondered about whether ornot the topics were too intimate (Viégas, 2005) and adjusted their writing styles to suit their audience.(Schiano et al., 2004). Similarly, bloggers should also respond to privacy concerns and vulnerability issuesthey perceive. The more conscious bloggers are regarding the hazards of disclosing online, the less likelythey should be to post intimate personal information on their blogs. Thus,H4: Perceived vulnerability is negatively related to perceived levels of self disclosure on blogs.3. METHOD3.1 Data CollectionTo address the research question and hypotheses presented above, we conducted an online survey of aninternational sample of bloggers. The sample was produced by first examining several major blog hostingservice sites, including blogger.com and livejournal.com. At the time of this study, only blogger.com offereda working ran<strong>do</strong>m blog selection feature. This was determined by personal correspondence with the bloghosting sites. Using the ran<strong>do</strong>m blog pointer on blogger.com, a list of one thousand unique blogs was246
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010generated. The authors then examined the list to select blogs appropriate for this study. Due to the focus ofthis project on active personal blogs by individual bloggers, the following types of blogs were excluded fromthe study: blogs with multiple authors, blogs containing pictures only, blogs with less than three posts on twodifferent dates in the last three months, and blogs used strictly for commercial or organizational purposes(i.e., marketing particular products or office coordination services). In addition, blogs with authors youngerthan 18 years old were eliminated.After the above restrictions, 700 qualified blogs remained. The authors then delivered a survey invitationto 622 of the 700 selected bloggers via emails or comments posted on their blogs. The other 78 bloggers didnot provide their email address or the comment option on their blogs and therefore did not receive theinvitation. Qualified blogs were not visually inspected by the researchers.Six weeks after the invitations were sent out, 148 completed surveys were received, yielding a 23.8%response rate. Among the respondents, 53.4% were male. The education level distribution of therespondents was as follows: about 10% had finished high school, 20% had taken some college classes, about39% held a bachelors degree, and 31% held a graduate-level degree. The respondents came from 32countries. About one third came from the USA, about 30% came from Europe, 25% came from Asia andAustralia, and the rest (about 12%) came from a variety of other regions.3.2 MeasurementsBlog self-disclosure. To measure self-disclosure on blogs, three items were adapted from the generalized selfdisclosurescale developed by (Wheeless & Grotz, 1976). These three items are the general subset of theoriginal 16-item scale. Participants were asked to base their answers to the following questions on their ownblog content: "I usually talk about myself in fairly lengthy blog posts," "Once I get started, I intimately andfully reveal myself on my blog," and "I often disclose intimate, personal things about myself withouthesitation on my blog." All items were measured on a 7-point scale (where 7=strongly agree), and Cronbach'salpha was .85.Face-to-face self disclosure. Three similar questions were used to measure the tendency to discloseduring face-to-face interaction. Participants were asked to imagine that they were talking to someone faceto-facewhen answering these questions: "I usually talk about myself for fairly long periods of time," "Once Iget started, I intimately and fully reveal myself," and "I often disclose intimate, personal things about myselfwithout hesitation." All items were measured on a 7-point scale (where 7=strongly agree). This scale yieldeda Cronbach's alpha of .81.Perceived identifiability. These items measured blog authors' perception of how easily their readers couldtell who they were from their blog content. Three 7-point Likert scale items were developed to measureidentifiability: "It is easy for my readers to tell who I am from my blog posts," "I think people who know mewould be able to determine my identity from the contents of my blog," and "I think if a stranger read myblog, he or she could determine my identity." Cronbach's alpha for this scale was .76.Perceived vulnerability. Two 7-point Likert scale questions were included to assess bloggers' perceivedvulnerability when posting personal information online. Participants were asked to report the degree towhich they agreed or disagreed with the following statements: "It is dangerous to post personal contactinformation online" and "Personal information available online is easily exploited". These two items werecombined to measure perceived vulnerability (Cronbach's alpha = .91).Extraversion. Following previous research (McCrae & Costa, 1996), four items were used as a generalmeasure of extraversion. Participants were asked to rate the extent to which they agree or disagree with eachof the following statements on a 7-point scale, where 7=strongly agree: "I like to have a lot of people aroundme," "I really enjoy talking to people," "I like to be where the action is," and "I usually prefer to <strong>do</strong> thingsalone" (reverse coded). Cronbach's alpha for this scale was .70.Participants also supplied their gender, age, and education information in the survey. For gender, maleand female were coded as 1 and 2 respectively. Education was divided to five levels from high school (1) toPh.D. (5).247
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADIS4. RESULTSBivariate correlations, means, and standard deviations were reported in Table 1. A number of statisticallysignificant correlations were observed. Participants' perceived self-disclosure on blogs was positivelyassociated with face-to-face self-disclosure (r=.54, p
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010Table 2. Regression analysis of blog self-disclosureModel 1 2 3DemographicsAge -.19* -.10 -.13*Gender .20* .17* .19**Education -.08 -.08 -.09Personal TraitsFtF Self-disclosure .55*** .49***Extraversion -.15* -.14*Perceived ContextIdentifiability .22**Vulnerability -.10F 5.09** 16.24*** 14.46***R 2 .10** .36*** .42***Adjusted R 2 .08 .34 .39Incremental R 2 .26 .07* p
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISperceived vulnerability was, however, inconclusive. While the coefficient of perceived vulnerability wasnegative, as proposed in H4, it was not statistically significant. H4 was not supported.As discussed above, extraversion has long been reported in the literature to be positively associated withself disclosure. Correlation analyses on our data confirmed this relationship between extraversion and faceto-faceself disclosure with a positive correlation coefficient of .29 (p
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010also suggests that there was a strong tendency for people to apply familiar communication practices aftera<strong>do</strong>pting new media.The negative relationship between extraversion and online self disclosure was not expected. This findingsuggests that introverted participants disclosed more intimate personal experience on their blogs than theirextraverted peers. This trend may indicate a social compensation effect in that writing on blogs allowsintroverted people to overcome barriers that had prevented them from talking about themselves. Specifically,the lack of social presence of the receivers and the asynchronous nature of blogs may help some bloggersreveal more online. When posting on blogs, authors <strong>do</strong> not have direct exchange with their readers. The lowlevel of audience social presence should reduce social anxiety for introverted bloggers and allow them to feelmore comfortable writing about personal matters. In addition, blog communication is asynchronous. Unlikein face-to-face conversations, bloggers <strong>do</strong> not immediately face possible negative feedback such as rejectionor disapproval. As a result, disclosing on blogs allows for extra time to handle unpleasant responses andreduces the demand for sophisticated social and communication skills. Together, the unique mediacharacteristics of blogs create a compensating environment for introverted bloggers and facilitate their selfdisclosure.However, it should be noted that this negative relationship between extraversion and blog self disclosurewas not observed in the bivariate correlation analyses. This association only occurred in the regressionmodel after controlling for demographic variables and face-to-face self disclosure tendency. It suggests thatonly when comparing their extraverted counterparts in the same demographic groups and with similar levelsof face-to-face self-disclosure, introverted bloggers reported relatively higher levels of online self disclosure.Another unexpected finding was the positive association between perceived identifiability and selfdisclosure on blogs. As discussed in the literature review, past research suggested that due to the lack ofassociation with real-life identity, people are more comfortable revealing things about themselves online.However, the findings presented herein suggest the opposite. The more bloggers thought they could beindentified by their audience, the more they disclosed. Considering bloggers’ control over their identityrelatedinformation via the profile page or blog posts, identifiability functioned as an indicator of selfdisclosure tendency. This finding cannot be explained by the social disinhibition effect which is <strong>do</strong>minant inthe literature. Rather, it can be better understood from an interpersonal relationship perspective.In recent years, Web 2.0 applications designed to facilitate social relationships have been gainingtremen<strong>do</strong>us popularity (Lenhart, 2009). Previous studies confirmed that people expanded and maintainedtheir existing social networks using social networking applications (Ellison et al., 2007) as well as blogs(Stefanone & Jang, 2007). A large body of literature supports the notion that self disclosure is essential torelationship development. As relationships become more intimate, so too <strong>do</strong>es the exchange of personalinformation between partners (Altman & Taylor, 1973). From this perspective, posting personal thoughtsand feelings on blogs can be viewed as an effort to enhance social relationships. Also based on this view,offering identity-related information is necessary to receive relationship gains within existing socialnetworks. Following this logic, bloggers’ decisions to make themselves known to their readers signal arelational motivation and this relational motivation drives the bloggers to write more about themselves.Similarly, this relational motivation may also help us understand the lack of a significant effect ofperceived vulnerability. While participants reported a moderately high level of perceived vulnerability(M=5.30, SD=1.73), this concern did not produce a statistically significant influence on bloggers’ onlinedisclosure behavior. One possible explanation is that diary-style bloggers have to make a strategic choicebetween protecting privacy and enhancing relationships when posting on their blogs. A strong motivation tomaintain or develop existing social ties may lead bloggers to weigh prospective relational gains againstpotential privacy risks. As a result, no significant effect of perceived vulnerability was observed.Finally, the post-hoc regression analyses shed some light on within-subject differences between perceivedself disclosure levels on- and offline. The results indicate that female and introverted bloggers tended toopen up themselves more on their blogs than in conversations. These findings support the main analyses.They also suggest that the media effect on self disclosure was systematically different across differentindividual characteristics.In conclusion, the findings provide a number of insights regarding the factors associated with selfdisclosure on public blogs. Demographic factors, personal traits, and perceived context all made independentcontributions to predicting self disclosure on blogs. Specifically, the survey data supported a gender effect aswell as an actor effect of self disclosure tendency. In addition, the negative relationship between extraversionand self disclosure on blogs suggests the media attributes of blogs may contribute by compensating for a lack251
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISof social and communication skills. Further research is necessary to verify this proposition. Moreover, thepositive relationship between identifiability and self disclosure on blogs cannot be explained by socialdisinhibition but, rather, suggests a relational motivation of blogging. This finding may also shed light onpeople’s online privacy management behavior. These results contribute to the ongoing discussion regardingantecedents and consequences of online self disclosure.REFERENCESArcher, R. L. (1979) The role of personality and social situation. IN Chelune, G. J. (Ed.) Self-Disclosure: Origins,patterns, and implications of openess in interpersonal relationships. San Francisco, Jossy-Bass.Archer, J. L. (1980). Self-Disclosure. In W. D. Vallacher (Ed.), The Self in Social Psychology. Oxford University Press:Lon<strong>do</strong>n.Altman, I., & Taylor, D. A. (1973). Social penetration: The development of interpersonal relationships. New York: Holt,Rinehart & Winston..Barrick, M. R., & Mount, M. K. (1991). The big five personality dimensions and job performance: a meta-analysis.Personnel Psychology, 44, 1-26.Ben-Ze'ev, A. (2003). Privacy, emotional closeness, and openness in Cyberspace. Computers in Human Behavior, 19,p.451-467.Berger, J. H. & Derlega, V. J. (1987) Themes in the study of self disclosure. IN Berger, J. H. & Derlega, V. J. (Eds.) SelfDisclosure: Theory, Research, and Therapy. New York, Plenum Press.Chiou, W.-B. & Wan, C.-S. (2006) Sexual self-disclosure in cyberspace among Taiwanese a<strong>do</strong>lescents: Genderdifferences and the interplay of cyberspace and real life. CyberPsychology & Behavior, 9, 46-53.Derlega, V.J., Metts, S., Petronio, S. & Margulis, S. T. (1993) Self-disclosure, Lon<strong>do</strong>n, SageDindia, K. & Allen, M. (1992) Sex differences in self-disclosure: A meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 112, 106-124.Eakins, B. W. & Eakins, R. G. (1978) Sex Differences in Human Communication, Boston, Houghton Mifflin.Ellison, N. B., Steinfield, C. & Cliff, L. (2007) The benefits of Facebook "friends:" Social capital and college students'use of online social network sites. Journal of Computer Mediated Communication, 12, 1143-1168.Fehr, B. (2004) Intimacy expectations in same-sex friendships: a prototype interaction-pattern model. Journal ofPersonality and Social Psychology, 86, 265-284.Galegher, J., Sproull, L. & Kiesler, S. (1998) Legitimacy, authority and community in electronic support groups. WrittenCommunication, 15, 493-530.Gefen, D. & Ridings, C. M. (2005) If you spoke as she <strong>do</strong>es, Sir, instead of the way you <strong>do</strong>: A sociolinguisticsperspective of gender differences in virtual communities. The DATA BASE for Advances in Information Systems, 36,78-92.Herring, S. C., Scheidt, L. A., Bonus, S., & Wright, E. (2005). Weblogs as a bridging genre. Information, Technology, &People, 18 (2), 142-171.Johnson, J. A. (1981). The 'self-disclosure' and 'self-presentation' views of item response dynamics and personality scalevalidity. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 40(4), 761-769.Joinson, A.N., & Paine, C. (2007). Self-disclosure, privacy and the <strong>Internet</strong>. In A.N. Joinson, K. McKenna, T. Postmes,& U.-D. Reips (Eds.), Oxford Handbook of <strong>Internet</strong> Psychology. 237-252, Oxford University Press.Jourard, S. M. & Lasakow, P. (1958) Some factors in self-disclosure. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 56,91-98.Jourard, S. M. (1971) Self-Disclosure: An Experimental Analysis of the Transparent Self. , New York, Krieger.Ko, H.-C. & Kuo, F.-Y. (2009) Can blogging enhance subjective well-being through self-disclosure? Cyberpsychology &Behavior, 12, 75-79.Lenhart, A. (2009) Adults and social network websites. Pew <strong>Internet</strong> & American Life ProjectLevesque, M., Steciuk, M. & Ledley, C. (2002) Self-disclosure patterns among well-acquainted individuals: Disclosers,confidants and unique relationships. Social Behavior and Personality, 30, 579-592.McCrae, R. R., & Costa, P. T. (1996). Toward a new generation of personality theories: Theoretical contexts for the fivefactormodel. In J. S. Wiggins (Ed.), The Five Factor Model of Personality: Theoretical Perspectives (pp. 51-87).New York: Guilford.Mckenna, K. Y. A. (2007) Through the <strong>Internet</strong> looking glass: Expressing and validating the true self. IN Joinson, A. N.,Mckenna, K. Y. A., Postmes, T. & Reips, U.-D. (Eds.) The Oxford Handbook of <strong>Internet</strong> Psychology. OxfordUniversity Press.252
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010Mckenna, K. Y. A. & Bargh, J. A. (1998) Coming out in the age of the <strong>Internet</strong>: identity “demarginalization” throughvirtual group participation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 75, 681-694.Mckenna, K. Y. A. & Bargh, J. A. (1999) Causes and consequence of social interaction on the <strong>Internet</strong>. A conceptualframework. Media Psychology, 1, 249-269.Miller, L. C. & Kenny, D. A. (1986) Reciprocity of self-disclosure at the Individual and dyadic levels:A social relationsanalysis. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 50, 713-719.Morgan, B. S. (1976) Intimacy of disclosure topics and sex differences in self-disclosure. Sex Roles, 2, 161-166.O'brien, R. M. (2007) A caution regarding rules of thumb for variance inflation factors. Journal Quality and Quantity,41(5), 673-690.PEW <strong>Internet</strong> and American Life Project (2006). Bloggers: A portrait of the <strong>Internet</strong>'s New Storytellers. Washington:Pew <strong>Internet</strong> & American Life. Retrieved June 1, 2010, fromhttp://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2006/Bloggers.aspx?r=1PEW <strong>Internet</strong> and American Life Report (2007). Digital Footprints: Online identity management and search in the age oftransparency. Washington: Pew <strong>Internet</strong> & American Life. Retrieved June 1, 2010, fromhttp://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2007/Digital-Footprints.aspx?r=1PEW <strong>Internet</strong> and American Life Report (2007). Teens and social media: The use of social media gains a greater footholdin teen life as they embrace the conversational nature of interactive online media. Washington: Pew <strong>Internet</strong> &American Life. Retrieved June 1, 2010, from http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2007/Teens-and-Social-Media.aspx?r=1Rosson, M. B. (1999) I get by with a little help from my cyber-friends: Sharing stories of good and bad times on the Web.Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 4.Schiano, D. J., Nardi, B. A., Gumbrecht, M., & Swartz, L. (2004, May). Blogging by the rest of us. Proceedings of CHI2004. Vienna, Austria.Snell, W., R., M. & Belk, S. (1988) Development of the emotional self-disclosure scale. Sex Roles, 18, 59-73.Stefanone, M. & Jang, C. (2007) Writing for friends and family: The interpersonal nature of blogs. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13(1), 123-140.Suler, J. (2004) The online disinhibition effect. Cyberpsychology & Behavior, 7, 321-326.Tannen, D. (1990) You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation, New York, BallantineTidwell, L. C., and Walther, J. B. (2002). Computer-mediated communication effects on disclosure, impressions, andinterpersonal evaluations: Getting to know one another a bit at a time. Human Communication Research, 28, p.317-348.Viégas, F. B. (2005). Bloggers' expectations of privacy and accountability: An initial survey. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 10 (3), article 12. Retrieved September 1, 2008, fromhttp://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol10/issue3/viegas.htmlWatson, D., & Clark, L. A. (1997). Extraversion and its positive emotional core. In R. Hogan, J. Johnson, & S. Briggs(Eds.), Handbook of Personality Psychology (pp. 767-793). San Diego, CA: Academic Press.Wheeless, L. R., & Grotz, J. (1976). Conceptualization and measurement of reported self-disclosure. HumanCommunication Research, 2, 338-346.Zweig, D. & Webster, J (2003) Personality as a moderator of monitoring acceptance. Computers in Human Behavior.19(4), 479-493.253
Short Papers
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010PARALLEL PROGRAMMING FOR EDUCATION AND ITSTRIAL EVALUATIONKeiichi Shiraishi*, Yoshiro Imai** and Yukio Hori***Kagawa National College of Technology, Koda551 Takuma-cho Mitoyo city Kagawa Pref. 769-1192 Japan**Faculty of Engineering, Kagawa University, 2217-20 Hayashi-cho Takamatsu city Kagawa Pref. 761-0396 JapanABSTRACT<strong>Internet</strong> and Cloud computing will provide several kinds of services including parallel computing. Parallel computing canbe achieved through a computer cluster (<strong>Internet</strong> itself) and special multiple computer/ processor systems. Users of<strong>Internet</strong> may be more familiar to obtain such parallel computing services in consequences. This paper focuses on parallelcomputing, evaluation of its performance and two kinds pf parallel programming examples based on master-workerparadigm. Such programming can be realized and executed on CPUs with multiple processor cores. We have comparedtwo types of parallel programming. One is programming for a), which is executed on a personal computer of the specificCPU with 4 processor cores. Another is for Cell B.E. with SPE library on Sony-produced PLAYSTATION3. Throughreal experiment and simple evaluation, the following evidences have been confirmed. Both of two cases are goodpractices for parallel calculation and expected performance. And the former is suitable for symbolic and/or algebraiccomputation, while the latter is efficient for numerical calculation.KEYWORDSParallel computing, CPUs with multiple processor cores, Amdahl's law, Master-worker paradigm.1. INTRODUCTIONParallel computing becomes more and more popular as various kinds of multiple computer/processor systemare available in several engineering fields. Especially, there are rapid and drastic changes even for end usersto utilize a computer cluster, multiple processor cores and other multiple computer systems through the<strong>Internet</strong>. Cloud computing will allow such users to have frequent opportunities to challenge for parallelcomputing and programming. Computers have made revolutionary progress by means of memory technology,large-capacity magnetic Disks, and especially powerful microprocessor architecture. And several kinds ofcomputers are considered to be a set of commodity hardware components so that network technologies caneasily bring them into the next stage of cluster computing. Some people say that it must become an importanttask to utilize multiple processors effectively and ecologically in order to obtain fruitful results from the<strong>Internet</strong> and Cloud computing.In a focus of microprocessors themselves, there were some complicated limitations for speedup based onuniprocessor architecture. The latest trends of speedup mechanism can be shifted into the architecture ofmultiple processor cores for high performance computing, namely parallel computing. Such architecturebecomes a great idea and break-through to improve computing capability. But there are some problems to beresolved in order to achieve efficient programming for parallel computing environment. In other words, it isnecessary for users to combine effectively multiple levels of parallel programming, namely not only clustercomputing for multiple severs bust also parallel programming for multiple processor cores. Education mustplay an important role to provide a good practice to teach even beginners to obtain useful skills in a shortperiod. In higher education for engineering, it will be much more important than past to educate parallelcomputing, especially, parallel programming paradigm and its applicable examples for some specificcomputers with multiple processor cores.This paper will focus on providing such a good practice for parallel programming by means of multipleprocessor cores. In order to show a simple but useful example or metho<strong>do</strong>logy for parallel programmingeducation, the paper describes the following four sections. The next section introduces background of parallel257
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADIScomputing and its formulations. The third one explains and compares two practical examples for parallelprogramming with different architectures for multiple processor cores. The fourth one illustrates computingperformance for such different programming styles. And the last section summarizes our conclusions.2. BACKGROUND OF PARALLEL COMPUTINGThere are several types of parallel computers, such as a computer cluster, a vector computer, multipleprocessor cores and so on. For example, Flynn's Classical Taxonomy classifies that a vector computer isclassified as SIMD computer's category while a computer cluster is <strong>do</strong>ne as MIMD one [1]. The formercomputes vector data, and the latter binds many computers by means of network.Amdahl's law has focused on description of performance for not only vector computers but also parallelcomputers. And it clearly shows that speed up ratio will be larger if the size of parallelized implementations(namely portion of program to be processed in parallel) becomes more. Its characteristics and behaviour aresimply expressed in the approximate relationship described below [2][1].It is assumed that Ts is the computing time to run the program on a scalar computer (uniprocessor),while Tp is the computing time to run on a parallel computer (multiple processor cores). α is theparallelization ratio, i.e. the ratio of parallelizable section to program. And finally n is the number ofprocessors. In the Amdahl's law, coefficient P for speed up can be expressed in the following equation (1)shown below.P = Ts = 1-- (1)Tp {(1 −α ) +α / n}Such a law is well known as a famous formula for determining the maximum expected speedup of anoverall system when only part of such a system is improved. It is often used in parallel computing in order topredict the theoretical maximum speedup using multiple processors. But it has been discussed whether itmust be treated as an impulsive force or as a regulative rule; namely optimistic view or pessimistic one [3][4].Users of parallel computing need more fruitful metho<strong>do</strong>logies in order to perform efficient parallelcalculation instead of the above discussion. Master-worker paradigm can play an important role for parallelprogramming practices. It is known as master-slave approach. And it is a kind of parallel programmingmodel, consists of a master process and worker ones. The master process controls all of tasks and throws theaccording tasks to its worker processes under command of it. It also receives the results of the tasks from itsworkers, combines such results and then produces the final result for the given problem [5].Each worker receives its assigned task from its above master and runs (i.e. computes) such a task. Theworker finishes its own task and returns its result to its master individually and asynchronously. In masterworkerparadigm, if the processing times allocated to all the workers are the same size i.e. the identical timelength,an expected speed up might obey the Amdahl's law. It is one of the most ideal cases for parallelcomputing. By the way, if such processing times are different one another, the speed up might depend on theorder of tasks to be processed. In the other words, it is necessary to discuss how such a suitable schedule iscarried out through parallel computing. If there is a smarter scheduling available, parallel computing becomesscalable, more efficient and asynchronously executable in more expected status for parallelization.3. PRACTICAL PARALLEL PROGRAMMING AND ITS EXAMPLESIt is very much difficult to realize so-called optimal scheduling. So there cannot be a general-purposescheduling algorithm to build the most suitable procedure to assign the equivalent processing time to eachprocessing unit. There must be no royal road to get semi-optimal algorithm without time-consuming trialand-errormethods. But we have an experience to utilize and evaluate some special scheduling algorithm that“excludes any conscious idle periods” in parallel calculation [6]. The scheduling only lets the accordingprocessors be idling whenever there are no jobs to be executed. Our heuristic results taught that such ascheduling algorithm could <strong>do</strong> users a favor of fairly shortest processing time, i.e. the algorithm allows us toachieve semi-optimal scheduling. The theorem below illustrates how such a schedule works correctly [7].258
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010It is assumed that the set of jobs is given, ω is the total elapsed time to finish the jobs, the order ofrunning jobs obeys the schedule and ω0is the shortest time which is running and also obeying the optimalschedule. The schedule has been realized by means of a trial-and-error method. The slowness, namely theratio of ω to ω0, can be expressed in the following inequality (2) shown below,ω ≤ 2 − 1-- (2)ω0where n denotes the number of processors. It seems that the right side expression of inequality (2) can alsogive the upper bound of the above ratio, namely the left side of the inequality.Therefore, if the jobs are allocated to the workers in the order of the job raised, the total elapsed time is atmost <strong>do</strong>uble of the time by optimal schedule. Generally speaking, it is necessary to consider some overheadthat includes communication and synchronization between master and each worker. It is assumed that suchan overhead can be neglected in this subsection. Of course, some overheads may control performance andefficiency. So targets for parallel computing are very important. The next subsection will illustrate a detail ofpractical parallel programming.This subsection illustrates two types of parallel programming examples. One is a programming examplefor Risa/Asir on the CPU with 4 processor cores. And another is for CELL B.E. of PLAYSTATION 3. In theformer case, programs must be written in a special programming language for Risa/Asir. It is an open sourcegeneral computer algebra system. OpenXM committers have been developing its Kobe distribution. Theoriginal Risa/Asir was developed at Fujitsu Labs LTD during Japan national project of the fifth generationcomputer [8]. In the latter case, programs are to be written in the C programming language for the CellMultiprocessor [9]. These are explained in detail as follows.3.1 Case(I): a Programming Example for Risa/AsirParallel programs for the computer algebra system called Risa/Asir are to be described as follows:1) Invoke an "asir" process and assign it to one of workers.2) Load a program code to the according worker process.3) Execute such a program on the process.4) Wait for termination of each worker's program and receive the computing result.Process assignment is automatically performed by means of load balancing facility of the operatingsystem. Namely users <strong>do</strong> not need to be aware of such a complicated operation. The computer algebra systemRisa/Asir <strong>do</strong>es not request users to revoke (destroy) each worker process. A master process can investigatewhether an according worker process terminate or not, so it is very efficient for users to write a good parallelprogram to reassign a next task onto vacant (idling) worker.3.2 Case(II): a Programming Example for Cell MultiprocessorParallel programs for Cell B.E. with SPE library (ver2) on Sony-produced PLAYSTATION3 are to bedescribed as follows:1) Load a program code for worker process onto memory.2) Allocate each code onto the according SPE(Synergistic Processor Element)3) Invoke a thread and give an instruction to execute a program for worker in the thread.4) Wait for termination of each thread which finishes when the according worker program is terminated.5) Revoke each worker process.Users must utilize each worker by means of an invocation of thread. This is why a function gives aninstruction to execute programs for workers but it <strong>do</strong>es not send back its return values until programs forworkers terminate. In the Cell Multiprocessor, SPE can play a role to perform data passing by means ofDMA transfer. So programs for workers, which are running in SPEs, can move several kinds of data from themain memory to local storage by means of DMA operation. After they has processed those data, they canrestore data in reverse, namely from their local storages to the main memory, through DMA channel.n259
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADIS4. PRACTICAL PARALLEL CALCULATION AND EVALUATIONThis section describes our practical parallel programming and shows a real result for execution of parallelprograms based on master-worker paradigm. We know that a value of the circle ratio can be computed bymeans of the following definite integration (3) shown below.=1 4∫1 + xdxπ0 2 -- (3)The real numerical value will be obtained through calculation of the equation (3) by the way of numericalintegration based on the following approximation (4) shown below,∑ − 11 N 4π ≈2 -- (4)N i = 0 1 + (( i + 0.5) / N )where N is a division number for integration interval 0,1][ of the equation (3). Users had better choose alarger number as N in order to obtain a more precise result for the above numerical integration.Such a calculation can be realized with description of “i” related loop operation, namely iterationprocedure about control variable of “i”. We can achieve practical parallel programming by means ofapplication of each loop operation into the worker process which has been explained in the previous section.In the other words, such a situation is suitable enough to satisfy Amdahl's law with efficient parallelizationratio. We will expect to achieve good speedup-improvement for parallelization in the case of parallelcalculation for numerical integration of circle ratio based on master-worker paradigm.In order to make certain of speedup improvement for calculation through parallel programming, we haveapplied N = 50,000, 000 to numerical integration of circle ratio expressed in the approximation (4). Atfirst, we have computed it with the computer algebra system Risa/Asir. Our test-bed PC has a CPU chip with4 processor cores so that we can select parallel programming with the master-worker based parallelcalculation from one worker process to four. Table 1 shows result of elapsed time for the above parallelcalculation.Table 1. Elapsed time for parallel calculation by the computer algebra system (Risa/Asir)Numbers of worker processElapsed time for calculation Speedup (Improvement) for(second)only one worker's case1 37.902 1.00023419.62713.78711.0561.9312.7493.428Secondly, we have computed the approximation (4) with PLAYSTATION3. The Cell B.E. ofPLAYSTATION3 has seven sets of SPEs, but SPE library of it can handle only six sets of SPEs. So we canselect the same (but not identical) way of parallel programming from one worker to six. Table 2 showsanother result of elapsed time for such parallel calculation.Table 2. Elapsed time for parallel calculation by Cell B.E. with SPE library on Sony-produced PLAYSTATION3Numbers of worker processElapsed time for calculation Speedup (Improvement) for(second)only one worker's case1 6.037 1.000234563.0232.0191.5181.2171.0171.9972.9903.9774.9615.936From comparison of Table 1 and 2, it is confirmed that elapsed times of calculation by the computeralgebra system Risa/Asir are fairly larger than ones by the Cell B.E. with SPE library on PLAYSTATION3.So the former is suitable for symbolic and/or algebraic computation, while the latter is efficient for numerical260
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010calculation. Additionally, we have another important evidence from both tables of our experiment. It is alsoconfirmed that speedup improvement has been approximately achieved in proportion of the numbers ofworker process. Our experiment did demonstrate that our two cases of parallel programming are suitableenough to explain validity of Amdahl's law. These are considered to be practical and important examples forbeginners to understand introductory parallel programming in the real educational environment.5. CONCLUSIONThis paper has described some samples of parallel programming based on Master-worker Paradigm and theirevaluation. We have compared the computer algebra system Risa/Asir to Cell B.E. with SPE library throughpractical experience. This is why education about parallel programming becomes important as several kindsof multiple computer and processors are available for users by means of the <strong>Internet</strong> and Cloud computing.An advantage of Risa/Asir is to utilize the same program on multi-core processor as well as clusteredcomputers. SPE library is a special one for using SPE of Cell B.E. and users need POSIX thread libraries inorder to execute multiples of SPEs as "workers" simultaneously. So it is indispensable to realize some kindsof TCP/IP-based communication between each machine in PLAYSTATION3-based cluster system.With regard to numerical analysis, Risa/Asir cannot be compared to Cell B.E. with SPE library, because itis not designed as an efficient software for numerical computation. It is confirmed that Risa/Asir is suitablefor symbolic and/or algebraic computation and is not good at high-speed computation. By the way, we havealso ascertained the qualitative capability of Risa/Asir to describe parallel programming based on MasterworkerParadigm through our experiment.In the future works, we will try to utilize high-speed computation with 128-bit Vector/ SIMD processingunits of SPEs. We have some problems to improve computation performance. Through a real experiment, itis confirmed that one of them is related to realize a smart DMA (Direct Memory Access) between the mainmemory of Cell B.E. and local memories of SPEs. If such a DMA procedure is less complicated, users willbe able to achieve parallel programming more powerfully and effectively.ACKNOWLEDGEMENTSThe authors are thankful to Professor Hitoshi Inomo, and Professor Wataru Shiraki of Kagawa University fortheir continuous supports. This study was partly supported by the Special Science Fund from Cmicroincorporated in Japan and also partly supported by Research for Promoting Technological Seeds from JapanScience and Technology Agency (JST).REFERENCES[1] Hennessy, J.L. and Patterson, D.A. 2003, Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach (third Edition). MorganKaufmann.[2] Amdahl, G.M., 1967. Validity of the Single-Processor Approach to Achieving Large Scale Computing Capabilities.Validity of the Single-Processor Approach to Achieving Large Scale Computing Capabilities. In AFIPS ConferenceProceedings, pp. 483–485.[3] Hill,M. and Marty, M.R. 2008, Amdahl's law in the multicore era, IEEE Computer, vol. 41, no. 7, pp.33-38.[4] Sun,X-H. And Chen,Y. 2010, Reevaluating Amdahl's law in the multicore era, Journal of Parallel and DistributedComputing. Vol.70, pp.183-188.[5] Wilkinson, B. and Allen, M., 1999. Parallel Programming, Prentice-Hall.[6] Shiraishi,K., et.al., 2001. On Load Balancing based on Parallelization of Wu's method, Report of Research Institutefor Mathematical Sciences, Kyoto University, Vol.1199, pp. 10-19 (in Japanese).[7] Liu, C.L., 1985. Elements of Discrete Mathematics (second Edition), McGraw-Hill.[8] Risa/Asir http://www.math.kobe-u.ac.jp/Asir/asir.html[9] Kahl, J.A., Day, M.N., Hofstee, H.P., Johns, C.R., Maeurer, T.R. and Shippy, D., 2005, Introduction to the CellMultiprocessor. IBM Journal of Research and Development, vol. 49, no. 4, pp.589-604.261
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISSENSE OF COMMUNITY FEELING IN A BLENDEDLEARNING ENVIRONMENT:EFFECT OF DEMOGRAPHICSHale Ilgaz* and Petek Aşkar***Ankara University** Hacettepe UniversityAnkara, TurkiyeABSTRACTIn distance education in which online communication technologies have played an important role, the communicationsbetween students and teachers, development of community feeling are crucial for sociality. The satisfaction of a studentwho feels himself/herself as isolated from the system, will tend to decrease through program and this affects his/herlearning. This situation may result with the student dropping out the program. Providing interaction with informationcommunication technologies come into prominence as a result of increasing importance of these technologies in distanceeducation. Although this situation has positive contributions, it may have negative effects on decrement of themotivation, achievement, satisfaction or learning of student such as social isolation, aprosexia, and feeling of alienation.The aim of this study is to analyze the development status of community feelings of students who have enrolled in adistance education program which is configured on a blended learning model, in terms of age, gender, access tocomputer, access to <strong>Internet</strong> and period of computer usage. The analyses were carried on the data obtained from the scalewhich administered to 676 freshman student. Results showed that students’ community feelings have significantdifferences in terms of gender, access to computers and access to <strong>Internet</strong>. However there is no significant difference interms of age and period of computer usage.KEYWORDSCommunity feeling, blended learning, distance education1. INTRODUCTIONBy the increases in demand to the education, information and communication technologies had a veryimportant position in people’s life. According to the annual analyze reports which were prepared by NCES(1999), <strong>Internet</strong> technologies were confirmed as the most rapid developing communication tools in distanceeducation after high school. The distance education which is performed due to information andcommunication technologies has become an opportunity for people who can not take education due tobarriers related to time or place.The communications between student and teachers and the ability of developing of community feeling aresocially essentials in distance education in which individuals are separated physically. The satisfaction of astudent who feels himself/herself as isolated from the system, will decrease through program and he/she cannot obtain sufficient learning. This situation may end up with the student dropping the program.Researches have shown that drop-out rates tend to be higher in distance education programs than intraditional face-to-face programs (Rovai, 2001). Although the distance education intends to correspond to theneeds of individuals and has a lot of advantages, it became necessary to analyze the increase in the drop-outrates. Despite a lot of advantages of distance education, intended to correspond to people’s needs, reasons ofdrop out must be searched. The research results showed that the factors like expectations are unfulfilled,dissatisfaction, loss of motivation, inadequacy of interaction affect the drop-out rates.According to Brown and Duguid (1996) when enrolled in distance education programs, studentparticipation in institutional life is often limited and may consist of infrequent residencies with little face-tofacecontact with other students, professors, and administrators, thus limiting the true involvement of distance262
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010students in institutional life. Consequently, there is a concern among some educators that distance education<strong>do</strong>es not promote community.The rationale was that a combination of face-to-face and online learning environments provides a greaterrange of opportunities for students to interact with each other and with their professor. These interactionsshould result in increased socialization, a stronger sense of being connected to each other, and increasedconstruction of knowledge through discourse, thus providing stronger feelings that educational goals werebeing satisfied by community membership (Rovai & Jordan, 2004).According to McMillan and Chavis (1986) there are 4 basic components of community feeling. The firstcomponent is the membership and defined as sense of belonging. The second component, influence meansmaking a difference to the group and group mattering to its members. Reinforcement, the third component, isintegration and fulfillment the needs. In another expression reinforcement is meeting the needs of groupmembers by resources. The fourth component, shared emotional connection, the commitment and belief thatmembers have shared and will share history, common places, time together, and similar experiences.Rovai (2001) defined the components of classroom community feeling based on these four componentswhich were constituted by McMillan and Chavis. These components are spirit, trust, interaction, andlearning.Spirit: The first component, spirit, denotes recognition of membership in a community and the feelings offriendship, cohesion, and bonding that develop among learners as they enjoy one another and look forward totime spent together (Rovai, 2001).Trust: The second of classroom community components. Trust is the feeling that the community can betrusted and feedback will be forthcoming and constructive. When people are accepted as part of a nourishinglearning community, they feel safe and trust the community. With safety and trust comes the willingness ofcommunity members to speak openly. This can<strong>do</strong>r is important to a learning community because with trustcomes the likelihood that members will expose gaps in their learning and feel that other members of thecommunity will respond in supportive ways (Rovai, 2001).Influence: A feeling that closeness and mutual benefit result between individuals. Interaction could beboth task driven and socio-emotional. Task-driven interaction is directed toward the completion of assignedtasks while socio-emotional interaction is directed toward relationships among learners. There are researchesabout importance about effective interaction for effective learning. For this reason interaction is an importantfactor that supports either the community-building process or learning (Rovai, 2001).Learning: A feeling that knowledge and meaning are actively constructed within the community, that thecommunity enhances the acquisition of knowledge and understanding. For community to flourish, membersmust not only identify with the group but must also internalize at least partial acceptance of the group’spurpose and values (Rovai, 2001).Rovai and Jordan (2004b) have aimed to analyzing the relationship between traditional, blended and fullyonline higher education environments and community feeling. Sample group of the research was taken fromwho is master student and teachers in primary schools and also registered 24 persons traditional, 23 personsblended and 21 persons online education program. According to the results blended course has been a higherand significant relationship on connectedness than either the traditional or online courses with a larger effectsize.As there are many factors influencing the quality of interaction, this situation influences the communityfeeling in distance education. In the research of Rovai (2002b) about the factors influencing the communityfeeling, 7 components were defined as transactional distance, social presence, social equality, small groupactivities, group facilitation, teaching style and learning stage, and community size.The aim of this study is to analyze community feelings of students in terms of age, gender, access tocomputer, access to <strong>Internet</strong> and period of computer usage in a distance education program which isconfigured on a blended learning model.263
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADIS2. METHODOLGY2.1 Participants676 freshmen who have enrolled to a blended learning program of the Divinity College of Ankara Universityadministered by Ankara University Distance Education Center participated in the research.The distance education program has a blended learning model in which learners could take an onlineorientation program, printed course books, video courses, discussion board, synchronous chat via LMS, 48hours face to face interaction in every term and face to face exams. The demographic profiles of the studentsare shown in Table 1.GenderAgeAccess tocomputer2.2 InstrumentationTable 1. Participant demographicsVariables Frequency Percent Variables Frequency PercentFemale 237 25.1 Regular 236 34.9Access toMale 439 64.9 Partially 191 28.3<strong>Internet</strong>25 and under 261 38.6Irregular 245 36.226-35 280 41.4 3 years and less 364 53.836-45 129 19.1 3-7 years 231 34.2Period of45 and older 6 0.9 8-12 years 65 9.6computerRegular 189 28.1usage13-17 years 6 0.9Partially 198 29.4 More than 17 3 0.4Irregular 286 42.5In this research “Community Feeling Scale” which was developed by Ilgaz (2008) was used. The scale wasdeveloped to determine the community feeling of students in distance education based on Rovai, Wightingand Lucking’s (2004a) studies. The scale composed of 6 items as a 7 point likert scale. Analysis had beenexecuted with remained 571 data. A confirmatory analysis was performed. Confirmatory factor analysis(CFA) is a statistical technique used to verify the factor structure of a set of observed variables. CFA allowsthe researcher to test the hypothesis that a relationship between observed variables and their underlying latentconstructs exists (Suhr, 2006). The scale has been designed as a two dimension scale- action and affectionbyconsidering the expression types of the items in community feeling scale. The CFA results were; [ 2 (7,N=571) = 24.76, p,05. This result showed that male participants have a stronger community feeling ( X =25.66) than female participants ( X = 24.11). The t-test results are presented in the Table 2.264
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010Table 2. T-test results by genderVariable Group N X S df t pFemale 237 24.11 7.23 674 2.57 0.01*Community feelingMale 439 25.66 7.59A one way ANOVA was carried out in order to determine whether there is a significant difference in thecommunity feeling in terms of students’ ages. Results showed that there is no significant difference incommunity feeling in terms of age. The results of one way ANOVA analysis are presented in Table 3.Table 3. One way ANOVA results by ageSource of Sum ofMeanSignificantdfFpVariance SquaresSquaredifferenceBetween groups 308.98 3 102.993 1.839 0.139-Within groups 37643.53 672 56.017Total 37952.51 675When the community feelings were analyzed in terms of students’ access to the computer, it wasdetermined that there is significant difference in the results of one way ANOVA analysis [F (2-670) = 5.583,p
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADIS4. CONCLUSIONIt is important to develop community feeling in distance education in which students and teachers arephysically separated. In this study, community feelings of students who have enrolled in a distance educationprogram which is configured on a blended learning model, in online environments, were analyzed in terms ofdemographic variables such as age, gender, access to computer, access to <strong>Internet</strong> and period of computerusage. Results showed that while there was a significant difference in the community feelings of students interms of gender, access to computers and access to <strong>Internet</strong>, there was no significant difference in terms ofage and period of computer usage. This study has revealed out that males have a stronger community feelingthan females. However in contrast to this study; previous studies showed that females have a strongercommunity feeling than males (Rovai, 2002a; Rovai & Barnaum, 2003).The students who have regular access to computer and <strong>Internet</strong> were found to have stronger communityfeeling than others. In addition, students who use online communication tools found to feeling themselvesbelong to the program as they are in touch with friends and teachers by synchronous and asynchronous. Itwas determined that conversation and face to face interaction help community feeling development morethan electronic discussion boards. The students stated that discussion boards did not influence their feeling ofbelonging in the same rate when it is compared to the other tools (Lord & Lomicka, 2008).In a research Swan and Shih (2005) found that younger students were significantly more comfortable withonline discussion than older students. In contrast to this study, according to the analysis there is no differencein the community feeling development of different aged groups. This finding may show that older studentscould attend to the online communications and tend to be an active participant, too.In the same way, as there are no differences between who were using computer for a long time and shorttime, it shows that their adaptations’ to online communication technologies are effective.Further studies should analyze the effect of attending frequency to the face to face interactions oncommunity feeling.REFERENCESBrown, J. S. et al, 1996. Universities in the digital age. Change, Vol. 28, No. 4, pp 11–19.Ilgaz, H., 2008, Uzaktan eğitimde teknoloji kabulünün ve topluluk hissinin öğrenen memnuniyetine katkısı, Ms thesis,Hacettepe University, Turkiye.Lord, G. et al, 2008. Blended learning in teacher education: An investigation of classroom community across media.Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education, Vol. 8, No. 2, pp 158-174.McMillan, D. W. et al, 1986. Sense of community: A definition and theory. Journal of Community Psychology, Vol. 14,No. 1, pp 6-23.National Center for Education Statistics, Distance education at postsecondary education institutions: 1997-98. Availablefrom: . [26 June 2009].Rovai, A. P. et al, 2004a. The classroom and school community inventory: Development, refinement, and validation of aself-report measure for educational research. The <strong>Internet</strong> and Higher Education, Vol. 7, No. 4, pp 263-280.Rovai, A. P. et al, 2004b. Blended Learning and Sense of Community: A comparative analysis with traditional and fullyonline graduate courses. The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, Vol. 5, No. 2.Rovai, A. P. et al, 2003. On-line course effectiveness: An analysis of student Interactions and Perceptions of Learning.Journal of Distance Education, Vol. 18, No 1, pp 57-73Rovai, A. P., 2002a. Sense of community, perceived cognitive learning, and persistence in asynchronous learningnetworks. The <strong>Internet</strong> and Higher Education, Vol. 5, No. 4, pp 319-332.Rovai, A.P., 2002b. Building Sense of Community at a Distance. The International Review of Research in Open andDistance Learning, Vol. 3, No. 1, pp 1-12.Rovai, A. P., 2001. Building Classroom Community at a Distance: A Case Study. Educational Technology Research andDevelopment, Vol. 49, No. 4, pp 33-48.Suhr, D.D. 2006. Exploratory or Confirmatory Factor Analysis. SAS Users Group International (SUGI) 31 Proceedings.San Francisco, USA.Swan, K. et al, 2005. On the Nature and Development of Social Presence in Online Course Discussions. Journal ofAsynchronous Learning Networks, Vol. 9, No. 3, pp 115-136.266
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010TECHNOLOGICAL ARTIFACTS FOR SOCIALINCLUSION: STRUCTURE OF THE BRAZILIAN SIGNLANGUAGE (LIBRAS), GESTURES FOR CITIZENSHIPCayley Guimarães, Diego R. Antunes, Daniela F. G. Trindade, Rafaella A. L. Silva,Sueli Fernandes, Aléssio M. Jr. and Laura Sánchez GarcíaUniversidade Federal <strong>do</strong> Paraná – UFPRABSTRACTThe Brazilian Sign Language (Libras) is the language used by the members of the deaf community, academia and relatedcommunities for access to information, citizenship, literacy, among others. The lack of adequate tools in Libras plays amajor role in social exclusion and lack of citizenship of the deaf. In order to aid social inclusion of the deaf, taken here tomean a real access to full citizenship, the significant gap of technological artifacts must be filled. This paper presents amodel of the computational description of the phonetic structure of Libras that will serve as the foundation stone of a vastset of tools to be constructed. This model will be used to create a sample of representative signs to aid the recording of abase of videos whose aim is to support the development of tools to support genuine social inclusion of the deaf.KEYWORDSLibras, Accessibility, Citizenship, Computational Model.1. INTRODUCTIONHistorically, deaf people were treated as having deficiencies, which set them apart from “normality”, ensuingexclusion and prejudices. Nowadays, the deaf are finally starting to be regarded as members of a minoritywhose inclusion aggregates social, political and citizenship dimensions, which include access to information,education, literacy, aid tools etc. Bearers of an identity, culture and other elements that constitute acommunity, the deaf need tools to help them to communicate among each other and with other members ofthe society as a whole. A pillar of such is the Brazilian Sign Language (Libras). Libras is a legitimatelinguistic system, with rules and structure (phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics) thatmakes it a suitable candidate for computational representation.This article presents a computational model of the structure of signs in Libras, based on phonologicalmodels of the sign languages. The model presented in this article will be used to generate a representativesample set of signs to be recorded in videos, and described computationally according to the proposed model(that may be represented in many data structures, but will be exemplified here by XML).2. A WORLD OF GESTURESFor Skliar (1999) the deaf communication issue should not be approached only as a medical problem;instead, deaf people´s issues demand social, political and citizenship dimensions. Linguistic conceptionsshould be used, thus removing the deaf persons from the deficiency realm and bringing them to a status ofbelonging to a minority outside orality. Fernandes (2006) advocates that the use of the sign language by adeaf person implies a specific relationship of the deaf with her own world, a different way of the deaf beingherself. The historical aban<strong>do</strong>nment and lack of research implies directly in the exclusion of the deaf from theoral society.Santos (2002) conclaims science to not only describe the world, but to understand it intimately and tounveil the human possibilities, turning the knowledge into practical, thus leading to inclusion. In this sense,267
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISthe deaf community must be respected in its culture, its identity, its own language. The communitie´sparticular form of communication and understanding of the world must be a part in exercising citizenship.According to Pinsky & Pinsky (2003), to exercise the right of citizenship is a necessity and it is visiblypresent on civil, social-economical and political rights. Citizens must have access to information so that theymay develop critical sense. At this point, it is clear to us that deaf people need adequate technologicalartefacts that would aid them access information, and, consequently, aid them to exercise their citizenship.Sign languages are a legitimate linguistic system, of spacial-gestual-visual manner, capable of providingthe deaf an adequate means to realize all of their linguistic potentialities. Sign languages are not universal,and, just like any oral language, it is different in various countries, and some may vary even within the samecountry or regions or among deaf communities [Stumpf, 2005].To Fernandes (2006:2), Libras is an autonomous, organized lexically (vocabulary), grammatically (rules)and functionally (usages), and is used only in existing groups that are present in agglutinating centers.Approximately 90% of deaf children are born to hearing parents, and, therefore, are not necessarily exposedto the gestual universe that would allow them to acquire sign language naturally. In this context, it isnecessary the use of Libras as a mediator in tools and materials geared towards citizenship of the deaf. InBrazil there are 5.7 million people with some degree of hearing deficiency, with around 3% of this totalconsidered as deaf, according to the census IBGE (www.ibge.org.br). In 2003´s school census it was shownthat only 344 deaf persons attended brazilian universities, demonstrating a high degree of exclusion and theinability of brazilian high education institutions to cope with the demands of the deaf communities.3. RELATED GESTURESAdamo et al (2007) introduce SMILE, a CAVE application for fifth-grade students to learn arithmeticconcepts and the corresponding signs from the American Sign Language (ASL), but fail to deliver content inASL. Furthermore, the system is complex in terms of usability, requiring sophisticated and hard to useequipaments. From Piper et al (2008) comes a Shared Speech Interface that consists of a multitouch tablescreen.The tool advances the state of the art by providing a shared experience of communication between thedeaf and a hearing <strong>do</strong>ctor, in a constructed, cooperative way. However, there remain problems related to theunconfortable necessary presence of an interpreter during the medical appointment, and the fact that the deafperson wasn´t an active participant in the conversation. A future tool that would address these problemsshould be independent of the presence of the interpreter, for example.Turof (1975) investigates how cooperative environments such as instant messages could facilitate thecommunication between the deaf and the hearing. Some of these ideas have been commercially implemented,but they require state-of-the-art, expensive technology if and when fully implemented.Some tools that mediate face-to-face communication are scarce. But, above all, such tools lack thecultural aspect to be used in Brazil. For example, in Brazil, a Congress initiative developed Rybená(www.rybena.org.br) that hasn´t, as yet, been fully a<strong>do</strong>pted by the community due to its lack of context (it<strong>do</strong>es not represent the correct syntax, and some signs are spelled).Some studies also focused on the communication for individuals by means of gestual recognition.However, most of the works <strong>do</strong>n´t help the deaf to communicate properly, or even to become an activeparticipant in the conversation. Several authors [Morris et al (2004); Izad et al (2003)] presented incompletetools: either because there lacked solid theoretical base, or because the real needs of the users were not takeninto account, or due to technological limitations (e.g. availability, cost etc.).4. COMPUTATIONAL STRUCTURE FOR LIBRASIn Brazil, Libras became the official language of the deaf by law decree number 10.436/2002, that guaranteedrights such as information access in education institutions, the communication in government job selectionand the mandatory teaching of Libras as a subject in teaching under-graduate courses.The following metho<strong>do</strong>logy was followed to elaborate the current proposal: A)Literature Review;B)Meeting with community representative; C)Additional conferences with specialists;D)Proposal of theComputational Model;E) Review and Evaluation of the Proposal.268
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010The phonology is the structure used in the literature to represent the components of a given sign. Thebasic phonological characteristics were demonstrated by Stokoe (1960), that showed that sign languagespossess all the linguistic aspects of a language, be it in the lexical, syntax or in its ability to generate infinitesets of sentences. Additionally, Stokoe showed that, just like the words from oral languages, signs arecomposed by segments, and stated that signs are complex and abstract symbols that can be studied by itsmany parts (as opposed to mere spelling or mimic, signs are complex structures).Stokoe said ASL had a limited number of combinations: location; hand configuration and movement.Then, the 70´s wittenessed an increase of deeper studies in the ASL: linguists such as Battison (1974) andKlima & Bellugi (1979) described a fourth parameter: the orientation of the palm of the hand. Additionally,the literature shows that signs have other elements that can be used to describe them, such as: structure forthe use of both hands, movement repetitions, non-manual expressions, signs that have two or more handconfigurations, among others.The model proposed in this article is based on the compilation and adaptation of the phonological modelsdescribed by Liddell & Johnson (1989), Quadros & Karnopp (2004), Ferreira-Brito (1995), among others.From Stokoe, we have that the majority of the signs are composed by minimal set of arrangements that areexecuted simultaneously, and Liddell & Johnson state that the signs must be defined also by theirsequenciality. Liddell & Johnson observed that in the ASL there are signs performed with more than a handconfiguration, more than a moviment and/or more than a location.Liddel & Johnson proposed the Movement-Hodel model: Hold (signs characterized by the lack ofmovement and stability of their composing parameters during articulation), and the Movements (signscharacterized by the alteration of at least one of their composing parameters), in addition to having thepresence of a movement. Thus, a model was developed based on the parameters hand configuration, location,movement, orientation (of the palm of the hand) and non-manual expressions, including several traits todescribe, in detail, the manner in wich signs are formed. Figure 1 shows the basic structure of this proposedmodel:Figure 1. Sign structureIn addition to the existing models, the proposed model a<strong>do</strong>pts two extra segments for the Hold and for theMovement: Dominant hand and Non-<strong>do</strong>minant hand. The signs in Libras are the same whether one performsusing the right or the left hand, although the literature specifies the use of the right hand when describing asign. The supporting hand have the same segments as the main hand, with its own attributes. In the proposedmodel, Hold is composed by Handshapes (pre-defined, the alphabet, spelling and numbers. Finger´splacement enrich the model); Location (place in the body, in space or on supporting hand where the sign isarticulated); Orientation of the Palm (up, <strong>do</strong>wn, left, right etc.) and local movements (placed in Hold becausethere are signs which are characterized more by oscillations, better described here than in the Movementsegment [Ferreira-Brito, 1995, p.41].The Non-Manual Expressions include movements of the face, eyes, head and <strong>do</strong>rsal. The Non-ManualExpression have, among others, the goal of pointing out some syntactic constructions (interrogative, relativesentences etc.) and the differentiation of lexical items (specific and pronominal references, negative particle,adverb, etc.), and may convey joy, sadness, angriness etc. They may also be used to represent desguisedsigns. For instance, instead of signalizing “theaft” in its entirety, one can use only the facial expression, thusbeing more discreet.Movement is defined as the actions of the hand in space and around the enunciator. Quadros & Karnopp(2004) show the views of several authors describing the complexity of Movement, which can becharacterized in many ways and directions, and, most importantly, they must be taken into account becausesuch variations may have different meanings in the grammar of the sign language. The type deals withaspects of movements, interaction and contact. The Quality of the movement contains temporal, nontemporalaspects (related to the extension and the tension with which the movement is executed) and velocity269
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADIS(e.g. continous, restrained etc.). As for the Directionality, the sign may be unidirectional or bidirectional,according to Ferreira-Brito.The Plane XYZ [Capovilla & Sutton (2009)] is utterly suitable for computational treatment. TheFrequency refers to whether there is or there isn´t repetition of the movement that forms the sign. Thenumber of repetitions may or may not be specified, but its presence indicates several meanings for that sign,such as the intensity. The values for the parameters are considered in reference to whom is executing thesign.The proposed model may be used in different representations, such as XML, Data Base or other datastructures deemed necessary for additional computational work. The Figure 2 shows the sign and table 1shows the XML for the sign “pagar à vista” to pay in cash. The Code shows its description based on theproposed model.Figure 2. Visual example of sign “pagar à vista” payment in cashThe sign “pagar à vista” is pictured here for example purposes only. Its XML code can be seen in table 1.Table 1. Example of sign “pagar à vista” (payment in cash)5. ANALYSYS, CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORKSThis research uses phonological models described in the literature, used and known by the communities ofdeaf people, as basis for the proposal of a computational representation of signs in Libras, aggregating a highdegree of details that allow for addition of new parameters, sequentially of signs, dynamics of signs, amongothers. This completudeness is important for the processing (use of the knowledge as described by the modelfor image recognition, translation etc.) and for the execution (e.g. to generate 3D avatars).The descriptivepower of the model is evidenced by the correctness of the description of the exemplifying sign.A sample set of signs in Libras will be constructed (a step that is necessary and sufficient for videopattern recognition). Once each sign is properly recognized in its segments predicted by the model, then mostsigns in Libras will be indentifiable and describable automatically, for future works in different directions,such as the automatic generation of the writing of the signs, using SignWriting, for example.Unlike the literature, that approaches the structure of sign languages as mere spelling, or as static signs,and that <strong>do</strong>esn´t take into account the real needs of the deaf community, this article advances precisely on270
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010these aspects, which were responsible for limitations in related works. Therefore, the proposed modelcontemplates elements such as: real needs of the deaf, solid theoretical basis, interdisciplinarity betweenlinguistics and computer science, the validation from specialists and natural users of Libras, a robustapproach to the description of the signs both socially and academically.As can be seen, the proposed structure is an initial step to a series of applications: Support environmentsfor teaching/learning: of Libras; of Portuguese mediated by Libras and any discipline of knowledge withmediation by Libras and the possibility of access by demand of translations in Libras; Virtual environmentsof communication and collaborative knowledge construction for the deaf community that incorporate and/orsimulate real situations of social use of the language, thus contributing to changes in prejudicial socialpractices originated from the communite itself and from the oral society.REFERENCESAdamo-Villani, et al., 2007. Two-gesture recognition systems for immersive math education of the deaf DOI0.410/ICST.IMMERSCOM3007.2081Battison, R., 1974. Phonological deletion in american sign language. Sign Language Studies, v.5, p.1-19.Brasil, 2002 Lei n. 10436, de 24 de abril de 2002. Dispõe sobre a Libras - Língua Brasileira de Sinais e dá outrasprovidências. Diário Oficial da República Federativa <strong>do</strong> Brasil, Abril de 2002.Capovilla, F. C., et al. 2009 Dicionário enciclopédico ilustra<strong>do</strong> trilíngüe da Língua de Sinais Brasileira. São Paulo:Edusp, 2009.Fernandes, S., 2006. Avaliação em Língua Portuguesa para Alunos Sur<strong>do</strong>s: Algumas Considerações. SEED/SUED/DEE,Curitiba.Izadi, S., et al., 2003 Dynamo: A Public Interactive Surface Supporting the Cooperative Sharing and Exchange of Media.UIST 2003, 159-168.Klima, E.; Bellugi, U., 1979. The signs of language. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University.Liddell, S.K.; Johnson, R.E., 1989. American Sign Language: the Phonological Base. Sign Language Studies, v. 64.p.95-278.Morris, M.R., et al., 2004. Beyond ‘Social Protocols’: Multi-User Coordination Policies for Co-located Groupware.Proceedings of CSCW 2004, 262-265.Pinsky, J., Pinsky, C. (orgs) 2003. “História da Cidadania”. Editora Contexto.Quadros, R. M.; Karnopp, L.B., 2004. Língua de Sinais Brasileira – Estu<strong>do</strong>s Lingüísticos. Porto Alegre: Artmed.Santos, B.de S., 2002. Um discurso sobre as ciências. Porto: Afrontamento, 2002.Skliar, C., 1999. A Surdez: Um Olhar Sobre a Diferença” 1a. ed. Porto Alegre: Mediação.Stokoe, W. C., 1960/1978. Sign Language Structure” Silver Spring: Linstok Press. (Revisto em 1978, Silver Spring,M.D., Linstok Press).Stumpf, M.R., 2005. Aprendizagem de escrita de língua de sinais pelo sistema signwriting: línguas de sinais no papel eno computa<strong>do</strong>r. Tese de Doutora<strong>do</strong>. UFRGSTuroff, M., 1975. Computerized Conferencing for the Deaf and Handicapped. ACM SIGCAPH Newsletter, Number 16,1975, pp. 4-11.271
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISMULTI-AGENT ARCHITECTURE FOR THE VIRTUALHEALTH RECORDLuca Dan Serbanati and Andrei VasilateanuFaculty of Engineering in Foreign LanguagesSplaiul Independetei 313, Bucuresti, RomaniaABSTRACTThe Electronic Health Record is a central, unifying component in an eHealth infrastructure. In our paper we present amodel for the EHR called Virtual Health Record (Sebanati et al, 2008) (VHCR) together with its services of discoveryand cooperation implemented using software agents. Having an open, decentralized architecture in mind we provide theVHCR the connection to a dynamic, non-deterministic world composed of different stakeholder working together in thecare process. We also want to integrate seamlessly medical devices supporting the continuity of care in our e-Healthsolution, correctly including the readings for a constant monitoring of the patient`s health status. The agent-orientedarchitecture and the interactions between components are presented.KEYWORDSe-health, multi agent system, ehr1. INTRODUCTIONThe healthcare is the prevention, treatment, and management of illness and the preservation of mental andphysical well being through the services offered by medical and third parties professionals.An important step towards efficiency improvement and cost cutting in health care is the use of theElectronic Health Record (EHR); that is an individual patient's medical record in digital format. It enables a<strong>do</strong>ctor to keep better track of his patients, to issue <strong>do</strong>cuments that can be interpreted by other <strong>do</strong>ctors an<strong>do</strong>ther EHRs. EHR systems can reduce medical errors, increase physician efficiency and reduce costs, as wellas promote standardization of care.We are building a prototype of a patient centric software platform called VHCR (Virtual HealthCareRecord) comprised of a longitudinal EHR and a population of software agents to support the continuity ofcare.Our application deals with the following issues:1) Information Integration: The system is tasked with interpreting and integrating informationextracted from medical <strong>do</strong>cuments originated from various sources and updating a unique and coherententity, the VHCR. The original <strong>do</strong>cuments are preserved in distributed repositories.2) Semantic interoperability: The agents are not restricted to interpreting messages in a single standardbut they are also tasked with translating from various standards with the help of a terminology conversionserver.3) Device integration: Already many medical device components have standard software interfacesallowing their data to be collected by corresponding applications. By wrapping these devices using intelligentagents capable of communicating to VHCR we can enable the seamless integration of incoming data in realtime.4) Longitudinal Record: The record of a citizen keeps track on the progress of the patient along alifelong period of time. Healthcare is seen as a process extended in time.5) Clinical workflows: A workflow agent monitors the treatment during an episode of care over a longperiod of time.6) Patient awareness: Multiple human-interaction devices can be registered in the system to receivenotifications.272
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 20102. VHCRVirtual HealthCare Record (VHCR) is the central part of our application. VHCR is not a <strong>do</strong>cumentrepository; instead it is a healthcare service provider. It holds data extracted from medical <strong>do</strong>cuments in afiner grained model than the <strong>do</strong>cumental model permits. The medical <strong>do</strong>cument from where VHCR extractedits information to populate the data structure is not lost. Integration is <strong>do</strong>ne by analyzing the <strong>do</strong>cument in itsmedical context (Episode Of Care, Health Issue) and making the necessary updates in the record. (Chronaki,2003).In effect integration and interpretation transforms the information received from the PoS from a<strong>do</strong>cument based-model into our model, based on an ontology derived from HL7 RIM v3,(HL7, 2007) seeFig. 1. Documenting the health status of a patient is <strong>do</strong>ne by using health issues. A health issue is a singlehealth problem like asthma, a broken leg etcA health issue has a life cycle of its own spanning across a time period. In this period we can have moreepisodes of care, for example a patient with asthma has this health issue all his life.An episode of care is a workspace which logically groups relevant data from an instance of the treatment.This way a <strong>do</strong>ctor can <strong>do</strong>wnload from the VHCR only the information from the current episode. Also we useepisodes of care for a finer grained access to information, the patient can give privacy rights based on theassociation (,).Episodes of care can be active, suspended or closed at a moment in time. Closed episodes are archived forfuture reference.An episode of care consists of morecontacts. A contact is an encounterbetween a patient and a health careprovider. Each contact has as anoutcome a <strong>do</strong>cument, stored in arepository and interpreted by theVHCR.During a contact the health careprovider offers a number of services tothe patient. These services includeprescription of medicine, referrals forfurther analysis or specializedprocedures. These care services can beatomic or can be grouped in a careplan, a workflow of services to beexecuted and monitored locally.Results of medical analyses are alsoavailable in the health record. They canrange from blood readings to x-rayimages.Figure 1. VHCR Information Model3. VHCR IN THE HEALTHCARE ECOSYSTEMWe envision the healthcare context as a complex business digital ecosystem comprising agencies, nationaland international regulations, business processes, models and contractual framework. The stakeholders areparties with a permanent or temporary interest in the healthcare process who are represented by unique,customized avatars, implemented by software agents. (Serbanati et al, 2005) In this complex virtual world theVHCR is itself an organization of agents (Wooldridge, 2002 & Grossi et al, 2006), able to communicate withother digital components and to participate in business processes. (Huhns, 2008 & Zambonelli et al, 2001).The focus of this paper is to describe the multi-agent system of VHCR, called VHCR Agency. (see Fig. 2)273
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADIS3.1 VHCR AgencyIn the followings the agents living in VHCR Agency are introduced:• Specialized agent of the VHCRVHCR exposes its services using a specialized agent that interacts with its care record. The “VHCRAGENT” is responsible for integrating data from other agents into the VHCR and also for answering queriesregarding the patient’s health current status, history, and ongoing treatments. VHCR agent is the only agentaware of the internal structure of the health record.• Synthesis agentSynthesis Agent is responsible with synthesizing specialized health summaries. In a scenario a patient isreferred to perform a procedure in a private clinic. This clinic requires the medical situation of the patient andis able to process electronic <strong>do</strong>cuments sent in Continuity of Care Document format, in Continuity of CareRecord (Ferranti et al, 2006) format or in a proprietary format. In this case the agent will extract a summaryin the required format. For translating data in an unknown format the agent interacts with the translationagent, described below.• Device AgentsEach medical device will be represented in the virtual space by an agent responsible for getting data fromthe device and sending it to the “VHCR AGENT”. The “device agent” can also be used to sendconfiguration requests to the medical device. To install such an agent the medical device must be registeredin the system, by using the patient portal. If the manufacturer of the device provides the software agent it willsimply be <strong>do</strong>wnloaded and started in the agent container. If the manufacturer provides a non-agent softwarethen an adaptor agent will have to be configured to work with the available software.• Agents that interact with agents from general practitioners and clinicsMost medical data to be incorporated in the VHCR comes from patient encounters with healthcareproviders. Healthcare providers will use different software applications that need to interact with VHCReither to receive data or to send medical <strong>do</strong>cuments for integration. To each such collaboration an agent willbe assigned “HCP Agent” that will be responsible for receiving signed <strong>do</strong>cument, sending them to VHCRincomingagents and forwarding queries to VHCR-outcoming agents.• Clinical workflow agentsOnce the patient’s health issue is found out, a health care provider can devise a care plan to be carried outby the subject of care and his/her care providers. The care plan is a workflow including activities that rangefrom observations and future appointments to procedures and medication. The care plan is derived from aclinical guideline and tailored to the patient peculiarities. A patient can have more than one active care plan,saved in VHCR, corresponding to a specific health issue and episode of care. To each active care plan aworkflow agent is assigned which monitors the realization of the care plan. For example it can sendnotifications before a scheduled procedure. When deriving the care plan, the health care professional canmark which activity realizations are requiredto be acknowledged. For example it is criticalfor the patient to take a medication once aday. When the medication is taken the patientmarks this fact on his PDA or in the patientportal and the event is sent to the VHCRwhere it is extracted by the workflow agent. Ifthe event is not received in the requiredinterval, the workflow agent sends anotification.• Health monitoring agentsWith the appearance of integrated medicalmeasurement devices that provide a real-timemonitoring of the life signs of a patient thereis a need to interpret this data as soon as it isintegrated in VHCR and raise anFigure 2. Local Agents of VHCR interact with the worldalarm if the measurements are off the scale.For this we introduce a “monitoring agent”274
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010which is an reactive agent with a set of rules .. The agent is notified whenever a newmeasurement is added to VHCR. It extracts it and compares it to admissible limits. When the agent is firstinstalled this limits are the default ones, based on the age, sex and health issues of the patient. However thehealthcare professional can customize the admissible limits to others tailored to the patient treatment. Theactions can be customized by the patient and consist in notification either of the patient or the generalpractitioner. An important issue here is the use of the monitoring agents in preventing the spread ofepidemics. For example they can receive updates from national authorities when a new strain of flu appears,the symptoms being added to the agent knowledge base. Suppose the symptoms consist of fever, coughingand headaches. When the patient measures his/her temperature the data is received by the agent whichprompts the patient to answer a query regarding his condition. If the patient confirms the symptoms, he isinformed he may be suffering from the flu and is invited to make an appointment to a health care provider.The agents themselves rely on low-level services to accomplish their tasks. These services are providedby the supporting agents as described below:• Broker agentIt acts as a registry for the agents supporting their discovery and communication. When a new agent isplugged in, it registers to the broker agent, publishing its services.• Agent lifecycle managerIt is responsible for creating new instances of agents, for activating and passivating agents when needed.It also acts as a garbage collector, removing unnecessary instances.• Agent`s ontology translation agentIn case our local agents communicate with agents and applications using a different medical terminologywe need a set of mappings between different vocabularies to achieve semantic interoperability. This is <strong>do</strong>neby creating and maintaining a registry of mappings, which falls under the responsibility of the agent`sontology translation agent. Whenever an agent encounters an unknown term it queries the translation agentfor a synonym. The translation agent either has the mapping in its knowledge base; either makes a query toan UMLS terminology server. The Unified Medical Language System (UMLS, 2010) is a compendium ofmany controlled vocabularies in the biomedical sciences. It provides a mapping structure among thesevocabularies and thus allows one to translate among the various terminology systems; it may also be viewedas a comprehensive thesaurus and ontology of biomedical concepts.4. VHCR IMPLEMENTATIONCurrently VHCR is a proof-of-concept prototype, and work has been carried out on extracting use cases fromcurrent medical practice, national regulations, published clinical pathways and also HL7 functionalrequirements for EHRs. Another point of interest was designing a message ontology to support agentcommunication.We have chosen JADE (JADE, 2010) as a platform for our software agents since it complies with FIPAspecifications (FIPA, 2005). JADE offers a seamless integration of rules written in JESS (JESS, 2008), a Javaimplementation of the RETE algorithm. Currently we are evaluating the possibility of implementing ourworkflow agents in WADE, a JADE extension that allows agents to execute tasks defined according to theworkflow metaphor.5. CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORKOur VHCR project is in design phase. We are analyzing the infrastructure supporting VHCR, a middlewareproviding authentification, authorization and encryption services. An open topic is complying with ebXMLstandards, acquiring a better interoperability and also integrating health services in broader businessprocesses.275
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISREFERENCESChronaki, C.E. et al, 2003. An eHealth platform for instant interaction among health professionals, S.C. Computers inCardiology.Ferranti, J. et al, 2006, The Clinical Document Architecture and the Continuity of Care Record. British Medical Journal,13(3):245.FIPA, 2005. [Online], Available: http://www.fipa.org/ [26 Jul 2010].Grossi, D. et al, 2006. Ontological aspects of the implementation of norms in agent-based electronic institutions,Computational & Mathematical Organization Theory, 12(2):251–275.HL7 Continuity of Care Document, 2007. [Online], Available: www.hl7.org [26 Jul 2010].Huhns, M. and Stephens, L., 2008. Multiagent Systems and Societies of Agents.JADE, 2010. [Online], Available: http://jade.tilab.com/ [26 Jul 2010].JESS, 2008. [Online], Available: http://www.jessrules.com/. [26 Jul 2010].Serbanati, L. et al, 2005. Modelling medical research processes in humans to set up a standard for clinical trialmanagement system. Innovation and the Knowledge Economy: Issues, Applications, Case Studies.Serbanati, L.D. et al, 2008. Supporting Continuity of Care with a Virtual Electronic Health Record, Romania 9thInternational HL7, Interoperability Conference, Bucharest, Romania.Unified Medical Language System, 2010. [Online], Available: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/research/umls/ [26 Jul 2010].Wooldridge, M., 2002. An Introduction to MultiAgent Systems. John Wiley & Sons.Zambonelli, F. et al, 2001. Organizational abstractions for the analysis and design of multi-agent systems. In Agent-Oriented <strong>Software</strong> Engineering, pages 407–422.276
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010ENHANCING FAIRNESS: A NOVEL C2C E-COMMERCECOMMUNITY MEMBER REPUTATION ALGORITHMBASED ON TRANSACTION SOCIAL NETWORKSWangsen Feng 1 , Bei Zhang 1 , Yunni Xia 2 , Jiajing Li 3 and Tao Meng 41 Key Laboratory of Network and <strong>Software</strong> Security Assurance of Ministry of Education (Peking University)1 Computing Center, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China2 College of Computer Science, Chongqing University, Chongqing 400044, China3 School of Mechanical Electronic and Information Engineering, China University of Mining and Technology3 Beijing 100083, China4 Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, ChinaABSTRACTToday, almost all the C2C e-commerce community member reputation evaluating algorithms are time sensitive. Thereputation of a community member is accumulated after transactions and the increment of reputation after a successfultransaction is computed based on the score given by his or her transaction partner. Since people always tend to <strong>do</strong>business with those with high reputation value, the reputation of members joined in C2C community at different time willvary greatly although they may provide the same commodity quality and service. It is unfair to new comers. In this paper,we propose a novel algorithm to overcome the shortcoming. Based on the transaction social network, our algorithmemploys the ran<strong>do</strong>m walk strategy to compute member reputation and enhance system fairness.KEYWORDSC2C e-commerce community; reputation; fairness; social network1. INTRODUCTIONNowadays, <strong>Internet</strong> reputation systems can be divided into two main classes generally. One derives reputationbased on the evaluation of application principals. Electronic commerce reputation system and web pageranking system of Web search engine are representative examples. The other derives reputation byapplications based on the behavior of application principals. BBS reputation system and P2P file sharingreputation system are representative examples.Electronic commerce reputation systems compute member reputation based on the mutual rating betweensellers and buyers. A large transaction social network is formed among members of e-commerce web sitesbased on the transaction relationship. Honest ven<strong>do</strong>rs and customers occupy central positions in the socialnetwork. The reputation of web pages is computed based on the web link structure. It makes use of the factthat the links among web pages are established by professionals who design these pages. Web pages win linksfrom other pages by their content and interface. BBS reputation systems rate users based on user behavior,including posting articles, replying articles, login times etc. P2P file sharing reputation systems rate usersbased on their online time, upload data volume and <strong>do</strong>wnload data volume.In this paper, we focus our attention on C2C electronic commerce reputation systems, studying how tofairly evaluate member reputation in C2C electronic commerce communities. Nowadays, almost all the C2Celectronic commerce systems a<strong>do</strong>pt reputation systems to keep electronic market order. The reputation of acommunity member is accumulated after transactions and the increment of reputation after a successfultransaction is computed based on the score given by his or her transaction partner [Paul Resnick et al, 2000].Such reputation evaluating algorithm is time sensitive. Since people always tend to <strong>do</strong> business with thosewith high reputation value, the reputation of members joined in C2C community at different time will varygreatly although they may provide the same commodity quality and service. In real market, those pioneerswho catch the business opportunity always occupy maximum market share and even monopolize the market. It277
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISis difficult for new comers to find a foothold, even if those own the same technology and service. They canonly wait for next revolutionary opportunity. It is unfair and is not good news for competing, progress oftechnology and customers. However, in the virtual network community, it is possible to improve the situation.Although there is already lots of literature on reputation research [Paul Resnick et al, 2000; Bin Yu andMunindar P. Singh, 2003; Gayatri Swamynathan et al, 2008; Ebrahim Bagheri et al, 2009], no one hasconcerned the fairness issue of online reputation systems.In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm to enhance C2C e-commerce reputation system fairness.Based on the transaction social network, our algorithm employs the ran<strong>do</strong>m walk strategy to computemember reputation.2. C2C COMMUNITY MEMBER REPUTATION INCREMENTEVALUATION FORMULAA non-trivial C2C e-commerce community member reputation increment evaluation formula is proposed inthis section, where reputation increment means the increment of member reputation after a successfultransaction. We believe the formula for evaluating increment of member reputation after a successfultransaction should consider the following factors: the score given by one’s transaction partner, the reputationof the transaction partner, the transaction value and the encouragement-punishment factor.The score given by one’s transaction partner reflects whether the member’s behavior satisfies his or herpartner, for example, whether the commodity quality or service is as promised, whether the payment is in time.Transaction value is an important factor for evaluating member’s reputation. In general, the larger thetransaction value is, the bigger the transaction risk will exist. If a member can still keep honest in transactionsof high value, then he deserves trust relatively. If transaction value is not considered in reputation incrementevaluating formula and the increment of reputation has nothing to <strong>do</strong> with transaction value, then gamblerswill accumulate their reputation in transactions of small value and cheat in transactions of large value.Encouragement or punishment factor is used to encourage a member to keep transaction contract or punish amember for breaking transaction contract. In human society, trust increases slowly and decreases quickly.Therefore, encouragement factor should be much smaller than punishment factor.In this paper, {1, 0, -1} is taken as the score rate set. Score rate 1, -1 reflect that a member is satisfactory orunsatisfactory with his transaction partner’s behavior, respectively. Score rate 0 is neutral between 1 and -1.Since the feedback of members is usually based on intuition, we believe that it is reasonable to set only threerates. Some large electronic commerce sites also a<strong>do</strong>pt {1, 0, -1} as the score rate set, like eBay.Denote by m, R(m) a member in C2C e-commerce community and m’s reputation value, respectively. Let sbe the score given by one’s transaction partner after a successful transaction and w be the transaction value.After a successful transaction, the increment of a participator’s reputation has much to <strong>do</strong> with the reputationof his or her transaction partner, the score given by the partner and the transaction value. We use the followingformula to calculate the increment of a member m’s reputation after a successful transaction.⎧ c ( R + w ) p 1 s = 1⎪∆ R ( m ) = ⎨ 0 s = 0⎪⎩ c R + w p s = −( ) 2 1Here, p 1 and p 2 are the encouragement factor and punishment factor, respectively, and R is the reputationvalue of the transaction partner, c is a small reputation constant (c
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010respectively. The transaction value and the score given by one’s transaction partner are also associated withthe corresponding edge. The induced graph is called transaction social network. It is easy to draw theconclusion: directed edges appear in pairs. For any vertex, the income degree is equal to the outcome degree.Almost all the C2C community member reputation computing methods are based on transaction time. It isunfair to new comers. A natural idea is that sort transactions ran<strong>do</strong>mly and update one’s reputation based onthe new transaction sequence. However, this simple strategy will bring new unfairness. In this paper, weiteratively select a transaction employing the ran<strong>do</strong>m walk strategy on the transaction social network andupdate one’s reputation until the reputation value of all nodes in the network are stable.The algorithm first induces the transaction social network topology from C2C e-commerce transaction data.Then it divides the network into several blocks using a social network analysis algorithm. After completing theabove preliminary work, it ran<strong>do</strong>mly selects one node from each block as seeds and applies ran<strong>do</strong>m walkstrategy on the network with each seed as a starting point. The algorithm iteratively performs above procedureuntil the reputation of all nodes converges. The exact algorithm lists as follows.getNextNode(v 1 )->v 2getNextNode(v)->v 1v 2v 1getNextNode(v 3 )->NULLv3vgetNextNode(v 2 )->v 3Figure 1. Ran<strong>do</strong>m walk path example (bold path), where v is the seed, the path extends from v and ends at v 3 .Algorithm: computing reputation based on transaction social network ran<strong>do</strong>m walkStep 1: induce transaction social network N based on the transaction data;Step 2: compute a community set C={c 1,c 2,…,c k} (k• 1) of network N using thecommunity analysis algorithm based on maximum modularity;Step 3: <strong>do</strong> {Step 4:ran<strong>do</strong>m select one node from each community in C, and get k nodes:n 1,n 2,…,n k;Step 5: for ( int i=1; i
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISIn order to control the growth of reputation, the function also introduces a control factor T, where T is the sumof reputation value of every node in the network and evaluated when repuConverge(N) is called. The initialvalue of T is set to be 1.Function: updateReputation(n)Step 1: Denote by d the income degree of node n. Select one edge e pointing to nuniformly.Step 2: Update n’s reputation value based on the transaction data corresponding tothe selected edge e using ∆R( n)R( n)+ =, where ∆R(n) can be computed with the formulaTintroduced in section II.Function getNextNode(n) determines whether the ran<strong>do</strong>m walk path will terminate. If it returns NULL, thepath terminates. If it returns a node n i which is pointed by n, the path continues and the destination of this jumpis n i . It is easy to see that the more the number of out edges is, the larger the jumping probability is. If a nodehas already been chosen in this loop before, the function should also return NULL.Function: getNextNode(n)Step 1: Denote by d the outcome degree of node n, and let n 1,…,n dbe the nodespointed by n. Select one element from the set {n 1,…,n d,NULL} uniformly.Step 2: if ( a node is selected and the node has not been chosen in this loopbefore )Step 3:return the nodeStep 4: else return NULL.Function repuConverge(N) is used to test whether the algorithm has converged and also to update thecontrol factor T. Clearly the increment of reputation tends to 0 because of the control factor T.Function: repuConverge(N)Step 1: if (the increment of every node’s reputation < δ)Step 2:return true;Step 3: else return false.Here δ is a constant threshold value.Clearly, the algorithm needs enough transaction data to induce the transaction social network. Therefore,when applying the algorithm into C2C electronic commerce reputation system, one had better use thealgorithm to modify reputation periodically. First, compute member reputation with the traditional algorithm.After a period, for example one month, compute member reputation using our algorithm based on thetransaction data of this period. Then one can average the reputation increment of this period computed by ouralgorithm and the reputation increment of this period computed by the traditional algorithm, and derive themodified member reputation value using this average value together with the reputation value at the beginningof this period.4. CONCLUSIONThis paper discusses a new issue of C2C e-commerce reputation systems: fairness. A novel memberreputation evaluating algorithm is proposed to enhance reputation system fairness. The algorithm employsthe ran<strong>do</strong>m walk strategy on the transaction social network and effectively reduces the computing complexity.We expect online e-commerce service providers can a<strong>do</strong>pt the algorithm.280
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010ACKNOWLEDGEMENTThis work is fully supported by the National Grand Fundamental Research Program of China under Grant No.2009CB320505 and the National High Technology Research and Development Program of China underGrant No. 2008AA01Z203.REFERENCESPaul Resnick et al, 2000. Reputation Systems. Communications of the ACM, Vol. 43, No. 12, pp. 45-48.Bin Yu and Munindar P. Singh, 2003. Detecting deception in reputation management. Proceedings of International JointConference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems. Melbourne, Australia, pp. 73-80.Gayatri Swamynathan et al, 2008. Towards Reliable Reputations for Dynamic Networked Systems. Proceedings of IEEESymposium on Reliable Distributed Systems. Napoli, Italy, pp. 195-204.Ebrahim Bagheri et al, 2009. Can reputation migrate? On the propagation of reputation in multi-context communities.Knowledge Based Systems, Vol. 22, No. 6, pp. 410-420.M.E.J. Newman, 2004. Fast algorithm for detecting community structure in networks. Physical Review E, Vol. 69,066133.Aaron Clauset et al, 2004. Finding community structure in very large networks. Physical Review E, Vol. 70, 066111.281
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADIS(SEMI-)AUTOMATIC NEGOTIATIONOF SERVICE LEVEL AGREEMENTSAnne Kümpel, Iris Braun, Josef Spillner and Alexander SchillChair of Computer NetworksTechnische Universität DresdenDresden, GermanyABSTRACTThe paper presents an approach to simplify and shorten the negotiation process towards a Service Level Agreement(SLA) between a web service provider and a service consumer. While interests of contract partners may differ in variousaspects, the negotiation phase can take a long time even without finding an optimal result. We propose an approach howthe negotiation phase can be shortened by using the decision matrices of the negotiation partners in a central component,which finds a quasi-optimal allocation for the negotiable parameters.KEYWORDSSOA, Web Service, Negotiation, SLA1. INTRODUCTIONIn the <strong>Internet</strong> of Services, where services become composable and tradable entities, contracts to describe theservice functionality and interfaces but also the obligations of service consumers and providers are anessential need. The negotiation phase of such contracts can be a complex and time consuming step in the lifecycle of service usage [Braun08]. Negotiations in general can be competitive or cooperative. While incompetitive negotiations every negotiator tries to maximize their own gain which implies several messageexchanges between all partners, the cooperative negotiation approach is interested in finding a global solutionfor all involved parties, which can be best reached through a mediator. The need of automating thenegotiation process especially in the service-oriented world has been discussed for more than ten years[Sierra97]. The approaches mainly are competitive, agent-based and follow an offer-counteroffer process. Acooperative approach, which uses a central component, is presented in [Comuzzi09]. They provide a pricedrivenconcept, whereas the generic concept presented in this paper is independent of monetary aspects. Theprice for a service can be subject of the negotiation process but also be negotiated or calculated afterwards.This approach can also be used for in-house service contracts or long term cross-service contracts.In the same context, researchers developed different mostly XML-based representations for servicecontracts. Prominent examples are WS-Agreement (WSAG) [wsag] and WSLA [wsla]. In the <strong>Internet</strong> ofServices, contracts, known as Service Level Agreements (SLA), exist between companies as well as betweenservice providers and end-users, who might have small knowledge of using agents or even of the creationprocess of SLAs. An SLA establishes agreements not only on the quality of a service (QoS) but also on allrelevant aspects of service usage between a service provider and a service consumer. A contract consists ofdifferent parts. While some of them are informative (e.g. provider address) and/or fixed (e.g. functionalaspects), others are variable and negotiable (e.g. support level, price or QoS parameters). To shorten the SLAnegotiation process, SLA templates, or QoS-profiles [Mulugeta07], are used to offer different profiles to theservice consumer. When there is no template that meets all consumers’ needs, they have to accept acompromise or must cancel the negotiation process. On the other hand if service providers often violateagainst the SLA, they have to delete or modify the templates to avoid violations in the future [Spillner09].The needs or business values for using or providing services normally differ between consumer and provider.While a consumer wants to have a short response time, the provider prefers to delay the guaranteed responsetime to save their resources. If only few parameters with little alternatives are negotiable, the easiest way is to282
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010rank all possible combinations and to come to an agreement on one of them. Raising the amount ofparameters and parameter values raises the possibilities and the amount of proposals becomes unmanageable.An example: If 5 parameters and 3 alternatives per parameter are given to negotiate, already 3 5 = 243proposals are possible. For such a multi-criteria decision problem a decision matrix can be used to find thebest choice. As already mentioned these decision matrices can differ for the negotiation partners. In thispaper we present an approach to specify the preferences on service quality parameters or other negotiableparameters and introduce a component which, based on the given decision matrixes, creates a nearly optimalproposal for a contract, which can be finished by the partners with a chosen protocol. The advantage of thiscooperative approach is to simplify the negotiation process for service consumers and providers byintroducing a way to model their preferences.Section 2 gives a brief architecture overview, followed by the description of the representation model forthe decision matrix. The process of finding the proposal is explained in Section 4 and the article finishes witha conclusion and outlook to future work.2. ARCHITECTURE AND NEGOTIATION PROTOCOLFigure 1 gives an overview of the architecture of the negotiation module. It provides two web serviceinterfaces for the negotiation process. One is to initiate the calculation process and the other is to poll theresult.Figure 1. Architecture of the negotiation moduleWith the initiation call a negotiation initiator introduces their constraints (preferences for differentparameters) for a specific service and receives an identifier for polling the result afterwards. The negotiationmodule will fetch the constraints for the corresponding service provider from a central component, the SLAmanager, which administrates the SLA templates. For a detailed view on an SLA-based infrastructure see[Winkler09]. The two given constraint sets are matched by the calculation module and the best proposal iscalculated. The initiator polls the proposal and converts it to their favored SLA format. In WSAG protocolfor example the proposal will be sent by the wsag:CreateAgreement(AgreementOffer) operation.3. REPRESENTATION OF USER PREFERENCESIn this section we present our model to represent the negotiations partners’ needs. For multi-criteria decisionproblems, a decision matrix can be used to find the best combination for several values of parameters.We define all negotiable parameters as p 1 ,...,p n . For each parameter p i a meta-information tuple Ip i ={name, metric, guarantor, kov, tov, info} and a set of values v pi = {v 1 ,..,v k } is given. The information tupleidentifies this parameter and gives all needed information. Name and metric are self-evident, the guarantormeans the partner who is responsible to keep the specific value that may be the consumer or the provider.KindOfValue (kov) indicates whether the values v pi are discrete or continuous values. If they are continuousvalues, the value set consists of only two values, the maximum and the minimum. An example: for theparameter “responseTime” normally a range will be defined (continuous) while for the parameter283
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADIS“encryption” specific provided encryption standards are given as a value set (discrete). TypeOfValue (tov)gives the data type of the values like String, Integer or Boolean. Additional information or extensions can bedefined in info. For assembling the decision matrix a parameter priority and value preference are introducedaccording to [Chun03]. The priority prio(p i ) of the parameter p i defines the weighting of p i in relation to theother parameters p 1 ,...,p n . The preference pref(v pi ) defines the degree of importance for v pi compared to theother possible values for p i. Figure 2 illustrates the representation of parameter constraints. The ConstraintListcontains a list of all parameters (constraints) with its appropriate priority, the meta-information tuple and thevalue set with the preferences.Figure 2. Overview of the representation model for user preferencesThis representation (Figure 2) of the user preferences is defined as an XML schema and can extend or beembedded into different SLA languages. WS-Agreement e.g. defines in wsag:Template awsag:CreationConstraints section with the free form element wsag:Constraint. This can be used to embed theprovider preferences. In the drafted extension of WSAG, WS-Agreement Negotiation [wsag-neg], a wsagneg:NegotiationConstraintssection with the same type as wsag:CreationConstraint will be defined and givesthe consumer a possibility to provide their constraints to the negotiation partner.shows an example, where two parameters ‘Response_Time’ and ‘Support_Language’ are defined in aWSAG-Template....Support_LanguageISO639-1Response_TimePROVIDERsecDISCRETEPROVIDERSTRINGCONTINUOUSINTEGER´ ende10fr1The parameter ‘Support_Language’ gives three alternatives, whereas “en” (English) is the most preferred.Listing 1. Excerpt of a WS-Agreement Template with embedded user preferences284
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010For ‘Response_Time’ a range for the minimum and maximum deliverable or acceptable value is given.The negotiated range in the final agreement has to be inside this range.4. DECISION MAKING PROCESSThe decision making process proceeds in five steps:1. Collect the constraint sets of consumer and provider. While the consumer gives their set together withthe order, the constraint set of the provider has to be fetched at the SLA Manager.2. Match the constraint lists. As the parameters in the constraint list of the consumer and provider maydiffer, they must be matched to a subset, which represents the intersection of the two lists.3. Match the value sets. Also the given alternatives for a parameter may differ in the provider and theconsumer lists. Especially for continuous values the ranges have to be matched and the preferences for themodified ranges have to be calculated.4. Normalize the priorities and preferences. To ensure that the given priority and preference values arecomparable and fairly used, they have to be normalized.5. Finally the best configuration (proposal) has to be found.To find the best proposal, an optimal solution for a defined objective function Z has to be found.If the parameter values are ranges, i.e. KindOfValue in the meta-information is ‘continuous’, we have tofind an agreement within a common range. As previously described, for ranges the value set consists of onlytwo values. In the third step we have to match the two given ranges (one for every partner), so we have tofind the intersection of the two ranges. Than we have to map the found common range to one preferencevalue for every partner. This is simply <strong>do</strong>ne by calculating the mean of the two preferences, which can beobtained from a linear function.With the given priorities and preferences we can calculate the utility function U(P) for a proposal P with nparameters by summarizing the utilities for every parameter:U(P) = ∑ U(v pi ) where U(v pi ) = prio(p i ) * pref(v pi ) and P = { v p1 ,...,v pn }For every partner the best allocation for parameter p i is the value v pi where U(v pi ) has a maximum. Fordetermining the best allocation for a parameter, which maximizes the utility function for both negotiationpartner 1 and 2, we define an objective function Z as:Z(v pi ) = U1(v pi ) + U2(v pi ) - |U1(v pi ) - U2(v pi )| ≡ 2 * min( U1(v pi ), U2(v pi ) )The best allocation v best for a parameter p i is where the objective function Z has a maximum. If we findmore than one allocation, we choose the v as v best , for which the sum U1(v pi ) + U2(v pi ) is highest. If we havestill more than one v we choose one ran<strong>do</strong>mly.After finding an allocation for all common parameters, the proposal can be offered to the initiator of thenegotiation.5. CONCLUSIONIn this paper we presented an approach for finding a proposal for a SLA, which fits nearly optimal the needsof the service consumer and the service provider as well. According to Arrows-Theorem [Arrow50] wecannot claim that the found proposal is the best, but it is one of the Pareto-optimal solutions (win-win). Theprovided approach gives the service consumer the possibility to initiate a negotiation independently from theprovided SLA templates. Of course the best fitting values can only be found for parameters which areevaluated by both partners, but the non-matching parameters can be offered to the initiator and be used forfurther (human-based) negotiations as well. We have implemented the decision making process and willevaluate it in collaboration with project partners in the TEXO use case of THESEUS project [Theseus]. Infuture work we have to extend the decision making process to find not only one Pareto-optimal solution butmore or even all to give the partners a choice. While this approach reflects interdependencies between thenegotiable parameters only in building the decision matrix but not in calculating the proposal, we have tobuild up and maximize an objective function Z(P) for a proposal as a whole, instead of maximizing theobjective function for the parameters separately. This will result in a typical constraint satisfaction problem.285
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISACKNOWLEDGEMENTThe presented work is part of the research project THESEUS and will be evaluated in the use case TEXO.The project was funded by means of the German Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology under thepromotional reference ”01MQ07012”.REFERENCES[Arrow50] K. J. Arrow (1950). `A Difficulty in the Concept of Social Welfare'. The Journal of Political Economy58(4):328-346.[Braun08] Braun I. et al, 2008. Zusicherung nichtfunktionaler Eigenschaften und Dienstgüte im Future <strong>Internet</strong> ofServices. In PIK - Praxis der Informationsverarbeitung und Kommunikation, Vol. 31(04), pp 225–231.[Chun03] H.W. Chun and R.Y.M. Wong, (2003). ‘N * —an agent-based negotiation algorithm for dynamic scheduling andrescheduling’, Adv. Eng. Inform. 17 (1), pp. 1–22[Comuzzi09] M. Comuzzi and B. Pernici (2009). ‘A framework for QoS-based Web service contracting’. ACM Trans.Web 3(3):1-52.[Mulugeta07] M. Mulugeta and A. Schill (2007). ‘An Approach for QoS Contract Negotiation in Distributed Component-Based <strong>Software</strong>’. Proceedings of 10th Intl. ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on Component-Based <strong>Software</strong> Engineering,Medford, Massachusetts, USA[Sierra97] C. Sierra, et al. (1997). `A Service-Oriented Negotiation Model between Autonomous Agents'. In Proceedingsof the 8th European Workshop on Modelling Autonomous Agents in a Multi-Agent World, pp. 17-35, Lon<strong>do</strong>n, UK.Springer-Verlag.[Spillner09] Josef Spillner and Alexander Schill (2009) ‘Dynamic SLA Template Adjustments based on Service PropertyMonitoring’ Proceedings of the 2009 IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing - CLOUD; 183-189;[Theuseus] THESEUS programme website: http://www.theseus-programm.de[Winkler09] Matthias Winkler and Thomas Springer (2009). ‘SLA Management for the <strong>Internet</strong> of Services’ INSTICCPress; ICSOFT 2009 - Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on <strong>Software</strong> and Data Technologies, Volume2, Sofia, Bulgaria, July 26-29, 2009; 384-391[wsag] A. Andrieux et al. (2005).’Web Services Agreement Specification.’, www.ogf.org/<strong>do</strong>cuments/GFD.107.pdf[wsag-neg] O.Waeldrich, 2010, ‘WS-Agreement Version Negotiation 1.0, draft of WS-Agreement NegotiationSpecification’, https://forge.gridforum.org/sf/projects/graap-wg[wsla] A. Keller and H. Ludwig (2003). `The WSLA Framework: Specifying and Monitoring Service Level Agreementsfor Web Services'. Journal of Network and Systems Management 11(1):57-81.286
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010REQUIREMENTS ORIENTED PROGRAMMING IN AWEB-SERVICE ARCHITECTUREVinicius Miana Bezerra and Selma Melnikoff*USP/Mackenzie*USPABSTRACTThis paper presents a technique to facilitate requirements reverse engineering, increase requirements traceability andreduce requirements maintenance costs by <strong>do</strong>cumenting requirements directly in the source code. To accomplish that amapping between a requirements meta-model and web-service oriented architecture was developed using a set of JAVAannotations to indicate those architectural elements in the source code. Finally, this paper presents a case study where thisprocess was used to recover requirements of a legacy system for a big <strong>Internet</strong> service provider with no formalrequirement record.KEYWORDSRequirements Engineering, Web-Services, SOA1. INTRODUCTION<strong>Software</strong> Evolution consists in adapting software. <strong>Software</strong> is adapted to satisfy either: a new or updatedrequirement or to prevent and fix errors (Robbes, 2007). These requirement changes are either due to changesin the software environment or change in the user needs. Bennett (2000) reports a survey that shows that 75%of the software evolution is due to new or updated requirements.Requirements Engineering has emerged as an discipline that deals with the objectives, functionalities,qualities and constraints of a software system. Requirements engineering is concerned with elicitation,evaluation, specification, consolidation, traceability and evolution of such system requirements(Lamsweerde, 2008). Managing requirements evolution is an fundamental activity of any software system(Rui, 2007). It is crucial to manage this evolution to have requirements written in a format , so that they arereadable and traceable. Traceability is particularly important as a changing requirement calls for finding outthe code fragments where this requirement is implemented in order to correctly perform the change in thesoftware (Schwarz, 2008). As times passes by and the software evolves and adapts to ever-changing userrequirements and operating environment, the knowledge of the developed system held by the team starts toreduce either as an effect of the changes in the software or by people leaving the development team. Withouta good knowledge of the software, maintaining the architecture coherent becomes harder which increases thesoftware degradation process (Bennett, 2000)(Weber, 2005)(Yang, 2007)(Fahmi, 2007). Keeping goodrecord of requirements and how they are implemented becomes very important to reduce the softwaredegradation and maintenance costs (Schwarz, 2008)(Fahmi, 2007). It is specially important to know whatparts of the code are implementing each requirement. This knowledge make it easier to perform changes as itis easier to know what parts of source code need to be changed and what will be the impact of those changes(Lamsweerde, 2008)(Fahmi, 2007)(Daneva, 2006).This paper presents an approach to manage and <strong>do</strong>cument requirements when maintaining a JAVAsoftware system by placing annotations in the source-code. The requirements might not necessarily beformally <strong>do</strong>cumented in order to use this technique. In order to present this technique, we organized thispaper as follows:• In the next section, we present related work <strong>do</strong>ne in this field and how they related to our work.• On section 3, we present our use case meta-model, which was developed based on Rui (2007) andaltered so that it can be mapped into source code.287
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADIS• On section 4, we present JAVA annotations and the annotations we proposed for the use case metamodelwe developed.• On section 5, we show how this technique can fit into a software development and maintenanceprocess and a case study and the results we obtained using this technique.• Finally, on section 6, we present this paper's conclusions and future work.2. RELATED WORKLagrein (Jermakovics, 2008) is a tool that allows visualizing software evolution and links requirements tocode expected to implement them. In order to map requirements into code it uses algorithms for LatentSemantic Indexing (LSI) (De Lucia, 2005). In our approach requirements are manually mapped bydevelopers, which require a bigger effort to obtain such visualization, but on the order hand, the result ismore precise.Rui (2007) developed a use case meta-model which, we use in our work, a process algebra to makechanges in use case that <strong>do</strong> not affect its semantics, a set of use case refactorings and a use case refactoringtool which is quite helpful in evolving software requirements. However, it <strong>do</strong>es not deal with mappingrequirements to code.Canfora and Di Penta (2007) wrote a paper on the frontiers of reverse engineering where they present themain developments in the area and highlighted key open research issues for the future. They showed thatmodern languages while allowing to get information from the code without the need to instrument it (usingJAVA reflection for example), they make it harder to analyze the program as the static view can not be usedto infer the dynamic view, requiring both kinds of analysis.Fahmi and Choi (2007) presented the importance of reverse engineering in the software evolution as akey element to manage with the requirements changes and proposed a process model where reverseengineering is a fundamental part of it.Schwarz (2008) presents how traceability is key to successful software evolution reinforcing whatCanfora, Di Penta (2007), Fahmi and Choi (2007) predicted in their research and presents a meta-model thatrepresent software development artifacts which can be used to query change impact.Liu (2005) presents a technique for reengineering requirements of legacy systems which relies on a top<strong>do</strong>wnblack-box approach that involves using the system and interviewing users. It assumes that no<strong>do</strong>cumentation or source-code is reliable.3. USE CASE META-MODELUse cases are used in many different ways. Although OMG has attempted to formalize use cases in UML,there is still a lot of room for subjectivity (Rui, 2007). Our Use Case meta-model was largely based on Rui(2007) Use Case meta-model, which was changed and simplified to fit the limitations on annotationmodeling and to reify entities, which could be explicitly represented in the source code. Rui (2007) defines 3levels from where the use case can be viewed:• Environment Level – where the use case is related to entities external to the system;• Structure Level – where the internal structure of the use case is defined;• Event Level – represents a lower abstraction level with individual events.In our model the environment level is represented by the following entities:• Use Case, which models a usage situation where one or more services of the target system are usedby one or more users with one or more goals in mind. As an use case represents an interaction between theuser and the system it is spread in several different parts of the source code. For that reason, we inverted thedependency and the use case is represented in our model as an attribute of the system service;• Actor, which is a role played by a system user which is also represented as an attribute of the systemservice;• System Service is a system functionality and the policies controlling its usage.The structure level is represented the following entities:288
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010• Scenario: which is a use case realization and comprises of an order sequence of finite events, whichmay trigger episodes. In our model, we make no distinction between the Scenario and Use Case as in thesource code the use case is already realized.• Context: which defines use case preconditions and post conditions. In our model the context wasconnected to the System Service and the Use Case Context is the union of all System Service's Contexts;• Episode, which represents a part of the use case behavior and can be a primitive episode orcomposite episode that contains other episodes.The event level is represented by events and as the only distinction to an episode is that it takes noduration, we decided to leave it out of the model for simplicity purposes. The diagram in figure 1 representsthe resulting model.Figure 1. Use case meta-model4. ANNOTATIONSA source-code has a very low-level of abstraction, which makes it hard to read high-level information. In ourproposal to use source-code to <strong>do</strong>cument requirements, which we are actually <strong>do</strong>ing is requestingprogrammers to <strong>do</strong>cument and instrument their code with which part of a requirement they are implementing.To make that requirement readable, it is very important that it must be easily extracted from the sourcecode, generating a higher-level model. Such need made annotations the ideal choice for such idea.Annotations allow indicating whether your methods are dependent on other methods, whether they areincomplete, whether classes have references to other classes creating a higher-level view of the source-code.Annotations were introduced in the JAVA platform with the release of version 5 (Taylor, 2008).Annotations are like meta-tags that you can add to the source code and applied to package declarations, typedeclarations, constructors, methods, fields, parameters, and variables. Annotations provide data about aprogram that is not part of the program itself. They have no direct effect on the operation of the code theyannotate (Ernst, 2010). Annotations can be used giving information in 3 distinct levels (Ernst, 2010):• Compiler — to detect errors or suppress warnings;• Compiler-time and deployment-time processing - where tools can process annotation information togenerate code, XML files, etc;• Runtime processing — to be examined at runtime.The annotations we defined in this work are compiler time annotations since they are used to generaterequirements <strong>do</strong>cumentation from source-code. In order to make this possible each annotation that representsan entity in our use case meta-model should be mapped to the existing software architecture.An annotation type can be defined using an “@” sign, followed by the interface keyword plus theannotation name and a data structure can be defined for the annotation. This data structure, however, isrestricted to primitives, String, Class, enums, annotations, and arrays of the preceding types (Ernst, 2010).Even though, a Use Case could be defined as a complex type attribute of the SystemService type, since theUse Case is not represented by a single fragment, all its attributes must be repeated in all services, creatinganother maintenance problem. To deal with this problem, we made a few changes to the model described inthe section III bringing Use Case attributes to the SystemService. The final annotations were defined asfollows:289
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISpublic @interface SystemService {String[] implementedUseCases();String[] actors();String description();String[] preConditions();String[] postConditions();}public @interface Episode {String name();boolean primitive() default true;}Both SystemService and Episode annotations are to be placed on methods. With those annotations we areable to reconstruct our Use Case model by recursively inspecting all methods that are called in a SystemService method we are able to find those annotated as Episodes. If the episode is primitive, the search on thatbranch may stop. Episodes composed of other Episodes can be found by search further in the method callstack.Use Case can be recovered by finding all SystemService methods that have that Use Case name in theirimplementedUseCases attribute array. The context will be the union of all contexts and so <strong>do</strong>es thedescription. The actors, on the other hand, will be defined the intersection of all actors attribute array in allSystemService methods that implemented the given Use Case.5. USING THE TECHNIQUE IN A WEB-SERVICE ARCHITECTUREWeb-Services architectures are quite suitable for wrapping-up legacy systems where mosts of the problemsof missing requirements <strong>do</strong>cumentation happen. Each Web-Service is a strong candidate for theSystemService annotation, mapping other elements of the architecture must be <strong>do</strong>ne. This should occur afterthe architecture is determined by recovering legacy <strong>do</strong>cumentation or reverse engineering it. Whenprogramming new functionalities, changing existing functionalities or reading the code to understand it,developers should identify the architectural elements that should be annotated and place annotations on themwith information as accurate as possible. After finishing a annotation, a <strong>do</strong>cumentation generation tool can becalled to recover the use case model following the procedures described in the previous section.This technique was applied in a hosting managing system for an internet service provider. The systemwas developed using the JAVA language and used the whole JEE technology stack and other open-sourcetools and frameworks including: EJB, JMS, Servlets, JSP, Hibernate, Spring, Velocity, Maven, JUnit, RMIand WebServices. The use of such technologies was clearly inadequate and the system was over-engineered.Such over-engineering made the system very hard to maintain. Lack of knowledge of basic object-orientedconcepts made developers create classes with thousands lines of code and representing no entity orabstraction.The development process was mostly based on SCRUM mixed with some other concepts from other agilemetho<strong>do</strong>logies. No formal requirements were kept. Unit tests were not developed as preached by suchmetho<strong>do</strong>logies.As the system evolved the architecture which was not good from the beginning deteriorated very fast,making even small changes in the requirements an humongous programming task. Such problems made thissystem a perfect candidate for validating this technique. Annotations were developed and a tool to generate<strong>do</strong>cumentation from the code was implemented. The tool recovered not only the use case model, but was alsoable to tell where each service and episode could be found.At the same time, a big effort on understanding the architecture and identifying who were thearchitectural elements that should be annotated as SystemService and Episode was <strong>do</strong>ne. After several hoursreading lines of codes, it was easy to determine all the candidates for the SystemService annotation, but wewere unable to define a rule for annotating Episodes. Annotating Episodes had to rely on a good290
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010understanding of the business and the desired granularity for Episodes as they could be found in differentlevels of the architecture.For each new requirement, a Story was created following the SCRUM metho<strong>do</strong>logy. When the Story wasto be programmed, developers were instructed to annotate every SystemService and Episode they would findin their way. Finding Episodes and SystemServices was not a problem, but it did not make changing thesystem any easier. On the other hand to describe a SystemService developers had define which use caseswere realized by that service, which actors used that service, and the service preconditions and postconditions, which added more difficult than just understanding and changing the code as it was <strong>do</strong>ne before.As more stories were developed, more SystemServices and Episodes were annotated and the fasterdevelopers could find where to change the code to implement a new Story by reading the <strong>do</strong>cumentationgenerated by the tool. This was easily detected by seeing how many SCRUM points were implemented ineach Sprint.6. CONCLUSIONAnnotations are a powerful tool to <strong>do</strong>cument and instrument code. The technique that we developed showedhow it could effectively help recovering a software requirement and mapping requirements to code. Whencompared to Jermakovics (2008) approach, this technique requires a higher manual effort on one hand, but onthe other hand can be used where no requirement <strong>do</strong>cumentation exists. When compared to Liu (2005)approach, this technique is much faster and more accurate however it relies on the source-code where Liuassumes that even the source-code is no longer reliable and it is a top-<strong>do</strong>wn black-box approach. Comparingin more generic way to other requirements reengineering techniques, there are two main approaches:• Code-parsing which is faster, but has limited use and requires some <strong>do</strong>cumentation, good variablenames in the source-code to be effective. Example: Jermakovics (2008);• Manually inspecting system and source-code which is slower, requires lots of hours, but can be usedin any situation. Example: Liu (2005).This technique uses the manual approach, but as it uses annotations is restricted to JAVA legacy systemsand requires a reliable source-code. As it <strong>do</strong>cuments the system directly in the source-code it has anadvantage over the other techniques because it can be used incrementally and simultaneously as the systemevolves.When applying the technique, we found that some modifications are necessary to make it more effective.These modifications are described in the next paragraphs and we are currently working on those issues.Actors and Use Case should be identified before making changes to the code. This may seem obvious tosomeone developing a new software, but when you are maintaining a legacy system, the Use Cases andActors may not be clear and not knowing them make it harder to annotate the SystemService.Annotation syntax as it is now <strong>do</strong>es not allow defining annotation recursive reference, annotationinheritance and others, which could help to have annotations that reflect more closely the original use casemetamodel. Such deficiencies made the use case model generated by the annotated code to have someinaccuracies and inconsistencies.Among the inconsistencies, it was the decision to have the context as the union of preconditions andpostconditions defined in the SystemService. Many times, as the Use Case was realized by calling differentservices, one service postcondition was the next service precondition making both of them incorrect as a UseCase context. Having the Use Case explicitly represented in the source code and referenced by the annotationis the only solution we found so far for this problem. With the current annotation syntax this could beaccomplished by having an abstract class UseCase and implementing the use case as a regular class thatwould never get called by system.An experiment was <strong>do</strong>ne creating the UseCase class and it showed also that it would be very beneficial tothis technique using annotations that are processed during run-time. This would also allow to find episodesand services relations by injecting dependencies and logging code during the run-time processing of theannotations. This would also help solving another problem which was dealing with alternative flows, since asthe tool is now it can only identify which episodes are part of a service, but it can not say which ones areinside a loop or an if statement and therefore run different number of times and in different conditions.291
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISAlthough helpful the annotation model is very poor and needs to be improved and so <strong>do</strong>es the<strong>do</strong>cumentation generation tool which <strong>do</strong>es not provide any graphical visualization of the Use Cases and itsmapping to the code. Developing a tool like Lagrein (Jermakovics, 2008) would be a good next step for thistechnique.Another issue that requires further research is how to integrate this technique with requirementsmanagement tools.Besides all this issued the technique proved that requirements could be recorded directly in the sourcecode in a way that they are readable and traceable. Documenting requirements directly in the code has theadvantage of having it easily accessible and read by developers. Also as the flow of episodes is determinedby the code, some changes in the requirements will be updated in the <strong>do</strong>cumentation without any extra effortfrom the developer.Finally, the case study showed that requirements knowledge and traceability has a big positive impact ofmaintenance productivity.REFERENCESBennett, K; Rajlich, V. “<strong>Software</strong> maintenance and evolution: a roadmap”. Proceedings of the Conference on The Futureof <strong>Software</strong> Engineering. Limerick, Ireland. p. 73 – 87. ISBN:1-58113-253-0. Publisher ACM Press New York, NY,USA, 2000Canfora, G., Di Penta, M. “New frontiers of reverse engineering”. In: Future of <strong>Software</strong> Engineering, Citeseer, 2007.Daneva, M. “Reuse measurement in the ERP requirements engineering process” In:<strong>Software</strong> Reuse: Advances in<strong>Software</strong> Reusability,p.211--230,Springer, 2006.De Lucia, A. et alli. “ADAMS Retrace: a Traceability Recovery Tool”, 9th European Conference on <strong>Software</strong>Maintenance and Reegineering (CSMR 2005), March. 2005.Ernst, M., Coward D. “JSR 308: Annotations on Java types”. http://pag.csail.mit.edu/jsr308/, March 1st , 2010.Fahmi, S.A. and Choi, H.J. “<strong>Software</strong> Reverse Engineering to Requirements”, In: 2007 ICCIT, p. 2199--2204, IEEEComputer Society, 2007.Jermakovics, A. and Moser, R. and Sillitti, A. and Succi, G. “Visualizing software evolution with lagrein”. In:Companion to the 23rd ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming systems languages andapplications, p. 749—750. ACM, 2008.Lamsweerde, A. “Requirements engineering: from craft to discipline”. In: Proceedings of the 16th ACM SIGSOFTInternational Symposium on Foundations of software engineering, p.238—249. ACM, 2008.Robbes, R., Lanza, M. “A Change-based Approach to <strong>Software</strong> Evolution”. In: Electronic Notes in Theoretical ComputerScience. Elsevier, vol. 166, p. 93-109, 2007Rui, K. “Refactoring use case models”. Concordia University Montreal, PQ, Canada, 2007.Schwarz, H. and Ebert, J. and Riediger, V. and Winter, A. “Towards querying of traceability information in the context ofsoftware evolution”. In: 10th Workshop <strong>Software</strong> Reengineering (WSR 2008), 2008.Taylor, K.B. and Rieken, J. and Leavens, G.T.. “Adapting the Java Modeling Language for Java 5 Annotations”.Technical Report 08-06, Department of Computer Science, Iowa State University, 2008.Weber, R. and Helfenberger, T. and Keller, R.K. “Fit for Change: Steps towards Effective <strong>Software</strong> Maintenance”, In:Industrial and Tool Proceedings of the International Conference on <strong>Software</strong> Maintenance, p.26--33, Citeseer, 2005.Yang, SU and Sheng-ming, HU and Yu-ying, W. and Ping, C. “Recovering early-aspects at requirements level fromsoftware legacy system”. In: CIT 2006. IEEE Computer Society, India, 2006.Liu, K. “Requirements Reengineering from Legacy Information Systems Using Semiotic Techniques”, In: Systems,Signs & Actions, Vol.1, No 1, p. 38-61. CITW, 2005.292
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010THE ROLE OF WEB-BASED COLLABORATIVE SYSTEMSIN SUPPORTING FIRM'S CREATIVITYClaudia Dossena and Alberto FrancesconiUniversity of Pavia – Faculty of Economics – Business Research DepartmentVia S. Felice 7, Pavia – ITALYABSTRACTThe diffusion of Web Communities significantly increases opportunities for communications and social relations, thusaffecting firm’s creativity potential. We aim at finding out how WCs, as collaborative systems, can support the firm’screative processes. Our findings, based on an explorative case-study, emphasize the role of a wide and cohesive WC thathas both peculiarities of networks for knowledge exploitation and exploration. Reflections on main assets and capabilitiesinvolved to manage the WC as well as suggestions for future research are presented.KEYWORDSWeb community, Collaborative systems, Creativity, Networks.1. INTRODUCTIONIn contemporary competitive context it is commonly recognized the importance of effective firm’s creativeprocesses, based on the generation and the exploitation, respectively, of both new and already existingknowledge.IT plays a fundamental role in supporting creativity both at individual and collective level, e.g. byencouraging cooperation and supporting the exchange of knowledge. Recently, the diffusion of social mediaand, in particular, of Web Communities (WCs), has become an important way to share interests, problemsand experiences, thus supporting creativity through social relations.Our WC analysis is based on important concepts used in network and inter-organizational learningliterature. In particular, our findings, based on a successful case (Roland DG Mid Europe), emphasize therole of a wide and cohesive WC to support firm’s creativity where the WC has both peculiarities of networksfor knowledge exploitation and exploration. In order to give some suggestions for managerial practice, mainassets and capabilities involved are highlighted too.2. WEB COMMUNITIES AS NETWORKSResearch on creativity focused primarily on creativity as an individual trait (see Barron & Harrington 1981for a review). More recently, perspectives on creativity focused more on how contextual factors can affectindividual creativity, such as the development of appropriate incentive systems, the presence of slackresources, the development of a work environment that promotes risk-taking and autonomous decisionmaking (Perry-Smith & Shalley, 2003; Woodman et al. 1993; Amabile et al. 1996; Tierney et al. 1999). Inseveral cases these factors have unequivocally a social dimension: creativity is, at least in part, a socialprocess (Amabile, 1988; Woodman et al. 1993). There are also other social factors directly linked toindividual creativity: interpersonal communication and social interaction levels (Amabile 1988, Woodman etal. 1993). Communication and exchanges of ideas increase creativity (Amabile, 1996; Kanter, 1988;Woodman et al. 1993). Similarly, also the contact among different individuals can increase firm’s creativity.This difference is linked to different background, specialization areas, roles inside a firm (Amabile et al.293
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADIS1996; Woodman et al. 1993). Differences lead to an increase in shared knowledge and to differentapproaches to face a problem (Kanter 1988, Andrews & Smith, 1996).Following this logic, some authors focused on benefits arising from the involvement of external actors(Kimberly & Evanisko, 1981), activating inter-organizational learning processes. Firms can maximize theeffectiveness of their inter-organizational learning processes by reaching the so-called “optimal cognitivedistance” (Nooteboom & Gilsing, 2004, 2006). Cognitive distance is the difference between cognitivepatterns and knowledge shared among the individuals involved in learning process. This level is a function oftwo different dimensions (in ‘trade off’): the level of absorption of exchanged knowledge shown byindividuals involved in learning processes (absorptive capacity) and the variety of exchanged knowledge.The level of cognitive distance explains what Nooteboom & Gisling (2004) call “network forexploration” and “network for exploitation”. Within networks for exploitation there is an effort to combineand to improve knowledge provided by members. This strategy is based on the research of synergy andcomplementarities. The focus is on the absorptive capacity level. In these networks there are pre<strong>do</strong>minantlystrong ties among members that show many similarities (Lincoln & Miller, 1979; Ibarra 1992). On thecontrary, ‘networks of exploration’ aim at reaching upper levels of innovation, investing more on variety ofknowledge shared. Ties among different members tend to be weak: this means also low affinity levels amongthem (Granovetter, 1982; Perry-Smith & Shalley, 2003).WC is a particular kind of network based on Web based technologies. It can be seen as the evolution ofCommunities of Practice (CoPs) (Wenger, 1998; Micelli, 1999; Hasan & Crawford, 2003). CoPs are createdin order to find common answers to problems related to the work of its members, sharing knowledge andexperiences. Also within WCs we can distinguish between ones in which learning is made by the valorizationof different knowledge (as in network for exploration) and ones in which people have similar knowledge (asin network for exploitation).The moderation process of the WC can be fundamental for the creation of a community more focused onexploiting knowledge (Pedersen, 2008). In other situations uniformity is caused by a strong social pressure,sometimes expressed in a very specific language shared by WC members, e.g. in forums about finance,engineering, medicine etc. Nevertheless, WC can be more similar to network for exploration when they areless cohesive such as in the case of members that have weaker ties to each other, changing more frequentlyand without leadership roles well defined. The huge number of individuals, variety and dynamism of sharedknowledge are really important for the creation of new knowledge, as in WCs like Wikipedia and YahooAnswer.3. THE CASE STUDY: ROLAND DG MID EUROPERoland DG Mid Europe srl (Roland), based in Italy, is a subsidiary of Roland DG Corporation 1 , a world classmanufacturer of computer peripherals on visual communication and digital graphics. Roland has 45employees and attends to the Italian market, the French and Balkan area, with a revenue in 2009 of about 26million Euros 2 and a market share of about 50%. We analyzed our case-study through 7 interviews toRoland’s Community Manager and Communication Manager - the 2 key figures in managing Roland WC -and <strong>do</strong>cument analysis.Firstly, we identified Roland’s strategies for community’s creation and development, both on-line an<strong>do</strong>ff-line (table 1). We found that tools and applications are conceived to create a cohesive community base<strong>do</strong>n strong connections or to increase visibility, thus drawing users, and enhancing the variety of sharedknowledge. This strategy combines the benefits of networks for exploitation and exploration.1 Roland DG Corporation, has more than 560 employees. Its head office is in Japan but it works also in USA, Belgium, Austria, UK,Spain, Italy and Denmark.2 It is decreasing compared with 2008 because of financial crisis (33m Euros), but it will be recovering in 2010.294
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010Table 1. Main tools a<strong>do</strong>pted by Roland for its communication activities with the outsideTool/application DescriptionMain taskEvents and participation in events concerning both Roland - commercial taskconferences products and other topics related to the WC - increasing the members of the communityRoland DGAcademyschool of Roland- visibility of the community- disseminate know-howRoland DGCreative Centershow room with most creative ideas comingfrom the community- visibility- gratification and status for community membersEvents and trips events and trips for community members - socializationFlickr - YouTube social networking site for sharing photos andvideo- increase cohesion in the community- visibility to Roland product and Roland communityRoland Blog blog - increase cohesion in the community- visibility to Roland productWiki Roland wiki - visibility to Roland productSlideshare social networking site for sharing video andpresentation- disseminate know-how- increase cohesion in the communityvirtual tour in Roland DG Creative Centre - visibilityRoland TV <strong>Internet</strong> TV - visibilityTwitter microblogging website - increase cohesion in the communityLast.fm internet radio - increase cohesion in the communitysocial media interactive press release- visibilitypress releaseFacebook –LinkedInsocial networking site- increase cohesion in the community- visibilityRoland Forum initially born as virtual place to connect people - increase cohesion in the communitymet during training in Roland DG Academyand to exchange working experiences- visibility- disseminate know-howWe found that the Roland forum, is the core of Roland’s WC. With its 9,398 discussions and its 2,996users (of which 790 active) 3 , Roland Forum is one of the most important forums in the world related to thearea of visual communication and digital graphics. Established in 2004, the WC is prevalently made by“Roland’s technicians, commercials and managers and customers though it involves also some dealers,product suppliers and “Roland Partners” recognized as opinion leaders, due to their roles and experiences.The involvement is totally voluntary. The wideness and heterogeneity of members as well as few constraintsand low levels of control support a remarkable variety of shared knowledge. Moreover, within the forumthere are 7 macro-areas (tab. 2). Some of them (no. 3, 6, 7) are specifically aimed at supporting socializationand social interaction among community members in order to create strong relations based on trust.Forum areatechnologicalcraftsmen’sworkshopNo.forumareaTable 2. Discussions existing in each forum area.Description Area task number ofdiscussions(percentage)1 dedicated to training, tutorials and exchangeof useful external linksknowledge sharing 32%application 2 about novel applications of Roland’s knowledge sharing 27%productsbou<strong>do</strong>ir 3 where you can relax and converse socialization and WC cohesion 22%software and 4 about main SW and HW solutions knowledge sharing 6%computerRolANDyou 5 where you can find information about knowledge sharing 6%external sourcesadministration 6 with forum rules socialization and WC cohesion 4%I was there(X-Events)7 about the events of Roland community socialization and WC cohesion 3%3 Data are collected on April 2010. This year the forum grew considerably compared to 2009: the number of discussions rose by 60%,the number of total users by 53% and the number of active users by 19%.295
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISAs a matter of fact, we found that the purpose of more than a third of Roland’s discussion areas (no. 3, 6,7) within the forum is to improve social identification and cohesion.At the same time, the other areas pursue both network for exploitation and network for explorationstrategies, supporting in a complementary and synergistic way the creative process. In particular, the areas 1,2, 4, 5 support the sharing of technical knowledge and specialist skills, thus reducing the cognitive distanceamong members and increasing their level of absorptive capacity (“network for exploitation” strategy). Thearea 2, for novel applications of Roland’s existing products, drives toward a self-feeding process that sustainsa continuous creative process based also on external resources and capabilities due to the fact it attractscontinuously new members (“network for exploration” strategy). The voluntary involvement of newmembers is stimulated by social pressure and social status and strengthen by DG Creative Centre 4 in whichare shown the most original and creative applications of Roland’s products emerged in the WC.3.1 Assets and Capabilities for managing a Web CommunityIn order to give some suggestions for managerial practice, in this paragraph we will focus on what are themain assets and capabilities used by Roland for the creation of the Web community according to seveninterviews to Roland’s Community Manager and Communication Manager. Firstly, for Roland themoderation process is a key element: moderators have the purpose of maintaining a non invasive control ondiscussions, though respecting shared rules. Secondly, there must be people that daily work on themanagement of the WC: in Roland there are 3 employees out of 45 and 2 external moderators, not belongingto the firm’s staff, that constantly manage the forum’s discussions without being rewarded. The CommunityManager works on everyday forum management, while the Communication Manager coordinates forum’sactivities, the blog and the website. They report directly to Roland DG Mid Europe CEO. From a strategicpoint of view, an International Marketing Committee declines some communication guidelines but thedefinition of actions about the WC is left to local administrations. A Web agency works on Roland’s websiteoptimization and hosting. However, Roland’s strategy is to internally manage Web application. Neverthelesshaving technical skills is necessary though not sufficient. To resume what is mainly needed to manage a WC:relational skills linked to specific communication channels, technical skills on community topics (in this caseabout visual communication and digital print technology), organizational skills about time management(acting quickly and monitoring the Web everyday). Besides moderators must have informatics skills, passionfor what they <strong>do</strong>ne, willingness to share their knowledge and authority because of the lack of hierarchy incommunities. Network management skills are critical factors too. According to Roland, problematic butfundamental is the development of skills linked to the managing of shared knowledge inside the community(knowledge management) and inter-organizational learning.As previously said, Roland aims at having a wide WC. In order to attract new members in its WC, Rolanduses Google AdWords and the Direct Email Marketing. Furthermore, an active involvements in other forumsbrings new members to Roland’s WC.Another key issue, subject to further improvements and deeper analysis, is related to performances on theWeb. Considering the difficulties in defining performance indicators of WC in terms of generated creativity,reputation, improvement of market’s share or sales, indicators on nature and characteristics of access to thewebsite are commonly used in order to improve the size and visibility of the WC. Currently, Roland’sperformances on the Web are actually measured through the tool “Google Analytics” by monitoring elementslike the number and the provenience of logins, the number of coming backs, the average time connection, etc.Nowadays, performance indicators of Web activities in terms of ROI are not used but this lack will be soonpartially fixed through the use of Salesforce, a software as a service for CRM. Investments on the Web arehardly measurable in terms of firm’s performance. Opposite to the huge costs associated with the managingof Web Communities (mainly coming from the human resources involved) there are benefits which, althoughpresent, are difficult to quantify. Notwithstanding the actual difficulty in measuring the economic returnslinked to the WC, Roland Corporation valued positively the experience on the Web deciding to replicate thisproject in France, too. As a matter of fact, though without specific data, from our interviews emerged that,thanks to the WC, in the last years the level of creativity of Roland increased.4 A showroom where, in addition to the availability of all Roland products for testing and evaluation, there are a lot of examples of theirpotential applications, often the result of forum members’ creativity.296
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 20104. CONCLUSIONFrom our case-study some suggestions arise: WC can support firm’s creativity if firms create aroundthemselves a wide and cohesive WC, that has both peculiarities of networks for exploitation and explorationof knowledge. In this work we illustrated how a successful firm has reached this aim. The accessibility ofWeb base instruments, a process of moderation which is not excessively tight and a wide variety ofstakeholders within the WC are three key elements. At first, they allow the WC to exploit a highlydynamicity and heterogeneity of members (as in network for exploration). Secondly, many initiatives (offlineor on-line) can be developed to support the cohesion of the WC, as in network for exploitation, where aless variety of knowledge exchanged is compensated by a higher level of absorptive capacity amongmembers. We are aware of the limits of this preliminary paper, first of all due to the uniqueness of the caseexamined. We plan to extend the analysis to other firms that exploit WC. Nevertheless, some practicalinsights for management arise. Main assets and capabilities used by a successful firm for creating andmanaging a WC community are highlighted as well as some important difficulties in managing a WC.REFERENCESAmabile, T. M., 1988. A model of creativity and innovation in organizations. Research in Organizational Behavior, Vol.10, pp. 123-167.Amabile, T. M., et al, 1996. Assessing the work environment for creativity. Academy of Management Journal, Vol. 39,pp.1154-1184.Andrews, J., and Smith, D. C., 1996. In search of the marketing imagination: Factors affecting the creativity of marketingprograms for the mature products. Journal of Marketing Research, Vol. 33, pp. 174-187.Barron, F., and Harrington, D. M., 1981. Creativity, intelligence, and personality. Annual Review of Psychology, Vol. 32,pp. 439- 476.Granovetter, M. S., 1982. The strength of weak ties: A network theory revisited. In P. V. Marsden and N. Lin (Eds.),Social structure and network analysis, pp. 105-130. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.Hasan, H., and Crawford, K., 2003. Codifying or enabling: the challenge of knowledge management systems, Journal ofthe Operational Research Society, Vol. 54, No. 2, pp. 184-193.Ibarra, H., 1992. Homophily and differential returns: Sex differences in network structure and access in an advertisingfirm. Administrative Science Quarterly, Vol. 37, pp. 422-447.Kanter, R. M., 1988. When a thousand flowers bloom: Structural, collective, and social conditions for innovation inorganization. Research in Organizational Behavior, Vol. 10, pp. 169-211.Kimberly, J. R., and Evanisko, M. J., 1981. Organizational innovation: The influence of individual, organizational, andcontextual factors on hospital a<strong>do</strong>ption of technological and administrative innovations. Academy of ManagementJournal, Vol. 24, pp. 689-713.Lincoln, J. R., and Miller, J., 1979. Work and friendship ties in organizations: A comparative analysis of relationalnetworks. Administrative Science Quarterly, Vol. 24, pp. 181-199.Micelli, S., 1999. Comunità virtuali: apprendimento e nuove tecnologie dell’informazione, Economia e PoliticaIndustriale, 104.Nooteboom, B., and Gilsing, V.A., 2004. Density and Strenght of Ties in Innovation Networks: A Competence andGovernance View, Report Series, Erasmus Research Institute of Management.Nooteboom, B., and Gilsing, V.A., 2006. Exploration and exploitation in innovation systems: The case of pharmaceuticalbiotechnology. Research Policy, Vol. 35, No. 1, pp. 1-23.Pedersen, A.F., 2008. The construction of patient identities in the Websites of patient associations, in 24th EgosColloquium, Amsterdam, Oland.Perry-Smith, J.E, and Shalley, C.E., 2003. The social side of creativity: a static and dynamic social network perspective.Academy of Management Review, Vol. 28, No. 1, pp. 89-106.Tierney, P. et al, 1999. An examination of leadership and employee creativity: The relevance of traits and relationships.Personnel Psychology, Vol. 52, pp. 591-620.Wenger, E., 1998. 'Communities of Practice. Learning as a social system', Systems Thinker, http://www.co-il.com/coil/knowledge-garden/cop/lss.shtml.Accessed December 15, 2008.Woodman, R. W. et al, 1993. Toward a theory of organizational creativity. Academy of Management Review, Vol. 18, pp.293-321.297
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISTOWARDS A MEANINGFUL EXPLOITATION OFIMPORTANT RELATIONSHIPS AMONG COMMUNITYMEMBERS AND COLLABORATION ASSETSGeorge Gkotsis*, Nikos Karacapilidis*, Costas Pappis** and Nikos Tsirakis****Industrial Management and Information Systems Lab, MEAD, University of Patras, 26500 Rio Patras, Greece**Department of Industrial Management, University of Piraeus, Piraeus 18534, Greece***Computer Engineering and Informatics Department, University of Patras, 26500 Rio Patras, GreeceABSTRACTNumerous tools aiming at facilitating or enhancing collaboration among members of diverse communities have beenalready deployed and tested over the Web. Taking into account the particularities of online Communities of Practice, thispaper introduces a framework for mining knowledge that is hidden in such settings. Our motivation stems from thecriticism that contemporary tools receive regarding lack of active participation and limited engagement in their use,partially due to their inability of identifying and meaningfully exploiting important relationships among communitymembers and collaboration-related assets. Particular attention is given to the identification of requirements imposed bycontemporary communities and learning contexts.KEYWORDSSocial Networking, Web 2.0, Collaborative Systems, Data Mining.1. INTRODUCTIONAs information diffusion is becoming enormous, contemporary knowledge workers are facing a series ofproblems. People are straggling when trying to filter relevant information, extract knowledge out of it, andapply specific practices on a problem under consideration. This phenomenon, broadly known as informationoverload, has currently raised new, challenging, but not fully addressed issues. At the same time, it is widelyadmitted that one of the best means to keep a knowledge worker’s competence high is through continuouslearning (Rosenberg, 2000). In fact, most organizations already support learning activities through seminarsand other traditional learning activities. Nevertheless, these activities <strong>do</strong> not comply with every learningneed. Collaborative environments aiming at supporting collaboration among groups of people formingCommunities of Practice (CoPs) are believed to be one of the most promising solutions to promote what iscommonly known as “collective intelligence” or “organizational memory” (Ackerman, 1998). The term CoPis used to define a group of people with “common disciplinary background, similar work activities, tools andshared stories, contexts and values” (Millen et al., 2002).Related to the above remarks, contemporary tools receive criticism as far as active participation andengagement of their users is concerned; this is partially due to the inability of identifying and meaningfullyexploiting a set of important relationships among community members and collaboration-related assets. Toaddress this problem, this paper introduces a framework that enables one to reveal meaningful relationships,as well as other valuable information, about the community members’ roles and competencies. The proposedframework exploits and integrates features originally found in the Data Mining and Social Networkingdisciplines, and is intended to be used towards strengthening a community’s integrity.298
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 20102. RELATED WORKContemporary approaches to web-based collaboration environments build on diverse user profilingmechanisms (Fink and Kobsa, 2000). These approaches usually distinguish between static (user defined) anddynamic (system updated) profiles. Dynamic attributes derive by tracking <strong>do</strong>wn user actions and aim atproviding a more personalized environment. Personalization of the environment may include user interfaceadaptation by making most usable actions or information more easily accessible. Moreover, by taking intoaccount a user’s profile, these approaches aim at filtering information that generally resides in a bigcollection of <strong>do</strong>cuments. Information filtering is achieved by reading the content of these <strong>do</strong>cuments andcombining this content with the user’s profile. The main goal of these approaches is to provide individualizedrecommendations to the users about the system items.Social network analysis (SNA) is a tool that allows the examination of social relationships in a group ofusers, which is able to reveal hidden relationships (Wasserman and Faust, 1994). In business, SNA can be auseful tool to reveal relationships and organizational structure other than those formally defined. Theserelationships are extracted by examining the communication level among employees, usually resulting to acollaboration graph. The outcome of this graph’s analysis is likely to result to a flow chart that <strong>do</strong>es notnecessarily follow the formal organizational structure. Traditionally, social relationships are revealed byacquiring data manually (through questionnaires or interviews). SNA has been applied with success inbusiness and is regarded as a useful tool to analyze how a corporate operates.In summary, the need for extracting and analyzing relationships among users has been identified for along time. The topic of this paper is addressed by two different but complementary approaches. One of themapplies Data Mining techniques that results to the identification of groups of people with similar preferences.The other a<strong>do</strong>pts SNA for gathering the required knowledge with regard to these groups. This approach isapplied to an online CoP aiming at revealing issues like management or human resource vulnerabilities.Integrating these approaches, this paper introduces a framework that aims at identifying, measuring andexploiting hidden relationships in a CoP. The overall approach followed in this paper, as described in thenext section, takes into account the particularities of these communities by customizing practices from DataMining and Collaborative Filtering and unites them with Social Network Analysis.3. MINING HIDDEN KNOWLEDGELet us consider a collaboration support system, which a<strong>do</strong>pts common Web 2.0 features and functionalities.The system allows members of a CoP to easily express pieces of their knowledge through various types of<strong>do</strong>cuments. These <strong>do</strong>cuments are uploaded on virtual working environments, usually known as workspaces.Let us also assume that the system supports <strong>do</strong>cument rating by its users. For such a setting, we introduce aframework for mining hidden knowledge. The proposed framework exploits a set of metrics that arediscussed below.First, we define user similarity sim(i, j) between users i and j. Similarity is calculated by exploiting theUser Nearest Neighbor algorithm (McLaughlin and Herlocker, 2004), which takes as input the items’ ratingsprovided by users. More specifically, the algorithm for measuring user similarity is based on the Pearsoncorrelation, with respect to the commonly rated items. We define:a∈Ai∑ ∩sim(i,j)=Aj( Rating ( a)− Rating )( Rating ( a)− Rating )iwhere σ i and σ j represent the standard deviations of the common item ratings for users i and j, respectively, A iσ σis the set of items that user i has rated, Rating i (a) is the rating of user i on item a, andijijjRatingiis theaverage rating of user i on the set of commonly rated items.To avoid overestimating the similarity of users with small corpus of <strong>do</strong>cuments that have been rating byboth users i and j, the above equation is amended as follows:max{| Ai∩ Asim'( i,j)=γj|, γ}× sim(i,j),299
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISwhere γ is a system-defined threshold.In our case, the users of the system are the authors of all <strong>do</strong>cuments uploaded on the system’sworkspaces. To weigh account ratings of user i on <strong>do</strong>cuments created by user j, a modification of the abovemeasurement is defined. It is:whereRatingijsim''(i,j)= × sim'( i,j),RatingRatingijis the average rating of user i on <strong>do</strong>cuments created by user j.The above equation takes into account how user i evaluates <strong>do</strong>cuments of user j with regards to the rest oftheir common <strong>do</strong>cuments. As derives from the above, similarity between users i and j is not reciprocal. Thisremark is of big importance. Naturally, depending on a CoP’s activity and nature of data, there are caseswhere the number of user’s j <strong>do</strong>cuments that are rated by user i is small and therefore the information islimited. Thus, depending on the amount and nature of our data, either sim′(i,j) or sim′′(i,j) can be selected (seemore in Section 3.1).Secondly, we define relationship ij between users i and j as a boolean measurement of directcommunication between these users as follows: for each couple (i, j) of members i and j, we create a matrix Awhere a ij is the number of <strong>do</strong>cument ratings that user i has made on <strong>do</strong>cuments created by user j. From thismatrix A, we construct a new symmetric matrix A′ where a′ ij =max{a ij ,a ji } (weak cohesion) or a′ ij =min{a ij ,a ji }(strong cohesion). Assuming that n i is the overall number of ratings of user i, we define a symmetricmeasurement, called communication degree d ij , which represents the communication flow between users iand j, as follows:dijn + nia'= .It is noted that d ij is 1 in case where users i and j rate exclusively each other’s <strong>do</strong>cuments, and 0 if none ofthe users has rated any of the other’s <strong>do</strong>cuments (weak cohesion) or at least one has not rated all of theother’s <strong>do</strong>cuments (strong cohesion). We define the binary function relationship ij to indicate the existence ornot of adequate direct information exchange between users i and j. It is:jiji− a'{ relationsh1 if dij≥ t,ip ij=0 if d < twhere t is a threshold depending on the nature and needs of the community under consideration. The functionrelationship ij is the fundamental relationship that is used to construct the social network in the communityand will be used for the required analysis.Other metrics a<strong>do</strong>pted within our approach are:– Clusters: they refer to groups of entities (users in our case), in a way that entities in one cluster arevery similar, while entities in different clusters are quite distinct. Each cluster can combine various plausiblecriteria.– Degree: it expresses the number of people a CoP member is connected to. Members with highdegree may be considered as of major importance in the network hub, since they keep the CoP tightlyconnected.– Betweenness: While someone may be tightly connected with someone else, it might be the case thatsome CoP members express the CoP’s integrity “better”. People with high betweenness value are consideredto better express a collective consensus. More formally, betweenness of a member can be expressed as thetotal number of shortest paths between all pairs of members that pass through this member (Freeman, 1977).– Closeness: it expresses the total number of links that a member must go through in order to reacheveryone else in the network (Sabidussi, 1966).3.1 ClusteringClustering can be defined as the process of organizing objects in a database into groups (clusters), such thatobjects within the same cluster have a high degree of similarity (while objects belonging to different clustershave a high degree of dissimilarity) (Anderberg, 1973; Jain and Dubes, 1988; Kaufman and Rousseeuw,ijij300
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 20101990). Generally speaking, clustering methods about numerical data have been viewed in opposition toconceptual clustering methods developed in Artificial Intelligence.Referring to a specific CoP, a cluster is a collection of users that share similar ratings on items of thesame workspace. For example, let SP 1 , SP 2 ,..., SP k be the k workspaces used by a community A. We build anarray X of size n×n (n is the number of users), where the cell X ij denotes the correlation between user i anduser j. Correlation can be either sim′(ij) or sim′′(ij), which will result to symmetric undirected or directedarrays, respectively. After the construction of these arrays, a unified array can be built for the whole set ofworkspaces by calculating the average value of each cell.Regarding the clustering procedure and depending on the nature of the data gathered, two differentapproaches with respect to the nature of the arrays (one concerning symmetric undirected arrays and oneconcerning directed arrays) are followed.In the first case (symmetric undirected arrays), an algorithm for hierarchical clustering is applied. Inhierarchical clustering, there is a partitioning procedure of objects into optimally homogeneous groups(Johnson, 1967). There are two different categories of hierarchical algorithms: these that repeatedly mergetwo smaller clusters into a larger one, and those that split a larger cluster into smaller ones. In MinMax Cutalgorithm (Ding et al., 2001), given n data objects and the pair similarity matrix W=(w i,j ) (where w i,j is thesimilarity weight between i and j), the main scope is to partition data into two clusters A and B. The principleof this algorithm is to minimize similarity between clusters and maximize similarity within a cluster. Thesimilarity between clusters A and B is defined as the cutsizes( A,B)=.∑∈ ∈wi A, j B i , jSimilarity (self-similarity) within a cluster A is the sum of all similarity weights within A: s(A,A).Consequently, the algorithm requires to minimize s(A,B) and maximize s(A,A) and s(B,B), which isformulated by the min-max cut function MMcut(A,B):s(A,B)s(A,B)MMcut ( A,B)+s(A,A)s(B,B)= .Linkage l(A,B) is a closeness or similarity measure between clusters A and B; it quantifies clustersimilarity more efficiently than weight, since it normalizes cluster weight:s(A,B)l(A,B)=s(A,A)× s(B,B)For a single user i, his linkage to cluster A is: l(A,i)=S(A,i)/S(A,A), where S(A,i)=S(A,B), B={i}.According to this equation, users close to the cut can be found. If a user i belongs to a cluster, his linkagewith this cluster will be high. When a user is near the cut, then the linkage difference can be used: ∆l(i) =l(i,A)−l(i,B). A user with small ∆l is near the cut and is a possible candidate to be moved to the other cluster.In the second case (directed arrays), the clustering algorithm presented in (Chakrabarti et al., 1998),which is based on Kleinberg’s link analysis algorithm (Kleinberg, 1999), is a<strong>do</strong>pted. Initially, this analysiswas applied to <strong>do</strong>cuments related to each other through directed relationships (like in the World Wide Web);for every <strong>do</strong>cument, authority and hub scores are calculated as the sum of hub and authority scores pointed toand from this <strong>do</strong>cument, respectively. More specifically, having set up the user similarity matrix X of sizen×n as before, a weighted directed graph of users is allocated and the non-principal eigenvectors of X T ×X arecomputed. The components of each non-principal eigenvector are assigned to each user. By ordering inincreasing order the values of each eigenvector, a partition is declared among users at the largest gap betweenthem. The entries of X T ×X represent authority scores and those of X×X T refer to hub scores. The result isgroups of users that are close to each another under the authority or hub score value. The algorithm can createup to 2×n different groups of users, but experimental results have shown that groups with users that havelarge coordinates in the first few eigenvectors tend to recur and therefore a first set of collections of users cansatisfy the clustering procedure (e.g. (Kleinberg, 1999)).3.2 Social Network AnalysisAfter the clustering procedure, groups of users that share the same or closely related preferences with regardsto their <strong>do</strong>cuments’ ratings are revealed. More formally, there is a classification of members of every CoPinto a set of clusters C 1 ,C 2 , . . . ,C m . For each cluster, the proposed framework computes the values of each of301
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISthe SNA measures (i.e. degree, betweenness and closeness). More specifically, contrary to clustering wherethe measurement was correlation (i.e. user similarity), SNA exploits the relationship ij measurement, whichcorresponds to communication among members. This analysis can provide useful findings; for example, aspecific group of users considered to have high similarity will appear as a cluster. More generally, thecombination of clustering and SNA highlights properties in groups of users of particular interest; thisextracted knowledge can be provided to the users through notification or recommendations mechanisms.4. CONCLUSIONSThis paper has introduced a framework that can be applied to a wide range of software platforms aiming atfacilitating collaboration and learning among users. Having described the basic characteristics of the settingsunder consideration, we presented an approach that integrates techniques from the Data Mining and SocialNetwork Analysis disciplines. More precisely, we formulated two different clustering approaches in order tofind the values of some meaningful metrics. Moreover, we combined the outcomes of the proposed clusteringmetho<strong>do</strong>logy with SNA metrics. The result of this effort is to reveal valuable knowledge residing in a CoP.REFERENCESAckerman, M. (1998). Augmenting organizational memory: a field study of answer garden. ACM Transactions onInformation Systems, Vol. 16, No. 3, pp. 203-224.Anderberg, M.R. (1973), Cluster Analysis for Applications. Academic Press, New York, NY.Chakrabarti, S., Dom, B., Gibson, D., Kumar, R., Raghavan, P., Rajagopalan, S. and Tomkins, A. (1998). Spectralfiltering for resource discovery. Proceedings of the ACM SIGIR Workshop on Hypertext Information Retrieval on theWeb. ACM Press, New York, NY, pp. 13-21.Ding, C., He, X., Zha, H., Gu, M. and Simon, H. (2001). A min-max cut algorithm for graph partitioning and dataclustering. Proceedings of the 2001 IEEE International Conference on Data Mining, Washington, DC, USA, pp. 107-114.Fink, J. and Kobsa, A. (2000). A review and analysis of commercial user modeling servers for personalization on theworld wide web. User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction, Vol. 10, No. 2, pp. 209-249.Freeman, L. (1977). A set of measures of centrality based on betweenness. Sociometry, Vol. 40, No. 1, pp. 35-41.Jain, A. and Dubes, R. (1988). Algorithms for clustering data. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ.Johnson, S. (1967). Hierarchical clustering schemes. Psychometrika, Vol. 32, No. 3, pp. 241-254.Kaufman, L. and Rousseeuw, P. (1990). Finding groups in data: an introduction to cluster analysis. Wiley-Interscience,New York, NY.Kleinberg, J. (1999). Authoritative sources in a hyperlinked environment. Journal of the ACM, Vol. 46, No. 5, pp. 604-632.McLaughlin, M. and Herlocker, J. (2004). A collaborative filtering algorithm and evaluation metric that accurately modelthe user experience. Proceedings of the 27 th annual international ACM SIGIR Conference on Research andDevelopment in Information Retrieval, ACM New York, NY, USA, pp. 329-336.Millen, D.R., Fontaine, M.A., Muller, M.J. (2002). Understanding the benefit and costs of communities of practice.Communications of ACM, Vol. 45, No. 4, pp. 69-73.Rosenberg, M.J. (2000). E-Learning: Strategies for Delivering Knowledge in the Digital Age. McGraw-Hill, New York,NY.Sabidussi, G. (1966). The centrality index of a graph. Psychometrika, Vol. 31, No. 4, pp. 581-603.Wasserman, S. and Faust, K. (1994). Social network analysis: Methods and applications. Cambridge University Press,New York, NY.302
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010DO THE PERCEIVED ATTRIBUTES OF SOCIALNETWORKS DIFFER IN TERMS OF BEING INNOVATOROR SKEPTICAL OF PROSPECTIVE TEACHERS?Assoc. Prof. Yasemin Koçak Usluel*, Pınar Nuhoğlu** and Bahadır Yildiz**Hacettepe Üniversitesi**Ankara ÜniversitesiAnkaraABSTRACTConsidering the social networks as an innovation, the purpose of this study is to determine if the perceived attributes ofinnovation vary in terms of the innovativeness or being skeptical. In this way, it is aimed to investigate the diffusion ofinnovation process from both of the innovation-based and an individual-based perspective. Perceived attributes ofinnovation is handled as five factors, namely; usefulness, ease of use, social influence, facilitating conditions and relativeadvantage. Innovators are defined as individuals who a<strong>do</strong>pt innovations earlier, courageous to try innovations and learnto use innovations by themselves. On the other side, skepticals are defined as individuals who use innovations to keeppace with society, fall behind in to use innovation for different reasons and use innovations only when majority using it.The data is collected by two scales, developed by the researchers. One of the scales aimed to measureinnovativeness/being skeptical (Cronbach α = .697) and consisted of 7 questions in 10-Likert type while the other scaleaimed to measure perceived attributes of innovation (Cronbach α = .929) and consisted of 27 questions in 10-likert type.Experts’opinion was taken for content validity and exploratory factor analysis was executed to show construct validity.The study group is consisted of 192 prospective teachers. An independent sample t-test has been executed to determinewhether the perceived attributes of innovation vary significantly in terms of innovativeness or being skeptical. The resultshave revealed out that among the perceived attributes of innovation, perceived usefulness and ease of use varysignificantly due to the innovative or being skeptical characteristics of prospective teachers. It has been also revealed outthat while the variation in usefulness was in favor of the skeptical teachers, that in ease of use turned out to be in favor ofthe innovatives. Thus within the limitations of the study, it can be concluded, perceived ease of use and perceivedusefulness are the perceived attributes that determine nature of innovative and the skeptical prospective teachersrespectively.KEYWORDSdiffusion of innovation, perceived attributes, a<strong>do</strong>pter categories1. INTRODUCTIONThe diversity of the innovations presented by improving technology and the sustainability of innovation bringalong studies on the diffusion and a<strong>do</strong>ption of these innovations in the field of education. There is a notableamount of literature presenting the perceived attributes of innovation and determining which of theseinnovations explain most the diffusion and a<strong>do</strong>ption of innovation (Lee, Kozar and Larsen, 2003; Venkateshand others, 2003; Mazman and Usluel, 2010).The process of diffusion for innovation is a multi-dimensional and dynamic one. This process may varyas to innovation, the social system or the attributes of the individual. Rogers (2003) stated that the perceivedattributes of innovation differ in terms of the characteristics of the individual. Thus this study attempts todetermine if there would be any differences in the perceived attributes of innovation in terms of beinginnovator or skeptical.It has been explained that the origins of the variables of perceived attributes of innovation as relativeadvantage (Rogers, 1983; Moore and Benbasat, 1991; Prekumar and Potter, 1995), compatibility (Rogers,1983; Chin and Gopal, 1995; Xia and Lee, 2000), complexity (Premkumar and Potter, 1995; Igbaria an<strong>do</strong>thers, 1996), observability (Moore and Benbasat, 1991), triability (Moore and Benbasat, 1991; Karahanna303
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISand others, 1999), image (Karahanna and others 1999; Venkatesh and Davis, 2000) are based on TheDiffusion of Innovations Theory (Rogers 1983). The origins of the social influence variable (Malhotra andGalletta, 1999; Venkatesh and Morris, 2000) is stated to be based on the Theory of Planned Behavior whichwas developed by Fishbein and Ajzen (1975), while facilitating conditions (Karahanna and Straub, 1999) onTaylor and Todd (1995) (Lee, Kozar and Larsen 2003).Five of the perceived attributes of social networks have been selected within this study: usefulness,relative advantage, ease of use, social influence, facilitating conditions. These five attributes were selected onthe basis of Usluel and Mazman’ (2010) content analysis study which examines 35 articles about thediffusion, acceptance and a<strong>do</strong>ption of innovations in the field of education published in the last five years onISI Web of Knowledge. This study has suggested that the perception of usefulness, the ease of use, socialinfluence and facilitating conditions have been the most examined factors among the perceived attributes ofinnovation. However, given the definitions of the perceived attributes, it is notable that the perceptions ofrelative advantage and usefulness have been studied through a wide perspective under the performanceexpectancy (Venkatesh and others, 2003). Venkatesh and others (2003) have stated that performanceexpectancy, the perception of usefulness, relative advantage, job relevance, external motivation and resultexpectancy are interrelated, and that these concepts generally reflect the individual’s perception that hewould obtain advantages when he makes use of an innovation. Thus, it has been detected that in all of the 35reviewed studies, the perception of usefulness has been studied in different ways under the termsperformance expectancy, result expectancy and subjective norms. However this study handles relativeadvantage and usefulness as two separate elements, and relative advantage has been included in the study inaddition to the 4 above mentioned attributes.1.1 The Perceived Attributes of Innovation:Davis (1989) defines usefulness as “the degree to which a person believes that using a particular systemwould enhance his or her job performance”, whereas saving prestige and economy refer to usefulness withinthis study. Ease of use is defined as “the degree to which a person believes that using a particular systemwould be free of effort” (Davis, 1989), however in this study ease of use is a<strong>do</strong>pted both learning and usingeasier that is consistent with Davis and Rogers’ approach. Facilitating conditions refer to the perception ofthe technical or institutional infrastructure of the employment of the system by the individual (Venkatesh an<strong>do</strong>thers 2003) which increase the usage and rate of a<strong>do</strong>ption of the system. Social influence is defined as“one’s perception that people who are important to him think he should or should not perform the behavior inquestion” (Fisbein and Ajzen, 1975; 302). Social influence becomes more important for rate of a<strong>do</strong>ptionwithin social networks because of its distinctive connection with sociality. Relative advantage is defined asthe “degree to which an innovation is perceived as better than the idea it supersedes” (Rogers, 2003; 15). Inthis study individuals’ subjective advantageous perception on innovation like <strong>do</strong>ing their job faster and easierexpresses the degree of relative advantage.1.2 The A<strong>do</strong>pter Categories:Based on the idea that the indicator of innovativeness is the relatively earlier a<strong>do</strong>ption of innovation by theindividual or the units compared to the other individual/units in the system, Rogers (2003) categorizes thea<strong>do</strong>pters in five: innovators (2,5%), early a<strong>do</strong>pters (13,5%), early majority (34%), late majority (34%),laggards (16%). In this study, those who choose to use the innovations before their environment, showingtendency to take risks while trying the innovation and who learned how to use it on their own without helpfrom the others shall be referred to as innovators; Those who employed the innovations to keep up with thesocial environment, somehow lagging behind in employing them, and who waited for the others to try theinnovation before they <strong>do</strong> in order to decide shall be referred to as skepticals. This study handles socialnetworks as an innovation, and aims to determine if there is a significant difference in the perceived attributesof innovation in terms of being innovator or skeptical of prospective teachers.304
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 20102. METHOD2.1 Study GroupThe study group comprised of 191 students attending teacher education programs in 2009-2010 springsemester of a public university, Faculty of Education in Ankara.Table 1. Genders accross to the education programsFemale Male TotalEducation Programs Elementary Mathematics Education f 37 15 52% 29,8% 22,4% 27,2%Primary School Education f 66 47 113% 53,2% 70,1% 59,2%Elementary Science Education f 21 5 26% 16,9% 7,5% 13,6%Total f 124 67 1912.2 Data Collection ToolsThe data has been collected by means of 2 scales developed by the researchers. The content validity of thescales is based on expert opinion while the construct validity was provided by exploratory factor analysis.2.2.1 The Scale of Innovativeness:10 likert-type scale of Innovativeness consisted of 7 questions to measure innovativeness/being skeptical(Cronbach α = .697); the 2-factor innovativeness scale explained 55,4% of the total variance.Mean points of the factors have been considered while grouping participants. In order to determine theinnovators and skepticals in terms of mean points, a minimum ½ standard deviation difference between meanpoints has been taken into consideration. Table 2 presents the explanatory factor analysis result ofinnovativeness scale.Table 2. Explanatory factor analysis results of the innovativeness scaleInnovators Question Factor Loading Skepticals Question Factor Loading2 ,825 1 ,7823 ,810 9 ,7717 ,601 10 ,6938 ,5162.2.2 The Scale of Perceived Attributes of Innovation:Perceived attributes of innovation scale was consisted of 27 questions in 10 likert-type (Cronbach α= .929),as a result of the factor analysis, 27 items have been grouped under 5 factors and these 5-factor of perceivedattributes of innovation scale explained 66,78 % of the total variance.The result of this scale which was designed to distinguish meaning difference of relative advantage andperceived usefulness, showed that these two structure put forward different results when compared to thedefinitions of Davis (1989) and Rogers (2003). Examining the results of the factor analysis, the perceivedusefulness could be described with concepts such as increase in prestige, being economical, increase inperformance, productivity while relative advantage could be described as the individual’s personal opinionthat he finds it useful to employ, and that the innovation equips him with the ability to <strong>do</strong> something in amore swift and convenient fashion. Table 3 present the factors and the factor loadings of scale.305
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISTable 3. Explanatory factor analysis results of the perceived attributes of innovation scaleFactor Question No Factor Loading Factor Question No Factor LoadingPerceived Ease of Use 2 ,878 Perceived Usefulness 27 ,6783 ,839 26 ,6301 ,711 10 ,6684 ,678 11 ,6135 ,622 Social Influence 14 ,836Facilitating Conditions 19 ,707 13 ,78621 ,727 15 ,65920 ,691 16 ,64918 ,627 Relative Advantage 23 ,85322 ,509 24 ,83412 ,6713. FINDINGSAccording to the t test results (Table 4), the prospective teachers’ perceptions of usefulness and ease of usediffer significantly in terms of being innovator or skeptical (t (89) =-2.347, p
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010prospective teachers have less effort expectations than the skepticals concerning how to learn to employ theinnovation and as the perception of complexity increases, the rate of a<strong>do</strong>ption of innovation will increase.It has also been observed that the skeptical prospective teachers’ perceptions of usefulness scores arehigher than that of the innovator prospective teachers. Examining this finding within the context of the study,the higher rate of perception of usefulness among skepticals concerning social networks suggests that theskeptical prospective teachers a<strong>do</strong>pt innovation considering the, increase in performance, providingproductivity. Thus, classifying the potential a<strong>do</strong>pters in two groups as innovators and skepticals in case of thediffusion and a<strong>do</strong>ption of innovations, it could be asserted that different diffusion and a<strong>do</strong>ption strategiesshould be followed for each group.REFERENCESBartlett-Bragg, A., 2006. Reflections on pedagogy: Reframing practice to foster informalLearning with social software.Retrieved 10.02.2008, http://www.dream.sdu.dk/uploads/files/Anne%20Bartlett-Bragg.pdf.Chin, W.W. and Gopal, A., 1995. A<strong>do</strong>ption intention in GSS relative importance of beliefs. Database, Vol. 26, No. 2&3,pp 42-63.Davis, F. D., 1989. Perceived Usefulness, Perceived Ease of Use, and User Acceptance of Information Technology. MISQuarterly, Vol. 13, No. 3, pp 319-340.Fishbein, M. and Ajzen, I., 1975. Belief, attitude, intention and behavior: an introduction to theory and research.:Addison-Wesley, Reading MA.Igbaria, M. et al, 1996. A motivational model of microcomputer usage. Journal of management information systems, Vol.13, No. 1, pp 127-143.Karahanna, E. and Straub, D.W. et al, 1999. The Psychological Origins of Perceived Usefulness and Perceived Ease-of-Use. Information & Management, Vol. 35, pp 237-250.Lee, M. C., 2010. Explaining and predicting users' continuance intention toward e-learning: An extension of theexpectation-confirmation model. Computers & Education, Vol. 54, No. 2, pp 506-516.Lee, Y. et al, 2003. The Technology Acceptance Model: Past, Present, Future. Communications of the Association forInformation Systems, Vol. 12, No. 50, pp 752-780.Malhotra, Y. and Galletta, D. F., 1999. Extending the Technology Acceptance Model to Account for Social Influence:Theoretical Bases and Empirical Validation. Proceedings of Thirty-Second Hawaii International Conference onSystem Sciences (HICSS)., Maui, Hawaii.Moore, G.C. and Benbasat, I., 1991. Development of an Instrument to Measure the Perceptions of A<strong>do</strong>pting anInformation Technology Innovation. Information Systems Research, Vol. 2, No. 3, pp 192-222.Premkumar, G. and Potter, M., 1995. A<strong>do</strong>ption of Computer Aided <strong>Software</strong> Engineering (CASE) Technology: AnInnovation A<strong>do</strong>ption Perspective. Data Base, Vol. 26, No. 2&3, pp 531-544.Rogers, M. E., 2003. Diffusion of innovation (5th ed.). New York: The Free Press.Taylor, S. and Todd, P., 1995. Assessing IT usage: the role of prior experience, MIS Quarterly, Vol. 19, No. 4, pp 561-570.Teo, T., 2009. Modelling technology acceptance in education: A study of pre-service teachers. Computers & Education,Vol. 52, No. 2, pp 302-312.Teo, T. et al, 2009. Assessing the intention to use technology among pre-service teachers in Singapore and Malaysia: Amultigroup invariance analysis of the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM). Computers & Education, Vol. 53, No.3, pp 1000–1009.Teo, T. and Schaik, P. V., 2009. Understanding Technology Acceptance in Pre-Service Teachers: A Structural-EquationModeling Approach. The Asia-Pacific Education Researcher, Vol. 18, No. 1, pp 47-66.Usluel, Y. K. ve Mazman, S. G., 2009. Eğitimde Yeniliklerin Yayılımı, Kabulü ve Benimsenmesi Sürecinde RolOynayan Ögeler: Bir içerik analizi çalışması. Çukurova Üniversitesi Eğitim Fakültesi Dergisi, under review.Usluel, Y. K. ve Mazman, S. G., 2010. Öğretmen adaylarının web kullanım amaçları yenilikçi/temkinli olma durumlarınagöre farklılık gösteriyor mu?. Uluslar Arası Öğretmen Yetiştirme Politikaları ve Sorunları Sempozyumu, Beytepe,Ankara, Türkiye.Venkatesh, V. et al, 2003. User Acceptance of Information Technology: Toward A Unified View. MIS Quarterly, Vol.27, No. 3, pp 425-478.Xia, W. and Lee, G., 2000. The influence of persuasion, training and experience on user perceptions and acceptance of ITınnovation. Proceedings of the 21 st International Conference on Information Systems, pp 371-384.307
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISA PROCESS CAPABILITY MODEL FOR SERVICES INTHE BRAZILIAN PUBLIC SOFTWAREMárcia R. M. Martinez, Sueli A. Varani, Edgar L. Banhesse, and Clenio F. SalvianoCTI - Centro de Tecnologia da Informação Renato ArcherRo<strong>do</strong>via D. Pedro I, km 143.6, CEP 13069-901Campinas, SP, BrazilABSTRACTThis article presents a Process Capability Model for Service Providers in the context of the Brazilian Public <strong>Software</strong>(SPB). SPB is a virtual environment in which the construction and appropriation of knowledge occurs in a collaborativeway. In spite of the diversity of Capability Process Models, there is a demand for new models for more specific contexts,such as services in the SPB. The Process Capability Model is structured with Process Capability Areas and ProcessCapability Levels. The current version of the SPB model is composed of five process capability areas: Admission ofService Providers (APS); Incident Solving (RI); Management of Services (GPS); and Management of Service by theCommunity (GSC). The process capability levels are levels 0, 1, 2 and 3 as defined in ISO/IEC 15504 Standard.KEYWORDSBrazilian Public <strong>Software</strong>, Process Capability Models, Services.1. INTRODUCTIONIn the recent years, society has experienced the importance of <strong>Internet</strong> as a new production locus, where it ispossible to establish a space favorable to the collaboration in webs. Authors of Wikinomics (Tapscott andWillians, 2007) define the phenomenon as a common basis for production, where the coexistence of actors,from private or public environments, is healthy and where there is a guarantee of access to results of works<strong>do</strong>ne by all the actors involved.In this context is the Brazilian Public <strong>Software</strong> (SPB after its original name in Portuguese: <strong>Software</strong><strong>Público</strong> <strong>Brasileiro</strong>), a virtual environment with a great potential to be a common basis for production, thatbenefits from the coexistence of the public and private sectors. SPB allows the generalization of artifacts thatgo beyond software code, aiding the sustainability of free licensing software and the equality of opportunitiesfor the private market.In the case of virtual networks such as SPB, the construction of capability models must go beyond theconventional view offered by current models, taking in consideration the prevailing dynamics, in which theroles are constantly altered and the limits established by interrelations are not clearly defined. Amongst theactors that coexist in the SPB are the service providers, which may be companies or self-employed workers,bound to software solutions, and whose target is to offer a range of services to users.This article presents a process capability model for services offered in the SPB, aiding service providersin the service quality improvement. It is being developed in a cooperative and shared way, with the supportof the SPB communities. This article is organized as follows. This first section provides an introduction tothe article. The second section presents, in a summarized way, the SPB and the dynamics of services offer inthe web. The third section describes a general introduction about the process capability models. The fourthsection deals specifically of the capability model in the SPB context. Finally, the fifth section concludes thearticle.308
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 20102. THE BRAZILIAN PUBLIC SOFTWARE - SPBSPB is an initiative undertaken by the Ministry of Planning, Budget and Management of Brazil, in order todecrease public costs by means of new and more efficient ways to develop and deliver software whilepromoting the sharing of solutions among the public institutions.The SPB considers on its formulation the free software model of production, and moreover, overlapsother issues that borderline this concept as Economics of intangible goods, new role for the State, neworganizational models operating in network and intellectual property of goods produced in a collaborativeway. The Brazilian Public <strong>Software</strong> is made available by a portal (PSPB, 2010), a virtual environment whichgathers software - available for users to <strong>do</strong>wnload and for its continuous improvement development underpermission - and a set of additional services offered by those entities that provide solutions such as userguidebooks, installation guidebooks, discussion lists, forums, management models and some support. Thus,the portal provides an important exchange of knowledge and of software tools, mainly those which are ofpublic interest. Currently the <strong>Portal</strong> has more than 40 thousand people subscribed, 37 software solutionsavailable, besides groups of interest. Among the current groups of interest there are 4CMBr and 5CQualiBr.The 4CMBr group of interest discusses information technology for the Brazilian Municipalities (4CMBr,2010). 4C means Collaboration, Community, Knowledge and Sharing after their Portuguese words:Colaboração, Comunidade, Conhecimento and Compartilhamento. 4CMBr was launched in November 2008with the purpose to stimulate the use of free software in the municipalities. From the use of informationtechnology, it proposes to improve the internal procedures of the Brazilian Municipalities, the quality of lifeof citizens with by offering online services, tackling the waste of public resources and time, managing andplanning expenses.5CQualiBr group of interest (5CQualiBr, 2010) concerns the subject of Quality. It has been developedwith the objective of increasing confidence in all levels of the artifacts displayed in the portal. The fifth C isfor Trust after its Portuguese word Confiança. It hosts communities interested in participating in theconstruction of knowledge devoted to aspects of quality (interoperability, test, quality of products, quality ofdevelopment processes, quality in service delivery, dissemination and sustainability).In the SPB <strong>Portal</strong> there is a group of software solutions and a group that demands services related to thesesolutions. The Virtual Public Market (MPV, 2010) is the virtual space that allows the approximation betweenthe two groups. In the MPV information is kept about the service providers, which can be self-employedworkers or companies, thus generating a catalogue of service providers and a guide for fast consultation. Theoccurrence of this phenomenon may, in theory, accelerate the development and use of the software solutions,the increase in the services performed and the stimulation of economy around each software, thuscharacterizing a new business model. Currently in MPV are registered more than 300 service providers.In the context of the model presented in this article, service means the set of activities offered by theVirtual Public Market to those who use the solutions available in the <strong>Portal</strong> SPB. Therefore, the servicesconsidered in the Process Capability Model for Services in the SPB may be: training, development,consulting, maintenance, installation, implantation, technical support, embedded software, interactiveapplications programming, mechanical and computational modeling and associated products.3. SERVICE CAPABILITY MODELSProcess Capability Models are repositories of best practices which are used as references for the processimprovement and assessment. In recent years, a set of best practices models has emerged in the informationtechnology field, with the objective of aiding companies in their structuring, management and monitoring oftheir processes performance. Among them we may mention the models of CMMI (SEI, 2006; SEI, 2009;SEI, 2007), MPS-BR (Softex, 2009) and ISO/IEC 15504 (ISO/IEC 2003). These models bring benefits to thecompanies by recognizing the competitive advantage that can be created by a process-based management. Arecent survey identified 52 Process Capability Models for different <strong>do</strong>mains (von Wangenheim et alli 2010).A new generation of quality models has emerged and they are specific to the improvement of informationtechnology service processes, which are: CMMI-SVC (SEI, 2009), and SCM-SP (Hyder et al, 2006), etc. Inspite of a diversity of Process Capability Models there is a demand for new reference models for specificcontexts. It is the case of SPB, which will be detailed in the following sections.309
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADIS4. PROCESS CAPABILITY MODEL FOR SERVICES IN THE SPBThis section presents the structure of the process capability model for services in the SPB, their processcapability areas and levels, and a summary of three process capability areas.The model has been developed with the use of Method Framework for Engineering Process CapabilityModels (Salviano et al, 2009). In this development we have focused on understanding the current practicesfor services in SPB and on analyzing the current general purpose models for services. The modelconstruction is coordinated by Centro de Tecnologia da Informação Renato Archer (CTI: InformationTechnology Center “Renato Archer”) and has the participation of research centers, universities and SPBcommunities. The work is financed by FINEP - Financia<strong>do</strong>ra de Estu<strong>do</strong>s e Projetos and is part of a largerproject called Reference Model for the Brazilian Public <strong>Software</strong>.Following the Method Framework, a process was defined and used to guide the development of firstversions of the Process Capability Model in a cooperative and shared way, with the support of the SPBcommunities. An initial version was developed and presented in a workshop with SPB´s service provides.From their feedback, another version was developed and established as a first version.The Process Capability Model is structured in Process Capability Areas and Process Capability Levels.The Process Capability Areas are described with the following components: (a) Purpose: Describes theobjective of the process capability area; (b) Introductory Notes: Shortly describes the process capability area;(c) Objectives: Describes the target to be achieved by practices application; and (d) Practice: Guides the wayto perform the activities. The focus is in ‘what’ and not in ‘how’ to <strong>do</strong>. Examples are presented to serve assuggestions of ‘how’ a practice may be implemented. The Process Capability Levels are described withsimilar elements.The Process Capability Model process areas of SPB describe a set of practices to support the servicesimprovement of MPV service providers. The SPB communities are free to define how to implement eachpractice. In this way, each process capability area guides the communities in the initiative to qualify serviceproviders, as well as guides service providers to improve the services quality through a set of practices. Thecurrent version of SPB model is composed of five process capability areas: Service Providers Admission(APS); Service Delivery (PS); Incident Solution (RI); Service Delivery Management (GPS); and CommunityService Management (GSC).These five process capability areas provide a system to guide an initial improvement of a service delivery.The objective was to provide a simple system, with few process capability areas, to facilitate itsunderstanding and application. Later, with more feedback from the SPB´s service providers, more processcapability areas will emerge.The process capability levels for this Process Capability Model are the capability levels 0 to 3 defined byISO/IEC 15504 (ISO/IEC, 2003). At Level 0: Incomplete process, the process is not implemented, or fails toachieve its process purpose. At Level 1: performed process, the implemented process achieves its processpurpose. At Level 2: managed process, the previously described performed process is now implemented in amanaged fashion (planned, monitored and adjusted) and its work products are appropriately established,controlled and maintained. At Level 3: Established process, the previously described managed process is nowimplemented using a defined process capable of achieving its process outcomes.The Service Delivery guides the establishment of processes for delivering a service based on a serviceagreement. This process can be performed by a service provider at capability level 1, 2 or 3. In order todeliver a service, a service provider needs to be admitted by a SPB community. The Service ProvidersAdmission guides the establishment of procedures to manage the service provider’s admission for the SPBcommunities. The service delivery of an admitted service provider of a SPB community needs to be managedby both the service provider and by the SPB community. The Service Delivery Management guides theestablishment of processes for this management by the service provider and the Community ServiceManagement guides the establishment of processes for this management by the SPB community. TheIncident Solution guides the establishment of processes to recovery agreed services as fast as possible with anadequate and effective solution for the service incident.Following we present a content summary of three process capability areas of SPB Model, composed ofthe purpose, objectives and practices. The complete description of these three process capability areas and theother two are available, including the examples of implementation of all the practices, in the community310
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 20105CQualiBR. The Figure 1 shows the process capability area “Service Providers Admission”, Figure 2presents “Service Delivery”, and Figure 3 presents “Community Service Management”.Service Providers AdmissionPurpose:The purpose of the Process Capability Area “Service Providers Admission” is to guide the establishment ofprocedures in order to manage the service providers admission for the SPB communities.Objectives and PracticesObjective APS 1 Prepared Admission:The admission is prepared based on the objectives, strategies and criteria for service delivery.Practice APS 1.1 Establish and Maintain the Objectives of Service DeliveryPractice APS 1.2 Establish and Maintain the Admission StrategyPractice APS 1.3 Establish and Maintain the Criteria for AdmissionPractice APS 1.4 Take Actions to Attend the ObjectivesObjective APS 2 Admission Performed and Monitored:Admission is performed based on the criteria defined, the agreement is established and used as reference tomonitor the service delivery.Practice APS 2.1 Perform and Monitor AdmissionPractice APS 2.2 Establish and Maintain AgreementPractice APS 2.3 Communicate the Admitted Service ProvidersPractice APS 2.4 Monitor Service Delivery over the ObjectivesPractice APS 2.5 Review the Admissions based on the Monitoring ResultsFigure 1. Purpose, objectives e practices of process capability area service providers admissionService DeliveryPurpose:The purpose of the Process Capability Area “Service Delivery” is to guide the establishment of processes fordelivering a service based on a service agreement.Objectives e PracticesObjective GSC 1 Service Delivery:The service is delivered based on the service agreement.Practice PS 1.1 Establish agreementPractice PS 1.2 Prepare for service deliveryPractice PS 1.3 Deliver and Monitor the ServicePractice PS 1.4 Request an evaluation of the delivery servicePractice PS 1.5 Communicate the results of the service evaluationFigure 2. Purpose, objectives e practices of process capability area service deliveryCommunity Service ManagementPurpose:The purpose of the Process Capability Area “Community Service Management” is to guide theestablishment of processes so that the moderator of the Community monitors the activities performed by theMPV Service Providers, taking proper action when significant deviation occurs in compare to theCommunity objectives.Objectives e PracticesObjective GSC 1 Services Managed:The services are managed, operationally and strategically, and actions are taken and monitored.Practice GSC 1.1 Establish the Community ObjectivesPractice GSC 1.2 Establish and Maintain a Strategy to Achieve ObjectivesPractice GSC 1.3 Monitor Service ProvidersPractice GSC 1.4 Verify Alignment with the Community ObjectivesPractice GSC 1.5 Take Corrective ActionsFigure 3. Purpose, objectives and practices of process capability area community service management311
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADIS5. FINAL CONSIDERATIONSThis work has presented a Service Process Capability Model for a virtual environment context, SPB. Themodel can be found in version 3.0 and its evolution has had the following validations: in the preliminaryversion the model had the participation of specialists in software engineering. The first version had thecontribution of other groups involved with SPB, being validated at a SPB conference, with the participationof community members and other interested people, generating version 2.0. The current version of the modelhas been elaborated with reference to the observations obtained in a workshop, feedback received in thediscussion forum and meetings of the team members. Case study of applications of a new version of themodel are being planned to evaluate it in pilot projects and therefore identifying its weak and strong points,and opportunities of improvement. From these results, new versions of the model for SPB will be developed.ACKNOWLEDGEMENTThe authors acknowledge FINEP – Financia<strong>do</strong>ra de Estu<strong>do</strong>s e Projetos, for financing and supporting thiswork, in the Project 0489/08: Reference Model for the Brazilian Public <strong>Software</strong>.REFERENCES4CMBr Brazilian Cities (Collaboration, Community, Knowledge and Sharing), available onhttp://softwarepublico.gov.br/4cmbr/xowiki/Principal, last access in July/2010.5CQualiBr (Trust for Cooperation, Communities, Knowledge, Sharing), available onhttp://softwarepublico.gov.br/5cqualibr/xowiki/, last access in July/2010.von Wangenheim, C. G., Hauck, J. C. R.; Zoucas, A.; Salviano, C. F.; McCaffery, F.; and Shull, F.; Creating <strong>Software</strong>Process Capability/Maturity Models, IEEE <strong>Software</strong>, vol. 27, no. 4, pp. 92-94, July/Aug. 2010,<strong>do</strong>i:10.1109/MS.2010.96 (available from http://www.computer.org/portal/web/csdl/<strong>do</strong>i/10.1109/MS.2010.96).Hyder, B. E. et al, 2006. The eSourcing Capability Model for Service Providers: eSCM-SP v2.01: Practice Details;ITSqc Carnegie Mellon.ISO/IEC, 2003. Information Technology – <strong>Software</strong> Process Assessment; Parts 1-9, The International Organization forStandardization and the International Electrotechnical Commission; v. ISO/IEC 15504.MPV (in Portuguese: Merca<strong>do</strong> <strong>Público</strong> Virtual) – available on www.merca<strong>do</strong>publico.gov.br, last access in July/2010.Salviano, C. F. et al, 2009. A Method Framework for Engineering Process Capability Models; In: EuroSPI, IndustryProc., pp. 6.25-6.36, 2-4, Spain.SEI, 2006. CMMI for Development, version 1.2: CMMI-DEV; <strong>Software</strong> Engineering Institute.SEI, 2007. CMMI for Acquisition, version 1.2: CMMI-ACQ; <strong>Software</strong> Engineering Institute.SEI, 2009. CMMI for Service, version 1.2: CMMI-SVC; <strong>Software</strong> Engineering Institute.SOFTEX, 2009. MR-MPS - Melhoria de Processo <strong>do</strong> <strong>Software</strong> <strong>Brasileiro</strong>: Guia Geral; SOFTEX- Associação paraPromoção da Excelência <strong>do</strong> <strong>Software</strong> <strong>Brasileiro</strong>, Brasil.Tapscott and Willians, 2007. Wikinomics – How mass collaboration changes everything; Penguin USA.312
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010A STRUCTURED APPROACH TO THE INTRODUCTIONOF ENTERPRISE 2.0Roberto Paiano and Andrea PandurinoUniversity of Salento, Department of Innovation Engineering, GSA LabVia per Monteroni, Lecce (LE), ItalyABSTRACTMore and more often the organizations need to use a flexible organization model able to adapt quickly the internalstructure to the changing market conditions. In many cases, this uninterrupted need of changing is not compliant with thestrict structure of the enterprise business process that set the employees and their activities in a fixed schema. To face thissituation, in the past years many metho<strong>do</strong>logies are born in order to improve the quality and to reduce the risks of changemanagement into an enterprise. Nowadays, the main innovation in the panorama of the organizational model is theintroduction of the Enterprise 2.0 (E2.0) philosophy. The E2.0 main concept of make the enterprise more flexibleimproving the collaboration between the employees represents a new aspect that before in the traditional approach wasnot considered. The use inside of an enterprise of the E2.0 is not a simple a<strong>do</strong>ption of a new technology but a morecomplex change that involves several areas. Today, there is not a unique and well-know process that could lead theenterprise in the a<strong>do</strong>ption of E2.0. This paper wants to provide (describing the introduction process) the guidelines andthe metho<strong>do</strong>logical steps that an organization could be executed for a correct and complete a<strong>do</strong>ption of the E2.0philosophy.KEYWORDSEnterprise 2.0, Collaboration, Knowledge, Business Process1. INTRODUCTION AND RELATED WORKToday the Web paradigm (defined as its interface, its interactional policy, the delivery mode of the contents,etc.) has reached a pervasive level in the ordinary way of life that the new applications or contents are mainlyprojected for this channel. An evolution process that involved the technological aspects and the user’sexpectations is in progress from these last years. On one side, the web applications evolved from a static website (that provided only static information) to richer applications that allow to delivery dynamic contents(such as video, audio) with interaction methods and performance closer to the desktop application (such as inthe case of Rich <strong>Internet</strong> Application). On the other side, the user requirements are radically evolved: the webis considered not as a simple tool to acquire information but as a virtual place in which all the daily andsocial tasks could be executed. Thus, the social web application such as Facebook - the most famous one -became a good alternative to the real meeting point allowing to cross over the geographic distance (in orderto interact with user far away) and the temporal gap (in order to contact old friends and to resume oldfriendships that in another way could be lost forever). In its entirety, the web is changing from a system thatis highly focused on the data and on the services to manage these data to a system focused on the user: theuser is placed in the centre of a complex infrastructure that on one hand provides enhanced services for theinformation and on the other hand, adapts itself to the specific communication user requirements allowing tointeract in his/her preferred way and using the channel closer to his/her needs. This innovative aspect leads tothe definition of a new generation of web applications that are described with the term “Web 2.0” [Lazar,2007]. In general, the concept of Web 2.0 is not a simple technological change (that was remarkable) but acultural transformation in the way in which the user uses <strong>Internet</strong>: it is a new philosophy focused on thecollaboration and puts the stress on cooperation and on the features to share the data between severaltechnological platforms based on hardware and software architectures. This new way to understand theenterprise is been defined by Andrew McAfee [McAfee, 2006] using the term Enterprise2.0. With this313
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISdefinition, McAfee wants to identify a real philosophy that uses the concepts of the Web2.0 in order to renewthe enterprise standards not forcing the application of a hierarchical organization and of a strictly proceduralprocess. Today, the introduction in an organization of the E2.0 model is seen as the a<strong>do</strong>ption of a newtechnology (through the use of a tool such as wiki, blog,.. ) [Chwelos, 2000] [Premkumar, 1995] and theproblems connected with the managing of the information or with the organization are not considered.Recovering this gap, this paper aims to define the a<strong>do</strong>ption process of the Enterprise 2.0 model that couldbe used as guidelines by the company in order to minimize the risk of a complete change of enterprise workprocedure [ The Economist, 2007]. After this paragraph that introduces the context in the second paragraphwe explain the open issue and the problem to a<strong>do</strong>pt the Enterprise 2.0 model into an organization. The thirdparagraph describes the process: first in general and then describing each phase. The conclusion describes theresearch result and the future works.2. THE ENTERPRISE 2.0 CHALLENGEAs stated before, the a<strong>do</strong>ption inside an organization of the E2.0 paradigm is not a simple task because manytechnical and social issues must be solved. First of all, it’s necessary to consider that the employees have anatural aversion to any changes in their working manner. Thus, the possibility of the employees to work in acollaborative perspective through the publication of their know-how in a blog or a wiki could be dramatic.Not only the low level of collaboration and/or communication between the employees could be an obstaclebut also its higher level could cause several problems. Indeed, we have to consider that the opportunityoffered to the employees to insert their information [Newman, 2009] and to express their opinions involvesserious problems of governance related with the loss of know-how (information that is not correct andinaccurate) and with the loss of sensible data (reserved information broadcasted).From the technological point of view, even if the introduction of the Web2.0 tools in the enterprisesoftware architecture <strong>do</strong>es not involve particular problems, these new collaborative features must beintegrated in the traditional information system. The traditional information systems are born and aredeveloped assuming the business process, including the operative processes, the management processes andthe collaborative processes in order to have a wide, integrated and pervasive control of the all enterpriseparameters . Clearly, the introduction of E2.0 that in a complete a<strong>do</strong>ption must affect these processes in orderto promote the collaboration, must be related with the legacy system modernization . Furthermore, we haveto consider that the current information systems are strongly focused and strictly dependent from data andtheir structure. These systems must be adjusted to manage the de-structured information obtained, forexample, from a forum and blog; in fact, the goal of the Web2.0 tools is to prompt each employee to elicit (ina blog, wiki, forum) his/her know-how that must be indexed and make widely accessible. If the internalinformation system <strong>do</strong>es not have a flexible infrastructure able to manage the not structured data, all thisknowledge will be lost and all benefits of E2.0 for the organization will be really poor.In the following, we report in general the main factors that affect the a<strong>do</strong>ption of a complete E2.0paradigm [Massey, 2007] [Riche, 2007] [Lin, 2005] inside an organization:• Infrastructure factor [Frappaolo, 2008] [Duncan, 2009]. This factor is directly connected with theability and the will of the enterprise to renew own legacy system: the management has to take a firm decisionin the modernization process and must be allocated a good part of the innovation budget. In some case,hybrid architectural solution in which the legacy system manages the operative data and the Web2.0 systemmanages the not-structured knowledge, could be efficiently a<strong>do</strong>pted.• Cultural factor [Holt, 2007]. This factor is related with the enterprise culture and with its inclinationto evolve its internal organizational structures to follow the E2.0 philosophy. A flexible organization will bemore able to use a flat structure and to use in an informal way the new available tools.• Environment factor [Premkumar, 2005]. The enterprise is a part of complex environment that is themarket with its rules and pressure. If the enterprise works in a market that is much competitive in whichcontinuous changes are required and the company is often forced to follow these changes, clearly the entireenterprise is directed towards a radical change such as the a<strong>do</strong>ption of E2.0.Technological factor [Edison, 2000]. Unlike the infrastructure factor, this aspect underlines the capacityof the organization to innovate itself [Parasuraman, 2000]. If the employees are not accustomed to use ICTtools during their works, the introduction of E2.0 will be more difficult.314
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010Assuming these factors, clearly the changeover to a E2.0 paradigm is not simple. The report “The Stateof Enterpise 2.0 A<strong>do</strong>ption Q4 2009” [Frappaolo, 2009] highlights the high level of uncertainty of scientificand industrial community about the best practice to introduce the E2.0 model inside an organization. In thefollowing, we report the main data of this research:• 21% of the interviewed company that have introduced the E2.0, used a top-<strong>do</strong>wn (also namedmanagement driven) approach. In this approach, the main actor is the management that became the lever ofthe entire a<strong>do</strong>ption process;• 28% of the company used a user-driven approach in which the innovation involves first the lowlevel of organization. The employees use the collaborative tools generating knowledge and collaborating inan informal way in the execution of their task;• 52% of the company use a mixed approach in which the innovation is mediated by the needs ofemployees, management and governance.Considering the importance of this innovation, clearly this uncertainty in the implementation process isnormal. Probably, the best solution is strictly related with the status of the organization; thus, it is difficult todefine a universal effective process. Taking up this challenge, we illustrate an implementation process thatconsiders the technological aspects and the factors related to the management, the business process and theinformation system.3. THE ADOPTION PROCESSThe process presented next is made up of several steps. In our vision, it is important to conclude anyway allthe steps. The skipping of a single step has as a consequence to increase the change risks and to compromisethe quality of the result. The organizations can start their evolutionary path from an intermediate step if theyare absolutely sure that had already implemented the previous steps. This choice must be based on thereasons that brought, in the past, to a<strong>do</strong>pt organizational/technological solutions apparently aligned with theE2.0 paradigm. It is useful to consider the process steps already completed as a checklist. We describe theprocess of fulfilment toward the Porter value chain; for each phase, we define the goal, the technological andthe metho<strong>do</strong>logical tools and the users (see figure 1).Figure 1. Process of a<strong>do</strong>ptionConsidering the company’s area in which the specific phase has the main effect, the steps are grouped. hegoal of the first four phases is to change the style of the company management to align the monitoring toolsto the E2.0 paradigm. Thus, the four phases have been grouped in the planning and monitoring area that dealswith management and governance. The operative area encourages the cooperation and collaboration in thehorizontal process and the vertical process. The phase 7 is characterized by the reengineering of the businessprocess more and more focused on the people and on their knowledge. The business process will be renewingthrough the innovative application of the existing technologies of the Web2.0 . The phase 7 is very complex,and it will be made in several sub-steps . The phase 8, called Vision is the end of a challenging path that315
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISbrings the organization towards a more flexible, efficient and competitive model supported by an informationsystem based not on the data but on the knowledge. Next, we describe the detail of each phase.Phase 1: Introduction of a common language. The introduction of the collaboration among employeesneeds to the definition of a company common language in order to describe facts and the knowledge. In awell-structured company, each unit operates in autonomy and develops its own know-how; thus, it isfundamental to use a common language that could be at the basis of the common knowledge. The knowledgebase is not only a glossary of terms but includes the internal procedures, success stories and the solution tonot-standard cases. The definition of a common language in the Public Administration is very important; infact, the used language is complex and that the knowledge changes rapidly because there are law changes atthe national and local level. Clearly, in this complex and dynamic situation in order to guaranteecollaboration between several function units, it is important to have a knowledge base that simplifies aconcept and the internal procedures in the public administration.Phase 2: Management involvement. The main role of the management is to apply the guidelines and theplans defined by the top management in order to foresee the internal goal and to contribute to theachievement of the company’s goal. The innovation in the E2.0 vision must start from the involvement of themanagement. In order to obtain the results, the management must manage people and resources and mustmanage problems and exceptions thank to the cooperation and collaboration with other employees. In thisview, the creation of communities oriented to the management answer to the requirement of improves thequality of the relation between people. he communities allow to create a shared knowledge base aboutcompany’s problems and their solution. Furthermore, the use of democratic tools such as blog, forum allowsto the employees to recognize the manager’s leadership. Clearly, if the manager is part of the community andhe/she understands the real benefit of that community, he/she understands the risks and benefit and he/she isready to address the change.Phase 3:Definition of the user profile. This phase is the key point in the company and <strong>do</strong> not requireimportant changes in the organization but only a change of thinking with the introduction of the E2.0paradigm based on the centrality of the people on their experience and knowledge. The definition of the userprofile is an activity that is: (i) centralized with the office that has the base information about the employeesuch as the role of the employee, the responsibility and so on; (ii) distributed where employees update itsown profile with its expertise, its professional experience and other information both personal andprofessional that is useful for the other employees. In the future, thanks to the profile available, it will bepossible to use these information in order to enhance the performance of the knowledge base; there will bethe possibility of enhance the index of the contents considering the profile of who add the content, and it willbe possible to have a search results considering the information about the profile in order to sharpen thesearch.Phase 4: Management of the governance 2.0. The a<strong>do</strong>ption of enterprise 2.0 must take in care themutual and strictly relationship between the organization structure, the tools and the information system.Thus, it is fundamental to understand the potential virtuous circles that must be proper managed to obtain allthe expected advantages. The first relationship is between the organization structure and the new Web2.0tools. In particular, the organization change improves and promotes the effective use of the collaborationtools that contribute to spread and to consolidate the new organization structure. The second relationshipbetween the applications and the information system concerns about the capability of the E2.0 tools to sprea<strong>do</strong>pen, collaborative and decisional processes suitable to the different needs of the corporate lifestyle. Thisaspect draws the a<strong>do</strong>ption of flexible information systems oriented to people, thus allowing the effectivediffusion of the collaborative tools and applications compliant with the security and performance aspects.Finally, concerning the organizational maturity of the company and the diffusion of the Enterprise 2.0, thebest governance policy is to manage an infrastructure able to improve the collaboration allowing to coexistwith situations in which the user is supported by the ICT role and others in which the ICT managementpromotes the users to manage their autonomy in an effective and mature way through the introduction ofnew collaborative tools and a proper training.Phase 5: A<strong>do</strong>ption of institutional communities. The main goal of this phase is to prompt theemployees to use the community tools to participate to the enterprise activities. The clearness and the accessto the enterprise information are implemented in this phase. The needed organizational changes are related tothe ability of the management to make the use of the community (realized through a blog, forum,..) ademocracy task in which the employees can free to express their opinion without to hit in explicit or implicitdisciplinary measures.316
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010Phase 6: A<strong>do</strong>ption of vertical collaborative tools. After that the management is become aware of theuse of the collaboration and that employees are changed their way to interact with the enterprise, the maingoal of this phase is to introduce the collaborative tools in the business process of the specific sectors of theorganization. The use of these tools can cause great vantage such as to reduce the time-to-market, to improvethe effectiveness and efficiency of the process sharing the knowledge inside the specific organization unit. Inthis case, the process must be not structured in a procedural workflow and must include in its nature somecollaborative aspects. A good example of this kind of process is the “Project Management” process. The taskthat is executed by the Project Manager and by the team could be considerably improved with a definedeconomical benefit through the use of collaborative tools: the Blog can become the main communication toolinside the team members and between different teams; the forum is, instead, the main source of knowledge ofthe project; the possibility of be authors of contents and the advanced <strong>do</strong>cument management (using Tag)could be the main tools to create the project <strong>do</strong>cumentation.Phase 7: People Knowledge Engineering. Until now, the gradualness of the a<strong>do</strong>ption process has thegoal is to make aware all the employees of a new way of working of cooperate. Furthermore, these phasesare related to not structured tasks or tasks that are more difficult to be structured that could have a bigadvantage using collaborative tools. Now, the main goal of this phase is to introduce the collaborationaspects in the processes that are governed by a rigid procedural workflow. Even if, the introduction ofWeb2.0 tool changes the business process, it <strong>do</strong>es not think proper to speak about “reengineering of thebusiness processes”, but we deal with “the people knowledge engineering” (PKE). In this phase, the usedapproach is based on the innovative and collaborative a<strong>do</strong>ption of the principles defined by Hammer[Hammer, 1990 ][Hammer, 1993] in his theory about the Business Process Reengineering. For example, theHammer principle to “Link parallel line of activity instead of integrating results” is the essence of thecollaboration. The activities executed by several offices and related to the same object must be executedconsidering the collaboration aspects and implemented using the web2.0 tools. The <strong>do</strong>cument managementsystem allows to work at the same time on the same set of <strong>do</strong>cuments.Phase 8: the future of the information system. This last phase is the final goal that each organizationshould aim in the future. In the previous phase, we have described the innovation on the existing system;however, a complete change of working procedure could be essential considering also the continuouschanges of the economic and social contexts. Thus, if the context requires that a new information systemmust be projected, the reference architectures must include the model <strong>Software</strong>-As-Service, thedematerialization and virtualization of the infrastructure through the cloud computing technologies. In thiscase, a full decomposition of the business processes will be required while other tools will manage the“orchestration” of the collaborative environments. For this reasons the new information system (namedinformation system 2.0) must be flexible and collaborative and able to adapt itself according to the marketchanges and the organization needs.4. CONCLUSIONToday, there are many organizations that declare to a<strong>do</strong>pt an Enterprise 2.0 model, but they have simplyadded in their business process tools like forum, wiki, chat. n this context these tools are used in an improperway and, above all, the employees’ know-how <strong>do</strong>es not enter in the knowledge of the enterprise that isstrictly linked to the old information system that manages data and not knowledge. Instead, there are manycompanies that need a more flexible organization model. These companies have business processes suitableto use collaboration, but they <strong>do</strong> not have a guideline that can drive themselves to an Enterprise 2.0 model ina gradual way and compliant with their organization structures.This paper describes a new process to introduce the Enterprise2.0 model into an organization. Thisprocess involves all the company sectors and roles (from the employee to the manager) and the transversaland vertical processes. It is clear that the importance of the innovation of the Enterprise2.0 <strong>do</strong>es not allow tomodel an unique process valid for all the type of organization because the E2.0 model must be adapted to thespecific features of the company. For these reasons, reasons, the reported process must be understood as aguideline that describes the metho<strong>do</strong>logical steps that an organization must mandatory <strong>do</strong> to reduce the riskof E2.0 a<strong>do</strong>ption such as a lack of governance. From our point of view, to gain the maximum benefits of theE2.0 model it is necessary to adjust the business process in order to introduce the collaboration aspects. In317
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISthis direction, our research will be developed. We think to have two steps in the process change: the first hasthe goal to introduce into the process the Web2.0 tools in order to improve and change gradually theemployee tasks; the second using these new tools, the business process must be decomposed in order to bemore flexible delegating the employees to execute correctly the tasks using their knowledge (that issupported by the entire information system 2.0).ACKNOWLEDGMENTWe want to thank the Links Management & Technology S.p.A. of Lecce for the support and the possibility totest our approach in a research project funded by Apulia Region.REFERENCESChwelos, P., Benbasat, I., and Dexter, A. S, 2000. Empirical Test of an EDI A<strong>do</strong>ption Model. Information SystemsResearch.Duncan, N. L., 2009. The invisible weapon: A study of Information Technology Infrastructure as a Strategic Resource Inthe Insurance Industry. Retrived 3/01/09 World Wide Web http://0-proquest.umi.com.millenium.itesm.mx:80/pqdweb?did=741213161&sid=2&Fmt=2&clientId=23693&RQT=309&VName=PQD.The Economist, 2007. Serious business Web 2.0 goes Corporate. A report from the Economist Intelligence Unit.Edison, S. W. and Geissler, G. L., 2000. Measuring attitudes Towards General Technology: Antecedents, Hypotheses andScale Development. Journal of Targeting, Measurement and Analysis for Marketing. Vol 12, 2..Frappaolo, C., and Keldsen, D., 2008. Enterprise 2.0: Agile, Emergent & Integrated. MarketIQ Intelligence Quarterly(aiim).Frappaolo C., Keldsen D. and Scrupski S., 2009. The State of Enterpise 2.0 A<strong>do</strong>ption Q4 2009. The 2.0 A<strong>do</strong>ptionCouncil, pp. 10.Hammer M., 1990. Reengineering work: <strong>do</strong>n’t automate, obliterate. Harvard Business Review.Hammer M., 1993. Reengineering the corporation: a manifesto for Business Revolution. Harper Business, New York.Holt, D. T., Bartczak, S. E., Clark, S. W., and Trent, M. R., 2007. The development of an instrument to measurereadiness for knowledge management. Knowledge Management Research & Practice. pp. 75- 92.Lazar, I., 2007. Creating Enterprise 2.0 from Web 2.0. Business Communications Review. Vol 37, No. 8.Lin, C.-H., and Peng, C.-H., 2005. The Cultural Dimension of Technology Readiness on Customer Value Chain inTechnology Readiness on Costumer Value Chain in Technology-Based Service Encounters. Journal of AmericanAcademy of Business. Vol. 7, No. 1. pp. 176-189.Massey, A. P., Khatri, V., and Montoya-Weiss, M. M, 2007. Usability of Online Services: The Role of TechnologyReadiness and Context. Decision Sciences. Vol. 38, No. 2, pp. 277-289.McAfee, A. P., 2006. Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration. MITSloan management review. Vol. 47, No3, pp. 21-28.Newman, A. C., and Thomas, J.G., 2009. Enterprise 2.0 Implementation. New York, USA: McGraw Hill.Parasuraman, A., 2000. Technology Readiness Index (TRI): A Multiple-item Scale to Measure Readiness to EmbraceNew Technologies. Journal of Service Research. pp. 307-321.Premkumar, G. and Ramamurthy, K., 1995. The Role of Interorganizational and Organizational Factors on the DecisionMode for A<strong>do</strong>ption of Interorganizational Systems. Decision Sciences. Vol 26, No.3, pp. 303-306.Richey, G. R., Daugherty, P. J., and Roath, A. S., 2007. Firm Technological Readiness and Complementarity:Capabilities Impacting Logistics Service Competency and Performance. Journal of Business Logistics. Vol. 28, No.1.318
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010RAPID DEVELOPMENT OF SERVICE-BASEDINTERACTIVE APPLICATIONS USING SERVICEANNOTATIONSMarius Feldmann, Felix Martens, Georg Berndt, Josef Spillner and Alexander SchillChair of Computer NetworksTechnische Universität DresdenDresden, GermanyABSTRACTThis paper presents an innovative development approach for creating Service-based interactive applications. Incomparison to further existing approaches enabling the creation of this type of applications our approach fully buildsupon the concept of Service annotations. Besides presenting the general idea behind our approach, an overview of aspecific tool is given, enabling the rapid development of Service-based interactive applications.KEYWORDSWeb Services, Service annotations, interactive applications, development metho<strong>do</strong>logy1. INTRODUCTIONNowadays, Web Services are one of the most important means for developing distributed applications. Manytools for their creation, deployment and runtime management have been produced and were introduced intovarious software development environments such as NetBeans or Eclipse. Due to their characteristics, WebServices are a promising tool for simplifying the development of interactive applications. By using functionalinterface descriptions as a starting-point, a basic form-based UI can be derived easily by applying aninference mechanism that analyzes available Service operations and their parameters and creates appropriateinput and output views based on the schema information (Spillner 2007). It is evident that the mechanismleads to very simple user interfaces only. Particularly in times of "Web 2.0" applications with dynamic andreactive UIs offering various support functionalities such as direct input validation or suggestion capabilities,this basic approach <strong>do</strong>es not lead to satisfying results. For improving the results of the automatic generationmechanism, additional information is necessary which can be attached to functional interface descriptions inthe form of Service annotations. In this paper, an approach is presented for using Service annotations notonly for expressing aspects reusable in various application contexts but additionally for describing navigationand data flows within interactive applications. By this, Service annotations are used as the only necessarydesign-time model for creating Service-based interactive applications thus making additional models forapplication representation unnecessary. This work-in-progress paper extends the concept of Serviceannotations to describe application-specific aspects and introduces an authoring tool enabling the rapiddevelopment of Service-based interactive applications. For full understanding the content of this paper, thework presented in (Janeiro et al. 2009) should be present to the reader.2. BACKGROUNDThe idea of Service annotations for describing user interface related aspects has been introduced in (Kassoffet al. 2003) and has initially been exclusively used for the ad-hoc generation of user interfaces for single WebServices. The most enhanced approach addressing this type of annotation exploration is the Dynvocationproject (Spillner 2008). Since the realization of the project ServFace between the years 2008 and 2010,319
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISannotations have been used additionally for simplifying the development process of Service-based interactiveapplications. Within the context of the FP7 project ServFace 1 , two application development approaches havebeen specified (Paternò 2010, Feldmann 2009) which explore Service annotations for reducing theinformation which has to be specified by an application developer during the design-time. Both approachesapply the annotation model described in (Janeiro et al. 2009). Just as previous annotation models, this modelfocuses exclusively on expressing recurring aspects of the user interface which can be reused in differentapplications contexts. The approach described in (Paternò 2010) goes beyond the creation of Service-basedapplications and enables arbitrary application classes, thus making the application development processcomplex. Several modeling and transformation steps have to be realized in order to create a final userinterface for accessing Web Services. In comparison, the approach described in (Feldmann 2009) focuses onpurely Service-based interactive applications. It enables a rapid development of this class of applications buthas got several shortcomings which are eliminated by our results. First of all, the approach is built upon anadditional design-time model for representing navigation and data flows between different Service frontends.This model binds the created application to a specific platform, thus making the transformation of anapplication developed once to several platforms difficult. Besides, even minor variations between differentapplications lead to the instantiation of completely separated models. Furthermore, the design-time tool usedwithin the approach targets end users without any programming skills which results in a simplification of thetool’s user interface abstracting from many technical aspects. Especially data type information is lost withinthe visual representation of the tool which is not desired in the case of developers with programming skillsand a basic technological understanding of the area of Web Services.On one hand, the goal of our research is to extend the concept of annotations for representing applicationspecificaspects instead of introducing an additional model. On the other hand, an authoring tool is developedwhich <strong>do</strong>es not abstract from the underlying technology, providing more transparency for a developer.3. EXTENDED SERVICE ANNOTATIONSIt is obvious that the intention of Service annotations is changed by using them as means for representingdeveloped Service-based interactive applications. Instead of just representing recurring, applicationindependent information used in different application contexts, they become application dependent. As aresult, the disadvantages of an additional model disappear. The applied model is platform independent an<strong>do</strong>nly those aspects have to be modeled which differ from the result of an automatic user interface inferenceapproach. Having a look at platform independent aspects, the models applied within the existing design-timeapproaches hold three types of information. Firstly, they specify which operations are used within the contextof the developed application, secondly, they specify the navigation flows between different operations and,thirdly, they point out the data flows connected to these navigation flows. As a consequence, the intendedService annotations have to be able to describe at least these three aspects. During our work, annotationshave been developed which fulfil this requirement. These annotations have been designed as an extension ofthe annotation model developed within the ServFace project. Thus we can apply the already existingannotations defined by this model and additionally the extended Service annotations without using differentannotation models.Figure 1 shows one of the annotations defined as an extension of the ServFace annotation model (theinterface DeltaAnnotation extends the class Annotation displayed in Figure 2 of (Janeiro et al. 2009)). Theannotation Application enables the specification of an application based on Web Service operations. Alloperations which are used within the interactive application are referenced by this annotation (via thereferences treatedOperations). Furthermore, those operations building the starting points of the navigationflow are pointed out (using the reference initialOperations). As other annotations as well, the introducedannotation can be bound to a specific language and to a specific platform. As a consequence, variations ofapplications <strong>do</strong> not lead to a complete reformulation of the developed application model but only to theintroduction of single alternative annotations.1 http://www.servface.org320
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010Figure 1. One of the developed annotations enabling the specification of an interactive applicationFor describing the navigation and data flows within a Service-based interactive application, an additionalannotation has been developed. It connects two operations, one of them forming the source, the second oneforming the target of the navigation step. Different types of data flows between the output of the sourceoperation and the input of the target operation can be associated with the specified navigation step.4. AUTHORING ENVIRONMENTFor creating and distributing instances of the extended Service annotation model, an authoring tool has beenimplemented 2 (based on Eclipse RCP and the Graphical Editing Framework 2.5). The authoring process isbased on three steps. Initially, a Web Service for which an interactive application should be created isimported into the tool by specifying the URI referencing its functional interface description (WSDL<strong>do</strong>cument). The operations provided by the Service with their input and output parameters are presented in aspecific view of the authoring tool subsequently (display in Figure 2 on the left side).Figure 2. View of the authoring tool visualizing an overview of navigation and data flowsOperations which should be part of the intended interactive application can be imported in a second stepto one of two modeling views. One of these views provides an overview of the already imported operationsand of the navigation links between them (displayed in Figure 2 on the right side). These navigation links andpotentially connected data flows between operations are specified using a further view (displayed in Figure3) in a third step of the modeling metho<strong>do</strong>logy. In this view, two operations are visualized besides each other.On this view so called navigation choices can be introduced resulting in a navigation link from the operation2 http://www.interactivecomponents.org/321
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISdisplayed on the left side to the operation displayed on the right side. Furthermore, the operation visualizationshows the available input and output parameters of the operations and their data type information, thusenabling the definition of data relations between the operations resulting in data flows during applicationexecution. During the authoring process, further Services may be imported and their operations can beconnected to the already existing navigation flow. After the authoring process is finished, the result isserialized and can be transferred to various platform-specific executable applications. Currently, generatorsfor the platforms Android and for regular Web applications have been implemented. First applied user testshave proven that the expressiveness of our approach is superior to the one presented in (Feldmann 2009).Figure 3.View of the authoring tool for defining navigation and data flows5. CONCLUSION AND OUTLOOKThis paper presents an overview of a novel approach for developing Service-based interactive applications.The central contributions of the paper are a coarse-grained introduction of, firstly, an extension of an existingannotation model and of, secondly, an authoring tool enabling the rapid development of Service-basedinteractive applications. In future work we will focus on extending the set of available annotations, thusimproving the expressiveness of the modeling approach. Furthermore, an extensive user study is planned inorder to evaluate the usability of the tool. Besides this work on the design-time, the set of available platformmappings for generating executable platform specific applications from the instantiated extended annotationmodel will be extended.REFERENCESMarius Feldmann, e, 2009. Overview of an End User enabled Model-driven Development Approach for InteractiveApplications based on Annotated Services. 4th Workshop on Emerging Web Services Technology, ACM InternationalConference Proceeding SeriesJordan Janeiro, André Preussner, Thomas Springer, Alexander Schill, Matthias Wauer, 2009. Improving theDevelopment of Service-Based Applications through Service Annotations. IADIS <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2009Michael Kassoff, Daishi Kato, Waqar Mohsin, 2003. Creating GUIs for Web Services. IEEE <strong>Internet</strong> Computing, vol. 7,no. 5, pp. 66-73Fabio Paternò, Carmen Santoro, Lucio Davide Spano, 2010. Exploiting Web Service Annotations in Model-based UserInterface Development. Proceedings of Engineering Interactive Computing Systems 2010. Berlin, Germany.Josef Spillner, Alexander Schill, 2007. Analysis on Inference Mechanism. Proceedings of XML Tage 2007. Berlin,Germany, pp. 113-124Spillner, J. et al., 2008. Ad-hoc usage of Web Services with Dynvoker. In proceedings of ServiceWave 2008, LNCS 5377.Madrid, Spain, pp. 208–219322
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010SMART UBIQUITOUS APPLICATION DELIVERY BASEDON USABILITY RULESDieter Blomme, Heiko Desruelle, Frank Gielen and Filip De TurckGhent University – IBBT - Dept. of Information Technology – IBCN, Ghent BelgiumABSTRACTToday there is a growing diversity in devices that support software applications in sectors such as mobile, automotive andhome entertainment systems. Developing and testing an application for each existing and future device is inefficient andnot scalable. We state that the web with its standardized technologies and powerful components will be the convergedplatform for ubiquitous application delivery. In this paper we propose a novel approach to ubiquitous application deliveryusing usability rules that combine the delivery context and web application semantics. We give an overview of theparameters that need to be taken into account when delivering applications ubiquitously.KEYWORDSUbiquitous, mobile, Semantic Web1. INTRODUCTIONMobile is predicted to be the seventh mass medium (Ahonen 2008). Automotive devices and homeentertainment systems also start to have internet access capabilities. The anytime/anywhere-paradigmenvisioned at the start of the internet is finally becoming a reality due to the ubiquitous nature of internetenabled devices, cloud computing and web service mash-ups.However, it is not efficient to redesign, develop and test an application for each type of existing andfuture device that can access cloud applications. The web will be the platform to support applicationdevelopment for ubiquitous devices. The combination of standardized technologies such as HTML, CSS andJavascript with powerful rendering and interpreter components ported to all these devices will enable trueconvergence. But even with the standardized nature of web technologies, the device and browser diversity onthe market today make it almost impossible to create web applications that are optimized for every device.On the other hand, a lot of these devices have additional capabilities that allow them to provide extensivecontext information. On device sensors such as GPS, motion sensor, camera, microphone, etc. allow a webapplication to be tailored not only to the target device, but also to the user using the web application.The goal of our research is to provide a smart ubiquitous application delivery platform from the cloud toa broad range of devices in a seamless manner.1.1 Research ChallengeIn order to achieve our goal, we need to tackle a number of issues and challenges.− Device diversity entails a broad range of presentation and interaction capabilities. The applicationshould adapt it's look-and-feel and interaction design to match these capabilities.− Ubiquitous devices, especially mobile phones, have the possibility to capture extensive contextinformation. The behaviour of the application has to be changed to fit the delivery context.− The behaviour of the application can also be augmented by taking the additional capabilities of thedevice, such as the GPS for location-aware mashups, into account.323
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADIS1.2 Proposed MethodWe propose an approach that guarantees an optimal ubiquitous application delivery based on the followingprinciples:Context detection Ubiquitous context identification goes beyond the traditional device detection whichfocuses on hardware parameters like screen size. To provide the user with an optimal experience, detection ofsoftware capabilities such as support for web technologies and available API's and detection of user settingssuch as security profiles are needed.Semantic analysis Previous efforts to automatically transform content for the mobile internet have hadlittle success because they are only looking at the format and the structure of content. We base ourapplication delivery on a semantic analysis of the web application. This will allow reasoning and dynamicapplication delivery that matches the delivery context of the device and user.Usability The key success factor for ubiquitous web application is usability. We use a rule based systemto match the semantic data from the application with the usability guidelines that match the delivery context.Transformations for web applications can be divided in two categories: object-level and structure-leveltransformations. The first type handles individual blocks in the application with a specific purpose on a page.Examples are a menu, a login form and input fields. The second type are transformations that redefine thestructure of a web application. This can be splitting out content over multiple pages, rearranging the contenton an individual page, rearranging table cells to fit the table to the width of the screen or changing a processflow.Figure 1. The proposed method.2. STATE OF THE ARTThis section gives an overview of prior research in our <strong>do</strong>main on which our work will build.Semantic page analysis Some works try to divide a page in segments based on their semanticrelationships (Xiang, P. 2006; Baluja, S. 2006). By using the structured data from the web page and visualhints extracted from a rendered version of the page, it is divided into it's structural blocks.Context delivery Mobile systems offer large possibilities for context-aware applications. By usingmicroformats, small object-level transformations can be made to adapt community dependent data (e.g. dates,addresses) to the local semantics (Mrissa, M. et al. 2008). The Web 2.0 trend of mashups can be extended tocreating context-aware mashups targeted to mobile devices (Brodt, A. et al. 2008). Personalization in generalweb-based information systems (Tvarozek, M. et al. 2007) can also be used and extended to take a mobiledevice's added capabilities into account.Usability Vigo, M. et al. 2008 provide a method to evaluate web pages adapted for mobile, using theMobileOK tests from the W3C as a basis. These tests are extended to take the device characteristics intoaccount. Device features are retrieved from heterogeneous repositories.3. SEMANTICS FOR (X)HTMLAn optimal transformation of a web application can only be obtained when the source HTML file containsunambiguous, machine-interpretable semantic information about both the object and structure level. At thepresent, there are three methods to annotate or enhance an HTML page, that are both standardized (or are in324
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010the process of standardization) and are already being used in existing web applications: Microformats, RDFaan HTML 5. Based on these methods, we develop a fourth, novel approach for our system.Microformats Microformats are tiny pieces of information that are injected into (X)HTML code by useof the class, rev and rel attributes. This way it promotes data reuse while reusing existing technologies. It isthe most popular way to provide semantic annotations on a web page. Web 2.0 sites such as Twitter, Flickr,LinkedIn and Yahoo have already a<strong>do</strong>pted microformats.Microformats are developed according to an open standard called the microformat specifications (Allsop,J. 2007; Khare, R. 2006). The invention of custom microformats outside of the community is discouraged,meaning a strict but limited vocabulary is available. This makes it easy to parse, but limits the extendibility interms of our problem.RDFa RDFa (Adida, B. et al. 2008a; Adida, B. et al. 2008b) is a modular extension of XHTML base<strong>do</strong>n RDF, developed and proposed by the W3C. It allows a set of XML attributes to carry metadata aboutvalues in the human-readable text of a HTML page. Because it uses XML specific properties, such asnamespaces, it is unusable for the non-XML compliant HTML standard. RDFa is based on external <strong>do</strong>mainvocabularies and thus promotes data reuse. It is still in an early a<strong>do</strong>ption phase, but the number of RDFaenabled websites will rise quickly with the integration in the new versions of popular content managementsystems such as Drupal.Unlike microformats, RDFa provides publisher independence and self containment. It allows applicationdeveloper to develop and publish their own vocabularies, extend others and let a vocabulary evolve over timewhile still allowing maximum interoperability. The HTML and RDFa data are also separated.HTML5 with microdata HTML 5 is a standard in development by the W3C and is intended to be thesuccessor for both HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.0. It aims to reduce the need for plug-in based RIAtechnologies such as Flash, Silverlight and JavaFX, indirectly improving the possibility to search and adaptrich internet applications.It provides semantics, by replacing certain generic block and inline elements with new semanticallyimproved tags. This will provide extended information about the structure of a web application, allowing animproved structure-level adaptation. Because the HTML5 standard is work in progress and is now in last callphase, browser support is still limited and the number of HTML 5 sites is small. Microdata (Anonymous2010) is a feature of HTML5 that provides another way to embed semantic annotations.Meaningful class attributes Besides microformats, the aforementioned technologies <strong>do</strong>n't enjoy awidespread use at this moment. Microformats itself only provides a limited and strict vocabulary. This givesus a very limited data set for testing. Therefore we made the choice to develop a fourth approach for semanticannotations. A lot of sites already provide meaningful class attributes to indicate semantic properties of thecontent as a way to separate content from presentation. By using CSS presentation can be associated tocontent based on semantics.This approach fulfills our requirements. By developing a custom vocabulary, extensibility is ensured.Reusing the existing class attributes in sites promotes data reuse. A lot of sites already have meaningful classattributes, so widespread use is provided. The key quality requirement performance can also be ensured,because a lot of high performance (X)HTML and CSS parsers already exist.4. DEVICE CATEGORIZATIONA user only perceives an application as usable when the interaction is smooth and <strong>do</strong>esn't providefrustrations. This makes it important to be able to categorize devices according to their interactionmechanisms. This chapter gives an overview of the most important interaction methods.− The oldest type of interactive devices have a limited keypad and a set of directional buttons. In mobile,these devices are the so-called feature phones, mostly associated with the 2G GSM networks. A similarapparatus for page traversal is the remote control of an internet-enabled TV-set.− Some devices use a trackball-based system to support interaction. This results in more degrees offree<strong>do</strong>m for page traversal. This navigation method can be found on a lot of blackberry phones and controlsticks on most game consoles.− Since the introduction of the iPhone, the era of touch phones has begun. Touch phones can be dividedin two categories: stylus and finger based touch interaction. Some automotive interfaces also provide a finger325
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISbased touch interaction. Finger based interaction requires a completely different interface than a regulardesktop website. At present day, most types of smartphones (iPhone, Android, WebOS, Symbian 3 , etc.) evenprovide multitouch capabilities.− The next steps in interaction method are multimodal interfaces. The device sensors and actuators can beused as additional input and output mechanisms, e.g. the camera to take a picture of a business card forcontact information.5. USABILITY RULESThe quality attributes that are deemed most important are usability, performance and modifiability. Based onthis, the design of our top level architecture will be based on a rule based system to determine the adaptationprocess for a specific delivery context. The rule-base is extensible, providing the modifiability of thetransformation pipeline.We focus our efforts on object-level transformations. Based on the use cases from the previous section,we can define two types of transformations:Base level transformations that adapt the HTML code to the target runtime. This is needed e.g. for thetransformation of the menu to either a selection box or a list.Progressive enhancement transformations that add CSS and/or javascript to the web application,optimizing it for the target delivery context. For example, javascript can be used to make the menu listexpandable.The input parameters for both transformations are (1) the semantic annotations for the object and (2) thedelivery context parameters. A set of rules that are expressed as formal logic statements will select theappropriate usability rule.The usability of the application will be guaranteed by creating a correct and complete set of rules. Rulebased systems have a negative impact on performance due to a slow selection process. However, by usingknown variables and a conflict resolution strategy combined with the RETE algorithm, the performance ofthe selection engine can be significantly improved .Figure 2 gives an example in pseu<strong>do</strong>code that indicates the transformation of a menu to a selection box ifthe browser <strong>do</strong>es not support XHTML and only provides limited CSS2 support.( object.class.contains(menu)AND !browser.htmlsupport.contains(XHTML)AND !browser.csssupport(CSS2 FULL) )=>apply(transformation.menuToSelectionBox)Figure 2. Usability rule: transformation of a menu to selection box.The second example (see Fig. 3) shows the addition of a stylesheet that makes sure all pointer elementson a finger touch based device have a minimum size.Device.interaction.contains(Touch)=>attach(stylesheet.touch)Figure 3. Usability rule: making the interface touch friendly.6. USE CASEOne important use case was selected to provide an overview of progressive enhancements techniques forubiquitous application delivery: a form which is an interaction object.Desktop forms are designed for interaction methods based on a keyboard and mouse with field thatrequire text input. On devices with limited input capabilities, filling out the same forms will be timeconsumingand frustrating.Two basic solutions can be used individually or combined, based on the type of device. One solutionsplits the form in multiple pages. Form data should be stored in between browsing sessions, because it is326
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010likely a user only fills out part of these pages during a short browsing session and wishes to continue the formentry at a later time.Another solution is to hide the optional fields from the view. On low-end devices these fields can be puton optional, separate pages. On middle- and high-end devices this can be <strong>do</strong>ne using javascript to hide theoptional fields from view, while still allowing the user to show them.Automatic form-filling can be used as a layer on top of the previous solution. Ajax can be used to provideautocompletion, e.g. to show possible values for the input field. The added capabilities of some devices alsoallows automatic form-filling for certain types of fields. Possible values for address fields can be shownbased on context information such as the user's current location or his home address.Automotive systems should limit user interaction, so the required input <strong>do</strong>es not distract the driver. Homeentertainment systems have a very limited typing interface, usually only a remote control with a keypad anddirectional buttons. The interaction for these devices can be optimized by displaying only the most basicform, e.g. one with only drop<strong>do</strong>wn boxes.7. CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORKIn this paper, we have developed a method for smart ubiquitous application delivery. Our approach is base<strong>do</strong>n context detection that goes beyond the traditional device detection and a semantic analysis of the webapplication. Our method is based on a rule based system to determine the adaptation process for a specificdelivery context. The rules are expressed as formal logic statements composed using known variables toincrease the performance of the selection process.Future research will include several directions. First, we will extend the rule base of our system withadditional object-level and structure-level transformations. A next step is the development of the semanticanalyzer for further automation of the ubiquitous delivery process. We will also investigate techniques thatallow the adaptation of application logic to the delivery context.REFERENCESAdida, B., Commons, C. 2008a. Rdfa in xhtml: Syntax and processing. [Online] Availablefrom:Adida, B., Birbeck, M. 2008b. Rdfa primer [Online] Available from: Ahonen, T., 2008. Mobile As 7th of the Mass Media: Cellphone, Cameraphone, Iphone, Smartphone. Futuretext, Lon<strong>do</strong>n,UKAnonymous. 2010. Microdata [Online] Available from: Baluja, S., 2006, Browsing on small screens: recasting web-page segmentation into an eficiente machine learningframework. Proceedings of the 15th international conference on World Wide Web. Edinburgh, Scotland, pp. 33-42Brodt, A., Nicklas, D., Sathish, S., Mitschang, B., 2008. Context-aware mashups for mobile devices. Lecture Notes inComputer Science, Vol. 5175, pp. 280-291Fling, B., 2009. Mobile Design and Development. O’Reilly Media, Sebastopol, USAKhare, R., 2006. Microformats: the next (small) thing on the semantic web? IEEE <strong>Internet</strong> Computing, Vol. 10, No. 1,pp. 68-75Mrissa, M., Al-Jabari, M., Thiran, P., 2008, Using microformats to personalize web experience. Proceedings of the 7thInternational Workshop on Web-Oriented <strong>Software</strong> Technologies. New York, USA, pp. 57-62Tvarozek, M., Barla, M., Bieliková, M., 2007. Personalized presentation in web-based information systems. LectureNotes in Computer Science, Vol. 4362, pp. 796-807Vigo, M., Aizpurua, A., Arrue, M., Abascal, J., 2008, Evaluating web accessibility for specific mobile devices.Proceedings of the 2008 international cross-disciplinary conference on Web accessibility, Bejing, China, pp. 65-72Xiang, P., Yang, X., Shi, Y., 2006, Effective page segmentation combining pattern analysis and visual separators forbrowsing on small screens. Proceedings of the 2006 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence,Hong Kong, China, pp. 831-840327
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISGVDSR: A DYNAMIC ROUTING STATEGY FORVEHICULAR AD-HOC NETWORKSMichael Barros * , Anderson Costa * and Reinal<strong>do</strong> Gomes ****Federal Institute of Education, Science and Technology of Paraíba (IFPB)**Systems and Computing Department - Federal University of Campina GrandeABSTRACTRouting in VANETs (Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks) is a developing area due the specific features of these networks. Oneof the challenges is to provide information even that the channel is rapidly modified by the network’s mobility. Mobilityis a notable issue, since it has been faced by the logical part in the network. The network layer needs to ensure thestability of routing without relying on the mechanisms from the physical layer, and routing solutions have to considerdifferent features for communication between different hosts/vehicles considering the constantly changing topology. Thispaper is presents a new routing strategy for VANETs called GVDSR (Generic Vehicular Dynamic Source Routing). Thisstrategy is based on the Routing Architecture for VANET Communications presented in this paper. Experiments wereperformed in different scenarios to evaluate the proposed strategy and the obtained results were compared with AODVand DSDV protocols. These experiments showed the usefulness of the proposed strategy and the results indicate that ourproposal gives markedly better performance on scenarios considered.KEYWORDSRouting, VANETs, Ad-Hoc, Protocol, Architecture.1. INTRODUCTIONThe specific characteristics of the network’s nodes and their communication patterns of VANETs will affectthe routing strategy. The challenge of determine routes for information transport in vehicular networks is acomplex work due the high nodes mobility in the network and instability of wireless links. The routingprotocols for the communication between nodes are classified as: topological, geographical, opportunists anddissemination of information [Alves 2009]. The protocols based in topology found the best path between anyother pair source-destination of the network. Typically, the best path is that offers the lowest cost accordingto the utilized metrics. These protocols can be proactive, reactive or hybrid.Position based routing (or geographical) is capable to provide more scalability in high mobilityenvironments. In this approach, it’s not necessary to keep information about the routes of each node in thenetwork [Gouqing 2008]. This type of routing assumes that the present elements in the network have somelocation system like GPS, as Galileo [Hein 2002].The community research is realized in order to provide a greater diversity of features to these protocols.The developed protocols have the following features: carry large scales in the network on situations with highvehicles density to improve routing [Wang 2007]; support to the intense vehicle mobility, adapts quickly tothe new topologies and enables a greater connection without a possible link breakage [Taleb 2007];adaptation system to the constantly position exchange of nodes in the network [Ali 2009]; passivity [Xue2008] and dynamic [Xi 2008]. Packets sent by proactive protocol have to update their paths database for thepackets routing, in other words, the routing protocol in VANETs has to forward packets reactively.Based on this study, a Routing Architecture for Vehicular Communications was proposed in [Barros2010]. This architecture contains relevant features which a routing protocol for VANET scenarios has toface. The Generic Vehicular Dynamic Source Routing is a new routing strategy for VANETs that followsthis architecture. The GVDSR was implemented in the Network Simulator 2 [NS2 2010], and it wascompared to others protocols for MANET with the objective of functional validation. The results show thecontributions and the advantages for the GVDSR protocol and for the Routing Architecture.328
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010This paper is organized as follows: Section 2 introduces the Routing Architecture; the GVDSR protocol ispresented in Section 3; the simulations are explained in Section 4 and the results in Section 5. The paper isconcluded in Section 6.Figure 1. Routing architecture for vehicularcommunicationsFigure 2. Used protocol on the architecture.2. ROUTING ARCHITETURE FOR VEHICULAR COMMUNICATIONSMany routing protocols for VANETs were studied and based on that were observed that these protocols focusin specifics features and presents limited solutions. Some of the most significant features necessary forVANETs routing protocols:• Be dynamic from the origin. The protocol will be reactive, determining routes on-demand [Xi2008].• Presents a good behavior in small scale situation, like in the streets where they have lower vehiclestraffic; and in large scale, where the vehicles traffic is bigger like found in the avenues [Wang 2007].• Recognizes the networks topology even with the constantly change of nodes position, and <strong>do</strong> therouting without a lot of discarded packets [Ali 2009].• Provides greater time connectivity between vehicles, for the packets routing can be <strong>do</strong>ne. And alsopresents mechanisms for link breakage situations between vehicles [Taleb 2007].To integrate these features in one routing strategy, an architecture was created to enable a new trend ofrouting protocols in VANETs. This new trend has to encompass a majority of VANETs features in amodularized way. The architecture is shown in the Figure 1. The Routing Architectures for VANETSpresents the most significant features of the vehicular communication.3. GENERIC VEHICULAR DYNAMIC SOURCE ROUTING - GVDSRInstantiating the Routing Architecture, a new protocol was developed: The Generic Vehicular DynamicSource Routing (GVDSR). The GVDSR protocol presents all steps from the routing architecture applyingVANETs existing protocols. The selected protocols that compose the GVDSR are shown in Figure 2. Theseprotocols can be replaced in every moment, if there is a new protocol with a new technology. The GVDSRprotocol is an extension of the DSR (Dynamic Source Routing) protocol [Johnson 2004], but it is designedfor Vehicular Communications.329
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADIS4. EXPERIMENTSThe GVDSR was implemented in the Network Simulator 2 (NS2) [NS2 2010]. This simulator was selectedfor the facilities of implementing a new routing protocol, the wide <strong>do</strong>cumentation and tutorials founded in the<strong>Internet</strong> and because the simulations in the network layer is near from the real world.The main objective for implementing the GVDSR is the functional validation of the protocol and thearchitecture. Primary scenarios were chosen for the same reason. The scenarios are shown in Figure 6. Thereare four different scenarios, varying the number of the nodes and their direction. The nodes S and D are thesource and the destination respectively. The I node is the intermediary node which is fixed, like roadsideunits. The S and D nodes move in 36km/h. The scenario c) is the unique on large scale for the distancebetween the final nodes, the other scenarios are also important for the validation of the routing strategy. TheGVDSR protocol was compared with other protocols: AODV (Ad-Hoc On-Demand Distance Vector)[Perkins 2003] and DSDV (Destination Sequenced Distance Vector) [Perkins 1994].FactorTransceiversPropagation ModelAntennasTable 1. Experiments parametersValueIEE 802.11 standardTwo Ray GroundOminidirectionalTable 2. Logic ConfigurationFactorTraffic ProtocolApplication ProtocolConnection TimeValueTCPFTPThe all simulation timeThe metrics for comparison were: Generated Packets, Dropped Packets and Total Throughput. ForVANET scenarios, the nodes needs a connection with a low number of packets discarded and a largethroughput for application, the metrics were chosen by these premises.Figure 3. Used scenarios5. RESULTSThe results in the scenario a), as shown in Fig.4, present the GVDSR protocol adding some extra packets forrouting. This strategy enables a higher discovery of information. The process of information discovery isappropriate for the evaluation of the specific features of VANETs. The number of dropped packets and theTotal Throughput shows the effectiveness of the information discovery strategy. In the scenario b), Fig 5, thenumber of dropped packets for GVDSR is lowers than the others protocols. The Generated Packets for330
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010GVDSR is greater, but it is for the information discovery, that enables the decrease of the dropped packets.The throughput for applications will increase showing that the packet delivery ratio increased too.Figure 4. Results for scenario a)Figure 5. Results for scenario b)Figure 6. Results for scenario b)Figure 7. Results for scenario d)The large scale scenario c), Fig. 6, is the one that shows the advantages of this architecture and theGVDSR. For large scale situation the GVDSR protocol acts greater than the others, improving the packetsdelivery ration with the decrease of packets number. This is ideal for VANETs scenario, with the increase ofthe distance, the networks needs to route information with the less number of packets discarded. For Fig 7,with the scenario d), the performance of the GVDSR protocol stays greater than the others protocols. Thenumber of dropped packets is lower for GVDSR, enabling an increase of the throughput for applicationssince the increase of the vehicles speed.331
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADIS6. CONCLUSIONA new protocol for VANETs was presented in this paper: the GVDSR. This protocol was obtained as aninstance of the Routing Architecture for VANET Communications. The protocol is subdivided in four steps.The steps are integrated in a modularized way for the selected algorithms being upgrade separately. Thealgorithm provides a dynamic source routing with checking the strength of the path link. The GVDSRprovides different treatments for small or large scale situations. To decrease the link breakage the algorithmcalculates a metric called LET, this metric shows the reliability of the link between two nodes.The GVDSR protocol was implemented in the NS2 simulator and compared with two protocols: AODVand DSDV. The results show that the GVDSR adds some packets for the strategy of information discovery.The number of dropped packets is the lowest in four different scenarios. For VANETs, the GVDSR protocolpresents a greater packet delivery ratio and a greater throughput for the nodes. Other metrics need to beanalyzed and evaluations for multimedia traffic are the future work.REFERENCESAlves et al., 2009. Redes Veiculares: Princípios, Aplicações e Desafios. Proceedings of Simpósio <strong>Brasileiro</strong> de Redes deComputa<strong>do</strong>res (SBRC) Minicourse.Gouqing, Z.; Dejun, M.; Zhong, X.; Weili, Y.; Xiaoyan, C., 2008. A survey on the routing schemes of urban VehicularAd Hoc Networks. Proceedings of 27th Chinese Control Conference. pp. 338 - 343.Hein, G.W., Godet, J., Issler, J.L., Martin, J.C.,Erhard, P., Lucas, R. e Pratt, T., 2002. Status of galileo frequency andsignal design. Proceedings of International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of the Institute of NavigationION GPS. pp. 266-277.Wang, W.; Xie, F.; Chatterjee, M., 2007. TOPO: Routing in Large Scale Vehicular Networks. Proceedings of IEEE 66thVehicular Technology Conference. pp. 2106-2110.Taleb, T.; Sakhaee, E.; Jamalipour, A.; Hashimoto,K.; Kato, N.; Nemoto, Y., 2007. A Stable Routing Protocol to SupportITS Services in VANET Networks. In IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology. Volume 56, Issue 6, Part 1, pp.3337-3347.Ali, S.; Bilal, S.M., 2009. An Intelligent Routing protocol for VANETs in city environments. Proceedings of 2ndInternational Conference Computer, Control and Communication. pp. 1-5.Xue, G.; Feng, J.; Li, M., 2008. A Passive Geographical Routing Protocol in VANET. Proceedings of IEEE Asia-PacificServices Computing Conference. pp. 680-685.Xi , Sun; Li, Xia-Miao, 2008. Study of the Feasibility of VANET and its Routing Protocols. Proceedings of 4thInternational Conference on Wireless Communications, Networking and Mobile Computing. pp. 1 - 4.Barros, M.T.A.O.; Costa,A.F.B.F.; GOMES,R.C.M., 2010. Routing in VANETs: propose of a generic algorithm.Proceedings of Wireless Systems International Meeting (WSIM). Campina Grande, Brazil.Ns2 (The Network Simulator), 2010. http://www.isi.edu/nsnam/ns/Johnson D.,Maltz D. e Yin-Chun H., 2004. The dynamic source routing protocol for mobile ad hoc networks(http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-manet-dsr-10.txt). IETF <strong>Internet</strong> Draft.Mo Z., Zhu H.,Makki K., Pissinou N., 2006. MURU: A multi-hop protoccol for urban ad-hoc networks. ProceedingsThird International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitos System: Networking and Services. pp. 169-176.Perkins, C., Belding-Royer, E. e Das, S., 2003. {Ad hoc on-demand distance vector (AODV) routing(http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3561.txt). IETF <strong>Internet</strong> Draft.Perkins, Charle E. and Pravin Bhagwat, 1994. Highly Dynamic Destination-Sequenced Distance-Vector Routing(DSDV) for Mobile Computers.332
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010AN OWL BASED ELECTRONIC HEALTH RECORDSUPPORTING EVIDENCE BASED MEDICINELukas Gerhold*, Hilal Tekoglu**, Markus Dorn*** and Michael Binder**Department of Dermatology, Division of General Dermatology, Medical University of Vienna**Coordinating Center for Clinical Trials, Medical University of Vienna***Faculty of Informatics, Technical University of ViennaABSTRACTAppling evidence based medicine (EBM) and good clinical practice (GCP) in daily practice enhance the quality of healthcare enormously. Checklists and guidelines help reducing medical malpractice significantly. A way to use checklists andguidelines is to integrate this information into medical <strong>do</strong>cumentation. Although some hospital information systemsalready support physicians with interactive IT support the use of EBM, structured, standardized electronic medical<strong>do</strong>cumentation is still very limited. Electronic health records facilitate medical <strong>do</strong>cumentation.Electronic health records are designed for exchanging patient information between institutions and systems. The aim ofthis work is to show a way how electronic health records can be embedded into a comprehensive medical <strong>do</strong>cumentationfor providing relations between patient information and decision- or treatment processes.Ambitious attempts have been <strong>do</strong>ne defining structures and models for electronic health records (EHR) facilitatingsemantic interoperability between electronic health records - and electronic patient record systems. One of them is theISO 13606 EHR communication standard.The Web Ontology Language (OWL) was developed for defining and structuring data semantically. OWL enables higherlevels of abstraction and expressiveness for defining models than relational database schemata can. Furthermore we useda transformation of the ISO 13606-archetype model to OWL. We introduce an ontology driven application model. Theontology driven application model describes how to derive functionality from ontology knowledge dynamically andusing it for application behavior. Furthermore we introduce an application layout that implements the ontology drivenapplication model. We realized a generic implementation being compliant with the ISO 13606 EHR communicationstandard, to capture standardized electronic health records.This work demonstrates how to use ontologies for developing a semantic web application, and finally proves theintroduced models and methods through presenting a prototype.KEYWORDSSemantic interoperability, electronic health records, OWL1. INTRODUCTIONEvidence based medicine (EBM) aims to provide the best available evidence for medical decision makinggained from scientific methods (Timmermans and Mauck 2005). It aims to assess the strength of evidence ofthe benefits and risks of treatments and diagnostic tests (Elstein 2004). A systematic way to apply EBM inpractice is by defining guidelines and checklists which represent the medical knowledge. Through theserepresentations physicians are guided through the decision or treatment process. Although applying EBM isquite common during the medical treatment and decision processes, there is hardly any standardised ITsupport.In the past several years many approaches have been appeared to support semantic interoperability for thecommunication of medical patient records (MPR) and electronic health records (EHR). Many complexcomputer models were developed, like HL7v.3 Reference Information Model (HL7), ISO 13606Communication Standard (ISO 2008) or openEHR (Beale 2000). Their aim is to structure medicalinformation formally, unambiguously and standardized to facilitate the exchange of health informationbetween diverse systems behind the scenes. Even more, as medical research advances, the information needsincrease or change; one major benefit of these standards is to easily adapt to new medical information333
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISwithout losing the possibility of retrieving captured information. Until now these benefits stay in thebackground as most approaches tend to fit these models into legacy systems instead of rethinking legacydevelopments.These standards should be used to facilitate the EBM information support for health care participants(HCP) during their daily practice. The models enable a vast range of interactive IT support for HCP by usingthe benefits of semantic interoperability. We are going to show how this works through introducing anontology driven application model (ODAM). Furthermore we will use this approach to show an interactive ITsupport for EBM and electronic <strong>do</strong>cumentation.2. METHODS AND STANDARDS2.1 ISO 13606 – EHR Communication StandardISO 13606 facilitates structuring, communicating and interpreting medical information. The ISO defines anEHR for integrated care as: “a repository of information regarding the health status of a subject of care incomputer processable form, stored and transmitted securely, and accessible by multiple authorized users. Ithas a standardized or commonly agreed logical information model which is independent of EHR systems. Itsprimary purpose is the support of continuing, efficient and quality integrated health care and it containsinformation which is retrospective, concurrent, and prospective” (International Organization forStandardization 2005). Communication is not only supported inside and between EHR systems but also withother applications and components such as middleware services, moving towards an architecture-centricapproach with alerting and decision-support services, agent components including work flow managementsystems (Blobel, Engel et al. 2006).ISO 13606 is based on the GEHR/openEHR dual model approach. That is the idea of an archetype modelthat constrains and references a generic reference model (Beale 2001). In other words an instance of thearchetype model - which is basically a meta-model provided following UML and XML - can be seen asdescription of how to use the reference model, through constraining and referencing it. ISO 13606 comprisesof five parts:Part 1 - specifies the Reference Model, which is a generic information model for communicating anddefining virtually any patient information. Furthermore it specifies the communication of a part or all of theelectronic health record (EHR) of a single identified subject of care between EHR systems, or between EHRsystems and a centralized EHR data repository (ISO 2008).Part 2 - specifies the Archetype Model, which is also a generic information model and language tospecify archetypes for communicating <strong>do</strong>main concepts. Archetypes describe constraints and structures for a(medical) information <strong>do</strong>main using the Reference Model for data definitions. This means an informationarchitecture required for interoperable communications between systems and services that need or provideEHR data. Part 2 is not intended to specify the internal architecture or database design of such systems.Archetype Definition Language (ADL), is a formal language for expressing archetypes, and can becategorised as a knowledge description language. It provides a formal, abstract syntax for describingconstraints on any <strong>do</strong>main entity whose data is described by the Reference Model.Part 3 - specifies the Reference Archetypes and Terms Lists, which describes how other EHR standardscould comply with ISO 13606.Part 4 - specifies the Security Features.Part 5 - specifies the Interface Model which describes how an interoperable communication can takeplace.2.2 Web Ontology LanguageThe semiotic triangle describes how linguistic symbols are related to objects they reference. The relationbetween a symbol and a reference is established through a concept that describes the object abstractly.Formalizing these relations was the aim for developing an ontology language (Sowa 2000).The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) developed the basic standards of Resource DescriptionFramework (Schema) (RDF(S)) and the Web Ontology Language (OWL) (W3C). RDF(S) and OWL are334
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010ontology languages that are especially made to facilitate information integration, implicit knowledge retrievaland semantic interoperability. RDF is a specification for information – the resources. Resources can bedescribed by attributes and their values, and also with the help of links to other resources (Hesse 2005).Metadata is described in triples, similar to elementary sentences in the form subject, verb and object(Berners-Lee, Hendler et al. 2001). A triple contains , whereas the attribute links theobject (which is representing a resource) to the value. The latter are nodes, so that an RDF model forms asemantic network (Mizoguchi 2003).OWL is a language for creating ontologies with a formal representation. In principle, it is a semanticmarkup language. Terms and their relations can be formally described by OWL in such a way that theybecome machine understandable. Technically, this language builds upon the RDF syntax and also employsthe triple model, but it features more powerful possibilities for building expressions than RDF/S. User caninsert, update or query/retrieve data out of OWL ontologies enhanced by the support of semantic relations.2.3 From ADL to OWLThere are several benefits using OWL to represent ISO 13606 archetypes. While the consistency ofknowledge cannot be guaranteed by using an ADL-based archetype construction it can be granted by using anOWL-based representation. The problem is that the aforementioned archetype model itself has noinformation about the Reference Model because these models are separately used. Hence instances of theArchetype Model (archetypes) <strong>do</strong>n’t refer to the Reference Model consistently and in a closed environment(Martinez-Costa, Menarguez-Tortosa et al. 2009). Another advantage of using OWL is the larger researchcommunity working on the development of OWL. While OWL 1.0 was produced in 2004, OWL 2.0 isalready available (W3C 2009).The authors of (Martinez-Costa, Menarguez-Tortosa et al. 2009) describe a promising way to transformADL into OWL without compromising the semantic interpretation of the Archetype Model. This mechanismof transforming ADL into OWL is also implemented in the LinkEHR (Mal<strong>do</strong>na<strong>do</strong>, Moner et al. 2009) tool,which is a tool used for modelling ISO 13606 or openEHR archetypes in ADL.As the ISO 13606 clinical standard is based on the dual model-based architecture, the main purpose is tohave both, the Reference Model and the Archetype Model, represented in OWL. For example, the ArchetypeModel comprises concepts like archetype, archetype description or archetype term, whereas folder,composition or section are classes of the Reference Model. The results of (Fernandez-Breis, Vivancos-Vicente et al. 2006) can be summarized as two main ontologies:• EN13606-SP: representing the clinical data types and structures from the Reference Model.• EN13606-AR: representing the archetype model ontology and includes some Archetype Model classes.Furthermore it imports the EN13606-SP ontology.Because of the combination of these ontologies, they facilitate a more natural representation of the<strong>do</strong>main concepts of archetypes than using ADL to formulate the same <strong>do</strong>main concept. Thus it is possible toaccess all information concerning the same clinical term (Martinez-Costa, Menarguez-Tortosa et al. 2009;Catalina Martinez-Costa 2010).3. RESULTSSection 0 describes the model behind the ontology driven approach. This approach can be seen asimplementation paradigm, how to use ontologies for implementing semantic web applications.The system section 0 uses this method to implement the translated 13606 EHR ontology.3.1 Ontology Driven Application ModelThe ODAM consists of 4 parts: the ontology model, the ontology (individuals), the application model and theapplication answer.335
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISThe ontology model is the abstract model. It is a set of classes and properties that model a <strong>do</strong>mainconcept. The ontology (individuals) comprises of the instantiations of the ontology model. The individualsare concrete information or knowledge of a <strong>do</strong>main.The application model (APM) is a platform dependent or programming language specific implementationof the ontology model that translates the platform independent ontology model (e.g. provide in OWL) into aprogramming language structure (e.g. classes and relations or database schema).The application answer is the aim of the ODAM. Dependent on the ontology model, on the applicationmodel and on the ontology instances, an application derives its functionality dynamically and returns theapplication answer. The application answer is dependent on the requirements the ODAM is designed for.3.2 The SystemThe system is divided into a server side implementation that provides the semantic web application’sfunctionality, web services accesses and basic application logic. And the second part of the system is a clientimplementation to demonstrate the ISO 13606 compliant communication and to beautify the user interface.3.2.1 The ServerThe server is an implementation of two APMs, the Demographics APM and the EHR ontology APM.The demographic APM accesses the demographics ontology. The demographics ontology is an OWLmodel of the ISO 13606 demographic package provided as UML model. The application answer of theODAM is the identification of a patient or a healthcare professional.The EHR ontology APM accesses the EHR ontology. The EHR ontology is based on the work mentionedin section 0. We extended the union (the archetype ontology) of both ontologies to additionally meet thecriteria of the ISO 13606 part 1 reference model. Therefore we had to add the classes and properties ofEHR_EXTRACT and EXTRACT_CRITERIA to the archetype ontology. According to ISO 13606 standardan instance of EHR_EXTRACT represents the top-level container for each patient’s health data. An instanceof EXTRACT_CRITERIA covers meta-information that facilitates finding an EHR_EXTRACT instance.The “EHR Ontology APM” builds the accessor functionality to reveal the information of the individuals, andto work with this information programmatically. The application of the ODAM for this APM is also to createnew EHR extracts (updating or changing an extract means the creation of new version) to store new patientinformation in the EHR ontology combined with <strong>do</strong>main knowledge of the archetype description. This APMcan be seen as wrapper for all the 13606 relevant operations.The functionalities of the controller, basic application logic and the web services are to call the APMs andpass information from/to the web services. The basic application logic comprises: login – user authentication;user administration, patient search, patient <strong>do</strong>cumentation call (load, save EHR extracts, process insensitive);logout. The access to the System is provided through web services. These web services facilitate the access tothe patient demographics APM and the EHR ontology APM, wrapped by the controller and basic applicationlogic. Furthermore the web services are designed to meet the criteria of ISO 13606 Part 5 standard thatspecifies the interfaces to access EHR and archetypes and are implemented to handle security issues.3.2.2 The ClientThe client is a J2EE compliant web application written in Java (Java ServerFaces). The patients suffer fromchronic wounds and the aim of this implementation is to establish a multi professional homecaremanagement. We have been capturing archetype based EHR data for <strong>do</strong>cumenting patients with chronicwounds. The graphical user interfaces supports input validation derived from archetype constraints. Thefunctionality of the client is to pass the user input data from and to the web services. The application logic isbuild around the web services. The client implements session handling to prevent the user from logging inagain every time he/she calls a web service.4. DISCUSSION - ODAM AND ISO 13606The ODAM could be applied onto a non OWL-, programming language-, and relational database- dependentimplementation of ISO 13606 as well. Thus can play an important role for simplifying the implementation:336
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010As the dual model approach of the ISO 13606 EHR Communication Standard has its origin in structuringinformation using <strong>do</strong>main ontologies (Beale 2000), Archetypes can be seen as descriptions of informationitems, which concepts are very similar to ontologies except that ontologies tend to describe real world things(OpenEHR 2008). Implementing the ODAM for ISO 13606, the ontology model is given by the ISO 13606Reference Model and the ontology instances are provided through the ISO 13606 Archetypes, an applicationcould easily adapt to new Archetypes without reprogramming IT infrastructure and back-end systems.Through an appropriate application model, EHR information could be exchanged and integrated with legacydatabase systems without losing information during transformation from Archetype-based EHR to data baseschemata and without compromising the benefits of Archetype-based EHR exchange.However several factors played a significant role for choosing OWL to implement ISO13606:• The power of OWL allowed us to uniform the dual model approach into a comprehensive andconsistent model, the EHR ontology model. Implementing the ISO 13606 dual model as one comprehensiveontology model created a far more abstract view onto the two models of 13606. As described above the EHRontology as ontology model (in the ODAM) unifies different system- and programming language- dependentimplementations.• The OWL representation facilitated implementing the generic concept of ISO 13606.• The OWL representation facilitated a fast application development, through API and tool support, likeProtégé (Stanford-University 2010).• The ISO 13606 standard specifies the information model only, which means that the standard is notspecific about the exchanging media. OWL is a means to structure the data according to the 13606 standard.Due to the ODAM, data retrieval can be performed based on the Reference Model. This enables queryingthe entire EHR data repository and drilling <strong>do</strong>wn onto archetype information later if necessary.Exchanging of EHR extracts, compatible to non ontology driven applications, happens through webservices. These web services provide the ISO13606 model through WSDL and exchange the informationthrough SOAP messages. Ontology driven applications can access the ontologies directly, dependent onsecurity policies.5. PERSPECTIVESTo formally express a process as ontology, the process building blocks are for example actions, control flows,decision nodes et al. The individuals of this ontology describe how to arrange these building blocks to definea concrete <strong>do</strong>main process. Both together result in an integrative-<strong>do</strong>main-process.The process model is derived from OWL-S Process.owl ontology. OWL-S is an ontology for semanticallydescribing web services. “OWL-S is an OWL-based Web service ontology, which supplies Web serviceproviders with a core set of constructs for describing the properties and capabilities of their Web services inunambiguous, computer-interpretable form”(DAML 2010). The aim of OWL-S is an ontology for webservices with a set of standardized classes and properties that enable a service provider to create machineinterpretable descriptions, and to enable a service requester to automatically find, invoke and composite theright services. This is basically <strong>do</strong>ne by providing a process description that defines the conditions (e.g.input- output parameter) for changing services’ state (Martin, Burstein et al. 2008). As OWL-S comprises ofdifferent parts, one part is used for defining processes, the Process.owl ontology.Implementing the ODAM for the clinical process model enables applications to communicate individualsand assembling them to an integrative process. Thus, several new processes for different contents could beeasily implemented without reprogramming the IT infrastructure. Furthermore interchanging individualsallows transmitting information about the state during a process. This means in a real world scenario forexample information about how the patient has been already treated and how he has to be further treated. Ifyou imagine a scenario where several attending physicians have to work together and exchange informationconcerning one patient, process information could be a major benefit.This approach facilitates the definition of EBM treatment or decision supporting processes for aninteractive IT support for HCPs.Combining the process model with ISO 13606 in an Ontology Driven Application approach, enablesdecision support using all aforementioned benefits. The process builds the knowledge base for guidance anddecision support, the Archetypes and EHR-extracts (patient information) trigger the workflow.337
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISREFERENCESBeale, T. (2000). "Archetypes - An Interoperable Knowledge Metho<strong>do</strong>logy for Future-proof Information Systems." fromhttp://www.openehr.org/publications/archetypes/archetypes_beale_web_2000.pdf.Beale, T. (2001). Archetypes, Constraint-based Domain Models for Futureproof Information Systems.Berners-Lee, T., J. Hendler, et al. (2001). "The Sematic Web." ScientificAmerican.com.Blobel, B., K. Engel, et al. (2006). "Semantic Interoperability." Methods Inf Med 45: 343-353.Catalina Martinez-Costa, M. M.-T., Jose Alberto Mal<strong>do</strong>na<strong>do</strong>, Jesual<strong>do</strong> Tomas Fernandez-Breis (2010). Semantic Webtechnologies for managing EHR-related clinical knowledge. Semantic Web.DAML. (2010). "OWL-S." from http://www.daml.org/services/owl-s/.Elstein, A. S. (2004). "On the origins and development of evidence-based medicine and medical decision making."Inflamm Res 53 Suppl 2: S184-9.Fernandez-Breis, J. T., P. J. Vivancos-Vicente, et al. (2006). "Using semantic technologies to promote interoperabilitybetween electronic healthcare records' information models." Conf Proc IEEE Eng Med Biol Soc 1: 2614-7.Hesse, W. (2005). "Ontologies in the <strong>Software</strong> Engineering process." fromhttp://www1.in.tum.de/static/lehrstuhl/files/teaching/ws0607/Wissensbasiertes%20SE/OntologiesInSE.pdf.HL7. "HL7 Reference Information Model." from http://www.hl7.org/Library/data-model/RIM/modelpage_mem.htm.International Organization for Standardization (2005). ISO/TR 20514:2005 Health informatics -- Electronic health record-- Definition, scope and context. I. O. f. Standardization.ISO. (2008). "ISO 13606-1: 2008 - Webpage." from http://www.iso.org/iso/catalogue_detail.htm?csnumber=40784.Mal<strong>do</strong>na<strong>do</strong>, J. A., D. Moner, et al. (2009). "LinkEHR-Ed: a multi-reference model archetype editor based on formalsemantics." Int J Med Inform 78(8): 559-70.Martin, D., M. Burstein, et al. (2008). "OWL-S: Semantic Markup for Web Services." fromhttp://www.ai.sri.com/daml/services/owl-s/1.2/overview/.Martinez-Costa, C., M. Menarguez-Tortosa, et al. (2009). "A model-driven approach for representing clinical archetypesfor Semantic Web environments." J Biomed Inform 42(1): 150-64.Mizoguchi, R. (2003). "Tutorial on ontological engineering." from http://www.ei.sanken.osaka-u.ac.jp/pub/allpublications.html.OpenEHR. (2008). "Ontologies Home." from http://www.openehr.org/wiki/display/ontol/Ontologies+Home.Sowa, J. F. (2000). Ontology, Metadata, and Semiotics. ICCS'2000. B. G. G. W. Mineau. Darmstadt, Springer-Verlag: 55-81.Stanford-University. (2010). "Protégé." from http://protege.stanford.edu/.Timmermans, S. and A. Mauck (2005). "The promises and pitfalls of evidence-based medicine." Health Aff (Millwood)24(1): 18-28.W3C. "World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)." from http://www.w3.org/.W3C (2009). OWL 2 Web Ontology Language, W3C OWL Working Group.338
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010LANGUAGES AND WIKIPEDIA: CULTURAL EVOLUTIONINCREASES STRUCTUREJulia Kasmire and Alfredas ChmieliauskasTU Delft, Energy & Industry SectionJaffalaan 5, 2628 BX Delft, The NetherlandsABSTRACTNatural languages and Wikipedia may both be evolving through the Iterated Learning Model, a cultural evolutionmechanism that relies on iterated learning, a transmission bottleneck, and a structured meaning space, but <strong>do</strong>es notrequire a competitive advantage for individual speakers or Wikipedia articles exhibiting more structure than others. Thispaper examines evidence that the evolution of structure on Wikipedia meets the same criteria as have been established forthe ILM in the <strong>do</strong>main of language, and provides indications that Wikipedia is actually evolving through this mechanism.As a more readily studied example of cultural evolution, Wikipedia may provide answers to the evolution of structurethat languages cannot address.KEYWORDSCultural evolution, structure, Wikipedia, iteration, learning1. INTRODUCTIONWikipedia is gaining structure, some of which has provoked the protests of editors and users. This structuralincrease may be more than just an annoying fad because similarities between Wikipedia and humanlanguages suggest that the same mechanisms may be driving evolution of structure in both <strong>do</strong>mains. Typicalinterpretations of evolution rely on a net benefit to individuals with a variation to drive the spread of thatvariation, but structure in Wikipedia and human languages <strong>do</strong>es not provide such a benefit. Only after thestructures are well established can the benefits to the total system be seen, with more structured exampleshaving little or no net benefit. The collective benefits of a shared, structured system <strong>do</strong> not justify theevolution of this structure according to simplistic interpretations of evolution, yet the existence of bothstructured languages and structure in Wikipedia shows that there must be a way.However, the Iterated Learning Model (ILM) is a cultural evolution mechanism that <strong>do</strong>es not rely on arelative benefit for individuals and which has been used to explain the evolution of linguistic structure. TheILM can also be applied to Wikipedia because Wikipedia meets all the necessary criteria and shows somepreliminary indications that the currently developing structure matches expectations from the ILM.Wikipedia, and other <strong>do</strong>cumented open source information portals, therefore represent new and valuablemedia for exploring cultural evolution behavior and dynamics, may be easier to study than language or othertypical subjects of cultural evolution models, and may help answer difficult questions for those fields.2. WHAT IS STRUCTURE ON WIKIPEDIA?Exploration of the English language Wikipedia and its version history, either through the internet or thecomplete Wikipedia articles and version history data dump (http://<strong>do</strong>wnload.wikimedia.org/enwiki/) showsthat when Wikipedia began in 2001 (Article: Wikipedia., 2010), there was very little structure in individualarticles. Instead articles were relatively holistic, meaning that the information was presented as a whole,without subdivisions, structure, or explicit relationships between the different kinds of information containedin the article. These early articles usually covered a single topic in as much detail as was available or desired339
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISby the community in an essay format. Although many kinds of structure have evolved on Wikipedia since itbegan, this articles focuses on only 2: section headings and infoboxes.Section headings are the titles given to the divisions in an article, and are usually listed in the table ofcontents, if one is present. They are editor chosen and dependent on the article contents, so not all possiblesection headings are in every article. This inclusion of structure has provoked no major reactions from editorsbut seems to have been a natural addition to any article long enough to have more than one distinct part.Starting in 2002, some science oriented Wikipedia articles began presenting some information in visuallyseparate “infoboxes” (Figure 1), which divide information into a label and its corresponding value, allowingusers to quickly identify relationships or compare properties through the infobox rather than searching forthat information in the main article. Infoboxes then began appearing in other articles as ways to quicklyreference typical information or as a summary for the basic information for very large articles. Morerecently, Wikipedia has seen a backlash against infoboxes, with some editors complaining that they areunnecessary, unattractive, redundant, and that they inappropriately oversimplify some subjects. In response,Wikipedia published a manual of style for infoboxes and various essays condemning the “infobox virus”(Projectpage: boxes., 2010) and calling for the removal of infoboxes failing to meet requirements for addedvalue, length relative to the main article, or subjective information content (Projectpage: disinfoboxes., 2010)in order to return to a “glorious preindustrial (pre-box) editor's paradise” (Projectpage: boxes., 2010)The antipathy toward infoboxes seems to come from the rapid numerical increase (Figure 2) and a failureto recognize benefits that outweigh their “negative” appearance and psychological effects (Discussion page:Disinfoboxes., 2010). Some editors see a value from aiding translation between different languageWikipedias (Project page: thinking outside the infobox., 2010), allowing quick and easy access to sometypes of information, and encouraging a uniform style (Discussion page: boxes., 2010), but these editors alsoadvocate major improvements or restrictions to limit the negatives. One benefit not mentioned in thediscussions of infobox pros and cons machine search-ability which allows websites like dbpedia to takesearch over the structured, compositional, regular and standard format infoboxes of many articles, combiningcriteria and compiling lists of all items that share many properties.Both section headings and infoboxes represent the addition of structure to Wikipedia articles, but thebenefits of these features come not from adding or improving information, as the infobox critics demand theyshould, but from organizing information and adding structure. This structure permits an exploitation of therelationship between organized information across many articles, providing a benefit for the entire structuredsystem, not individual articles.(a)(b)Figure 1. Wikipedia article with and without structureAn early version (a) of the Wikipedia article for comedian Eddie Izzard without structure and a laterversion (b) with structures such as an infobox (on right, including a picture) and a table of contents (on left)with some section headings.340
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010Figure 2. Rapid growth of Wikipedia and its structureAn analysis of the March 2010 English language complete Wikipedia data dump reveals that the numberof new Wikipedia articles created and the number of new infoboxes have increased rapidly. After firstappearing in 2002, the infobox addition rate stabilized at approximately 1/10 of the article creation rate in2006, and has since closely followed the pattern of article creation.3. CULTURAL EVOLUTION LEADS TO STRUCTURENatural languages have many structural features that aid communication. For example, compositionalityallows listeners to understand a completely new word if they understand the parts from which it is composed,while syntax means that users can reliable interpret completely novel sentences by relying on the relationshipbetween the words and the way they are strung together.A <strong>do</strong>minant linguistic paradigm postulates a sophisticated, genetically inherited cognitive tool that turnssparse linguistic exposure into language competence (Chomsky, 1965 and 1995; Briscoe, 1997). As aconsequence of this assumption, many researchers link the biological evolution of cognitive abilities to agradual increase in linguistic structure (Pinker, 1992; Gould, 1979), such that less cognitively capableancestors would have spoken less structured languages. However, a new linguistic structure gene <strong>do</strong>es notbenefit the individual, as he has no one who can understand the more structured language he speaks. Instead,as with infoboxes, the benefits come only from a shared structure.Regardless, the time elapsed since Wikipedia's introduction in 2001 precludes concurrent biologicalevolution as an explanation for the evolution of its structure. Cultural evolution, which substitutes learningand imitation in place of genetic inheritance, moves much faster and could be responsible. One view ofcultural evolution simply replaces genes with memes and relies on the relative net benefit of these "units ofculture" to <strong>do</strong>minate the population of cultural items, Wikipedia articles in this case, just as the genes for asuperior language ability might have come to <strong>do</strong>minate early human populations. However, this explanationrequires a recognized net benefit for relatively more structured articles, while the largely unrecognizedbenefits of structure apply across articles rather than to single articles.Fortunately, the Iterated Learning Model (ILM) is a cultural evolution framework that provides a memefreeexplanation for the evolution of language structures such as recursive syntax (Kirby, 2002),compositionality (Smith, 2003), word order universals (Kirby, 1999) and the regularity-irregularitydistinction (Kirby, 2001). In a typical ILM (Figure 3), learners are exposed to linguistic data as input, usuallyin the form of pairs of meanings and signals. From this input they attempt to form a hypothesis of thelanguage which they use to reproduce the language as output. The linguistic output is then provided as theinput to a new learner, and the cycle is repeated.If the input is unstructured then there are no patterns or relationships between meanings and signals, suchthat similar meanings have similar signals, and no way to interpret the meaning of a novel signal or predictthe signal for a novel meaning. As such, the learners would need 100% exposure to the unstructured training341
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISInput Input InputL i L i+1 …Output OutputL i+nOutputFigure 3. Iterated learning model (ILM)The initial learner (L i ) forms a hypothesis from the input, then uses that hypothesis to produce output forthe next generation (L i + 1 ), and the pattern repeats to the i + nth generation.data in order to be able to reproduce it correctly and if reproduced correctly, it will remain unstructured.However, providing only a subset of the total possible input to the learners, creates a “transmissionbottleneck” and produces a different result. Because the transmission bottleneck prevents exposure to all themeaning-signal pairs possible in a language, learners are forced to invent new signals as output whenprompted to reproduce a signal for an unfamiliar meaning. These inventions become part of the input for thenext learner, changing the language at each generation, and providing opportunities for accidental similaritiesbetween the signals of similar meanings to creep into the data, Learners can then interpret these similaritiesas weakly structured patterns, leading to a semi-structured hypothesis of the language. The learners then usethat hypothesis when prompted to invent new output for unfamiliar meanings, thus extending the structure inthe new inventions. After many generations, the structure becomes well enough established that a learner canform a hypothesis that correctly reproduces the entire language even when exposed to only a subset of thelanguage as input and will produce output that reliably leads a new learner to the same hypothesis.4. CRITERIA FOR APPLICATION OF THE ILMThe ILM can explain the evolution of structure in language because of 3 important criteria that are also trueof Wikipedia, making the ILM an excellent candidate to explain the evolution of structure and increasingnumbers of section headings and infoboxes, despite the poorly recognized benefits or the protests of infoboxcritics. The first important criterion is iterated learning, meaning that the output of one learner forms theinput for another. Just as all language users learned to speak from exposure to the language of others,Wikipedia editors learn how to make a Wikipedia article based on exposure to existing Wikipedia articles. Iftheir input includes structure, such as section headings and infoboxes, then their hypothesis of how to makean article will capture patterns of when and how to use that structure, and will later be used to add structurewhen creating output. Wikipedia now provides templates, or formalized hypotheses of appropriate structure,making it easier to include section headings and infoboxes, thus reinforcing the patterns in the data.Second, like language, Wikipedia has a transmission bottleneck. In many ILM simulations, thetransmission bottleneck is a formal limit on the percentage of all possible training data a learner recievesbefore being asked to reproduce the language. There is no limit on the number of well-formed utterances inevery natural language (Nowak, Komarova, & Niyogi, 2002), essentially making natural languages aninfinite set of meaning-signal pairs. Since all speakers produce output before being exposed to the infinitepossible meaning-signal pairs, there is always an “implied bottleneck” (Vogt, 2005). Likewise, althoughthere is not an infinite number of Wikipedia articles, exponential growth since 2002 (Voss, 2005) means thateditors cannot possibly be exposed to all the available input before creating new articles. The impliedbottlenecks for language users and Wikipedia editors force them to produce output based on a hypothesisformed from exposure to a subset of the total possible input, rather than exposure to a correct or ideal form tobe copied.Third, the perception of structure in the meaning space may be a requirement for the evolution ofstructure in the signal (Smith, 2003). Many ILM simulations represent language as a mapping frommeanings, such as combinations of objects and actions (Kirby, 2002) or points in a multi-dimensionalmeaning space (Smith, 2003) to signals, usually strings of characters from a limited set. The meaning spaceis structured because relationships between pairs of meanings that share actions or objects, or that are neareach other in the multi-dimensional space, make them more similar than other pairs of meanings that <strong>do</strong> notshare features or proximity. Through the interaction of iterated learning and the transmission bottleneck, therelationship across meanings comes to be mirrored by structure in the signal. Like meaning in languages,342
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010Figure 4. Meaning space structure is increasingly reflected in the articlesInitially ran<strong>do</strong>m sections featured many unique headings, but now appear to be converging on a standardstructure.pairs of Wikipedia articles can be can be judged as more related or similar. Further analysis of the March2010 English language complete Wikipedia history data dump shows that the not only are examples ofstructure increasingly present in Wikipedia, but they are also behaving as the ILM predicts. For example, in2002, almost 45% of the section headings found in articles about musicians were unique, being only found inone article. By 2009 however, only 13% of section headings were unique with all the rest appearing inmultiple articles. Wikipedia editors appear to have used patterns in their input to form a hypothesis of how anarticle about musicians should look, and then used that hypothesis to extend the patterns, resulting in acollection of articles that are more similar in structure, mirroring the structure in the meaning space.Language and Wikipedia are both ways to transmit information, but some readers might suggest that theaccidental introduction of patterns in language evolution simulations is unlike the apparently rational andintentional addition of structure to Wikipedia. However, research using human participants in place ofcomputer agents (Kirby et al., 2008) showed that people are unaware of their hypotheses formed from theinput, and then unintentionally and unknowingly increase structure in the language, as did the computeragents. Both in computer simulations and in human experiments, the hypothesis reflects patterns in the datarather than rational searches for the optimal example. While introducing a particular structure to a particularWikipedia article may or may not be intentional or rational, structure evolves without rational decisions orawareness of patterns in the data. Furthermore, given the rapid rate of infobox addition along with theoutspoken criticism, rational decisions to include infoboxes seems unlikely to explain the “infobox virus”.5. CONCLUSIONSince Wikipedia and language are both well described as cases of iterative learning, with transmissionbottlenecks and with a structured meaning space, the ILM of cultural evolution provides a good explanationfor the rapid evolution of structure on Wikipedia, despite the tastes of some critical Wikipedia editors, just asit can explain the evolution of structure in language. However, syntactically ambiguous utterances like “I sawa moose in my pajamas.” or non-compositional phrases like “kick the bucket” (meaning to die) show that,although stable at high level of structure, natural languages are not totally structured. As Wikipedia has notyet stabilized or converged on structure, it provides an opportunity to explore how structure evolves in waysno longer possible for natural languages.Will Wikipedia articles converge on a standard structure? Will there be formal rules regarding thestructure of articles, or will unstructured articles be quickly edited to include structure? What kind of articles,if any, will remain unstructured? Given the ambivalent or negative reactions to some structure, how willeditors react to a convergence on structure? Unlike language, Wikipedia has a completely recoverable343
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISrevision history, as well as recorded talk pages, and statistics on page views and author networks, all ofwhich can provide new insight into how the structures first arrive, change over time, increase in popularity,and approach convergence on a standard.ACKNOWLEDGEMENTThis project is made possible by European Regional Development Fund and the Communication Task ForceSustainable Greenport Westland East Country. Special thanks to I. Nikolic and C. Davis for theirconstructive criticism, feedback and ideas.REFERENCESAnonymous, 2010. Article: Wikipedia. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. [online] Available at:,http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia> [Accessed 6-July-2010].Anonymous, 2010. Discussion page: boxes. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. [online] Available at: [Accessed 6-July-2010].Anonymous, 2010. Project page: boxes. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 2010. [online] Available at: [Accessed 6-July-2010].Anonymous, 2010. Project page: disinfoboxes. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. [online] Available at: [Accessed 6-July-2010].Anonymous, 2010. Project page: thinking outside the infobox.Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. [online] Available at: [Accessed 6-July-2010].Anonymous, 2010. Discussion page: Disinfoboxes. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. [online] Available at:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Disinfoboxes [Accessed 03-09-2010].Briscoe, T., 1997. Co-evolution of language and of the language acquisition device. Proceedings of the eighth conferenceon European chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics. Association for Computational Linguistics, pp418-427.Chomsky, N., 1965. Aspectsof the Theory of Syntax. MITPress, Cambridge, MA.Chomsky, N., 1995. The minimalist program. MITPress, Cambridge, MA.Gould, SJ. And Lexontin, RC., 1979. The spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian paradigm: a critique of theadaptationist programme. Proceedings of the Royal Society of Lon<strong>do</strong>n Series B. Biological Sciences. Lon<strong>do</strong>n, UK,Vol. 205, No. 1161, pp581-598.Kirby, S., 1999. Function, selection, and innateness: The emergence of language universals. Oxford University Press,USA.Kirby, S., 2001. Spontaneous evolution of linguistic structure-an iterated learning model of the emergence of regularityand irregularity. IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, 5(2):102–110.Kirby, S., 2002. Learning, bottlenecks and the evolution of recursive syntax. Linguistic evolution through languageacquisition, pages 173–203.Kirby, S., Cornish, H., and Smith, K., 2008. Cumulative cultural evolution in the laboratory: An experimental approachto the origins of structure in human language. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 105(31):10681.Nowak, M.A., Komarova, N.L., and Niyogi, P., 2002. Computational and evolutionary aspects of language. Nature, Vol.417, No. 6889, pp. 611-617.Pinker, S. and Bloom, P., 1992. Natural language and natural selection. The adapted mind: Evolutionary psychology andthe generation of culture. Pp. 451-493.Smith, K, Kirby, S. and Brighton, H., 2003. Iterated learning: A framework for the emergence of language. ArtificialLife, 9(4):371–386.Vogt, P., 2005. The emergence of compositional structures in perceptually grounded language games. ArtificialIntelligence Vol. 167, No. 1-2, pp 206-242.Voss, J., 2005. Measuring Wikipedia. International Conference of the International Society for Scientometrics andInformetrics pp. 221-231.344
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010A TOOL TO SUPPORT AUTHORING OF LEARNINGDESIGNS IN THE FIELD OF SUSTAINABLE ENERGYEDUCATIONSotirios Karetsos and Dias HaralampopoulosEnergy Management Laboratory, Dept of Environment, University of the AegeanMytilene, GreeceABSTRACTSustainable energy education is anticipated to contribute to the solution of a sequence of challenges–problems relatedgenerally with the <strong>do</strong>minant developmental models and particularly with the energy production and consumption. Withinthis contribution we examine the integration of an ontology based framework for learning design in sustainable energyeducation area with a semantic wiki, as a web based tool supporting the collaborative construction, improvement andexchange/ dissemination of learning designs in the field of sustainable energy education.We conjecture that the semantic wiki technology platform constitutes an adequate environment, in terms of its usabilityand expressiveness, for the building and supporting of a community of practice in this area.KEYWORDSOntology; learning design, sustainable energy, semantic wiki, collaborative authoring.1. INTRODUCTIONThe efficiency of the development of learning scenarios highly depends on the ability to reuse existingmaterials and expertise (Pawlowski & Bick, 2006). While the issue of reuse in education was initiallyfocused in content, hereafter the focus was shifted to the activity oriented approach, which promotes a modelof the teacher as a designer and is enhanced from the parallel development of tools in the <strong>WWW</strong>, stimulatingthe emersion of communities of practice for the exchange of learning scenarios and experiences (Brouns, etal., 2005; Pernin & Lejeune, 2006). One such category of popular tools that support more and morecommunities to collaboratively produce and exchange knowledge are Wikis (Nixon & Simperl, 2006).However, according Kousetti, et al. ( 2008), if the web is considered as a continually growing collectionof <strong>do</strong>cuments readable only by people <strong>do</strong>es not fully exploits the stored knowledge. Thus the evaluation,collection, adaptation and distribution of the ever growing amount of educational material in the <strong>do</strong>main ofsustainable energy education, coming from various resources, in various languages and forms, constitutes atroublesome undertaking. This problem becomes more critical due to the reported teacher’s lack of basiceducation on sustainable energy (Papadimitriou, 2004; Skanavis, et al., 2004; Spiropoulou, et al., 2007),necessitating teachers’ training.Semantic Web can support addressing such problems. According Aroyo and Dicheva (2004), SemanticWeb technologies and standards are needed, along with new methods and types of courseware compliantwith the Semantic Web vision, in order to adaptation, flexibility and interoperability be achieved in the webbased educational systems. Furthermore the combination of Wiki and Semantic Web technologies is alignedwith the requirements of knowledge society for life-long learning and flexible learning environments(Schaffert, et al., 2006). It pairs the user-friendliness of wikis, as Social <strong>Software</strong> giving users free<strong>do</strong>m forchoosing their own processes and supporting multi-site content generation and collaboration anytime andanywhere, while Semantic Web technology gives the possibility to structure information for easy retrieval,reuse, and exchange between different systems and tools. Additionally, learning modes <strong>do</strong>vetailed inherentlywith wiki environments, as cooperative and group learning are becoming increasingly important as problemsare usually solved by teams and not by individuals (Dello, et al., 2006; Schaffert, et al., 2006).345
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISTaking into consideration the above concepts we attempted to integrate a ontology-based framework forlearning design in the field of sustainable energy education (Karetsos, et al, in press) with a semantic wiki inorder to support the tasks of collaborative construction, improvement and exchange/ dissemination oflearning designs in the area of sustainable energy education. We envisage these tasks as a cooperativeteaching and learning process implying the formation of a community of practice in this area.Briefly the paper is structured as follows: First a predefined ontology-based framework for learningdesign in the field of sustainable energy education is outlined. Second our choices regarding the integrationof the ontology based framework with a semantic wiki are justified while some technical details and usecases of the platform are presented. Finally future work is mentioned, along with some concluding remarks.2. THE ONTOLOGY-BASED FRAMEWORK FOR SUSTAINABLEENERGY EDUCATIONIn order to lay the foundations of an energy-environment curriculum that will enable teachers and students tofamiliarize themselves with the current developments in the area of sustainable development we rely on aframework based on three ontologies, namely content, learning design (LD) and sustainable energy <strong>do</strong>mainmodels (Karetsos, et al., in press), enriched by a ontology-based competency model (Karetsos &Haralampopoulos, 2010). This framework is designed to support discovery of LOs, recommending about theselection of learning designs, and construction of learning designs with reuse of LOs. An overview of thisframework including some generic relations among its constituent ontologies-models is depicted in Fig. 1.Figure 1. Representation of the ontology based framework integrated in the semantic wiki, including generic relationsamong the constituent models.Below, we describe in brief what we mean by <strong>do</strong>main, LD, content and competency models and how weenvisage to support learning design in the field of sustainable energy education relying on this framework.The <strong>do</strong>main model specifies the basic concepts of sustainable energy development and theirinterrelations. Its core component is the DPSIR (Driving force, Pressure, State, Impact, Response action)indicator-based framework (European Environment Agency-EEA, 2002), extended by Hierro and. Pérez-Arriaga (2005) in order to embody impacts of energy production and consumption not only on theenvironment but also on the society and the economy, and enriched by Karetsos et al (in press) in order tobecome a broad knowledge base for learning design, rather than a tool for policy making. The DPSIRframework depicts the sequence in which the events take place in the energy production-consumption chain,allows identifying the stages where there is a sustainability problem, and connects this problem with apotential response-solution. This structure provides a base for a systemic approach of sustainability in aproblem-based manner, contributing also to the semantic annotation and retrieval of LOs. Causal loops base<strong>do</strong>n the DPSIR framework and related with sustainability problems can act as a backbone of a learning course(Karetsos, et al, in press).The LD model is based on the concept of “mediating artefacts” (Conole, 2008) that practitioners use inthe authoring process, in order to, according activity theory, bridge the gap between historical state oflearning design and their developmental stage. It is designed to act as repository of existing artefacts in thelearning and learning design fields, like pedagogical models, patterns and generic learning designs, casestudies, but also educational taxonomies, learning design processes, learning design conceptual models andrepresentation formats. Following a toolkit approach for the learning design process aims at providing avariety of supports, ranging from informal solutions, as patterns, up to more constraint structures as the346
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010formal representation inspired by IMS Learning Design specification (IMS Global Learning Consortium,2003).As far as the content model is concerned, it is based on the IEEE Learning Object Metadata standard -(IEEE Learning Technology Standards Committee, 2002).Finally the competency model (Karetsos & Haralampopoulos, 2010) represents competencies needed tobe obtained in the <strong>do</strong>main and can support competencies’ gap analysis and personalization of learning,increasing potentially the level of competencies possessed by the learners. It is aiming to establishconnections between LOs, learners, activities, learning objectives/competencies and knowledge in thesustainable energy <strong>do</strong>main and actually interconnects the other three models. For example the question forassessing progress of sustainable energy development in a society (EEA, 2002), “Is the use of energy havingless impact on the environment, the economy and the society?”, which instantiates the class assessment entity(belongs to the competency model and represents the evidence of a competency possessed by a learner) isrelated with a number of pressure indicators/classes of <strong>do</strong>main ontology like greenhouse gas emission, airpollutant emission, generation of radioactive wastes, and poorest income to energy prices.3. SEED WIKI: INTEGRATING THE ONTOLOGY-BASEDFRAMEWORK WITH THE SEMANTIC MEDIA WIKIIn order to explore wiki technology as an environment for supporting authoring and exchange/ disseminationof learning designs in the field of sustainable energy education, we have built a semantic wiki, calledSEEDWiki. (Sustainable Energy Education Wiki).Our wiki is built on the top of Semantic MediaWiki (SMW) (Krötzsch, et al, 2006). SMW is an extensionof MediaWiki, a platform used by the popular Wikipedia, implying thus a usability advantage (Krötzsch, etal, 2006). According its creators addresses core problems of today’s wikis, as consistency of content,accessing knowledge and reusing knowledge. SMW is probably the most popular and mature semantic wikiplatform (Kuhn, 2008), with a wide variety of available extensions like SMWHalo, SemanticForms,SemanticGardening, SWMOntologyEditor, SemanticResultFormats, SemanticCompoundQueries ,SemanticGraph, and RichMedia, which support and enhance the functionalities of adding, editing,annotating, browsing, querying, displaying, importing exporting rich data and their interconnections.The choice of a semantic wiki platform is justified by several reasons.First of all it can provide a web-based uniform tool and interface for the representation of the differentcomponents of the ontology based framework (i.e. <strong>do</strong>main, learning design, content, and competencymodels). Second, a wiki constitutes an accessible environment for collaborative construction of knowledge ina <strong>do</strong>main, being quite familiar application for regular users, and requiring only a web-browser from them inorder to use it.Furthermore a semantic wiki allows for the semantic annotation and retrieval of pages. Moreover such aplatform could support the collaborative construction and refinement not only of learning designs but also ofthe underlying ontology itself. This actually could be facilitated by the use of predefined templates allowingthe formalization of informal descriptions inserted to the wiki. A semantic form realizing such a template isthe key concept for the user friendliness of the application. This way a user <strong>do</strong>es not need to know anyparticular syntax or language to participate in a learning design process.Via the integration of the ontology-based framework to the SMW platform we actually import a structuresceletonfor filling the wiki.Another aspect we took in consideration in our choice was the ability for context-based navigation. Therelations between wiki pages, specified by the sustainable energy <strong>do</strong>main ontology for example, couldsupport navigation between resources, based in a causal DPSIR loop helping the user to catch an overall viewof a sustainable energy issue. Visual representation of such loops, along with relevant inline queries couldjointly substantiate such a prospect.347
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADIS4. SOME APPLICATION SCENARIOS FOR SEED WIKIScenarios involving teachers exchanging knowledge regarding sustainable energy issues over the Wiki,include the supporting and guiding of users to contribute content, and other material as learning models orgeneric learning designs and patterns, enriched with semantic annotations. A predefined form is the key forsupporting such a task, in terms of a content annotating tool.Hence, a community of teachers interested in sustainable energy issues could upload or reference suchmaterial from the semantic Wiki, relating it to other concepts within the Wiki. Afterwards such resourcescould be retrieved and accessed via form based query functionality.Also in the overall case, where users follow the steps of a suggested learning design process (e.g. Browseand select theme, Extract a DPSIR model, Select and adapt templates, Identify objectives, Arrange activities,Specify resources and assessment, Represent learning design), the ontology browser and semantic drill<strong>do</strong>wnallow selection by use of a tree or list browsing correspondingly, while inline queries could be used topresent/highlight a categorization of pages in a way that helps decision making by the user.The inline queries are based on the parser function #ask and can be created by few editors providingdynamically query results which can inform users without requiring from them to learn the query syntax. Thusregarding the selection of templates corresponding to abstract representations of learning designs (i.e. learningmodels or generic learning designs and patterns) these could be presented dynamically in the relevant page,categorized by the purpose/challenge they address.As far as the extraction of causal chains based in the DPSIR model is concerned, effort has beenundertaken for visual representation of pages relations, as valuable information attached to any page andincreasing the user friendliness of the application. The parser function #Hypergraph is used to representrelationships specified in the wiki as a network graph, while inline queries further specify these relationships.An example concerning the page AirPollutionEmissionGr04 is depicted in Fig. 2.Figure 2. Visual representation and the results of inline queries included in the page AirPollutantEmissionGr045. CONCLUSIONWe introduced a tool, named SEEDwiki and resulting from the integration of a ontology-based frameworkfor authoring learning designs in the field of sustainable energy education with a Semantic MediaWikiplatform. Via this integration we aim to facilitate the acquisition and representation of knowledge about348
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010learning design in the field of sustainable energy education for users with no experience of knowledgeengineering and management technologies. Users are allowed to add and view knowledge facilitated bysemantic forms and visual representations of pages’ relations.The prototype presented in this article is under active development. Work for the near future concerns themore efficient representation and extraction of DPSIR causal loops related with sustainable energy issues andacting as skeletons for learning designs, along with improvements of the user interface. Evaluationexperiments with the participation of teachers are needed, in order to detect if the wiki provides the adequateexpressiveness and functionality to support them in constructing learning designs suited to their specificeducational context.REFERENCESAroyo, L. and Dicheva, D., 2004. The New Challenges for E-learning: The Educational Semantic Web. In EducationalTechnology & Society, Vol. 7, No. 4, pp. 59-69.Brouns, F. et al, 2005. A First Exploration of an Inductive Analysis Approach for Detecting Learning Design Patterns. InJournal of Interactive Media in Education, Vol. 3, pp. 1-10.Conole, G., 2008. Capturing Practice, the Role of Mediating Artefacts in Learning Design. In L. Lockyer, S. Bennet, S.Agostinho, and B. Harper, eds. Handbook of research on learning design and learning objects: Issues, applicationsand technologies. Hersey PA: IGI Global, pp. 187-207.Dello, K. et al, 2006. Creating and using Semantic Web Information with Makna. Proceedings of 1 st Workshop onSemantic Wikis - From Wiki to Semantics. Budva, Montenegro, pp. 43-57.European Environment Agency, 2002. Energy and environment in the European Union. European Environment Agency,Copenhagen, Denmark.Hierro, I. and. Pérez-Arriaga, I.J., 2005. Indicator-Based Metho<strong>do</strong>logy to Analyze Progress toward a Sustainable EnergySystem in a Country: Application to the Spanish Energy Context. Proceedings of the Madrid SESSA Conference onInvestment for sustainability. Madrid, Spain.Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Learning Technology Standards Committee, 2002. IEEE 1484.12.1 Stdfor Learning Object Metadata. IEEE Standards Association, New York, USA.IMS Global Learning Consortium, 2003. IMS Learning Design Specification ver.1.0. IMS GLC, Lake Mary, USA.Karetsos, S. and Haralampopoulos, D., 2010. Ontologies to Support Teachers to Construct Learning Designs in theDomain of Sustainable Energy Education. Proceedings of the 8th International JTEFS/BBCC Conference onSustainable Development - Culture – Education. Paris, France.Karetsos, S. et al, (in press). An Ontology-Based Framework for Authoring Tools in the Domain of Sustainable EnergyEducation. In International Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Information Systems-Special issue onIntelligent Systems for Engineering Environmental Knowledge.Kousetti, C. et al, 2008. A Study of Ontology Convergence in a Semantic Wiki. Proceedings of 4th InternationalSymposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration (WikiSym '08). Porto, Portugual.Krötzsch, M. et al, 2006. Semantic MediaWiki. In Computer Science, Vol. 4273, pp. 935-942Kuhn, T., 2008. AceWiki: A Natural and Expressive Semantic Wiki. Proceedings on Semantic Web User Interaction atCHI 2008: Exploring HCI Challenges. Florence, Italy.Nixon, J.L.B. and Simperl, E., 2006. Makna and MultiMakna: Towards Semantic and Multimedia Capability in Wikis forthe Emerging Web. Proceedings of the Semantics2006, Vienna, Austria.Papadimitriou, V., 2004. Prospective Primary Teachers’ Understanding of Climate Change, Greenhouse Effect, andOzone Layer Depletion. In Journal of Science Education and Technology, Vol. 13, No. 2, pp. 299-307.Pawlowski, J.M. and Bick, M., 2006. Managing & Re-using Didactical Expertise: The Didactical Object Model. InJournal of Educational Technology & Society, Vol. 9, No. 1, pp. 84-96.Pernin, J.P. and Lejeune, A., 2006. Models for the Re-Use of Learning Scenarios. Proceedings of Conference onImagining the Future for ICT and Education, Ålesund , Norway, pp.49-59.Schaffert, S. et al, 2006. Learning with Semantic Wikis. Proceedings of 1 st Workshop on Semantic Wikis - From Wiki toSemantics. Budva, Montenegro, pp. 109-123.Skanavis, C. et al, 2004. Educators and Environmental Education in Greece. Proceedings of the International Conferencefor the Protection and Restoration of the Environment VII. Mykonos, Greece.Spiropoulou, D. et al, 2007. Primary Teachers’ Literacy and Attitudes on Education for Sustainable Development. InJournal of Science Education and Technology, Vol.16, No. 5, pp. 443–450.349
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISBILINGUAL ALPHABETISATION OF DEAF CHILDRENAND PROGRESS ASSESSMENT: A PROTOTYPE OF AWEB SYSTEM BASED ON A PHONIC METHODOLOGYMiranda, Aléssio Paula, L.J.de , García,L.S, Capovilla F.C, Direne, A.I; Sunye,M.S.; Castilho, M.A.; Bona, L.E; Silva, F.; Macha<strong>do</strong> D. and Duarte J.; Bueno J.Computer Science Department, UFPR, Centro Politécnico, Av Cel Francisco H <strong>do</strong>s Santos, Curitiba Paraná, BrazilABSTRACTGlobalization, supported by computer technology and mechanisms of long distance communication, is responsible forincreasingly smaller obstacles in communication across countries and cultures. However, the communication obstaclesfaced by deaf people are yet to be eliminated, one effective way of <strong>do</strong>ing it being through leaning Portuguese. In order tosupport this process and assess the students language acquisition, Fernan<strong>do</strong> Capovilla develop a set of eleven teststhrough which the level of Libras (Brazilian Sign Language) and Portuguese knowledge of deaf students can be measuredwith some precision. In the present paper, we will describe a web prototype of these tests based on the aforementionedmetho<strong>do</strong>logy. The test system we propose here could potentially be used by deaf people across the country. We will alsodiscuss the challenges entailed by the project, as well as the solution we put together, for which both key concepts ofHuman-Computer Interaction and certain contextual constraints were of paramount importance.KEYWORDSDeaf students, Human-Computer Interaction, Assessment, Libras, Portuguese, Capovilla.1. INTRODUCTIONOne of the most paramount underlying principles of education is the notion of evaluation, meant here as thekey element to the constant improvement of teaching. Only through constant improvement will it be possibleto add to the conceptual pair “teaching-learning” the necessary underlying cause-consequence relation to theprocesses of teaching and learning. In this light, evaluation in the context of the alphabetization of deafchildren plays an even more crucial role, particularly in a country with chronic difficulties in the area ofeducation. Indeed, the current investments in education are not even enough to bring illiteracy to an end, letalone to improve the standards of Special Education to an acceptable level.2. THE TESTS AND THE HYPOTHESIS METHOD2.1 Features of the TestsThe tests contain four basic response types, namely “choose amongst the pictures”, “choose amongst thewords”, “choose Right or Wrong” and “write words”. As for the stimuli that prompt the responses, the testsmake use of the following: live or drawn Libras signs, pictures of objects, pictures of objects associated towords and written sentences. As regards the analysis of the cognitive process, five different strategiespermeate the different tests. Firstly, the level of difficulty is increased gradually so as to indentify when theexaminee stops getting questions right. Secondly, the level of syntax complexity of the sentences is graduallyincreased as a strategy of error induction, mainly through distracting pictures that actually correspond toincomplete parts of the sentences. The main objective here is to assess the level of syntactic processingacquired by the student. Thirdly, different reading routes (logographic, perilexical, lexical) are contrasted350
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010through various subtests that offer independent evidences for internal checking, as well as cross-validation ofconclusions and findings associated to the test. Fourthly, quality, completion and precision evaluation criteriaare used. Finally, errors are induced by distractions, in order to characterize the nature of the cognitiveprocessing underlying the student’s reading and writing in Portuguese.2.2 The Four Tests selected for Our PrototypeAs already mentioned above, we selected four out of eleven tests to make up our prototype. Here is adescription of these tests.The TVRSL, or Test of the Visual Receptive Vocabulary of Libras Signs(Capovilla, 2004), was elaborated and validated according to the results of a study carried out in differentyears of both primary and secondary education. The test assesses the students’ ability to understand isolatedLibras signs performed live. In fact, it assesses the level of development of their chimerical lexicon, i.e. theirset of Libras signs. This knowledge allows the deaf person to understand, express and process informationthrough sign language. The TCLS, or Test of Sentence Reading Competence (Capovilla, 2005), assesses thestudents’ ability to read sentences and texts, and to present their meanings by choosing the right pictureamongst distracting pictures. The TNF-Choice, or Test of Picture Naming by Choice, assesses theexaminees’ ability to choose the correct written name of 36 pictures from sets of four alternatives.3. CHALLENGES IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE PROJECTOnce we had analyzed these four tests, we then moved on to the transposition of the tasks from a physical,concrete space into a virtual environment. Our main aim at this point was not to interfere with intrinsicfeatures of each test; in other words, we strived to keep all variables that characterize each test unaltered.During the mapping process of both the real and the virtual spaces, we tried to come up with adequatetechnical ways of displaying the tests (static aspects) and enabling the computational interaction, so as toensure their user-friendliness (dynamic aspects).In addition to the abovementioned difficulty, another aspect of the project was particularly challenging forus, namely the technology employed. Our objective was to introduce a tool capable of providing possibilitiesinexistent in the real process (Winograd and Flores, 1986). Amongst these innovative possibilities are, forinstance, the simultaneous follow-up of every individual test being taken in the lab – the examiner can checkon which question a given student is working and how much time there is left for him/her, for example.Another innovative possibility is real-time conversation amongst all examiners giving similar tests in any ofthe schools registered in the server. This last advance is particularly useful for when examiners want todiscuss eventual questions or unpredicted situations that may have arisen (Figure 1).Figure 1. Test follow-up screen.Another innovative possibility we introduced so as to illustrate the potential of this tool (but which iseasily reversible) is the animation of the expressions in Libras in the TVRSL (Figure 2). This interventionwas inspired in the concepts of semantic and articulatory distance devised by Norman (1986), a classic authorin the area of Human-Computer Interaction. Even though the original sequence of pictures indicates themovement through arrows, thus making the meaning (semantic) susceptible to the user’s interpretation, thereis a significant distance between the expression (articulation) and the movement, a problem which ouranimation tool solves. Nevertheless, we feel that before a<strong>do</strong>pting this solution, one must thoroughly revise351
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISthe expressions and perhaps even conduct an experiment to determine the following: to what extent theanimation affects the length of the test in minutes, and to what extent it affects the results obtained. We haveused a number of works by the group of the author of the metho<strong>do</strong>logy to build our prototype, and theseworks reveal the importance of this issue.Figure 2. Sequence of three standard pictures with arrows indicating the movements in the central picture on the left, andthe solution with the “play” button to activate the animation on the right.4. OUR SOLUTION4.1 The Conceptual ModelWe strived to make our conceptual model as generic as possible, so as to allow new future developments orchanges. Additionally, we based it on an arguably complete model. The prototype represents our idea of apossible solution, revealing the functional potential of the four tests described above and allowing them to bepartially <strong>do</strong>ne (just to show what the possibilities would be like). Within the system, there are two kinds offinal user, namely examiner and student. Such user profiles are associated to their own units of work andstudy. Therefore, when examiners wish to schedule a test and select students to take it, they will be able toaccess only the profiles of students registered in the school where they work. In addition to students andexaminers, the system comprises the registration of schools, tasks and answers. In other words, all theseentities are represented in the database. The conceptual model of the system includes the storage of theanswers to the tests’ tasks and questions. As different students take different tests and feed their answersinto the system’s database, it will be possible to implement consultations which, in turn, will produce theexpected answers – based on the data and on statistical manipulation (which is technically easy). Moreover,we have taken into account the fact that sets of alternative data, i.e. sets of ordered sequences of items foreach question, must be available for all tests. Indeed, if the same students need to retake the same tests, theywill not receive the exact same data again. This way, we have managed to avoid the carry-over effect or testretestlearning by controlling the set up and configuration of alternatives of all tests.4.2 The Model of Architecture (Client-server)In our model, students can work asynchronously regardless of the computer platform or school network towhich they belong. However, there are a few tasks that examiners have to <strong>do</strong> prior to each test in order toensure that. In fact, in the real world, students usually take these tests asynchronously and independentlyanyway, since the time they take to complete each task will vary by a fraction of a second depending on thestudent. Indeed, even the same student will perform differently at different moments, going more quickly ashis/her learning set improves, and going more slowly as he/she grows tired. In the solution proposed by ourprototype, once a given examiner has enabled a number of students to take a certain test, this examiner maygather these students in a lab and have them take it at the same time. Nevertheless, the moment all studentshave heard the system guidelines, they can log in and start taking their test independently from their peers.Despite that, all students must take the test under the same conditions, which in turn will depend on thescientific specifications particular to each test. In this case, synchrony, i.e. having all students begin a testsimultaneously, may have its advantages, particularly as regards the follow-up by the examiner. However, it352
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010is un<strong>do</strong>ubtedly not the best solution because it relies greatly on computer conditions and, therefore, might berather problematic in primary and secondary schools in Brazil.4.3 Functionality and the EnvironmentOur environment offers four basic functions within the user profile “examiner”, as follows: “about the tests”(displays a short summary of each available test for examiners to take a quick look), “schedule a test” (allowsexaminers to select a school, a test, a date and time), “give test” (instructs examiners about the guidelines tobe given to students for the successful interaction with the tool – meta-communication system-user isnecessary to the intellectual artifacts (De Souza,2005) and enables the follow-up of the test by examiners),and “check results” (is a projected though not implemented tool that displays a menu with availableinformation, which in turn may be compiled by the system, stored in its database and displayed in the mainscreen. In the future, the system should be able to generate a table containing three columns, the firstdisplaying the number of items (e.g. 1 to 70), the second indicating whether the task was <strong>do</strong>ne right (1) orwrong (0), and the third showing the total time taken to finish the task (in minutes). This table would becompatible with any electronic spreadsheet application. As for the user profile “student”, the environmentdisplays the list of available tests and, once a test has been selected, it enables the access to the test inquestion (Figure 3).Figure 3. Example of our solution for the TVRSLIt is up to the examiner to schedule a given test, and this can be <strong>do</strong>ne either in advance or right before thetest is given to a group of students. Once examiners have guided students through the system guidelines, theyallow students to log in. The moment a student enters the environment, he/she can choose the correct test andbegin, quite independently from other peers that may or may not be present in the lab. A little progress barproportionally and graphically showing the student’s progress in relation to the question on which s/he iscurrently working is constantly displayed, as well as a clock showing how much time has elapsed and howmuch time remains, so as to help students to manage their time while taking the test (Figures 3). Thisparticular feature may be enabled or disabled by researchers, who in turn are hierarchically abovesupervisors, followed by examiners. The researchers must let the supervisors know in which version thisfeature will be disabled, and they must then inform the examiners. These timing resources may be a greatsource of anxiety and distraction, causing examinees that are more inexperienced or prone to nervousness anddistraction to achieve worse results, hence being able to disable them is a precious tool. The effects of thesefeatures still need to be verified before their introduction5. CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORKSFrom the point of view of the interface environment in relation to the user, we would like to stress therelevance of two resources added to the prototype. Firstly, it provides examiners with numerous advantages,including a set of guidelines to be explained to the students, a real time list containing the names of allstudents currently taking a given test, the number of the task on which a certain student is working at a givenmoment, and how much time has elapsed and how much time still remains for that student (a tool that may ormay not be enabled for students to access these pieces of information as well). These tools (especially the lastthree) are a great help for examiners to better manage the entire process. Secondly, our prototype includes atool that allows different examiners working on the same tests to communicate with one another, giving them353
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISthe opportunity to discuss and share information about questions they may have. The relevance of this lasttool depends on the context. Indeed, it is extremely relevant when new examiners join the team, but becomesgradually less relevant once this new examiner has mastered the use of the system.As far as future works are concerned, a pilot experiment should be carried out, followed by the setting ofnorms to be taken into account in a new experiment. This set of tasks would probably prove the hypothesiswhereby the computer version of the tests successfully assesses the alphabetization process of bilingualacquisition (Libras and Portuguese) of deaf children in all years of special education (primary and secondaryschool).REFERENCESCapovilla, F. C. 1989 on the context of discovery in experimentation with human subjects. volume 1. ANN ARBOR:UMI, Cambridge, Mass, 1989.Capovilla, F. C. and Raphael, W.D. 2004 Enciclopédia da Língua de Sinais Brasileira: O Mun<strong>do</strong> <strong>do</strong> Sur<strong>do</strong> em Libras,volume 1 Edusp: Editora da Universidade de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brasil.Capovilla, F. C. and Raphael, W.D. 2004 Enciclopédia da Língua de Sinais Brasileira: O Mun<strong>do</strong> <strong>do</strong> Sur<strong>do</strong> em Libras,volume 2 Edusp: Editora da Universidade de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brasil.Capovilla, F. C. (2009) Protótipo <strong>do</strong> grupo da UFPR, e-mail to Fernan<strong>do</strong> Capovilla email (fcapovilla@gmail.com), 17FEB.Capovilla, F. C. and Mace<strong>do</strong>, C.E. Costa et al 1996 Manipulação de envolvimento de ego via para-instruçõesexperimentais: Efeitos sobre esta<strong>do</strong>s de ânimo e desempenho educativo em resolução de Problemas Psicologia USP,São Paulo, Brasil.De Souza, C. S. 2005 Semiotic Engineering of Human-Computer Interaction MIT Press, 55 Hayward Street Cambridge,MA 02142-1493, USA.Norman, D. A. and Draper, S.W. 1986 User centered system design: New perspectives on human-computer interaction.Ablex Publishing Corporation. Norwood, NJ.T. Winograd and F. Flores. 1986 Understanding Computers and Cognition: A New Foundation for Design, AblexPublishing Corporation, Norwood, NJ,354
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010GENERATING SECRET COVER IMAGE BY USINGRANDOM ART APPROACHRaghad Jawad AhmedComputer Science and Engineering Dept., University Politehnica of Bucharest ,RomaniaABSTRACTWe present an efficient approach to offer a cover image to embed an image within. The cover image has been constructedaccording to the characteristics of the embedded image through applying Ran<strong>do</strong>m Art Approach. It is often uneasy tochoose a suitable image to embed the secret image within. To make it easier and more accurate, the characteristics of thesecret image are considered in a better and more accurate embedding.KEYWORDSSteganography, Information hiding, Ran<strong>do</strong>m Art, Image Processing, Cryptography.1. INTRODUCTIONSteganography is the art and science of hiding information such that its presence cannot be detected.Motivated is growing concern about the protection of intellectual property on the <strong>Internet</strong> and by the threat ofa ban for encryption techniques. The interest in techniques for information hiding has been increasing overthe recent years [1]. Two general directions can be distinguished within information hiding scenarios:protection only against the detection of a message by a passive adversary and hiding a message such that noteven an active adversary can remove it. A survey of current Steganography can be found in [2].Steganography with a passive adversary is perhaps best illustrated by Simmons’ “Prisoners’ problem” [7].Alice and Bob succeed if Alice can send information to Bob such that Eve <strong>do</strong>es not become suspicious,Hiding information from active adversaries is a different problem since the existence of a hidden message ispublicly known, such as in copyright protection schemes. Steganography with active adversaries can bedivided into watermarking and fingerprinting, Watermarking supplies digital objects with an identification oforigin; all objects are marked in the same way [4, 5, 6].In this paper the proposed approach produces a suitable cover image is needed to bury the embeddedimage. The present study a<strong>do</strong>pts ran<strong>do</strong>m image generation method considering embedded image, and theran<strong>do</strong>m image has been constructed according to the properties of the embedded image through applyingRan<strong>do</strong>m Art Approach. By applying the Ran<strong>do</strong>m Art approach on the embedded image by using the ran<strong>do</strong>mimage generation grammar, we can build a suitable cover image that clasps the embedded image in it.2. LITERATURE REVIEWThe technique for secret hiding of messages in an otherwise innocent looking carrier message belongs to thefield of Steganography. The purpose of Steganography is to conceal the very presence of secret information;The field of steganography is very old. The most popular steganographic methods used by spies includeinvisible ink and micro<strong>do</strong>ts [3]. Micro<strong>do</strong>ts are blocks of text or images scaled <strong>do</strong>wn to the size of a regular<strong>do</strong>t in a text. Shifting words and changing spacing between lines in text <strong>do</strong>cuments or in images containingtext can also be used for hiding bits of secret messages. The gaps in human visual and audio systems can beused for information hiding. In the case of images, the human eye is relatively insensitive to high frequencies.This fact has been utilized in many steganographic algorithms, which modify the least significant bits of graylevels in digital images or digital sound tracks. Additional bits of information can also be inserted into355
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADIScoefficients of image transforms, The stenographer’s job is to make the secretly hidden information difficultto detect given the complete knowledge of the algorithm used to embed the information except the secretembedding key [2]. This so called Kerckhoff’s principle is the golden rule of cryptography and is oftenaccepted for steganography as well, in real world, however, it may be rather difficult if not impossible toobtain this knowledge. In one typical scenario, Alice and Bob exchange messages (images) and Eve wants tofind out if they use steganography. Alice and Bob draw images from a certain source, Eve may find out, forexample, that Alice uses a specific scanner, digital camera, a camcorder with a TV card, or some otherimaging device as a source of images. Eve could purchase the same type of imaging device and generate alarge database of images.3. RANDOM IMAGE GENERATION (RIG)Generally, each pixel in plane image can be represented by x and y coordinates, and the pixel value isevaluated from the three components Red, Green and Blue, which can be denoted as [R, G, B].The pixel components (red, green, blue) should also have a value between [-1, 1], since its value isdependent on a mathematical functions (such as sin, cos, etc.). For example, RGB [0,0,0] is black which isnormalized into RGB [-1,-1,-1] , RGB [255,0,0] is red which normalized into RGB [1,-1 –1] and so on, theequations below convert the default RGB values into values between [-1, 1]:( n 1) * 255Nb1..10..255, Where n is any number from [-1...1] (3.1)2n * 2Nb0..2551..1 1, Where n is any number from [0...255] (3.2)2553.1 The Grammar RulesThe used grammar rules are written using Backus-Naur Form (BNF). BNF is a notation for expressing thegrammar in the form of production rules [8]. BNF grammar consists of terminal{s} and non-terminals. InBNF notation, angle brackets are used to distinguish non-terminals, the symbol: : = stands for “ is definedas”, and | stands for “or” . The use of | is a shorthand for several productions, which have a concatenation ofzero and more symbols (terminals and non-terminals) on the right hand side [7]. The BNF grammar used inthe proposed RIG is shown in Table 1Table 1. The RIG grammarProductionrule number0123456789The Production rule::=::=::=X::=Y::=R::=Add(,)::=Mult(,)::=Div(,)::=Mod(,)::=Sin()Productionrule number101112131415161718The Production rule::=Tan()::=Arctan()::=Cos()::=Reverse()::=Bw()::=Expf()::=Rgb(,,)::=If(,,)::=Mix(,,,)Several mathematical functions are selected and used in the proposed system to generate the cover image.356
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010Table 2. The list of functions that are used in RIGFunction number Function name Function meaning12345678910111213141516X[]Y[]R[]Bw[G]Expf[a]Sin[a]Cos[a]Tan[a]Arctan[a]Reverse[a]Add[a,b]Mult[a,b]Div[a,b]RGB[r,g,b]If[cond,T,E]Mix[a,b,c,d]Identifies the X coordinate.Identifies the Y coordinate.Generates ran<strong>do</strong>m number in range [-1,1]A shade of gray, G=-1 is black, G=1 is white.The exponential function.The sine function.The cosine function.The tangent function.The arctangent function.The reverse color of a.The sum of two colors.The product of two colors.The division of two colors.A color specified by the RGB component.The “ if -then-else” function: if cond is positive, then the value is T, else the value is E.The mixing of two colors a and b depending on the value of c and d.3.2 Linear Feedback Shift Registers (LFSR)The embedded image properties are described as set of bytes. These bytes must be composed in a ran<strong>do</strong>mform. A feedback shift register was used to satisfy the ran<strong>do</strong>mness.A feedback shift register is made up of two parts: a shift register and a feedback function as it is shownin Figure 1. The shift register contains a sequence of bits. The length of a shift register is figured in bits; if itis n bits long, it is called an n-bit shift register.The simplest kind of feedback shift register is a linear feedback shift register or LFSR as it is shown inFigure 2. The feedback function is simply the XOR of certain bits in the register; the list of these bits is calleda tap sequence.b n b n-1 …… b 4 b 3 b 2 b 1Feedback FunctionFigure 1. Feedback shift registerb n b n-1 …… b 4 b 3 b 2 b 1Shift Registerb n b n 1Feedback Functionb 4 b 3 b 2 b 1Figure 1. Feedback shift registerFigure 2. Linear Feedback shift registerOutput357
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADIS3.3 Image generating Fidelity CriteriaThe RIG generated images need to satisfy the most common regularity properties. Images that are containingrecognizable shapes are called regular images. So every image generated by RIG must be tested for itsregularity and amount of information. The Fourier spectrum can be used to detect the image regularity. Eachimage can be detected by calculating the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) for it and then we check the energy ofthe selected image. The Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) equation may be illustrated as:N 1 kF ( k)f ( n)Qn0For k =0, 1… N-1 (3.3)N 11kf ( n) F(n)QN n0For n = 0, 1… N-1 (3.4)Where 2k 2kQ k cos i sin N N (3.5)Where i 1For regularity property, if the energy of the spectrum is concentrated in the high frequency, then image isirregular, otherwise the image is regular; the amount of image information is measured by applying Entropytest. The following equation describes the entropy formula:L 1Entropy p i* log p i(3.6) i02( )Where p i : stands for the probability of the ith gray level = n k / N 2n k : stands for the total number of pixels with gray value k.L : stands for the total number of gray levels (e.g., 256 for 8 bits)4. THE PROPOSED TECHNIQUEThe proposed approach uses the structured images, which are generated using ran<strong>do</strong>m image generation(RIG) algorithm. Because if photographs are used instead of the structured images; it is easier for theobserver to predict some information about secure embedded images, and another personal knowledge, thefollowing algorithm describes the technique of the proposed system:Step 1: Extracting the embedded image properties.Step 2: The first ran<strong>do</strong>m digit is generated using LFSR and depends on extracted properties.Step 3: If the first digit matches one of the grammar numbers that is suited to the first generated digits, thenstore it in a temporary array. Otherwise return to step 2.Step 4: Scan for the applicable rule that the generated digit number matches its number.Step 5: Search the matching rule to count the number of arguments of its function.Step 6: If the number of arguments is not equal to zero and is less than 13 (since the maximum number ofnested functions can be 13), then <strong>do</strong> the following steps:i) Generate new digit using LFSR.ii) Search for the application rule that the generated digit number matches its rule number.iii) Scan the matching rule to count the number of arguments of its function.iv) If the number of arguments is equal to zero, then decrement one from the resisted number ofarguments of the previous function. Otherwise, increment the number of functions of the resultingstream of integers and return to step 6.Step 7: If the number of arguments is equal to zero then go to step 9.Step 8: Else, if the number of arguments is not equal to zero and the number of functions in the formula isgreater than 13 then generate ran<strong>do</strong>m number using LFSR and decrement one from the number ofarguments. Repeat this process until the number of arguments becomes zero.Step 9: Replace the resulted stream of digits to the corresponding right-hand side of the production rule inthe RIG grammar.358
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 20105. IMPLEMENTATIONThe Matlab 6.5 and Mathematica 4.0 applications are used to build the proposed system. Many functions areconstructed depending on the given facilities of the selected applications.5.1 Experiments and Results1- First test was applied on 100x100 gray scale images. Figures 3, 4 show the selected image and itshistogram. The result of RIG approach is (256 by 256) color Cover image shown in Figure 5.Figure 3. Embedded Image (100x100)Figure 4. Embedded Image HistogramThe grammar rule of the embedded image is illustrated bellow:Ran<strong>do</strong>m Image formulaRGB Color FormulaComposed FormulaR Sin (X[])G If (X[],Y[])B Mult(Sin(X[]),Y[]) RGB [Sin(X[]),If(X[],Y[]),Mult(Sin(X[]),Y[]]Figure 5. Shows the RIG generated image of the above formula:Figure 5. The Generated (256x256) Image Using Ran<strong>do</strong>mArt approachFigure 6. Energy spectrum of the generated image byapplying FFTThe amount of information of the generated cover image is calculated as :{ Entropy value} =7.9645 bits/ pixel.2- The second test was utilized on (150x150) gray scale embedded image shown in Figure 7. Figure 8.Describes the histogram of the selected image. The output of RIG is(256x256) color image is shown inFigure 9 ,The grammar rule of the embedded image is illustrated bellow:Figure 7. Embedded Image (150x150)Figure 8. Embedded Image HistogramThe grammar rule of the embedded image is illustrated bellow:Ran<strong>do</strong>m Image formulaRGB ColorFormulaComposed FormulaR Tan (X[])G If (X[],Y[])B Add(Cos(X[]),If(X[],Y[])) RGB [Tan(X[]),If(X[],Y[]),Add(Cos(X[]),If(X[],Y[])]359
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISFigure 9. The Generated (256x256) ImageFigure 10. Energy spectrum of the generated image byapplying FFTThe amount of information of the generated cover image is calculated as :{ Entropy value} =3.6733 bits/ pixel.6. CONCLUSIONConstructing a ran<strong>do</strong>m image proved to be a good hiding media, where:1. Ran<strong>do</strong>m image is a suitable media for the image that is intended to be Cover image, because it has nospecific meaning. The reason behind this is that ran<strong>do</strong>m image <strong>do</strong>es not raise the suspensions of theattackers.2. An image that is highly detailed can be produced by complicating the grammar. The product image ismore suitable for embedding secret message.3. The Consideration of the characteristics of the embedded image allows us to recognize the informationcontained in the image. A suitable cover image is needed to hide the embedded image; the present studya<strong>do</strong>pts ran<strong>do</strong>m image generation method considering an embedded image.4. New functions can be added to the grammar rules to generate and expand wide range of images that areappropriate for embedding.REFERENCES1. Roos Anderson (ed.), 1996. Information hiding, Lecture Notes in computer science, vol. 1174, Springer.2. Ross J. Anderson and Fabien A. Petitcolas, 1998. On the limits of Steganography, IEEE Journal on Selected areas incommunications 16, no. 4.3. N.F.Johnson, 1998. Steganography , http://www.jjtc.com/steg<strong>do</strong>c, George Mason University.4.D. Kahn, 1996. The history of steganography”, 1 st Information Hiding Workshop, Lecture Notes in ComputerScience, R. Anderson, ed., vol. 1174, pp. 1–5, Springer-Verlag.5. Moni Naor, Amos fiat and Benny Chor, 1994. Tracing traitors , advances in cryptology : CRYPTO ‘ 94 (Tvo G.Desmedt,ed.), Lecture notes in computert science, vol. 839.6. British Pfitzmann and Matthias Schunter, 1996. Asymmetric fingerprinting, advances in cryptology; EUROCRYPT ’96(Ueli Maurer, ed.) ,Lecture notes in computert science, vol. 1233.7. V.J . Rayward –Simth , 1984 . A first course in formal language theory.8. Alfred V.Aho, Ravi, Sethi, and Jeffrey D.Ulman, 1986.Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools, Addison-Wesley.360
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010BILINGUAL ALPHABETISATION OF DEAF CHILDREN:REQUIREMENTS FOR A COMMUNICATION TOOLJuliana Bueno 1 , Laura Sánchez García 1 and Aléssio Miranda Júnior 11Computer Science Department – Federal University of Paraná,Centro Politécnico, Jardim das Américas, ZIP CODE: 81531-980 – Curitiba - PRABSTRACTThe present work was inspired by the wish to contribute to the bilingual alphabetisation of deaf children whose mothertongue is Libras (Brazilian Sign Language). In this light, we came up with an internet environment to encourage deafchildren to engage in informal conversations and, at a later stage, in educational activities (both oral and written). In orderto create the environment, we first carried out extensive research as an essential metho<strong>do</strong>logical step, which then led tothe establishment of three sets of requirements. These requirements gave rise to the possibilities offered by the system, aswell as to its general interface and interaction solutions. Finally, we described the overall features of the technologicaltool proposed in the present paper.KEYWORDSDeaf Children, Libras (Brazilian Sign Language), Bilingual Alphabetisation, Virtual Environment, Interface.1. INTRODUCTIONThe origin of the present work traces back to the questioning of social and production habits of people.People with special needs, the deaf included, make up a minority and thus tend to be discriminated against. Inorder to change this situation, one must acknowledge the differences inherent to these minorities, respectingthe way in which the members of these groups interact and communicate, rather than imposing on them whatseems “normal” to the majority of the population.By analysing these minorities – in this case, deaf people – and thinking of ways to both respect theirdifferences and bring them closer to the so-called hearing community, we arrived at the conclusion thatstudying the alphabetisation process of deaf people might be a great contribution, starting at early childhoodstages. Normally, in order to obtain positive results, deaf children must first learn sign language (L1) beforelearning a second language (L2), in this case Portuguese. This process is entitled bilingual education(Quadros, 2006).Nowadays, computers have become a resource which - if used efficiently – may greatly contribute to thisteaching-learning process (Masetto, 2000). Indeed, thanks to the latest developments in Computer Science,communication has been changing and schools have been trying to adapt by using computers as a teachingtool (Stumpf, 2005). Especially concerning deaf people, computer resources bring even more advantages dueto their particularly visual character.In this light, the main objective of our project was to call attention to the issue of the bilingual educationof deaf children and to highlight the role the computer plays in the process of language teaching and learning.Therefore, our main motivation was to contribute to the process of Portuguese learning by deaf children(or Libras, which is a term used to describe people who know Libras, i.e. Língua Brasileira de Sinais, orBrazilian Sign Language). Having this objective in mind, we think about developing an attractive andalluring <strong>Internet</strong> environment to help these students with their writing.In order to build the environment, we first had to carry out a detailed study to identify its mainrequirements, which in turn is perhaps the main contribution of the present work. To fulfill this task, welooked into the culture and identity of deaf people, as well as into sign language and its importance for deafchildren learning other languages. As our target public consisted of children, we had to become acquaintedwith more comprehensive research within the area of Visual Communication on the likes and preferences of361
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISchildren. Finally, we studied the various means of representation of sign language so as to understand whatfactors must be taken into consideration when one uses these means.Based upon the overall results we obtained in our research, we came up with requirements forcommunication environments on the computer whose aim is to help the bilingual (Libras-Portuguese)teaching-learning process of deaf children.Finally, we sketched an environment that synthesised all this; all in all, an adequate environment for thework hypothesis discussed here. The implementation will be our future work.2. LITERATURE REVISION2.1 Deaf Children: Culture, Teaching and LearningAs we looked into the concept of culture, or more specifically into deaf culture, we realised that one shouldspeak of multicultural products rather than of cultural products (Peter McLaren apud Moura, 2000). Indeed,when one creates a certain product for a deaf target public, one must at the same time respect the targetculture and not restrict the product to that culture; instead, one must interact with the hearing culture as well.Another paramount element is the use of visual resources in communication because they are inherent to thecommunication between deaf people and the world (Perlin, 1998 and Quadros, 2005).As for the kinds of activities to be used, we find group activities particularly important as they push thelearning process of deaf children forward. Amongst the strategies we studied, story reading and telling ingroups is perhaps the most interesting one, motivating children to improve their reading skills (Gillesppie andTwar<strong>do</strong>sz, 1996).Another relevant element we took into account is the notion of “visual alphabetisation” in a bilingualcontext (Sofiato, 2005). This notion consists of focusing the child’s attention on reading by exploring theinterpretation of images.Yet another aspect we found relevant is the fact that Libras must be the main language for user-systemand system-user communication (Peixoto, 2006).Furthermore, we feel that making use of fun activities in Libras is a promising strategy to increaselearning and integration amongst the children. By playing games, telling stories and the like, children havefun in sign language and learn more (Quadros, 2004).Finally, in terms of the kinds of materials to be used for deaf children, we believe that they must includeinteresting texts filled with images and that promote the constant association between text and image(Fernandes, 2006).2.2 Graphic Projects targeted to ChildrenAs far as our graphic project is concerned, it is well known that the visual concept of a given project mustprivilege the preferences of the target public. In our case, the environment must explore the fun character ofactivities and stimulate the children’s imagination (Munari, 1981).Another relevant factor is colour. When one works with children, one should make use of primary colours(red, yellow and green) because they tend to be the children’s favourite and because they help to establishcolour as an emphatic element for content (Farina, 1982).As for content, it must be less verbal and more visual. Indeed, an interesting way to instigate children toread is to use iconic, indicial and symbolic reading, so as to stimulate them to first learn how to read images.In terms of adequate fonts for children, they must be clearly legible and sized between 14 and 24 pts.Capital letters that clearly distinguish between “a” and “g”, for example, together with texts aligned to theleft are ideal for children being alphabetised (Strizver, 2006).Concerning shapes, children tend to prefer circular or round shapes. Therefore, in this kind of project, theuse of round shapes makes the environment more attractive to children (França, 2005).Another essential element is the fact that environments targeted to children must always allow for someinteraction amongst the children and between them and the environment.362
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010Moreover, some studies have shown that a more rectilinear illustration style containing primary colours,naturalism, a fairly absent context and geometrical lines is often preferred by children (França, 2005). Thisspecific point can be explored in the Libras illustrations.Last but not least, it would be interesting to make use of visual vocabulary (signs and arrows), helping thechildren to associate them with other educational contents, thus leading them to improve their visualorientation – which is key in Libras representations.2.3 Representation of Libras SignsEven though there have not been standard studies about Libras representations, particularly not about thebilingual teaching of deaf children, the materials we studied shed some light on the matter and led us to a fewconclusions.One of these conclusions is the importance of preserving, together with a certain sign, its correspondingfacial and body expression. Similarly, when it comes to Libras representations, one must respect itscomplexity and avoid ambiguity.The use of graphic resources, such as arrows, action lines and multiple juxtapositions, is pertinent inLibras illustrations. By the way, these resources are already being used, but often in the wrong way. A fewvery recent studies may lead to a more effective use in the future (Dyson, e Souza, 2008).In materials targeted to children, the use of differential illustrations (that nevertheless contain all thecomponents of the sign), together with the use of colour, make the materials more in line with the preferencesof the target public (Couto, 2009).As for images, videos and animations in Libras, displaying all the movements comprised by a sign isessential. One must not display the character-interpreter’s entire body, but rather the head and torso. Thecharacter must stick to those movements and expressions related to the sign only. In addition to that, otherrules have to be followed, such as the adequate clothing of the interpreter, as well as the use of the sameinterpreter for all signs (Campos, 2007).In computer systems that present signs through videos and animations, it is important to allow users tocontrol these videos and the like, enabling them to disable this function if they wish to <strong>do</strong> so.3. BILINGUAL ALBHABETISATION OF DEAF CHILDREN:REQUIREMENTS FOR VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENTS3.1 The Three Sets of RequirementsRequirements related to the user profiles of Deaf Children_Libras (RDCL):RDCL1 - Libras as main communication language user-system: The environment must use Libras asthe main communication language user-system and user-user.RDCL2 - Integration Interculturality: The environment must be multicultural, i.e. it cannot berestricted to a deaf audience, but rather must respect the specificities of the deaf community and, at the sametime, interact with the hearing community.RDCL3 - Multiple representation of a single meaning: It is important to establish associations betweenwhat is said (hearing), signalled (deaf) and written (Portuguese), so as to make communication easier.Getting deaf children to visualize what is verbal and non-verbal, and to make associations between thelanguages, in order to build a single meaning, is essential to bilingual (Libras – Portuguese) leaning andknowledge.RDCL4 - Visual Character: The environment must make abundant use of visual resources since visualmeanings make up the basis of communication amongst the deaf.RDCL5 - Genuinely interesting environment, subject to visual representation: The environment mustoffer users not only interesting texts, but also texts rich in images and associations between language andimage.363
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISRDCL6 - Support activities to bilingual alphabetisation: The environment must offer childrenadditional activities to those used in their alphabetisation class.RDCL7 - Articulation in Libras: It is useful to carry our role playing activities, as well as otheractivities that encourage group learning, focusing on the ability to express signs.Requirements related to Visual Communication for Children between 7 and 10 years of age (RVCC):RVCC1 - Project Conceptualisation: The visual concept of the project must privilege the preferences ofthe target public, making use of fun activities and stimulating the children’s imagination.RVCC2 - Use of Colours: The environment must privilege the use of primary colours (red, yellow andgreen) both because children tend to prefer these colours, and also because colours may be explored asemphatic elements to be associated to content.RVCC3 - Attractiveness: Content must be less verbal and more visual.RVCC4 - Emphasis on Different Reading Types: The tool must explore iconic, indicial and symbolicreading, as children must first learn to read images.RVCC5 - Use of Fonts: The environment must contain legible fonts sized between 14 and 24 pts,preferably capitalised, with a clear distinction between the letters “a” and “g” and with texts aligned to theleft.RVCC6 - Use of Shapes: The environment must also privilege circular or round shapes because childrentend to prefer them.RVCC7 - Interaction Stimulation: The environment must offer children the opportunity to interact withone another.RVCC8 - Illustration Style: The style to be a<strong>do</strong>pted for illustrations and drawings should be rectilinear,with primary colours, naturalism, a fairly absent context and geometrical lines.RVCC9 - Use of Visual Vocabulary: The interface must make use of visual vocabulary (signs andarrows), making associations with other educational contents and making visual orientation easier.Requirements related to the Expression of Libras Signs (RELS):RELS1: The expression must preserve all elements of the sign, including its facial and body expression.RELS2: The representation of the sign must strive to avoid ambiguities;RELS3: When it comes to materials target to children, it is important to make abundant use of differentand colourful illustrations of the signs.RELS4: The interpreter-character, be it in an image, animation or video, must respect all the current rulessurrounding Libras interpretation.RELS5: The system must allow users to have control over the display of images and videos, being usersalso capable of enabling this control function.3.2 Environment ProposalIn the present subsection, based upon the abovementioned requirements, we shall look into any functions ofthe application in form topics:• Real-time communication amongst users;• Group Communication – discussion forums;• Translation Portuguese – Libras and Libras – Portuguese;• Writing and sending online messages;• Story-telling;• Role Playing Game;• Display of Libras expressions;• Libras practice;3.3 Preliminary Architecture of the EnvironmentFigure 1 describes the preliminary architecture of the environment. The structure comprises a few userprofiles, various software modules, and several input and output devices. We shall describe these elementsbelow.364
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010The environment offers the following user profiles: deaf Libras children (aged from 7 to 10), children ingeneral (equally aged from 7 to 10), Libras teachers, Libras and Portuguese monitors.As input and output devices we have at least the following: keyboard, camera 1 (close), camera 2 (large,angular), microphone, monitor.Figure 1. Preliminary architecture4. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORKSThe present work had its origins in two main facts, as follows: firstly, in the need for bilingualalphabetisation (Libras and Portuguese) of deaf children as the basis for their full human development andsocial inclusion; and secondly, in the complexity inherent to the learning of Portuguese by deaf childrenwhose mother tongue is Libras.In this light, we developed an environment with an emphasis on communication amongst the members ofthe target public, attractive enough to instigate children to work with it, so that, in the long run, they getinvolved with other activities of support to bilingual alphabetization to be incorporated into the environment.To be implemented, the environment must first be better detailed. We estimate that the translationmodules Portuguese – Libras and Libras – Portuguese will offer the most difficulty, seeing as they require alot of research in the area of image processing. Once the tool has been partially implemented, one can thenconduct experiments on its actual use, aiming at obtaining feedback from the target audience and henceproviding ongoing improvement to the environment.REFERENCESCampos, M. B.; Silveira, M. S., 2007. Promoção da Cidadania da Comunidade Surda: o Uso das TICs na Apropriação desua Língua Materna. In: XXXIV SEMISH - Seminário Integra<strong>do</strong> sobre <strong>Software</strong> e Hardware, 2007, Rio de Janeiro.Couto, R. M. S., 2009. Multi-Trilhas. Do concreto ao virtual: interatividade no letramento de indivíduos sur<strong>do</strong>s. Relatóriofinal de pesquisa, PUC-Rio.Dyson, M., Souza, J. M. B., 2007. An illustred review of how motion is represented in static instrutional guides. GlobalConference Visual Literacies: Exploring Critical Issues. Oxford, United King<strong>do</strong>m.Farina, M.,1982. O mergulho nas cores. Psicodinâmica das cores em comunicação. São Paulo: Edgard Blücher.Fernandes, S. F., 2006. Práticas de letramentos na educação bilíngüe para sur<strong>do</strong>s. SEED. Curitiba.França, M. S., 2005. Estamparia têxtil infantil: abordagem teórica e experimental. Trabalho de Conclusão de Curso(Graduação em Desenho Industrial), UFPR.Gillespie, C. W.; Twar<strong>do</strong>sz, S., 1996. Survey of literacy environments and practices in residences at schools for the deaf.American Annals of the of the Deaf, 141(3), 224-230.365
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISMasetto, M. T., 2001. Mediação pedagógica e o uso da tecnologia. In: J. M. Moran, M.T. Mosetto; M. A. Behrens. Novastecnologias e mediação pedagógica. Editora Papirus. Campinas.Moura, M. C., 2000. O Sur<strong>do</strong>: caminhos para uma nova identidade. Editora Revinter. Rio de Janeiro.Munari, B., 1981. Das coisas nascem coisas. Lisboa: Edições 70.Perlin, G., 2005. Identidades Surdas. Em Skliar (org.) A Surdez: um olhar sobre as diferenças. Editora Mediação. PortoAlegre. 1998. Magistério. 3ª Edição. Ed. Scipione. São Paulo.Peixoto, R. C., 2006. Algumas considerações sobre a interface entre a Língua Brasileira de Sinais (LIBRAS) e a LínguaPortuguesa na construção inicial da escrita pela criança surda. Cad. CEDES, vol.26.Quadros, R. M., 2004. Educação de sur<strong>do</strong>s: efeitos de modalidade e práticas pedagógicas. Temas em Educação EspecialIV. São Carlos. EDUFSCar, p. 55-62.Quadros, R. M., 2006. Idéias para ensinar português para alunos sur<strong>do</strong>s. Brasília: MEC, SEESP.Sofiato, C. G., 2005. O desafio da representação pictórica da língua de sinais brasileira. Dissertação de Mestra<strong>do</strong> (emArtes Visuais) – Instituto de Artes, UNICAMP.Strizver, I., 2006. Type Rules!: The Designer's Guide to Professional Typography. Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley &Sons, Inc.Stumpf, M., 2005. Aprendizagem de escrita de língua de sinais pelo sistema signwriting: línguas de Sinais no papel e nocomputa<strong>do</strong>r. Tese (Doutora<strong>do</strong> em Informática na Educação), Pós-Graduação em Informática na Educação, UFRGS.366
Reflection Papers
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010SEMIOTICS OF BRAZILIAN E-COMMERCE SIGNSCayley Guimarães, Diego R. Antunes, Alice G. de Paula and Aléssio Miranda JrUniversidade Federal <strong>do</strong> ParanáABSTRACTSigns from Brazilian e-commerce sites were studied focusing on their intended meaning for the user to go about theoperations to be executed to perform desired tasks. It is shown a low mapping between the intended function in thesystem and the desired goal from the user. A better understanding of the Theory of Sign Production and SemioticEngineering Methods for sign re-design is recommended.KEYWORDSSemiotic Engineering. Sign Analysis, e-commerce, Communication ruptures.1. INTRODUCTIONDertouzos (1977) states the importance of e-commerce sites, widely used. Pictographic signs (e.g. shoppingcart) are used to communicate available functions. When the user is unable to determine the meaning of suchsigns, she may simply go to another site. In Carroll et al (1988) we find that metaphors are a good aid in theattibution of meaning to novelties, and can be used to represent a concept in a non-verbal manner. Such useof metaphors in the form of pictographic signs may be used with the purpose of designing a user-friendliersite. de Souza (2005) states that the elements of the interface serve to communicate to the user how and whyto use the system. This communication is obtained through the use of several types of signs.Pio & Guimarães (2007) analized signs used in Brazilian e-commerce sites and concluded that thesubjects had a great difficulty in atributting meaning to signs they encoutered. This research further analysesthe same set of signs using a semiotic approach in an attempt to try to elucidate the communications rupturesand interpretations (i.e. abductive paths) of users.2. SIGNSAccording to de Souza (2005), the “engineering of signs” is a rational process of choosing represantationsthat will be computationally codified and interpreted. The choices certainly make sense to the coder. It isexpected that they also make sense to the user: “The design of signs that can trigger converging semiosisaround its implemented meaning is the primary goal of HCI design in a semiotic engineering perspective”.According to Pierce apud de Souza (2005), a sign is defined as “anything that stands for something else, tosomebody, in some respect or capacity” and it is the basis of interpretation (what someone understands as themeaning of something). Pierce views signs as a triade composed by the object (referent), the representamen(representation) and the interpretant (meaning). The relation within the triade is that the representamenrepresents the object (referent) in a manner that creates the interpretant (meaning) in the mind of theinterpreter. Signs work as a process: there isn´t, necessarily, a conection between a representation and itsobject: meaning is always a mediatior between them.According to Pierce, signs can be classified, among others, in firstness, secondness and thirdness.Firstness is the category of undiferantiated qualitative experience (e.g. the cry of a child). Secondness is thecategory of strict association between two phenomenum, that happens through some common invariablebetween them (e.g. when the child cries, for the parents this cry is the secondness that something is wrong).Thirdness is the category of mediated relations (e.g. the thirdness occur when the parents attibute to thecrying the meaning that the child is hungry). Originally, Pierce´s classification referred to the how369
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISrepresentations evoqued their referents (not their meanings (i.e. how the representamen manifests the objectof a sign). Therefore, icons are signs in which the representation brings up the firstness of the referent.Indices are signs whose representation bring the secondness (e.g. smoke represents fire). Symbols are signsthat bring the thirdness, a result of a convention that stablish its meaning.According to de Souza (2005), signs entail a process named semiosis, in which the three parts(interpretant, object and representamen) interact to form the sign. This process is infuenced by a plethora ofelements, such as culture, previous knowledge, context etc. Since signs are designed to convey specificmeaning, this process is supposed to succeed. A well designed sign links the object and the interpretant to theuser, and it is this relation that determines the success or failure of the interpretation process (effect relation -where the links between the object and the interpretant are closely tight and cannot exist independently fromeach other). There is also a relation between the representamen and the object, that deals with the conceptionof the sign to convey its meaning. Additionaly, to complete the triade, there is also the relation between therepresentamen and the interpretant.According to [Carroll et al, 1988] signs reduce the complexity of the system, the mental overload of theuser in face of a new system. They may represent functions, states of the system etc. and the most effectiveicon is that which maps the object directlly. Signs are more easily recognized and remembered, and givesupport to learning and to user´s memory. However, ill-desined signs may reduce the usability. However,“often people recognize the picture of things, and grasp its meaning more quickly than when the verbalrepresentations of the things are used”.Eco (1997) states that signs have a few functions, such as: Signification systems; CommunicationProcesses; Discursive Competence (that manifest itself by knowledge and exposition to signs). Eco alsodefines four modes of composition and interpretation of signs: Cost (if a sign is already known, it cost less tobe interpreted); Type-Token (use culturally conventioned expressions – ratio facilis to ratio difficilis);Continuum (reference or content similar to the expression); Complexity of articulation (icons). For Eco, thesefour parameters are used to distinguish the various ways of sign production: the physical job required toproduce an expression; the ratio type-token of the expression; the type of continuum; the mode andcomplexity of the articulation (characterizes the degree of gramaticalization of the sign to be produced).3. PICTOGRAPHIC SIGNS EVALUATIONAccording to Mullet and Sano (1999) apud de Souza (2005) “[…] when developing multiple images, caremust be taken to maintain cohesion within the image set to consider the physical, conceptual, and culturalcontext in which the images will ultimately be displayed. Mastery of these concepts is far more importantthan any innate ‘artistic’ ability in developing an effective image program.” Sign evaluation is a process ofsubjective interpretation, created within the context in which the sign is inserted, and even that of the user´sculture. The signs analysed in this research exist within the context of the functionality of Brazilian e-commerce sites, and the user has previously used the expected functions for such sites in order ot obtain theirgoals (those of finding, comparing, buying a product).Pio & Guimarães (2007) conducted an usability evaluation test with 30 users of e-commerce sites, whichallowed them to select the signs most common to conduct a large survey (130 responses) of their meaning.showed that the icons chosen by developers <strong>do</strong> not match the meaning attribution desired. In fact, a greatnumber of signs were not recognized by the subjects. Above all, the subjects attributed different meaningswhen compared to the percentage of correct meanings.is the picture of lock, whose thirdness was to inform that the site was safe. 84.2% made such relation.10% interpreted the sign as the representation of a shopping list. Firstness may be the cause of failure, sincethe sign resambles a shopping basket, that refers to shopping (secondness), which reminds of the list ofproducts to be shopped (thirdness). The cost of recognition was high. has an intended thirdness of productvisualization. 63.1% made the intended relation. There was no suggestion as to a better meaning. Thirdnessand a mismatch in the type-token relation: the user might have a previous experience with other systems thatlead to the meaning attibution of a file (which <strong>do</strong>es not <strong>do</strong>es not exist in the context of e-commerce sites).is typical of shopping bag in Brazil, but was used to represent the shopping list (for 52.6 % of thesubjects). 26.3% thought the secondness was for the act of buying (bag to hold products), a problem of type-370
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010toke relation. The use of for buying the product was made sense for only 42.1% of the subjects. 52.6%thought the thirdness of the sign was the shopping list. Culturally, the shopping cart is where shoppers putitems to be bought later. It is hard to understand the firstness of , meant to mean delivery services (to31.8%). 36.8% found the secondness to be the homepage. It can be seen that the designer had a problem withthe complexity to articulate the concept of delivery services, for which there is no convention. As for itappears to have the firstness of a shield, for safety (31.8% of the subjects made such relation). A lower costfor safety could be the use of a lock, widely used in all types of information systems in regards to safety.is a “talking baloon”, typical from cartoons. Its intended thirdness was that of online services, arelation made by only 26.3%. For another 26.3% of the subjects, the assigned thirdness was of information.The cost of recognizing this sign was high. The sign was meant to stand for type of payments, a relationmade only by 26.3% of the subjects. 52.6% attibuted the price as the meaning of the sign, which seems to bethe more culturally common attribution.To show the wraping service, the designer used , meaningfull to 15.8% of the subjects. 47.4%abducted that the sign indicated which items were to be sent to another person (as a gift). The type-tokenrelation didn´t follow the cultural idea of a gift, causing the low understanding of the sign. As for , it ishard to see why the designer intended its thirdness to be online questions, a relation made by only 15.8% ofthe subjects. 36.8% understood the thirdness to be contact information. A high cost of producing this sign fora rather abstract concept may have played a role in its lack of understanding by the subjects.was used to indicate that the picture of the product could be enhanced, a relation made by only 10.5%of the subjects. 73.7% went with the widely interpretation (althought controversial) that its thirdness was forthe “search” operation. In an example of lack of consistency, the sign was meant to bring up a thirdnessof a wedding list, a relation made by only 10.5% of the subjects. 15.8% attributed the thirdness of indicatingwhich item is a gift. is rather difficult, and it was used by the designer as a thirdness of store locations, arelation made by only 5.3% of the subjects. 31.6% thought the firstness was that of a storage warehouse, andattributed the meaning of the availability of the product. Clearly the sign wasn´t recognized. Perharps a mapwould directly map the designer´s intention. In contrast, the sign was used to bring the thirdness ofavailability. Only 5.3% of the subjects dared to attribute the meaning that the product would be deliveredsealed. It is even hard to guess as to a abductive path in this case.Again, the lack of consistency appears, with the designer using as a thirdness of privacy policies. It isnot far fetched to see why none of the subjects made that relation. The type-token relation would indicatesafety, as was the case for all the subjects. appears to be a notepad, whose intended thirdness was thevisualization of the product´s items, a relation made by no one of the subjects. Instead, 68.4% attributed athirdness of shopping list, a more culturally known relation. The firstness of is also obscure, and it wasused for a thirdness of exibiting the technical data of the product, a relation no subject made. 26.4% thoughtthe sign was for configurations of the product. The firstness of the signs and was also hard todetermine. The former was meant to be return policies and the latter the “login” into the system. 15.8%thought that the first sign was for buying the product, and 21.1% thought that the second sign meant “groupdiscount”. The articulatory complexity may have played a part.Another inconsistency can be found in the sign , whose firstness is that of a gift, but whose intendethirdeness by the designer was for gift certificates. No subjcet made such relation, whereas 42.1% attributedthe meaning of a gift (not a gift certificate). A clear firstness of a telephone, the sign meant a thirdness ofsales phone. However, 68.4% of the subjects made the rather culturally conventional attribution os CustomerServices, in a clear example of a type-token relation common in other e-commerce sites.The sign seems a swiss-knife representation, and it was used as a thirdness of sales and services. Amore common meaning culturally conventioned for the swiss-knife in Brazil is that of multiple uses, arelation made by 26.3% of the subjects. The rather difficult concept of wish list was represented by the sign. The firstness for this sign is anyone´s guess. 31.8% of the subjects saw a shopping list. There were ahigh cost of recognition and a high degree of articulatory complexity for this sign. The same can be said of, whose intende thirdness was that of partnership. 47.6% of the subjects took the firstness to be a lock, and371
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISthe thirdness to be safety. A rather obscure thirdness was also intended for the sign : that of e-mail service.The typical type-token relation lead 94.7% of the subject to attribute the more culturally conventionedmeaning of help. For 21.1% of the subjects meant the user profile (instead of the desired phone service);31.6% thought that , a pendrive, had a continuum of “save” (as opposed to product description); isclearly a computer for 31.6% of the subjects, not a sign for help; and meant product list for 26.3% of thesubjects (whereas the thirdness intended by the designer was that of services).4. ANAYSIS AND CONCLUSIONSThe set of signs, used in the major Brazilian e-commerce sites, analyzed here, is not suitable for functionalityrepresentations in such information systems. The signs used confuse the user into attributing dismalmeanings. Only 2 out of 29 signs lead to a thirdness attibution that was convergent with the intended one. 11lead the user to attibute a different meaning from that intended. And 16 failed completely in helping the userto converge on their meaning. Worst, these 16 signs lead the user to attibute, some times, the oppositemeaning. It was observed a lack of consistency even for the firstness for the traditional functions expected ina e-commerce site, such as sales (three different signs), safety (two) and information. These type-tokenrelation mistakes should be easily avoided.A lot of the meaning attribution discrepancies occurred because culturally conventioned signs were notused properly. 11 of the problems occurred in the thirdness (which is typical of symbols alreadyconsolidated). 7 occurred in the secondness (that shows a direct relation between the sign and its knownfunction). For example, rightly so, the users attributed the meaning of gifts to signs intended to show wrapingservices, wedding list, return policies, itens of a product etc. Gift was also the meaning of choice for signsintended to bring up the thirdness of delivery. Another example is the attribution of shopping to signs thatwere wrongly intended to mean safety, list, return policies, wish list, help. The magnifying glass and theinterrogation point are blatant examples of such disregard for culturally conventioned symbols.The lack of consistency also appeared when it is observed that for safe site, different signs such as lockand shield were used. As for more abstract concepts such as privacy policies, technical data, items of aproduct, partnerships, services, online support, among others, the signs didn´t quite convey a firstness to helpthe user to converge an abductive path to the intended meaning. The <strong>do</strong>llar sign, for instance, is clearly a signfor value, and not payment alternatives.Corroborating the findings in Pio & Guimarães (2008), the present study show that the signs used forfunctions and concepts in Brazilian e-commerce sites are not adequate. There appears to be a lack ofunderstanding of the importance such signs play in the overall success of the information system. A call for amore systematic construction and evaluation of signs is made.REFERENCES1. Carroll, J.M. et al., 1988. “Interface metaphors and ser interface design” In, Helander, M. (ed.) Handbook of Human-Computer Interaction. Elsevier Science Publishers, 67-85.2. Dertouzos, M. 1997. “O que será: como o mun<strong>do</strong> da informação transformará nossas vidas”. São Paulo: Cia dasLetras.3. de Souza, 2005. “The Semiotic Engineering of Human-Computer Interaction.” In: Capítulo 2, Fundamental Conceptsin Semiotics, MIT: MIT Press.4. Pio, F.; Guimarães, C., 2007. “E-commerce: Qual Ícone vale mais que mil palavras?” In: SBC/IV SMSI, 2007, Lavras.5. Umberto Eco, 1997. “Semiotica e filosofia del linguaggio”. Torino: Giulio Einaldi editore.372
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010NEED FOR PROTOCOLS AND STANDARDS FOR ADECENTRALIZED WEB SEARCH PARADIGMSergio R. CoriaUniversity of the Sierra SurCalle Guillermo Rojas Mijangos S/N, Col. Ciudad Universitaria70800 Miahuatlan de P. Diaz, Oax., MexicoABSTRACTThis paper proposes to create a new paradigm on services for information search on the web, involving new protocols andstandards. For more than one decade, the current paradigm has consisted in services that have been provided by a smallnumber of private companies on an advertising business scheme, mainly. This concentration involves a number of risksand disadvantages to <strong>WWW</strong> users. One of the risks is the service vulnerability because of the large dependence on theinfrastructure of one or two providers. Scalability might become into a concern because of the huge increasing ofinformation on the <strong>WWW</strong>. The current paradigm also involves economical and political disadvantages because theproviders decide which websites are allowed to be listed or not as well as their rankings; this can bias the search results.Therefore, this paper aims to suggest general lines for research and development for a new, global, non-for-profit,paradigm for crawling, indexing and searching information on the <strong>WWW</strong>.KEYWORDSWeb search, web crawling, web indexing, protocols, standards.1. INTRODUCTIONSince the 1990 decade, service for information search on the World Wide Web (SISW) has been provided bya small number of private companies on an advertising business basis. A general explanation on how SISWwork can be found in (Manning et al., 2008), and Brin and Page (1998) present a specific description ofGoogle, the most influential SISW at the present time. A historical overview of infrastructure and algorithmsfor information search on <strong>WWW</strong> is presented by Evans et al. (2005).The current paradigm presents a series of technological, economical and political concerns to cyberspaceusers. Concentration in a small number of providers involves, among others, the risk that the service is morevulnerable because of the large dependence on their infrastructure only. Information increasing on the <strong>WWW</strong>can impact on infrastructure scalability. A non-technological issue is the bias in both search results andrankings that can be introduced by the service providers. Spink et al. (2006) show how search results differamong the major providers, suggesting that bias can be involved.Centralization of web contents indexes and focus on profit orientation seem to be two importantweaknesses of the current paradigm. Thus, index decentralization and a non-for-profit approach are desirablecharacteristics of a future, improved, paradigm. Index decentralization needs to be supported by a largenumber of servers; therefore, new protocols and standards to communicate multiple locations can be useful.A non-for-profit approach needs publicly accessible hardware infrastructure to reduce index hosting costs.2. PROTOCOLS AND STANDARDSWeb search depends on creating and updating indexes of the <strong>WWW</strong> contents. This is a highly complex taskthat needs efficient algorithms as well as infrastructure with high storage and speed capabilities. Brin andPage (1998) state that distributed indexing systems, e.g. GlOSS (Gravano, 1994), can be the most efficientand elegant technical solution for indexing. Furthermore, they consider that distributed indexing would373
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISimprove searching drastically. Other more recent studies about distributed indexing for the <strong>WWW</strong> are(Melnik et al., 2001) and (Baeza-Yates et al., 2009). Brin and Page comment the difficulty to use distributedindexes on a worldwide basis because of the high administration costs of setting up large numbers ofinstallations. However, they also suggest that this can become feasible by reducing the costs.Our claim is that low-cost distributed indexing can be implemented as an inherent functionality of webservers if protocols and standards for crawling, indexing and ranking web contents are created. Once theseare available, free software solutions can be developed to automatically create and manage local indexes. Ifevery web server has an index and a ranking list of its local contents, the web search process can be easierlyperformed by a larger number of search engine providers, either commercial or non-commercial. This way,openness and auditability can be characteristics of the new paradigm, and bias in web searching can bereduced or even eliminated.The definition of protocols and standards for crawling, indexing, ranking and searching can be started byenumerating features (i.e. functionalities) to be satisfied by web server software and by search engines. Aseries of useful features are suggested in sections 5 and 6.3. INFRASTRUCTUREIn the new paradigm, a bottom-up approach can be considered, i.e. a fully- or semi- distributed searchingservice that operates on a set of publicly available servers and indexes can be implemented. No newinfrastructure is needed because typical web servers can be used as hosts for their own contents indexes byusing the new standards and protocols. This way, web hosting providers can allocate both forward andinverted indexes along with their hit lists.The new providers of searching services would need less hardware resources for their search engines, andtheir indexes can be construed by inverted indexes and ranking tables only which can be produced from thoselocated at web hosting servers. A probabilistic approach for distributed indexing can be adapted on a basissimilar, for instance, to (Gravano et al. 1994). A fully non-for-profit paradigm can be implemented bydefining a hierarchical structure and standardized protocols on a basis inspired on the DNS server globalinfrastructure. General lines to organize a distributed indexing scheme are suggested in section 4.Figure 1. Basic architecture of the new paradigm374
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 20104. HIERARCHICAL STRUCTURE OF DISTRIBUTED INDEXESIn the current paradigm, search engines (SE) create forward indexes (fi), inverted indexes (ii) and other datastructures, but no index is created at web servers (WS) locally. In the new paradigm, every WS creates a set oflocal indexes. In addition, index servers (IS) are proposed to allocate mid-hierarchy indexes that subsumedata from those located at a set of WS. Figure 1 presents a hierarchical index structure for the new paradigm.Three index levels are needed in the new paradigm:Level 1: local indexes and hit lists that are located at every WS, the lowest level of the hierarchy.Level 2: intermediate indexes and ranking tables that are located at every IS. This level can be construedby a number of sublevels.Level 3: general indexes and ranking tables that are located at search engines (SE).Structures at level 2 contain data that subsume data from level 1. IS can be hosted by web hostingproviders. Level 3 contains data subsumed from level 2. Assignation of WS to IS needs to be ruled by astandard or protocol to guarantee the following conditions:i. At least one IS is assigned to every WS.ii. At most n WS are assigned to every IS. n can be defined for each particular IS in accordance with aset of IS classes that depend on infrastructure capabilities. These involve storage size, hardware speed andnetworking bandwidth. Smallest IS can constitute, for instance, class A, other larger can constitute class B;other even larger, class C, etc. This way, n can be, for instance, 2 for class A; 4 for class B, 8 for class C, etc.iii. Every IS is available to every SE.5. NEW FEATURES IN WEB SERVER SOFTWARETwo of the most important new features to be available and standardized in web server software are indexingand ranking. Both involve data structure and algorithm issues that might be addressed on a basis similar to(Brin and Page, 1998) and (Melnik et al., 2001), as described below.5.1 IndexingStandardized data structures (see figure 1) for indexing local contents at every web server (WS) should store:i. A <strong>do</strong>cument index (di).ii. A lexicon (l).iii. A forward index (fi).iv. An inverted index (ii).Similar data structures are needed at index servers (see IS in figure 1) to store data on a subsumed basis.A number of data structures that are present at level 1 might not be necessary at levels 2 or 3.The subsumingprocess can be based on a probabilistic approach, similar to (Gravano et al. 1994). Standardized indexingalgorithms should:i. Create and update the data structures enumerated above.ii. Minimize data transfer among different levels of the architecture.5.2 RankingStandardized data structures (see figure 1) for ranking should store:i. A hit list (hl) that is created from only local information and is hosted at every WS (level 1).ii. A ranking table (rt) that is created from data available at a number of hl and other additional data(e.g. link graphs). An rt is hosted at every IS (level 2).Standardized ranking algorithms should:i. Create and update these data structures.ii. Minimize data transfer among different levels of the architecture.375
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADIS6. FEATURES IN WEB SEARCH ENGINESSince a series of indexes, hit lists and ranking tables can be available at IS (and also at WS), a SE <strong>do</strong>es notneed to create them from scratch. Instead, SE can take advantage of them. Therefore, SE should:i. Store and create data structures at level 3 that subsume data from level 2 and, maybe exceptionally,from level 1.ii. Update these data structures.iii. Minimize data transfer among different levels.Crawling in the new paradigm is significantly different from that in the current. Even more, crawlingcould be unnecessary. The main reason is that levels 1 and 2 are responsible for creating and updating theirindexes, hit lists and ranking tables on a bottom-up basis. Therefore, SE <strong>do</strong>es not need to access WS directly.Rather, crawling is replaced by a new, different, process in which SE uses data structures of IS at level 2.If standards for level 1 are established, other alternate architectures can be implemented for the newparadigm using other different data structures and features at levels 2 and 3. Regarding WB, new featurescould be incorporated, so that WB can perform a smarter role in information search and retrieval.Nevertheless, the increasing in network traffic that could be produced by smarter WB is a constraint to betaken into account.7. CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE RESEARCHThis paper has addressed the need for standards to crawl, index and rank web contents in order to provideweb server software with local indexing features that support a global, distributed, indexing scheme. Thesestandards and protocols can become guidelines to create free software applications so that every web servercan automatically create and manage local indexes. If these functionalities become inherent to <strong>WWW</strong>protocols and servers, dependence on centralized search services can be reduced. Future research shouldaddress an evaluation of the best algorithms and data representations for these purposes in order to proposepreliminary standards.REFERENCESBaeza-Yates, R. et al., 2009. On the Feasibility of Multi-site Web Search Engines. Proceedings of ACM 18th Conferenceon Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM 09). Hong Kong, China, pp. 425-434.Brin, S. and Page, L. 1998. The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine. Proceedings of the SeventhInternational World-Wide Web Conference (<strong>WWW</strong> 1998). Brisbane, Australia.Evans, M.P. et al., 2005. Search Adaptations and the Challenges of the Web. IEEE <strong>Internet</strong> Computing, Vol. 9, Issue 3,pp. 19-26.Gravano et al. 1994. The Effectiveness of GlOSS for the Text-Database Discovery Problem. Proceedings of the 1994ACM SIGMOD International Conference On Management Of Data. Minneapolis, USA, pp. 126-137.Manning, C. D. et al. (2008). Introduction to Information Retrieval. Cambridge University Press, New York, USA.Melnik, S. et al. 2001. Building a Distributed Full-Text Index for the Web. Building a Distributed Full-Text Index for theWeb. ACM Transactions on Information Systems, Vol. 19, No. 3, July 2001, Pages 217–241.Spink, A. et al. 2006. Overlap among Major Web Search Engines. Proceedings of the Third International Conference onInformation Technology: New Generations (ITNG'06). Las Vegas, USA. pp. 370-374.376
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010A RECOMMENDER SYSTEM FOR E-LEARNINGLara Cini, Matthew Montebello and Vanessa CamilleriDepartment of Intelligent Computer Systems, University of Malta, Malta.ABSTRACTE-learning plays an important role in today’s world. It provides people with the possibility of learning at their own pace,which is of a great advantage (Rosenberg, 2006). However, people are finding increasingly difficult to find relevantcontent from the Web because its volume is drastically increasing in an unstructured manner. This paper takes a look at asystem which aids learners throughout their learning process by recommending learning resources which match theirinterest or even other learners who share common interests. The integration of the hierarchic description of conceptsunder which resources fall and that of a social network is fundamental in the proposed system. This paper takes a look atthe most important parts of a project bearing the same name, and is essentially a summary of it.KEYWORDSTagging, Ontologies, eLearning1. INTRODUCTIONInformation stored on the web is not structured. Rather, if one is interested in a subject, one is allowed to putup a website about the matter to which other websites can be linked. With no regulatory body which keepstrack of data proliferating on the web it becomes tedious for a viewer to filter out content which one wouldhave already encountered from content which is new (to the viewer).Nevertheless, the World Wide Web is a place whose wealth of information is comparable to no other. Itwould be desirable to aid a user in viewing content which is relevant to him. The approach that this paperdeals with involves the usage of online social networks. It employs different aspects that such a networkprovides for providing a user with relevant information.This paper is divided into sections. In the next section, an overview of the background literature includingsimilar recommender systems and technologies available for achieving the goal of the project are defined.The following section gives an in-depth analysis and design of the proposed system which leads to the actualsystem implementation. In section 6, the results obtained from the evaluation of the entire system arediscussed.2. BACKGROUND2.1 Social NetworksThere are numerous existing bodies of literature which deal with the understanding of how social networksfunction and the tools for the provision of recommendation algorithms.A Social Network (Weaver, et al., 2008) is composed of a number of users, referred to as learners,connected together with the aim of sharing learning material. Users annotate resources by using tags.Resources include articles, reports, videos or any other content found on the web while tags refer to the termsused to define a particular resource. The purpose of Social Tagging is to classify information which makes iteasier for users to find information.377
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADIS2.2 The Concept of an OntologyAn ontology allows for the hierarchic description of concepts (Bennett, et al., 2006). This gives insight onhow concepts relate to each other. Essentially, an ontology is a tree whereby any node may have multipleparents or children, and, therefore, subsequently siblings.The concept of ontologies in e-Learning is implemented in the LT4eL project which is defined inMonachesi et al. (2008). This project uses the ontology to search for <strong>do</strong>cuments in a Learning ManagementSystem but <strong>do</strong>es not entail the idea of using ontologies together with social networks for friends/resourcesrecommendations.2.3 Recommender SystemsRecommender systems are engines that recommend information to a user. For example, they might provide adaily digest of what resources the friends of a user have tagged, or what new friends they have added. Moreintelligently, they might put to action algorithms that analyse an ontology and/or a social network and comeup with prioritised recommendations. Thus, it makes sense, since usage of social networks is on the rise, thatrecommendation approaches based on them are developed. Such approaches take advantage of the fact thatusers would have already manually tagged resources themselves and selected users to be their friends.(Kardan, et al.)2.4 Notion of a Target UserMost of the recommendation algorithms put forward in the project relate to a target user. A target user is theuser on which the recommendation algorithms act, to which: friends, and resources are proposed..3. AIMS & OBJECTIVESThe ‘e-learning Recommender System’ proposed in this thesis aims at providing means which reduces thetime taken for a learner to find relevant resources from the Web. This will definitely be an asset for thoseusers who wish to further their knowledge on a particular topic.The advent of social networking has made the tasks of finding relevant material easier. This has broughtabout the idea of communities of learners in which the latter can share ideas and knowledge amongstthemselves (Terveen, et al., 2001). Thus, it is important for users to identify the other learners who seem tohave similar interests in order to form their network. The proposed system is able to provide the users with alist of other users, also known as friends, who have similar interests which are more likely to form part of theusers’ social network.4. DESIGNWhat social networks provide for is a basis upon which one can build several approaches through which tooffer user recommendations. This is because, since social networks are inherently attractive to a person, onewillingly invests time adding friends and even tagging resources to show his friends that he likes them.Figure 1, below presents several approaches of dealing with recommendations.A summary of the approaches is given below:i) Recommending resources via ontologyThis approach traverses an ontology, seeing what user has tagged. It commences from the different levelsof concepts’ tags of a target user may fall in, and traverses two levels up and two <strong>do</strong>wn. It should be notedthat a node in the ontology may be encountered more than once, in different traversals stemming fromdifferent concepts of the target user.378
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010Figure 1. General structure of the systemiii) Recommending friends via tagsThis approach uses the cosine similarity measure (Ji, et al., 2007) to find the similarity between two users.The approach detects similarity between two users by taking into consideration the number of tags commonbetween them, and how often they have used them. Clearly it has to be run for each pair of users present inthe topology of a social network, in order to be comprehensive with regard to it. The equation used forcollaborative tagging (Ji, et al., 2007) is:Equation 1. Similarity between users via Collaborative Taggingiv) Recommending friends via ontology and ratingsThis approach builds on the first. It finds all the users which have tagged recommended resources that thefirst approach recommends for a target user, in order to recommend friends to the target user. It takes intoconsideration the number of tags that each user has attributed to each particular resource. This is used to ratethe friendship of the recommended friend.v) Recommending experts via technical terms & tagsThis approach attempts to find a measure for the expertise of each user, if any. It compares the tags that auser has used for different resources against a set of technical terms. The more tags a user has which fallwithin the set, the more expert he is classified to be.vi) Finding expertise distribution of experts via ontologyThis approach is similar to the former approach in that it deals with the expertise of a user. However,whereas the former approach measures the expertise of each user and put a figure on it, this approachattempts to put a figure of how much the expertise of a user is spread. To <strong>do</strong> this, this approach makes use ofthe ontology. It counts, for each user, the number of technical tags used by him pertaining to concept fallingunder different branches. Therefore, each user would have scores as much as there are branches in theontology. A branch is defined as a concept and its children, which is a child of the concept of “Collection”,which is the parent of all branch parents. From these, scores, then, for each user, one can calculate thestandard deviation. This would go to indicate how much the expertise of a user is spread.Different algorithms are put forward in different approaches. The approach, which traverses an ontologytree in order to recommend similar resources and similar friends employs the concept of recursion:getScoresUp(concepts, position, currentScore){for (int i = 0; i < concepts.size(); i++){altagsCurrConc = concepts(i).getTags();/* loop on altagsCurrConc, finding which resources are taggedby the tags and adding [currentScore] to their scoresarrayList which is the value of hTresScores, keys beingresourcesNames*/ (Process A)379
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADIS}}/* loop on siblings of each concept */for (int i = 0; i < concepts.size(); i++){}siblings = concepts(i).getSiblings();for (int j = 0; j < siblings.size(); j++){}if (concepts.contains(siblings(i)){}aLCurrSibTags = siblings(i).getTags();<strong>do</strong> Process A on aLcurrSibTags;if (position < 2){}for (int i = 0; i < concepts.size(); i++){}getScoresUp(aLsuperClassessCurrConc,position++, currentScore * 0.5);Figure 1. Pseu<strong>do</strong>-code showing recursion in getScoresUp methodThe concept of recursion is particularly useful in that traversing different levels of an ontologyintrinsically employs the same concept. The base case of the recursion would occur when the desired numberof levels in the ontology has been traversed. This is referred to in Figure 1 as position.The project targets this issue in that scores of past recommendation are stored in database, to be used forfuture recommendations.5. IMPLEMENTATIONThe project is implemented in an object oriented manner using the language Java. It is important to point outthat in reality the project may be implemented in any OO language. The web interface of the project utilisesJSP.SPARQL is used to query both the RDF and the ontology. SPARQL (Prud'homeaux, et al., 2008) is aquery language for RDF. A SARQL query is composed of triple patterns which correspond to subject,predicate and object and are usually represented as variables. The basic parts used to construct a SPARQLquery are the SELECT and WHERE clauses. The SELECT clause identifies the variables that should appearin the result while the WHERE clause is the criteria in the form of a graph pattern which should match thegiven data graph. Moreover, SPARQL syntax can be extended for further functionalities. The following is asample SPAQL query which gets all names of the persons in a social network.6. RESULTSThe <strong>do</strong>cumentation argues about the result obtained from variations of approaches enlisted in the designsection that the project puts forward. For instance, tags used by a target users may or may not be used toidentify resources which to recommend in approach one. This makes sense if the target user has confidencein his own tagging. In addition, more detailed concepts (children of concepts of the target user) may be givena lesser score than concepts above. This makes sense if the target user is interested more in getting to gripswith general ideas rather than specific ideas.Ultimately, different flavours of the approaches put forward have their benefits and disadvantages inrelation to what the target user is looking for. Other minor variations in results entail considerations related to380
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010display, such as whether to display or not resources returned by recommendation algorithms which mayalready be tagged by a target user (see approach 1 in the design section).It should be noted that the recommendation of friends and that of resources to a target user is closelyrelated. This is because friends may be recommended on the basis of how much they have shown interest ona resource which an approach has deemed as similar. Conversely, similar resources may be recommended onthe basis of how much they have been tagged by users which have been deemed as similar. This is alsoalluded to in the design section.7. CONCLUSIONThe major strength of this project is that it would aid a user in searching for resources. Through semanticdescription of data, the system is able to recommend friends and resources as well as allowing users to rateboth resources and other friends. In addition, the system is also able to find the experts in the social networktogether with their main area of expertise. The project has been extensively tested and in general allrecommendation algorithms that were implemented function as expected.8. FUTURE WORK Recommending friends via same tags Changing recommended friends’ positions Giving weight to concepts depending on the levels in the ontology Computing the experts’ scores via technical terms Automatic Generation of ontologyAn ontology may be built both automatically or manually. Automatic building of it would entail languageprocessing techniques and resource (or <strong>do</strong>cument) automatic classification, an area which the project <strong>do</strong>esnot delve into. Although the project <strong>do</strong>es not directly propose such automatic ontology generation techniques,it discusses concerns which such a process must address. For example, the fact that resources may pertain tothe same part (or branch) of an ontology must be treated with care. Such a process should try to ascertain thatthe classification of a resource to a concept is as relatively detailed as can be. The process should therefore beexhaustive, not stopping short of classifying resources into sub-categories rather than categories wherepossible. Moreover, usage of a stemming algorithm is also needed in this regard, in that <strong>do</strong>cuments maycontain different versions of the same word. When classifying <strong>do</strong>cuments, it is crucial to ascertain thatdifferent versions of the same word are treated as the same word, with the prefixes and suffixes beingremoved.REFERENCESBennett, Bran<strong>do</strong>n and Fellbaum, Christine. 2006. Formal Ontology In Information Systems. s.l. : Netherlands : IOS Press,2006. 1-58603-685-8.Ji, Ae-Ttie, et al. 2007. Collaborative Tagging in Recommender Systems. 2007.Kardan, Ahmad A., Speily, Omid R. b. and Modaberi, Somayyeh. Recommender Systems for Smart Lifelong Learning.Iran : s.n.Monachesi, P., et al. 2008. What ontologies can <strong>do</strong> for eLearning? . In: Proceedings of The Third InternationalConferences on interactive Mobile and Computer Aided Learning. 2008.Prud'homeaux, Eric and Seaborne, Andy. 2008. SPARQL Query Language for RDF. W3C Recommendation. [Online] 0115, 2008. http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-sparql-query/.Rosenberg, Marc J. 2006. Beyond E-Learning. San Francisco : Pfeiffer, 2006.Terveen, Loren and Hill, Will. 2001.Beyond Recommender Systems: Helping People Help Each Other. HCI In the Millenium, J. Carroll, Ed. Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA. . 2001.Weaver, A. C. and Morrison, B. B. 2008. Social Networking. 2008, Vol. 41, 2.381
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISWEB 2.0: INTRODUCTION INTO E-GOVERNMENTAPPLICATIONSFrancesco De Angelis, Roberto Gagliardi, Alberto Polzonetti and Barbara Re1 School of Science and Technology University of Camerino ItalyABSTRACTUnder the name of web 2.0, a new wave of web-based applications has emerged and has recently found successful takeupin different <strong>do</strong>mains. These applications rely on the concept of the user as a producer or co-producer. Web 2.0technologies also provide new ways to improve public governance. Involvement and active online participation ofcitizens, businesses, interest groups and employees of public, private and non-profit organizations becomes possible in aneasy and unconventional way. Web2.0 entails various kinds of activities for citizens: political participation, communitybuilding and opinion forming, advising of other citizens, providing service ratings, assisting in monitoring and lawenforcement, acting as producer of government information and services, etc. Also staff of agencies may use these newsocial media for cross-agency interaction and collaboration, good practice exchange and knowledge management. Thiscontribution provides a reflection of web 2.0 introduction into e-government applications.KEYWORDSe-government, Web 2.01. INTRODUCTIONUnder the name of Web 2.0, a new wave of web-based applications has emerged and has found successfultake-up. Web 2.0 means a paradigm shift, i.e. understanding the <strong>Internet</strong> “… as platform, spanning allconnected devices. Web 2.0 applications are those that make the most of the intrinsic advantages of thatplatform: delivering software as a continually-updated service that gets better the more people use it,consuming and remixing data from multiple sources, including individual users, while providing their owndata and services in a form that allows remixing by others, creating network effects through an ‘architectureof participation’, and going beyond the page metaphor of Web 1.0 to deliver rich user experiences” [9]. Theterm is closely associated with Tim O'Reilly because of the O'Reilly Media Web 2.0 conference in 2004(http://www.web2con.com/web2con/ ) Although the term suggests a new version of the World Wide Web, it<strong>do</strong>es not refer to an update to any technical specifications, but rather to cumulative changes in the wayssoftware developers and end-users use the Web. Whether Web 2.0 is qualitatively different from prior webtechnologies has been challenged by World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee, who called the term a"piece of jargon"[14] — precisely because he specifically intended the Web to embody these values in thefirst place.Web 2.0 also provides a recently emerging but important way to improve public governance. Socialmedia can be used in government-related activities. Through web 2.0 technologies and the respectiveparadigm shift from citizens as consumers to citizens as co-producer, influence can be largely exerted ondemocratic deliberation and participation in policy making. Likewise, the principles of public governance –transparency, efficiency/effectiveness, responsiveness, forward vision, rule of law - stressed by the OECD([10], p. 58) can be supported and implemented in a better way.In the following sections the discussion starts sketching the basics: so the demands of e-participation andthe diverse possibilities the Web 2.0 is offering. Then the influence of Web 2.0 on Public Governance istreated in three aspects: the citizen side; the administration side; the special case of Less DevelopedCountries.382
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 20102. WEB 2.0 SYMBOLIZING A NEW WEBUnder the name of Web 2.0 a new wave of web-based applications has emerged [9].These applications relyon the concept of the user as a producer of information. As a consequence Social Webs are emerging. Thecreation of collaborative content is <strong>do</strong>ne in several ways. So blogs are online notes open to comment forother users, while wikis are built by collaborative edition of content. Further important is tagging that resultin co sharing of information, so it may be organized by references such as bookmarks and URLs. Web 2.0 isa broad and emerging concept, so best it is regarded as a set of features involving technologies, applications,and values.The user roles are diverse in Web 2.0 applications. One may distinguish for qualitative different roles: (a)Producing content such as blogs or contributions to wikis; (b) providing ratings and reviews; c) using contentprovided by other users; (d) providing attention such as using on-line services or going to a most read page.As the level of engagement decreases, the number of users increases. There is a para<strong>do</strong>x on uptake: Lowuptake for large scale online public services; high uptake for low-budget user-driven services. Thus alsocommunities are diverse, so Communities of Practice may involve professionals while Communities ofInterest brings together persons with different background. With a social web new ideas are diffusing muchmore rapidly. Time (25 Dec 2006) made the User the Person of the Year. Therefore the front-page of thatedition had a reflecting foil mirroring the spectator.2.1 Participation on the RiseDeveloping Government has to support the formation of a democratic culture. Thus e- participation developsand implements new forms of participation. Communication in e-participation involves citizens, publicauthorities, elected representatives etc. One challenge is the perceived democratic deficit requiring newrelationships between state and citizens. Public responsiveness should be improved. Reconnecting citizenswith politics and policy making is high on the agenda. Given the complexity of decision making andlegislation, knowledge and expertise of citizens should be tapped in a well. All those who are concerned by adecision should be directly or indirectly part of the decision making process.The various project in Europe, have been investigated (DEMO-net project, www.demo-net.org ), thevarious views and concepts of participation via technology and have brought forward a structured way ofconceptualizing e-participation research and practice [11, 12, 13].The focus of e-Participation have changed. Initial investigations on e-democracy have focused on e-Voting and transparency. There were several projects using the web for voting (see e.g. the proceedings ofthe e-voting conferences [14,15]). But most projects ran without digital signature and were often directed torather special groups.Further interest was put on transparency. There is a close connection between transparency andparticipation in the form of a mutual promotion. In recent years some new foci have come in. Several projectsshow direct ways to the top, so in e-Petition which gives communication to the Prime Ministers Office.Besides several initiatives by public agencies and examples of successful projects the overall picture remainsequivocal. Many projects are isolated, they lack commitment from elected representatives, and they mayexperience political resistance.Then online consultations are not inter-connected with other activities on same public policy issue.Problems of size, numbers, space, distances, and different languages have to be overcome. There is a need tocreate environment and culture favorable to engagement in e-Participation. So the to-<strong>do</strong> list is long: activeparticipation; innovative solutions; responding to greater diversity; better outcomes at less cost. One has tosupport all forms of community development.3. WEB 2.0 IMPROVING PUBLIC GOVERNANCEIn the public sector transformation of Government and improving Public Governance is high on the agenda.E-Transformation has changed nearly <strong>do</strong>main of performing work. Transformation takes place for any kin<strong>do</strong>f relationship: seller-to-buyer, administrator-to -citizen, and teacher-to-student are just some examples. ThusElectronic Government is about transformation: changing fundamentally the way Government <strong>do</strong>es what it383
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADIS<strong>do</strong>es. The permanent e-Transformation of the public sector spurs the discussion on entirely new ways forPublic Governance.The scope of Public Governance is rather broad: democratic and cooperative policy formulation; citizenand civil society involvement; a transparent and efficient implementation of policies; a continuous evaluationof their results; an accountability of public decision makers; ways to improve policy making in the future.With this agenda it becomes clear that Web 2.0 applications are going to improve Public Governance. Thereare several government-related activities that can be affected:• Democracy and participation.• Petitions.• Campaigning.• Monitoring politicians.• Advice and ratings on public service.• Law enforcement.• Suggestions and Feedback.• Cross-agency collaboration.• Knowledge Management.• Good Practice Exchange.3.1 Web 2.0 and Public Governance: The Citizen SideE-Democracy is the support and enhancement of democracy, democratic processes and institutions. Soempowerment is the red thread in many activities. The idea of empowering means: giving someone thepower that he was deficient before. Participation is the way, democracy is the goal. E-Participation willtransform the nature of representative democracy by facilitating more direct and more numerous linksbetween representatives and individual voters.Citizens may become quite active in supporting their representatives at elections. Earlier Campaigningwas performed by print media, party meetings, rallies, public speeches. Then electronic media, radio and TV,arrived. Since the mid-Nineties the Web 1.0 got used, a new medium but an old message. Now there is amove to Web 2.0 as new medium bringing additional messages. E-Campaigning is about raising awarenessabout issues as well as engaging with people and encouraging people to engage with each other. So itchannels the power of public opinion to advance a progressive drive. The tools used are quite diverse, soblogging, forwarding campaign information via email or twitter, producing videos, making fund raising sites,etc. The new contexts are different: e-Campaigning is citizen-based, decentralized, and individualistic usingsocial micro-networks.Citizens are not only supporting their representatives, they are also watching and observing them in acritical disposition. Diverse forms of monitoring have become a leading issue in citizen participation. Thetargets of monitoring are diverse. They include events such as elections, groups such as political unions,persons such as politicians, modes such as proper fund spending and spaces such as parks.There are many cases where law is enforced and citizens help with monitoring. Such cases may involvenegative behavior such as insults on race. Other cases are that citizen may be involved in <strong>do</strong>cumentingtrespasses of the travel code. As an example citizens have posted photos of cars parking in a bike lane. Such aform of monitoring has been nick-named as little-brother-role.Other forms of contributions by citizens include e.g. providing advice and ratings of public servicestherefore helping other citizens. Some lay persons are very skilled in rewriting public information in a formthat is better understandable as the official jargon used for. Further, experienced citizens may give hints howto better deal with special administrative problems such as making applications to a certain public agency.Then the Web 2.0 may be used for suggesting administrative improvements. There is a common criticthat e-Government is too much supply oriented with too much focus on efficiency. The citizens maycontribute by giving proposals for amendment via social media. So Burgerlink was created in TheNetherlands and suggests an e-Citizen Charta (www.burger.overheid.nl). The demands stated include: Choiceof channel, overview of rights and duties, comprehensive procedures and convenient services etc.384
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 20103.2 Web 2.0 and Public Governance: The Administration SideWith Web 2.0, the border between e-Democracy and e-Government is blurring. In many cases, the Web 2.0is used as a means to improve Public Administration. One important point is: citizens suggest animprovement. This is a valuable feedback to agencies and makes administration more accessible. As anexample, the Dutch ministry of the Interior set up a portal posing the question: How would you improvegovernment? From many answers the best three were voted. The winning ideas included: (a) Help me withthis e-Form; (b) Government makes it possible - a proactive system; (c) A portal that makes governmentservices more accessible. Web 2.0 tools can be used for cross-agency cooperation and managingadministrative knowledge. In administrations the usage for cross-agency cooperation is substantial – sodifferent agencies may write joint reports. In the public sector problems may occur as cooperation is informalskipping hierarchies. Further some moderation may be needed, as it comes to sharing of rather sensitive data.Another field is lawmaking – an effort involving politicians, administrations, citizens and experts.Connecting stakeholders will make law-making more effectively. Empowered through ICT law making maybecome more transparent, accessible and accountable. Further, citizen will be more engaged in public lifewhen they get better access to parliament.Knowledge Management is an important application for larger communities of knowledge workers andpublic administration is a typical example for them. The usage for Knowledge Management means especiallysharing of informal and tacit knowledge among. Also the persons involved get a better understanding whatother persons of the community <strong>do</strong>. In addition, analyzing and visualizing the flow of knowledge may revealtrends. Different social interaction scenarios may be investigated. For the professionals information exchangeis of utmost importance. Taking as example the field of e-Government the professional community hasdifferent stakeholders, such as politicians, administrators, companies, researchers. For them, the portalwww.epractice.eu was created and promoted by the European Commission.3.3 Web 2.0 and Less Developed CountriesIn particular for Less Developed Countries (LDC) Web 2.0 becomes important. For LDCs one has to putemphasis on low-cost, grassroots, sustainable solutions that makes emails and mobile phones fundamental. InLess Developed Countries mobile phones can substitute other ways of communication; so mobile phoneshave undergone a transformation to a multi-purpose tool of ubiquitous nature. Thus a priority is to deploycontent and applications for mobile phone applications. There are other factors as well promoting mobilephones. So with regard the political situation in Less Developed Countries prepaid mobile phones are popularbecause they cannot be tracked back to particular citizen. It is a way to organize participation in the case ofunstable democracies and authoritarian regimes. In addition, economic factors count also for the mobilephones.REFERENCES1. Leitner, C. (ed), eGovernment in Europe: The State of Affairs, presented at the eGovernment Conference in Como,EIPA, Maastricht, 2003.2. Millard, J. (ed), European eGovernment 2005-2007: Taking stock of good practice and progress towardsimplementation of the i2010 eGovernment Action Plan, presented at the eGovernment Conference in Lisbon, ECBrussels, 20073. Osimo, D., Web 2.0 in Government: Why and How? http://www.jrc.es/publications/ pub.cfm?id=15654. Fages, R., Sanguesa, R., (ed), State of the art in Good Practice Exchange and Web 2.0, http://www.epractice.eu,September 20075. COE, Council of Europe, Good Governance in the Information Society,http://www.coe.int/T/E/Integrated_Projects/Democracy/6. COE, Council of Europe, Reflections on the Future of Democracy in Europe, ISBN 92-871-5835-5, Sept 20087. Smith, S., Macintosh, A., Millard, J. (ed), Study and supply of services in the development of eParticipation in theEU, http://www.european-eparticipation.eu, May 2008385
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADIS8. Tholeifs<strong>do</strong>ttir; A., Wimmer; M. (ed), Report on current ICT’s to enable Participation, http://www.demo-net.org,20069. O´Reilly, T.: What is Web 2.0. URL: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html10. Jacobzone, S., C. Choi and C. Miguet, "Indicators of Regulatory Management Systems", OECD Working Papers onPublic Governance, 2007/4, OECD Publishing. <strong>do</strong>i:10.1787/11208247560411. Sabrina Scherer, Christian Schneider, Maria A. Wimmer. Studying eParticipation in Government InnovationProgrammes: Lessons from a Survey. In Hampe, F., Swatman, P.M.C., Gricar, J., Pucihar, A., Lenart, G. (Eds.).eCollaboration: Overcoming Boundaries through Multi-Channel Interaction. 21st Bled eConference, 2008, electronicproceedings (ISBN 978-961-232-217-5)12. Maria A. Wimmer, Christian Schneider, John Shad<strong>do</strong>ck. Framework and metho<strong>do</strong>logy to turn barriers and challengesof eParticipation into research themes and actions. In Cunningham, Paul, and Cunningham, Miriam. Expanding theKnowledge Society: Issues, Applications, Case Studies. Part 1. IOS Press: Amsterdam et al., 2007, pp. 189-19613. Ann Macintosh. eParticipation and eDemocracy Research in Europe. In: Chen, H. Brandt, L., Gregg, V.,Traunmüller R., Dawes, S., Hovy, E., Macintosh, A. & Larson, C. A.: Digital Government: eGovernment Research,Case Studies, and Implementation. Springer, 2007, pp. 85-10214. "DeveloperWorks Interviews: Tim Berners-Lee". 2006-07-28.http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/podcast/dwi/cm-int082206txt.html. Retrieved 2007-02-0715. Krimmer Robert Electronic Voting 2006 2nd International Workshop Co-organized by Council of Europe, ESF TED,IFIP WG 8.6 and E-Voting.CC, August 200616. Robert Krimmer, Rüdiger Grimm (Eds.), 3rd international Conference on Electronic Voting 2008, Co-organized byCouncil of Europe, Gesellschaft für Informatik and E-Voting.CC, August 200817. Meet, share and learn Selected articles from 19 European eGovernment Awards 2007 Finalists September 2007(http://www.epractice.eu/files/<strong>do</strong>wnload/awards/ArticlesPublicationFinal.pdf )386
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010STUDY CASES ON THE CURRENT USE OFMICROFORMATSIasmina Ermalai and Radu Vasiu“Politehnica” University of TimisoaraBd. Vasile Parvan no 2, 300223, Timisoara, RomaniaABSTRACTMicroformats are simple standards used as frames for intelligently publishing content on the Web. They are considered tobe the lower case semantic web and they are designed for humans first and for machines second. These are the mainreasons why the number of web pages that have implemented merely hCard has surpassed 2 billion by the middle of2010. Nevertheless only a small number of universities have integrated no more than two of the most commonmicroformats (hCard and hCalendar) into their educational web portals. The present paper offers a perspective on thecurrent use of microformats.KEYWORDSSemantic Web, Microformats, hCard, hCalendar, eLearning1. INTRODUCTIONThe success of the <strong>Internet</strong> encouraged new forms of communication but even if its growth was exponential,it still remained mostly oriented towards the human reader. This is the reason why there is an urgent andcontinuous need for the automation of content processing on the <strong>Internet</strong>. Researchers and web enthusiastworldwide are trying to develop machines capable of understanding and processing data from the Web.Semantic Web is the next big thing and it has been like this for a few years now. According to SirTimothy Berners-Lee, Semantic Web is an extension of the current web, in which information receives a welldefined meaning, enhancing thus the communication between humans and machines (Berners-Lee, 2001). Inorder for the Semantic Web to be functional, computers must have access to collections of structuredinformation. The Semantic Web implies standardization and transformation of existing programs or agentsaccording to the new vocabularies. This is sometimes very difficult to initiate and accomplish, thus thedistrust of some IT experts (Downes, 2007).Microformats appear at this moment as a way of attenuating the gap between present and future web.They are designed for humans and machines both and they work with existing tools and on existing browsers.Microformats actually represent class names which enhance the semantic of web pages. Microformats aresimple, yet structured methods, based on existing standards (HTML and CSS) and used for adding moremeaning to web pages, in order to better indicate people, companies, events, reviews, tags, and so on (Lewis,2009) (Çelik, 2007).Despite the fact that best known web portals use microformats, universities worldwide appear to be quitereluctant when it comes to integrating microformats into their learning portals. Only a handful of universitiesuse hCard and hCalendar as tools for facilitating the administrative part of the learning process.The present paper aims to establish the current use of microformats both in educational, as well as in noneducationalweb portals.387
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADIS2. MICROFORMATS AND THE WORLD WIDE WEBMicroformats are frames for the content. Using them, humans and machines can better understand themeaning of the information published on a web page (Martin). Microformats represent an intermediate stage,as well as a major step towards Semantic Web. Due to the fact that they are destined for humans andmachines both, but mostly because they allow a relatively easy adaptation and processing of existing webcontent, the number of applications, services and programs that implement different types of microformats isquite significant nowadays and it is continuously growing.Following are some of the most important and widely known web portals and applications that useMicroformats: Digg, Dreamweaver (Microformats Extension supporting hCard, hCalendar, XFN, rel-tag,relg-licence), Drupal, Eventful, Facebook, Flickr People and Photos, Google (Chrome, Search, Blogger,Creative Commons Search, Maps), <strong>Internet</strong> Explorer, LinkedIn, Ma.gnolia, phpMicroformats, Technorati(Contact Feed Service, Events Feed Service, Microformats Search, Search, Tags), Upcoming, WordPress,Yahoo (Creative Commons Search, Local, Tech, UK Movies), and Pingerati (Microformats.org, 2010b).The most commonly used microformat is hCard.Recent browser versions, like Firefox 3.0 have built-in support for microformats while older versions canbe adapted by adding plug-ins like Operator, BlueOrganizer, Tails or Tails Export. <strong>Internet</strong> Explorer 7 usesOomph as a plug-in for Microformats. Chrome uses Michromeformats as an extension and Android usesMosembro. Other browsers with a consistent effort in this direction are Flock and Safari (Microformats.org,2010a).According to the examples listed on the Microformats’ official web page, the most commonly usedmicroformats pages are:- hCard – stable microformat specification used for representing people, companies, organizationsand places; information published using hCard classes can be exported and saved into different otherprograms (for example a contact can be saved into Yahoo! Contacts);- hCalendar – stable microformat specification used for representing events; information publishedusing hCalendar classes can be saved in digital agendas like Google Calendar.- hResume – draft microformat specification used for publishing resumes and CVs;- hReview – draft microformat specification used for embedding reviews (of products, services, etc)in web pages.As stated by Tantek Çelik, the father of Microformats, in the mid 2010, at five years of existence, overtwo billion web pages used hCard, the most common Microformat (Çelik, 2010).According to ReadWriteWeb, Google stated at the Semantic Technologies conference that it had beenusing structured data open standards such as microformats and RDFa for rich snippets feature and also thatmicroformats were far more common for this feature (MacManus, 2010).3. MICROFORMATS AND EDUCATIONAL PORTALSRegardless of their currently significant use in web portals, Microformats have not raised the same interest inthe educational field. According to a study conducted in the year 2009 (Ermalai, 2010b), only a small numberof worldwide universities integrated Microformats into their web pages, and one could not really speak of adiversity of Microformats - the maximum number of complex Microformats implemented by any universitywas two: hCard and hCalendar. A similar study conducted this year revealed the fact that the number ofeducational institutions using microformats has barely increased and no other microformat has been added tothe two mentioned above. Both of the mentioned studies had as starting point the examples-in-wild page fromthe Microformats official web portal. Examples published on this page were tested in order to establish theaccuracy or the information.The results of this year’s study led to the figure below:388
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010Figure 1. hCard versus hCalendar in educational portalsWe used black for hCard and gray for hCalendar. In the case of a University using both of the mentionedmicroformats, we included that university in the hCard, as well as in the hCalendar numbers.Universities used hCard for the following:- publishing solely the institution’s address (they only used the hCard’s adr class) - 23% of the wholemicroformats’ use;- publishing staff information and also the institution’s address – 40% of the total microformats’ usein educational institutions.The first implementation allows students to localize the institution on digital maps, while the second oneoffers the facility of exporting or saving the contact information in different other programs.hCalendar holds 37% of the microformats’ educational market and universities generally use it forpublishing information regarding the timetable. Using a plug-in, students can save this information into theirdigital agendas.In 2009, the “Politehnica” University of Timisoara has also implemented microformats in the DistanceLearning Centre’s portal. The novelty resided in the fact that, besides the two microformats mentioned in theabove study, we have also integrated hAudio, whose classes were used for publishing information about theaudio/video materials from the Podcasting section of the University’s web site. On account of the fact thathAudio was still a draft, we also had to develop a script that allowed processing of the information publishedusing hAudio classes. Including this script in Operator plug-in, students could <strong>do</strong>wnload the audio/video filesor they could perform web searches for materials with the same name on web sites like YouTube,TeacherTube, StudentTube, Trilulilu or Google.The functionality and ease of use of the three microformats mentioned above were evaluated with thefourth year students. The results of the tests revealed the fact that microformats were viable tools in an onlinelearning environment (Ermalai, 2010a). As a consequence of these results we plan to develop one or moremodules which would be used for integrating different microformats into the present web portal of“Politehnica” University of Timisoara, which is an implementation of Moodle. Considering the fact thatMoodle is the most used learning management system nowadays, the development of the mentioned moduleswould be a good method for increasing the number of microformats in the educational environment.4. CONCLUSIONSMicroformats are simple, easy-to-use standards which offer a method for publishing structured content on theweb. They are part of the Semantic Web and are much easier to use and understand than Semantic Webvocabularies, known as ontologies (e.g. OWL). The current paper seeks to establish the present use ofmicroformats both in educational as well as non-educational web portals.Research shows that nowadays most of the worldwide known web applications like Facebook, LinkedIn,Chrome, Blogger, Yahoo use microformats for structuring different pieces of information. Special plug-ins389
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISdiscover this information and offer various ways of using it, facilitating thus the way data is transferred fromone application to another.Regardless of the obvious utility of microformats, their penetration into the educational field is scarce.Only a few universities/institutes worldwide have implemented two of the most used microformats (hCardand hCalendar) into their web portals. But hCard and hCalendar are not the only microformats withapplicability in education; for example hReview is a microformat which could be used by tutors for writingreviews about the students’ activities and hResume could be used for the tutors and students resumes’.By adapting and integrating different types of microformats in learning web portals and by teachingstudents and tutors to use them, the administrative part of the educational process would gain significantsupport.REFERENCESÇelik, T., 2007, Microformats, Building Blocks, and You. Available from:http://tantek.com/presentations/2007/05/microformats-bb-you/Çelik, T., 2010, microformats.org at 5: Two Billion Pages With hCards, 94% of Rich Snippets. Available from:http://microformats.org/2010/07/08/microformats-org-at-5-hcards-rich-snippetsDownes, S., 2007, Why the Semantic Web Will Fail. Available from: http://halfanhour.blogspot.com/2007/03/whysemantic-web-will-fail.htmlErmalai, I. et al, 2010a, 'The usefulness and functionality of Microformats in a particular eLearning system', in IEEEInternational Joint Conferences on Computational Cybernetics and Technical Informatics (ICCC-CONTI 2010),Timisora, Romania, pp. 387-390.Ermalai, I. et al, 2010b, 'Inserting Microformats into Online Learning Environments', Scientific Bulletin of “Politehnica”University of Timisoara, Transactions on Automatic Control and Computer Science, vol. 55(69), no. 1 / March, pp.37-42.Lewis, E. 2009, Microformats Made Simple.MacManus, R., 2010, Google's Semantic Web Push: Rich Snippets Usage Growing. Available from:http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_semantic_web_push_rich_snippets_usage_grow.phpMartin, A., What are microformats? Available from: http://microformats.org/wiki/what-are-microformatsMicroformats.org, 2010a, Browsers. Available from: http://microformats.org/wiki/browsersMicroformats.org, 2010b, Microformats Implementations. Available from: http://microformats.org/wiki/implementationsBerners-Lee, T. et al, 2001, 'The Semantic Web', Scientific American.390
Posters
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010A WEB-BASED MULTILIGUAL DICTIONARY FORTERMINOLOGY OF POLYMERSTiago França Melo de Lima and Cláudio Gouvea <strong>do</strong>s SantosUniversidade Federal de Ouro PretoOuro Preto, MG – BrasilABSTRACTThis paper presents the current stage of development of a web-based system to support the construction of an onlinemultilingual dictionary for terminology of polymers. The dictionary allows users to <strong>do</strong> searches for terms and definitionsand find its translations to various languages such as English, Chinese, French, Greek, Portuguese, and Spanish. This is aproject of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC), world authority on nomenclature andterminology related to chemistry, and will bring benefits to scientific, academic and professional communities, expandingand facilitating the access to standards defined by IUPAC.KEYWORDSWeb-based system, dictionary, terminology, multilingual, polymer.1. INTRODUCTIONThe International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) "serves to advance the worldwide aspectsof the chemical sciences and to contribute to the application of chemistry in the service of Mankind"(IUPAC, 2010). Thus, IUPAC is recognized as the world authority on chemical nomenclature andterminology. Through their publications it endeavors to spread Chemistry-related information to thescientific, academic and industrial communities around the world. One of these efforts is the development ofa multilingual dictionary for science of polymers.This paper presents the current stage of the development of a web-based system to support building of anonline multilingual dictionary for terminology of polymers. It is expected that the development of this projectwill benefit the scientific community as a whole (researchers, professionals, teachers and students), servingas a quick reference for terms and definitions of the science of polymers, improving scientific communicationand expanding access to standards defined by IUPAC.2. THE MULTILINGUAL DICTIONARYThe dictionary for terminology of polymers is formed by a set of terms and definitions of polymers’nomenclature, currently standardized by the IUPAC in English, and their translations into several otherlanguages. Once the dictionary is publicly available through a website, users will be able to access a term andits definition in English, and also view their translations to several others languages.The project receives contributions from several countries. The current working group for translations isformed by chemists of Argentina, Brazil, China, Korea, France, Italy, Japan, Poland and Czech Republic.Thus, the user interface should be common and without ambiguities for all users, avoiding interfering intranslation process.To support the construction of dictionary, the system should be flexible and efficient, allowing fast andefficient updates and additions of terms. All terms and definitions in dictionary should be in accordance withstandards established and approved by IUPAC. So, only authorized users can insert and update data ondictionary. Moreover, system interface should be simple and easy to use, due to its wide range of users.393
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISThe web is the ideal platform for various types of activities involving terminology (Nuopponen, 1996). Agreat number of dictionaries and encyclopedias in different languages and targeted to a wide variety of userscan be found on <strong>Internet</strong> (Nuopponen, 1996; Nuopponen, 2000). One example is the multilingual dictionaryfor technical terms related to astronomy, developed by International Academy of Astronautics (Matsukata etal., 2002). Another example, related to Geoinformatics area, provides users a greater participation andinteraction allowing them to add suggestions and comments on dictionary entries. Such suggestions andcomments are visible to all users and can stimulate discussion and influence linguistic decisions of thoseresponsible for dictionary maintaining (Jachimski, 2004). The OpenDict, a multilingual dictionary based onwiki technology for e-learning, allows users to directly add and edit entries in the dictionary, and thedictionary’s administrator can assesses these changes and can accept or reject them (Szedmina et al., 2005).The possibility of use of hypermedia content, the rich interactivity due to its non-linear navigation'sstructure, and the power to make information widely accessible makes web the ideal media to builddictionary. Furthermore, with the web it is possible to <strong>do</strong> frequent updates and immediate publications ofinformation, unthinkable for other types of media. Moreover, the high connectivity that eliminates distancesand establishes a virtual communication offers high productivity through collaborative methods of virtualwork, essential for building the dictionary.There are many efforts destined to promote access to information for general and scientific purpose, asWikipedia (http://www.wikipedia.org/) and Science Across the World (http://www.scienceacross.org/). Amultilingual dictionary for terminology of polymers easily accessible represents another effort.3. DEVELOPMENT OF THE DICTIONARYThe system development process is iterative and incremental. The following activities were undertaken in theproject development: (1) elicitation and analysis of requirements; (2) definition of conceptual model andarchitecture of the system; (3) development of prototypes to validate the requirements; (4) definition of thetechnologies to be used; (5) implementation of the system; (6) deployment of the system.The main use cases of the application <strong>do</strong>main are: (1) Register a term – registration of a term standardizedby IUPAC; (2) Register a translator – registration of a collaborator as the translator for a specific language;(3) Translate a term – translation of a term and its definition from English to another language; (4) Searchterms: search for terms and definitions in dictionary. The system has the following actors: (1) Administrator,responsible for include terms and definitions approved by IUPAC in the dictionary and register on the systemthe collaborators responsible for translations, (2) Translator, that represents collaborators that will make thetranslation of terms and definitions (3) End-user, that represents the community of system end-users,comprised of students, teachers, researchers and others that will use the dictionary.An important requirement is the implementation of access control of users to database, as illustrated inFigure 1. Only the Administrator user has total access to the database where standardized terms are stored.The Translator user has writing’s access only to the specific database of language which he is the responsibletranslator, while the End-user can perform just read-only queries in database.Figure 1. Database control accessThe a<strong>do</strong>ption of free tools and technologies was made as an implementation strategy to reducedevelopment and maintenance costs. Thus, the LAMP platform (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP),widespread and consolidated for web systems, was used. Linux is an open source operating system robustand appropriate for systems that require high performance and reliability. Apache (http://httpd.apache.org/) is394
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010the most used web server in the world (http://news.netcraft.com/) and provides support for various tools andprogramming languages. MySQL (http://www.mysql.com/) is a multitasking and multiuser database serverthat has a free license. PHP (http://www.php.net/) is a programming language that allows the development ofweb based systems, supports object oriented programming and provides connections to several databases.The interfaces for interaction with users were implemented using HTML and CSS, according to therecommendations and standards defined by W3C – World Wide Web Consortium (http://www.w3c.org/)Each collaborator will have a login and password to access the environment of translation (only for thelanguage in which it was registered). Once authenticated, he can access the set of standardized terms to betranslated. Choosing a term, its information and fields for insertion of the translation will be displayed, asshown in Figure 2. The option "Activate Translation" allows publish or not the translation of the term in thedictionary.Figure 2. Interface for translation of termsThe registered terms can be accessed through an index or by a search engine. The search engine allowsusers to choose the language of research. Figure 3 shows an example of search. Once a term is accessed,registered and active translations for this term will be displayed. The translation of the definition can beaccessed by clicking on the term in the desired language.Figure 3. End-user search interface395
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADIS4. FINAL CONSIDERATIONSThe work presented in this article is still under development, requiring the implementation of aspects ofvalidation and security of the system and improvements on the interface of interaction with the user and theinclusion of languages with non-occidental characters.The availability of a multilingual online dictionary for terminology of polymers will bring gains for thescientific community, improving the scientific communication and expanding access to standards defined byIUPAC.REFERENCESIUPAC, 2010. International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry – IUPAC. Jachimski J., 2004, Design of an open formulae for the interdisciplinary multilingual terminological dictionary forgeoinformatics. International Archives of Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences. Vol.XXXV. Istanbul.Matsukata, J.; Hashimoto, T.; Ninomiya, K.; Akiba, R., 2002, International Edition of IAA Multilingual DictionaryCoordinated Through Computer Network, Acta Astronautica vol. 50, no. 2, pp. 95-101. International AstronauticalFederation. Published: Elsiever Science Ltd.Nuopponen, A., 1996, Terminological Information and Activities in World Wide Web. Terminology and KnowledgeEngineering. 92-99. Frankfurt: INDEKS-Verlag.Nuopponen, A., 2006. Terminology Forum. < http://lipas.uwasa.fi/comm/termino/>Szedmina, L; Covic, Z; Sabino, T.G.; Risthaus, M., 2005, An e-Learning Multilingual Dictionary (OpenDict). 3rdSerbian-Hungarian Joint Symposium on Intelligent Systems – SISY 2005.396
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010PROCESSING REMOTE SENSING IMAGES ON AGRID-BASED PLATFORMSilviu Panica, Marian Neagul and Dana PetcuComputer Science Department, West University of TimisoaraB-dul Vasile Parvan 4, 300223 Timisoara, RomaniaABSTRACTHuge quantity of remote sensing data is acquired daily by several satellites and only few of them are really exploited. Thepublic availability of a considerable part of these data allows the development of new innovative applications. A minimaltraining in processing remote sensing images is needed to develop such applications. Unfortunately, training thedevelopers of Earth observation applications is currently addressed only by few institutions and platforms. In this context,we have built recently a training platform distinguished from other solutions by its high degree of interactivity andextensibility. The fast response to the multiple users’ processing requests is possible due to the usage of Grid computingtechnologies that is hidden behind a friendly Web-accessible interface shortly described in this paper.KEYWORDSGrid computing, Image processing, Earth observation, Distributed data management.1. INTRODUCTIONDue to its intensive data processing and highly distributed organization, the multidisciplinary EarthObservation (EO) applications community is highly interested in the exploitation of Grid computinginfrastructures. Several petabytes of already acquired data are presently underexploited due to the fact thatgetting the results in a reasonable time requires more computing power that currently is available in thebiggest data centers. If these data are made publicly available, even with the support of Grid technologiesmainly focusing on computing facilities, an efficient distributed infrastructure to handle and treat very largedata sets is still missing. In order to facilitate the access to data, their processing and visualization, a specialattention was given in the last decade to the development of Web portals integrating standard and EO specificservices. In few cases these portals expose Web or Grid-based computational services or Web access toparallel processing facilities. Despite the availability of these new <strong>Internet</strong>-based remote facilities, humanresources involved in the development of new services or exploitation of the existing ones are suffering fromlow level of training either in Earth observation techniques, either in using the new technologies.In this context we proposed recently a Grid-based training platform for Earth Observation, namelyGiSHEO. Its design and different views of particular platform components functionality were alreadyreported last year (Neagul et al, Petcu et al, and Petcu 2009). Following the results of stressing the platformunder real usage conditions in classroom trainings in the academic year 2009-2010, the requirements for theuser interface were modified and the development of a new Web user interface was necessary affectingpartially also the services interfaces. In this paper we report shortly these changes.2. SHORT OVERVIEW OF THE GISHEO PLATFORMGiSHEO’s architecture is basically a service oriented one. The Grid-enabled platform for satellite imageprocessing is structured on several levels including user, security, service, processing and a data level. Theuser level is in charge with the access to the web user interface (built by using Google’s Web Toolkitframework). The security level provides security context for both users and services. The service level397
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISexposes internal mechanisms belonging to the GiSHEO platform by using various Web services technologiessuch as the followings: EO services – processing applications are represented through a Web serviceinterface; the workflow service – internal workflow engine which can be accessed by using a specializedWeb service; data indexing and discovery services – access to the GiSHEO’s data management mechanisms.At processing level the GiSHEO platform proposes two models for data processing by either using Con<strong>do</strong>rHTC, a direct job submission using Con<strong>do</strong>r's specific Web services, or Globus Toolkit 4 through GRAM. Atdata level we have the datasets database which contains the satellite imagery repository and processingapplication datasets used by applications to manipulate satellite images. At the date of this paper therepository includes authorized copies of NASA public available remote sensing images, photograms specificfor the geographical region of the developers, as well as connections with ESA’s GENESI-DR cataloguethrough a particular Web service.The GiSHEO processing platform consists of two parts, the interface exposed as a Web service (WS) andthe workload management system. The interface is built by using AXIS2 Web Service technology and isresponsible for the interaction with other internal services as the Gisheo Data Index Service (GDIS) in orderto facilitate access to the processing platform. Its main responsibilities are at this point to receive tasks fromthe workflow engine or directly from user interface, to use a task description language (the ClassAd metalanguage for example in case of Con<strong>do</strong>r HTC) in order to describe a job unit, to submit and check the statusof jobs inside the workload management system and to retrieve job logs for debugging purposes. As aworkload management system, GiSHEO uses Con<strong>do</strong>r HTC and provides Con<strong>do</strong>r HTC resource manageraccessible through it built-in Web service interface to access an internal component called Con<strong>do</strong>r JobManager used for task dispatching and administration.The Web-based user interface is designed as a client to the platform services. New user interfaces orapplications can be easily build on top of the existing Web and Grid services that are publicly exposed on theproject Web site. Due to the fact that EO applications are data-intensive, the key element in any Web portalfor EO is the selection of the data and, only after it, the selection of the processing that will be applied tothem. Note GiSHEO’s current solution in Figure 1: the data information is central; each data has associated alist of tasks that can be launched using it depending on its type.Figure 1. GiSHEO’s Web-based interface - front page: photogram catalogThe EO data selection in different EO portals range from simple selection from list based catalogues tovisual selection of region of interests. The early interface of GiSHEO has been designed having in mind alow degree of knowledge about data types and therefore the visual selection was preferred (see the interfacefunctionality in the demos provided on the project website). But this option has put a high stress on theplatform, as well as on the user’s Web browser, in order to be able to present multiple pre-views of the hugedata (at different zooming scales) available for the same region simultaneous. Moreover the computing taskdependability on the type of the input data was hardly solved in the case of multiple inputs representing data398
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010from the same region of interest. The new solution that is proposed allows the user to select the images toprocess using the location, type, date and so on parameters, and presents the data available in a list form, eachentry having only one preview form and a list of possible tasks to be applied. The user can specify aparticular location in which he or she is interested. More complex type filtering is also available. A specificlanguage was designed for these kinds of selections and can be used when someone wants to build his/heruser interface to the platform – <strong>do</strong>cumentation is available on project site.Note that the input and output (huge) images are not transferred to the user site, only at request, and allthe processing are taking place where the data are, on GiSHEO platform. The processing results are stored atremote site in catalogues that are specified by the user and which can be shared later one with other users.Since the processing time of the huge satellite images can be of seconds order (depending on the task type),the communication with the user is asynchronous. After the task completion, the user can retrieve the results.As mentioned earlier, the platform is designed with the training purpose in mind. The easy developmentof the EO lessons based on the interactive experimental facilities of the platform has been also a clear goal ofthe project. The eGLE component of the platform for e-learning allows the teacher to build, in a short time,new lessons based on templates for texts, images, videos etc.3. RELATED WORKGiSHEO follows after considerable world-wide efforts in Grid-based experiments for Earth observation. Weconsider that two periods can be distinguished in Grid-based Earth observation developments. The first one isthat of early experiments and proof-of-concepts finalized by European DataGrid, SARA Digital Puglia orGEOGrid projects. The first period finished with the studies delivered by the European projects D4Scienceand DEGREE about the challenges that the Earth Sciences are imposing on Grid infrastructure, as well asseveral case studies in which Grid are useful of production environments. The second period is the one of theproduction environments. The platform called Grid Processing On Demand, shortly G-POD currently offers aGrid-based platform for remote processing of the satellite images provided by ESA and offers severalsatellite image processing services for environmental management. Moreover, GENESI-DR offers aninterface for digital data discovery and retrieval, while raw data are processed using G-POD facilities. TheLandsat Grid Prototype LGP is using Grid computing to generate single scenes from the composite ofmultiple input scenes. EGEE-3 and SEE-Grid-SCI e-infrastructures projects have build environmentalapplications based on satellite data including also some of the ones provided by GENESI-DR. Note that theGiSHEO’s eGLE component is connected to the SEE-Grid-SCI platform, and the catalog to GENESI-DR.The closest solution to GiSHEO’s one is G-POD. Both have Web services interfaces to access theplatform facilities. Opposite to G-POD that is designed for commercial aims and offers very complexprocessing services on proprietary images, GiSHEO is designed for training aims and the processing tasks aresimple and operate on public available data. Complex applications can be build on top of GiSHEO platform,to reach the level of complexity of G-POD services, only by using its workflow based services that areexposed and by exploiting a pre-knowledge of the user in Earth observation processing requirements.Currently there is only a few number of resources involved in educational activities in EO. One of themost complex is EduSpace. While the training material is more consistent than that of the GiSHEO platform,the interactivity and flexibility degree in the relationship platform-user is lower compared with GiSHEOsolution.REFERENCESNeagul, M., Panica, S., Petcu, D., Zaharie, D. and Gorgan D., 2009. Web and Grid Services for Training in EarthObservation, Proceedings of IEEE International Workshop on Intelligent Data Acquisition and Advanced ComputingSystems: Technology and Applications. Rende, Italy, pp. 241-246.Petcu, D., 2009. Challenges of Data Processing for Earth Observation in Distributed Environments, IntelligentDistributed Computing III, Studies in Computational Intelligence SCI 237, Springer, pp. 9-19.Petcu, D., Zaharie, D., Neagul, M., Panica, S., Frincu, M., Gorgan, D., Stefanut, T. and Bacu, V., 2009. Remote SensedImage Processing on Grids for Training in Earth Observation. Image Processing, In-Tech, Vienna, pp. 115 – 140.399
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISDEVELOPMENT OF AN E-LEARNING SYSTEM TOSUPPORT SELF-LEARNING OF NURSING SKILLSYukie Majima*, Masato Soga** and Yasuko Maekawa****Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Osaka Prefecture University, 1-1 Gakuencho, Naka, Sakai, Osaka, Japan**Faculty of Systems Engineering, Wakayama University, 930 Sakaedani, Wakayama-city, Wakayama, Japan***School of Nursing, Osaka Prefecture University, 3-7-30 Habikino, Habikino-city, Osaka, JapanABSTRACTThis study developed an e-learning system for beginners to support the self-learning of nursing skills. To share and useknow-how of nursing skills that has been accumulated from experience but which cannot be verbalized, this systemrenders them as formal knowledge through visual representation. The instructional design consists of the following fourphases: 1. Identification of one’s own technical procedures; 2. Comparison of model images with one’s own technicalimages; 3. Comparison of each image with one’s own practice progression; and 4. Output and identification of learningresults. Then, we experimented in intravenous injection technology for nursing students and nurses. We describe that thecharacteristics of how nurses and nursing students perceive knacks of intravenous injection and the overview of our e-learning system.KEYWORDSE-learning system, Nursing skill, Self-learning, Nursing student, Intravenous injection1. INTRODUCTIONLearning appropriate nursing skills is necessary in nursing education, as well as learning specializedknowledge. Good or bad skills influence evaluation of nursing. Consequently, not merely procedures butsafe, comfortable, and practicable expert techniques (skills) are also required. For use in ICT for education 1) ,numerous studies have been <strong>do</strong>ne of systems to support the learning specialized knowledge 2) , but studies ofrequired-skills learning support systems have just begun. For that reason, this study first clarifies thedifferences between technical “knacks” of intravenous injections perceived by nurses and those by nursingstudents. Then, based on the characteristics, an e-learning system is developed for beginners to support selflearningof nursing skills.2. METHODSIn the experiment, we chose an intravenous injection.Subjects were 31 nurses (2 male and 29 female; averageage 36.7; average years of experience 15.1) and 30nursing students (4 male and 26 female; average age20.1), who gave consent to the study. The procedures ofthe study are as follows. Figure 1 presents a picture of theexperiment situation.1) Performing intravenous injections assisted by asimulation model.2) Conducting a semi-structured interview surveyabout what are perceived as knacks when performingintravenous injections3) Developing an e-learning system to support self-Intravenous InjectionSimulation Arm ModelFor Self-TrainingThe Role of PatientEye Mark Recorder(Nac EMR-8B)MonitorIntravenous Injection Simulation Arm ModelSimulated Blood BoxFigure 1. The experiment situation400
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010learning of nursing skills (hereinafter designated as the system) based on results of the interviews.3. RESULTS3.1 Characteristics of how Nurses and Nursing Students Perceive Knacks ofIntravenous InjectionResults of the interviews revealed that the knack of intravenous injections most often perceived by nursingstudents was “selection of a blood vessel” (14 people), followed by “feeling and sense at needle insertion” (8people), “syringe fixation” (5 people), and “arrangement of articles and procedures” overall (5 people). Onthe other hand, the contents of knacks perceived by nurses were “selection of a blood vessel” (17 people),“feeling and sense” (3 people), and “image simulation” (3 people). Linguistic expressions differ from nurseto nurse in terms of the sensation of fingers at selecting a blood vessel or inserting an injection needle. Forexample, it was expressed as “smoothly” or “without hesitation” at needle insertion, which indicates thatsuch a sense of speed is important.Many nursing students and nurses recognize“selection of a blood vessel” as a knack. However,regarding selection methods, nurses answered visualinspection or feeling by touch based on their own realfeelings, whereas students gave answers such as“engorging (or tying) sufficiently” and “understandinganatomy”. Furthermore, regarding “feeling and sense”,they recognized others’ experiences that would beknacks in the future, such as “It is better to capture asense of entering a blood vessel”, as knacks, but nottheir own real, experienced feelings. It would be goodfor nursing students to be able to learn knowledge (tacitknowledge) that experts have gained throughexperience.On the other point, the differences of intravenousinjection skill between nurses and nursing students were “how to hold the syringe”, “angle of needle prick”,“how to stretch the skin”, and so on(Figure 2).3.2 Overview and e-Learning System CharacteristicsLinguistic expressions differed among nurses in termsof the sensation of fingers that nurses recognize atperceiving blood vessels by touch or inserting aninjection needle. This suggests that formal knowledgeby visualization would be better than that byverbalization to share and use know-how of nursingskills which cannot be verbalized.Consequently, the developed e-learning systemdescribed herein assigns importance to handling imagesto enable visual learning. In addition, because manynursing students consider precise implementation ofprocedures as technical “knacks”, the instructionaldesign consists of the following four phases:Figure 3. The screen of technical procedures check1. Identification of one’s own technical procedures;2. Comparison of model images with one’s own technical images;3. Comparison of each image in one’s own practice progressions; and4. Output and identification of learning results.A NurseA Nursing Student< Difference between nurses and nursing students ># How to hold the syringe# Angle of needle prick# How to stretch the skinFigure 2. The differences of intravenous injection skillbetween nurses and nursing students401
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISThe Identification of one’s own technical procedures in this e-learning system is shown Figure 3. Nursingstudents can study the right technical procedures by checking radio button in this phase.A major feature of the system is that it can synchronize and display two images from the beginning ofnursing skills. This screen layout is shown Figure 4. A learner answers the presented questions by comparingtheir own technical images with the nurse’s model technical images on the system. Therefore, the learner putsthat awareness (tactic knowledge) in writing and expresses it (formal knowledge), instead of learning itintuitively by viewing images. The result is that reflective learning is <strong>do</strong>ne during the expression process. Wealso added a PDF file output function to use reflected results. Figure 5 presents an example of outputtedreport.Figure 4. The screen of comparing images and inputtingawarenessFigure 5. The example of outputted report4. CONCLUSIONThis study clarified the differences between “knacks” of intravenous injection skills perceived by nurses andthose by nursing students. Based on their characteristics, we developed an e-learning system for beginners tosupport self-learning of nursing skills. Learning effects attributable to the system will be examined in futurestudies.ACKNOWLEDGEMENTThis study supported by Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research (B) at Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports,Science and Technology in Japan (19390548).REFERENCES1) Vincent DS., et al., 2003, Interactive nursing skills training using advanced networked technology,J Telemed Telecare,Suppl 2, pp.S68-70.2) Yukie M., et al., 2009, Development of ubiquitous on demand study support environment for nursing students,Human-Computer Interaction. Interacting in Various Application Domains Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol.5613/2009, pp.149-155.402
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010DESIGNING AN E-LEARNING SYSTEM TO SUPPORTRE-EMPLOYMENT OF POTENTIAL NURSESYukie Majima*, Yumiko Nakamura**, Yasuko Maekawa**, Hiroko Makino**,Yukari Nakajima** and Mizuko Hiramatsu***Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Osaka Prefecture University, 1-1 Gakuencho, Naka, Sakai, Osaka, Japan**School of Nursing, Osaka Prefecture University, 3-7-30 Habikino, Habikino-city, Osaka, JapanABSTRACTThe shortage of nursing personnel has been a growing national concern in Japan because of the progression of the agingpopulation concomitantly with a low birth rate. Consequently, we developed an e-learning system to support reemploymentof those who have a nursing qualification but who are not engaged in nursing service employment (potentialnursing personnel). Major features of this system are: 1) it can recommend certain contents from over 100 learningcontents according to when potential nursing personnel were separated from service and according to medicaldepartments in which they wish to be re-employed; and 2) it can answer questions posed by learners.KEYWORDSPotential nursing personnel, E-learning system, Recommendation, Nursing practice example, Mentor assistance1. INTRODUCTIONIn Japan, after medical fees were revised in 2006 with the requirement that “The basic fee for hospitalizationin a general ward is determined based on seven patients for one nurse”, the demand for nursing staff hasincreased further. This has engendered the concentration of new graduate nursing personnel in some largehospitals and the shortage of nursing staff in other facilities. As a strategy to mitigate that severe shortage ofnursing personnel, it would appear useful to support re-employment of those who have a nursingqualification but who are not engaged in nursing services (potential nursing personnel). However, it isextremely difficult to locate potential nurses, who are estimated as up to 550 thousand in Japan.Our previous study 1) suggested that unemployed nurses evaluated practical nursing skills more highlythan nursing supervisors and they felt a lower need for training and a greater need for the items of latestinformation and handling equipment. This study then developed an e-learning system to reveal potentialnursing personnel and to support training for their re-employment using the internet. The e-learning contentsare consisted of their learning needs. We report on that system.2. OUTLINE OF THE E-LEARNING SYSTEM TO SUPPORT RE-EMPLOYMENT OF POTENTIAL NURSESA major feature of this system is to recommend certain contents from over 100 contents to learn nursingpractice examples and nursing skills according to when potential nursing personnel are separated fromservice and which medical departments in which they wish to be re-employed. The configuration of thesystem is as described below.403
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADIS2.1 Learning Content Presentation SystemThe developed e-learning systemcontains example materials mounte<strong>do</strong>n an e-learning system for learningnursing practice examples 2) as itsbasic learning content. The examplesspan a wide array of nursing fieldssuch as basic, adult, maternal andpediatric, gerontological, psychiatric,community health, home care, an<strong>do</strong>ccupational care nursing 3) .This system enables nursingpersonnel to learn specializedknowledge, nursing skills, and pastnational exam questions in thecontext of the development ofnursing processes. An overview ofthe e-learning system for learningnursing practice examples ispresented in Figure 1.StudyMode 1StudyMode 2e-Learning Training MaterialsPatientUnderstanding Ex.Care Planning Ex.Care PlanEvaluation EX.Study Knowledge Study Skills ExercisesNursing Practice Examples (Nursing Process) of "Basic Nursing Knowledge", "BasicNursing Techniques" and "National Examinations" are studied through e-Learning.Figure 1. Overview of the e-Learning system for studying nursing practice2.2 Learning System for Potential Nursing PersonnelTo undertake training to support the re-employment of potential nursing personnel, this system has thefollowing two functions: (1) a configuration management function for training programs: and (2) a mentorassistance function.2.2.1 Configuration Management Function for Training ProgramsThis is the function by which, when a potential nurse (learner) inputs the prescribed requirements, the systemautomatically produces and presents a training program that is suitable for the person. Figure 2 presents theconfiguration and flow.The prescribed requirementsinclude the following: the year ofseparation from service; experiencedmedical departments; the medicaldepartment at the time of leavingservice; a desired facility and amedical department the learnerwishes to return; a desired area forpractical training; and a desiredlearning pattern.We define the following threepatterns as desired learning patterns.1) I would like to return toservice as soon as possible.Consequently, I would like to learnby particularly addressing skills andknowledge modified after myretirement in a medical departmentto which I wish to return.Configuration management function for training programsPotential nursingpersonnel(Learner)MateriallearningUser master The system automatically configures a training program from the educational material DB usingindividual attributes (year of leaving service, medical department at the time of leaving service, desiredmedical department to return, desired learning pattern) as the key. Using automatic configuration, a training program is acquired together with information in cooperationwith the material learning system (URLs and names of educational materials to be learned). Potential nurses can add (or delete) materials to a training program along with automatic configuration.2) I would like to return to service if certain conditions are met. Consequently, I would like to learn allskills and knowledge in a medical department to which I wish to return (including skills and knowledgemodified after my retirement).LoginTraining programAdditionalregistrationEducationalmaterial DBAutomaticConfigurationprocessMaterial learning systemAdding attributes(1) Medical department(2) Year(3) Kind of skill(4) KeywordsFigure 2. Configuration and flow for the training system404
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 20103) I would like to learn all skills and knowledge without specifying a medical department to which I wishto return or the year in which I left service.2.2.2 Mentor Assistance FunctionThis function assists the service by which a learning assistant, designated as the “mentor”, answers questionsor consultations from a person oflearner on the Web. The flow of Mentor assistance functionthe system is as depicted inPotentialMentorFigure 3.Inputting aUnanswerednurseQuestion dataquestionQuestion list (Learning1) A mentor inputs a(Learner)assistance)proposed answer and keywords Presentation processing is a process toAnswer dataextract educational materials matched to keyto a question from a person of words set by a mentor from the educationalInputting anmaterial database and present them.learner and presses the searchanswer After selecting the most appropriate one Presentationdatabase button.from presented educational materials, aprocessingmentor sends an answer to a potential nurse.2) The system extractsInputting an answer by a mentor/Learning materialeduca-tionnal materials matchedInforming after learning materialQuestions/ answersselectionto the keywords set by the selectionLearning material DBmentor from the database andAnswerannouncingpresents them.mailMaterial learning system3) The mentor selects appropriateones among the presentedlearningViewing answersMaterialList of learningEducationalmaterialsmaterial DBeducational materials and sendsan answer to the learner.4) The learner receives theFigure 3. The Flow of mentor assistance functionanswer and is able to view theeducational materials to be learned.3. CONCLUSIONThis e-learning system was developed to identify potential nursing personnel whose whereabouts might beunknown and to support their training for re-employment using the internet. In future studies, we plan toadminister a post-learning questionnaire to users and to perform a comprehensive evaluation of the system,along with promotion of the system.ACKNOWLEDGEMENTThis study supported by Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research (A) at Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports,Science and Technology in Japan (20249083).REFERENCES1) Yumiko N., et. Al., 2010,Comparison of Training Needs for Rehiring of Unemployed Nurses and Nursing Supervisors,11th International ICNE Conference Clinical Ethics across the Lifespan, (Acceptance)2) Yukie M., et al., 2006, Framework for Problem-Solving Based Learning in Nursing Domain -An Experimental Study-,Learning by Effective Utilization of Technologies: Facilitating Intercultural Understanding, pp.625-628 .3) Yukie M., et al., 2009, Development of ubiquitous on demand study support environment for nursing students,Human-Computer Interaction. Interacting in Various Application Domains Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol.5613/2009, pp.149-155.405
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISAUTOMATIC SEMANTIC IMAGE ANNOTATION WITHINTHE DOMAIN OF SOFTWARE MODELINGMatthias Heinrich and Antje Boehm-PetersSAP AG, SAP Research, Dresden, GermanyABSTRACTThe information society requires capable means to access the vast set of digital content. Currently, search engines are thepre<strong>do</strong>minant approach to find suitable data. Although state-of-the-art search engines deliver decent results for textualcontent, algorithms to retrieve appropriate bitmap data fall short on providing proper image selections. Therefore, wepropose a semantic image annotation solution that automatically classifies raw bitmap data visualizing software diagramswith an ontological formalism. Rather than applying pattern recognition techniques to an existing image pool, bitmapdata is enhanced by semantic annotations at image creation time. Thus, the underlying data model can be exploited toderive semantic annotations. In contrast to pattern recognition algorithms, our approach implies a precise ontologicalclassification which is the foundation of accurate bitmap search.KEYWORDSImage Annotation, Ontology-Based Annotation, Automated Annotation1. INTRODUCTIONThe information age brings along a rapid increase of digital content. For example in 2000, the total of diskstorage summed up to 3,000,000 TB and this capacity is <strong>do</strong>ubling each year [Coffman et al. 2002]. In orderto leverage the broad knowledge base, information technology has to provide appropriate means to access theavailable information. Thus, search engines have evolved and nowadays satisfy search queries operating ontextual content.However, bitmap search still delivers poor results. This is due to the fact that retrieving meaningfulkeywords from bitmap data in an automated fashion is a cumbersome task. Numerous research activitiesfocus on pattern recognition techniques [Schreiber et al. 2001] which are able to identify and classify objectsvisualized on images. Nevertheless, fully-automated classification systems are not adequate to achieve 100%accuracy.Therefore, we propose an automated image annotation platform capable of associating bitmaps withprecise semantic annotations. The platform serves as an image annotator as well as an image generator forbitmaps derived from software models (e.g. UML, BPMN). Since image creation and image annotation isexecuted by one integrated platform, annotation derivation algorithms have full access to the underlying datamodel. This data model is a typed, well-defined and programmatically accessible model representing aprecise semantic description of the visualization. Consequently, the association of images with semanticannotations breaks <strong>do</strong>wn to the task of preserving knowledge captured in the data model within the targetexport format. In the proposed solution, we have combined the semantic formalism supplied by the SemanticMediaWiki system with widespread bitmap formats such as JPEG. Eventually, this enforces a semanticallyenriched and consistent image library which allows for precise semantic search.In this paper, we proceed with a brief discussion of related work in Section 2. Section 3 introduces thehigh-level architecture of the semantic image annotation platform and describes the concrete implementationin detail. Finally, in Section 4 we summarize the benefits of the presented solution and propose furtherapplicable <strong>do</strong>mains.406
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 20102. RELATED WORKSeveral publications address the topic of semantic image annotation. In general, there are two establishedapproaches to enrich bitmap data with semantics.On the one hand side various research endeavors favor a semi-automatic solution. Even though systemssuggest various annotations and support the annotation process itself, <strong>do</strong>main experts decide whether theautomatic tagging is eligible. For example Schreiber et al. describe in “Ontology-Based Photo Annotation”[Schreiber et al. 2001] a tool that allows for annotating and querying photographs. The annotation ontology isbased on the RDFS standard [RDFS 2004] and capable of capturing photo features (e.g. photographer),medium features (e.g. resolution) and subject-matter descriptions (e.g. setting). In order to finalize theannotation process experts are required to validate all produced annotations. A second accepted approachfocuses on automated semantic annotation systems. Those autonomous systems scale and are cost effective.Tansley et al. implemented an automated solution called MAVIS 2 [Tansley et al. 2000]. The semanticclassification combines latent semantic analysis with proprietary semantic classification algorithms.Resulting classifications are produced automatically but may include incorrect annotations.Currently, all existing systems are not able to join the cost-effectiveness of automated systems with theannotation accuracy of expert-supported systems. Our proposed solution offers cost-effectiveness as well asannotation accuracy for the software modeling <strong>do</strong>main.3. ARCHITECTURE & IMPLEMENTATION OF THE SEMANTICIMAGE ANNOTATION PLATFORMThe semantic image annotation platform derives bitmaps from the visual representation of software modelsand enriches the generated bitmap data with the semantics of the displayed content. Figure 1 represents theplatform architecture.Figure 1. Platform architectureFigure 2. Platform implementationThe architecture is split into 3 components: the developer’s workbench, the content extraction platformand the content management system (CMS).The developer’s workbench provides the tooling to create & modify software models. Dedicated editorsare in place to manipulate software models in an ergonomic way. The resulting models are persisted in arepository and adhere to a so called meta-model. This meta-model specifies the language vocabulary whichwill be instantiated by models. The content extraction platform consists of a bitmap extractor that transformsthe model visualization into a bitmap format. The semantics extractor analyses the model itself (modelelement properties and relations to other model elements are analyzed, constraints are calculated, etc). Sincethis analysis is executed on the software model and not on the respective bitmap data, the entire data modelcan be traversed and exploited in order to extract its semantics. Finally, the export component combinesbinary bitmap data with textual semantics data and transmits it to the CMS. The CMS stores bitmap andsemantic data. Furthermore, it links bitmap instances to ontological instances. Therefore, raw bitmap data isalways associated with its semantics.407
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISThe explained high-level architecture is implemented reusing well-known open-source frameworks asdepicted in Figure 2. The developer’s workbench is implemented as a set of Eclipse plug-ins and currentlysupports two software modeling languages (UML [UML 2009] and BPMN [BPMN 2009]). The meta-models– describing available elements of the UML and BPMN language – are defined using the Ecore languagewhich is part of the Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF) [Steinberg et al. 2008]. EMF also provides an APIto create models adhering to the respective meta-model and means to load / save models. In order to visualizethe data model, the Graphical Editing Framework (GEF) is utilized.The content extraction platform facilitates the data derivation and submission. The bitmap extractorconsumes GEF-figures and maps them to JPEG-bitmaps. Besides rendering diagram bitmaps, the extractor isalso capable of cropping minimal bitmaps displaying solely single elements (e.g. UML class, BPMNactivity). To capture the semantics of software models, the openArchitectureWare (oAW) framework isutilized. oAW provides a code generation engine and a template language called Xpand. Xpand templatesdefine rules which entities of the software models specify the semantics and should therefore be extracted.The Xpand templates operate on the vocabulary described by an Ecore meta-model. Therefore, one templatecan process all models based on a certain meta-model. That leads to a fully automated annotation process.All generated data (bitmap and semantics data) is bundled by the export component. The exportcomponent injects the data to a Semantic MediaWiki (SMW) installation using the HTTP-interface.The SMW system persists all data and links the semantics to the appropriate bitmap. Semanticclassification & association is established through SMW categories, relations and attributes. The semanticsextractor maps the model elements to SMW categories, relations and attributes by analyzing the modelelements and its relations to other elements. Consequently, bitmaps stored in the CMS can be accessed usingsemantic search or navigation.4. CONCLUSIONIn this paper, we presented an image annotation platform fostering precise semantic annotations whichprovoke an expressive, ontologically-enriched bitmap data base. Furthermore, the annotation platformsupports an automated end-to-end annotation process. Both assets - accuracy & effectiveness - are the keydrivers to stimulate large-scale roll-outs and eventually pave the way for semantic bitmap search.Presently, the annotation platform is applied to the <strong>do</strong>main of software modeling. However, it is notlimited to this <strong>do</strong>main. For example mechanical engineers typically rely on computer-aided design (CAD)tooling. To communicate and <strong>do</strong>cument wireframe models, a mapping from CAD models to bitmap formatsis required. Our architecture could be applied to render and annotate those bitmaps. Various other <strong>do</strong>mainsmay also be embraced. Nevertheless, all <strong>do</strong>mains that leverage the generic approach have to fulfill solely oneprerequisite: the models have to be based on an explicitly specified formalism (e.g. meta-model or schema).REFERENCESBPMN 2009. Business Process Model and Notation - Version 2.0. OMG Specification. Available athttp://www.omg.org/spec/BPMN/2.0/, retrieved May 23rd, 2010.Coffman, K. et al., 2002, Growth of the <strong>Internet</strong> - Optical Fiber Telecommunications IV B. Academic Press, USA.RDFS 2004. RDF Semantics. W3C Recommendation. Available at http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/REC-rdf-mt-20040210/,retrieved May 23rd, 2010.Schreiber A. et al., 2001. Ontology-Based Photo Annotation. In IEEE Intelligent Systems, Vol. 16, No. 3, pp 66-74.Steinberg, D. et al., 2008, Eclipse Modeling Framework, Second Edition. Addison-Wesley, USA.Tansley, R. et al., 2000. Automating the linking of content and concept. Proceedings of 8. ACM Multimedia 2000. LosAngeles, CA, USA, pp 445-447.UML 2009. Unified Modeling Language. OMG Specification. Available at http://www.omg.org/spec/UML/2.3/,retrieved May 23rd, 2010.408
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010LOCATION BASED MOBILE ADVERTISINGMatthew Sammut, Matthew Montebello and Vanessa CamilleriDepartment of Intelligent Computer Systems, University of MaltaABSTRACTThe scope of this paper is to use Location-Based Services and create an advertising platform for mobile phones based onthe location of the user. The system is aimed mainly at location-based marketing but can be used for other purposes suchas location-based news, general information, events, weather and much more. Information will be delivered to the subscribersbased on what the advertisers have specified. This data will be delivered via SMS. Today’s mobile phones aregetting increasingly sophisticated and are being equipped with geo-positioning systems (GPS) which are accurate to afew meters’ range.1. INTRODUCTIONIn this age of noteworthy competition in the telecommunications sector, mobile network operators and softwarebusinesses continually seek new and innovative ways to create differentiation and increase profits. Oneof the best ways to accomplish this is through the delivery of highly personalized services. LBS and the varioustechnologies required to achieve accurate, timely locations from mobile phones will be explained here.This paper is based on two main scenarios which are being integrated in mobile phones. These are locationawareness and presence. Location-awareness enables a device and a person carrying it to be geographicallylocated, while presence allows a user, or in this case a system, to know the status of another user.2. AIMS AND OBJECTIVESThe main aim of this paper is that of creating a service where advertisers can target adverts to a particularzone. Users then subscribe to this service and install a small application on their phone. When the users andtheir devices are in the advertising zone, they will receive advertisements related to the area in which theycurrently are. The objectives are divided into three parts: Website – Design and develop a website where advertisers and users can subscribe to the service.Advertisers will have the facility to target their adverts in different zones on a Google Map. Userswill have options to subscribe to various categories of adverts and <strong>do</strong>wnload the mobile applicationon their smart phone. Application – Develop an application for BlackBerry phones which will get co-ordinates of the locationat which the phone currently is and send the data to the server which in turn will be matchedto advertising zones in the database.SMS Messaging System – Given that co-ordinates being passed from the application to the systemfall in one or more advertising zones, an SMS will be sent with the advert content to the mobilephone.All three parts will communicate together wirelessly and deliver real-time adverts based on the location ofthe users. The aim is to have a fully working prototype and test the effectiveness of such a system and thevarious uses that it might have.2.1 Specification and DesignA clear picture of the system helps in identifying all the modules and the interaction between them. Below isa list, together with a brief explanation of the main modules of the system:409
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISAdvertisers’ Subscription - In order to access the advertiser’s section on the website, users need to signup as advertisers. This will be <strong>do</strong>ne through a user friendly form where basic information will be requested.Advertisements based on Location - Each advertiser will be able to create advertisements based on location.This will be <strong>do</strong>ne by having a map and advertisers will just drag a marker on the advertising zone.The co-ordinates will be recorded by the system automatically. The advertiser then will just need to enter theadvertising text based on the location he has chosen.Advertisement Categories - A list of predefined categories will be already available in the system. Thesecategories will help advertisers to categorize their adverts in one or more categories.Subscribers Information and Preferences - In order to make use of the system, users are required tosubscribe and choose their preferences. These preferences include their mobile number, the choice of categoriesthat they wish to subscribe to, the maximum number of adverts they wish to receive daily.Mobile Application to track position - An application which will be installed on the subscribers’ phones(more specifically BlackBerry phones) will be developed to track the co-ordinates or the users and send theseco-ordinates to the system. The application will prompt the subscriber for the username and password so thatit will identify him/her.Advert messaging platform - SMS will be used to deliver advertisements. The messaging platform willbe triggered every time the application sends a set of co-ordinates that are located in an advertising zone.When this happens, an SMS containing the advertisement text will be sent to the mobile phone found in theadvertising zone.Having listed and described the various specifications required by the system, in Figure 1 we can see aconceptual design that defines the structure and behavior of the system.2.2 Mobile Application DesignFigure 1. System ArchitectureApplications designed for BlackBerry devices should provide a balance between the best possible user experienceand a long battery life. The aim of the application is not to boast a cool user interface, but to have anapplication that when started, runs in the background and send data at intervals through a wireless networkavailable to the system database. The application focuses to identify the position of the user by checking theposition of the device using the integrated GPS. These fundamental characteristics were identified during thedesign stage and which were of use during the implementation phase: A smaller screen size that can display a limited number of characters; Slower processor speeds; Wireless network connections with a longer latency period than standard LANs; Less available memory; Shorter battery life; One screen at a time.410
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 20102.3 Website and Database DesignThe website is an essential part of the implementation since every module that forms part of this system interactsin some way or another with the website. The website is not just an informative static website but afully fledged dynamic website which adapts and changes with the content input by the advertisers andsubscribers. It is also an informative website with a blog being continuously updated by the site administratoron news and information related to Location-based services from around the world.3. IMPLEMENTATIONA key difference between system implementation and all other phases of the lifecycle is that all activities upto this point have been performed in safe, protected and secure environments where issues that arose havelittle or no impact on the final system.3.1 WebsiteUsers have two different roles in the system, namely, subscriber advertiser. A registration module was requiredto distinguish between them. The website front-end can be accessed by anyone browsing the internetexcept for two specific pages being the Advertiser Page and the Subscriber Page.The advertising module allows advertisers to list advertisements on the website. This is divided into thelistings section and the add an advert section. The listing section displays all the adverts and correspondinginformation of the logged in advertiser whilst the add an advert section allows the advertiser to create advertisementsby choosing the location from the Google Map, category from the drop <strong>do</strong>wn list and fill in theadvertisement text.The subscriber module allows subscribers to set their user preferences on the system. Logged in subscriberscan choose categories pre-defined by the advertisers in order to receive adverts based on these categories.Subscribers are always presented with the list of subscribed categories which they can alter anytime theywant. Allowing users to choose the categories they are interested in makes the service more interesting.Both subscribers and advertisers can unsubscribe from the service from the website and all the related informationis permanently deleted. Other sections in the website like the blog section make the system morecomplete.3.2 Mobile ApplicationThe mobile application that was created is small service application that is used to get the subscriber’s mobileco-ordinates and send them to the system for the comparison with advertising zone areas. JAVA and variousBlackBerry API’s where used to develop this application. It consists of two basic screens which are the loginscreen and the status viewer screen. When the application is started, the Login Screen appears so that the subscriberinputs the username and password and then the application authenticates them with the system database.The application can then be minimized to run as a background process on the phone. Subscriber’s canalter the interval each time the co-ordinates are sent to the system database. This is <strong>do</strong>ne through the statusview screen. On this screen the viewer can also see the latest co-ordinates that had been sent to the systemdatabase.Since advertising zones are set by just a pair of co-ordinates we needed to find a way to know if the coordinatesbeing sent by the phone of the subscriber, fall in the advertising zone – the area around the pointsset by the advertiser. To <strong>do</strong> this we used the Haversin Formula (see Equation 1) which is an equation thatcalculates the distance and bearing between Latitude and Longitude points.Equation 1: Haversin Formula411
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADIS3.3 Delivering SMS AdvertsSMS adverts are only delivered to the subscribers that are located in an advertising zone. With the HaversinFormula this is being calculated and the result can either be that a subscriber is found in an advertising zoneor not. If there is no match then nothing happens but if the subscriber is in an advertising zone then the systemneeds to deliver an advert via SMS.4. RESULTSThe main aim of this paper was to create a system that is able to send advertisements based on the location ofits subscribers. The system was divided into three main parts: Website, Application and SMS messaging system.Each on of these three main modules had a list of specifications that had to be designed, developed andintegrated with the rest of the system.Different testing strategies were a<strong>do</strong>pted to ensure that the implementation was in line at every progressivestage. Unit testing was carried out after every subtask was completed to check that each componentworked well. Integration testing was performed when components were integrated together, to ensure thatcomponents worked well in conjunction with each other. System testing ensured the end-to-end quality ofthe entire system.4.1 Application Testing ResultsIn order to verify that the application works correctly, a series of tests were carried out. The results obtainedfrom these tests enabled us to understand the weaknesses of the system and thus help us correct and improvethe application. We made sure that the application worked in different scenarios and also verifying that theapplication <strong>do</strong>es what it needs to <strong>do</strong>. The outcome from the results obtained shows that the application createdis robust.The targets set in the beginning of this paper have been accomplished and the system has all the featuresmentioned in the aims implemented. From the results obtained it can also be said that the system is quite robustand has good error handling capabilities.5. CONCLUSIONA location-based service has been created to allow advertisements to be sent to subscribers based on theirlocation. The expectations set in the beginning seemed impossible but yet in the end the implementation waseffectively tackled step by step and all the required tasks were accomplished. The system was divided intomodules which were easier to handle in the various stages outlined. The end result was precisely that whichwas initially described as the ultimate goal: a location-based mobile advertising platform.REFERENCESAG, YellowMap. 2002. Business Models for LBA. Europe : s.n., 2002.BlackBerry. 2010. Smartphones and Cell Phones at Blackberry.com. Blackberry.com. [Online] Research In Motion(RIM), January 20, 2010. [Cited: May 22, 2010.] http://www.blackberry.com/.CentOS. 2010. The Community Enterprise Operating System. [Online] [Cited: May 6, 2010.] http://www.centos.org.Clickatell. 2010. Clickatell. Clickatell Bulk SMS Gateway. [Online] May 29, 2010. [Cited: May 22, 2010.]https://www.clickatell.com/.Linux. Linux Homepage at Linux Online. Linux.org. [Online] [Cited: May 6, 2010.] http://www.linux.org/.Shukla, Reena. 2000. LBS - The ingredients and the alternatives. GIS Development. [Online] February 19, 2000. [Cited:April 26, 2010.] http://www.gisdevelopment.net/technology/lbs/techlbs006.htm.412
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010BRAZILIAN PUBLIC SOFTWARE AND QUALITYAngela M. Alves, Giancarlo Stefanuto and Paula F. D. CastroCentro de Tecnologia da Informação Renato Archer (CTI)Rod. Dom Pedro I, km 143,6, Campinas, SP, Brazil, 13069-901Marcelo PessôaUniversidade São Paulo (USP)Av. Prof. Luciano Gualberto, nº 380, São Paulo, SP, Brazil, 13069-901ABSTRACTThis work presents a case of an innovative Brazilian experience of use of free software in public administration as anemergent ecosystem, and the attempt to establish a quality framework for that. At the beginning of the century, Brazilianpolicy makers were concerned with the limitations of the Free <strong>Software</strong> Model of Production (FSMP) to provide softwareto public administration. Issues such as installation and operational support, quality of software (users interfaces,manuals) and bugs were not effectively solved by the FSPM alone. They then shaped the Brazilian Public <strong>Software</strong>,which is based on code opening (FSPM), but includes some additional duties to the entity that makes the softwareavailable. To support and to make the concept operational and institutional, an environment was formed and so a virtualambience named Brazilian Public <strong>Software</strong> <strong>Portal</strong> (BPSP) began to exist. Since their beginning in the end of 2006, theBPSP1 has increased its number of associates to 84,000 users, and today it has 40 software solutions available, in manytechnological areas: geo-processing, health, public town management (sanitation, hospitals management, datamanagement, etc). Even software solutions originated from private entities that had public interest as textual database andweb application server ambience. The solutions are used not only by governmental agencies but also by small andmedium-sized companies and other kinds of organizations. Other related interest groups emerged inside the BPS:4CMBr, driven to municipalities; Virtual Market focused on services; 5CQualiBr devoted to the quality of the software ina large sense and to the ecosystem sustaintability. Quality and quality assurance are a challenge in this kind of ecosystemKEYWORDSE-Government, digital emerging ecosystem, network quality model.1. INTRODUCTIONThis article presents a case about the quality in the BPS, the cooperative network focused at producing publicsoftware in the Brazilian government. The quality framework is based on the BPS experience, seen throughthe lens of the Complex Thinking Theory. The BPS is a project of the Planning, Budget and ManagementMinistry (PBMM) of Brazil that introduces a new concept and operational structure to produce software,aimed at improving efficiency of the governmental system. The project began officially in 2006 [1]. At thattime, FSPM a<strong>do</strong>pted by the Federal Government was strongly stimulated by national policies. One of theexperiences of code opening, the Cacic software [2] (infrastructure inventory software), gave to Brazilianpolicy makers the perception that the government and several sectors of the Brazilian society were interestedin sharing and improving the software knowledge. In few months, thousands of software developers accessedthe site where Cacic was and formed a virtual community, similar to FSPM communities.Then, policy makers of PBMM developed the concept of public software and created the BPS project.The BPS project is based on a code opening model (FSPM), but it also includes additional duties to the entityinterested in making its software available as a public good. This is basically because the government has thelegal responsibility to make public goods available (including software) in minimal conditions of use,security and trust. These duties are established by a formal term between PBMM and the entity that includes1 www.softwarepublico.gov.br413
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADIS[3]: 1) to license software in (General Public License (GPL) form; 2) to provide software guidebooks to usersand guarantee that software work after installation; 3) to provide a focal point or a team that constitutes acommunication interface with the society, driving and solving their needs concerned with the availablesoftware; 4) to provide associated services to <strong>do</strong> the communication with society, like forum, internet site,software version control tools and 5) to manage the collaboration with the virtual community, inducingparticipating, registering contributions to software, defining quality patterns, launching and new versions.Today there are more than 40 solutions available in the <strong>Portal</strong>. Around each software solution a communityhas been formed that interacts with the leaders. Therefore, many people participate in more than onecommunity. The solutions came mostly from public entities, but private enterprises began to release software.The growth of software communities in the BPS portal quickly gave rise to demands that in their turn ledto new dimensions to be analyzed and incorporated into the BPS model [3,4]. Dimensions quite different interms of their nature, such as intellectual property, services commercialization derived from theapprenticeship in the communities, demands on the infrastructure usability, flexibility and interoperability,new policy acts to complete the public good concept even the implantation of the model in other countries inLatin America. These results [7] [10] indicate that the ecosystem is evolving. Like a living system, BPSecosystem responds to environmental (socio-politic-economic context) pressures. And the changes occurredin BPS derive from responses to that pressures and the learning process involving it [5]. This learning processis not only derived from responses to practical situations, but involves a common desire and efforts of thecommunities of BPS and the policy makers of PBMM to understand the complex nature of BPS [6].This work presents the trajectory followed by researchers of the Centro de Tecnologia da InformaçãoRenato Archer (CTI) to comprehend the complex dynamic of BPS ecosystem. First, it presents the contextand the researcher problem, secondly; the 5CQualiBr and next the final considerations.2. THE 5CQUALIBR5CQualiBr is a group of interest which deals with the topic of quality in the realm of the BPS ecosystem [11].The main values of the 5CQualiBr group are: Trust, Cooperation, Community, Knowledge and Sharing Theobjective of the group is to build knowledge in a collaborative way about Information and CommunicationTechnology (ICT), directed to the Quality of the Brazilian Public <strong>Software</strong>. In the group, the team Quality ofBPS is divided into many subjects. Each specific topic of quality is called a vector. The vectors currentlyimplemented are: Ecosystem, Interoperability, Quality of <strong>Software</strong> Products, Quality of development process,Quality of services, <strong>Software</strong> tests. The members of the group of interest may participate in all the vectors oronly in those of their interest. The dynamics of the group is aligned by Cooperation to build and ShareKnowledge within the Community. A fifth fundamental element for the development and sustainability of theenvironment is Trust. Trust is important for all in the group and in the ecosystem. For the Sharing ofKnowledge to exist, Trust is needed, and so that Cooperation exists, knowledge is needed. The higher thequality of BPS solutions, the more Trust will be placed by the society, given that Trust generates Quality andQuality generates Trust, in a virtuous cycle. The participation in the vectors of interest occurs in the followingways: <strong>do</strong>wnload of contents (technical <strong>do</strong>cuments or publications), posts of opinions in the vector blog;participation in forums; participation in chats and file upload [7]. 5CQualiBr also uses in its environment toolslike Twitter [8] and identi.ca! [9]. The environment also counts on a blog (“Hello Community”), which is thevirtual space created for the discussion of topics of the BPS community as a whole, that is, a space for postingopinions, criticism, <strong>do</strong>ubts and suggestions about the BPS interactivity. It is a space to treat the environmentcommon to all communities and vectors, the necessary changes and the existing conflicts. It is a site forcollecting ideas and improving the collaborative environment and makes it sustainable. The disseminationactivities of the 5CQualiBr aim to support two basic steps to build knowledge and make it available in acollaborative way that are: attracting a heterogeneous public of collaborators and publicize the knowledgegenerated by the collective interaction. The needs identified for the first step are: 1) Obtaining informationabout the previous understanding of the purpose of the Project by its participants and above all, by thecommunities of the BPS portal; 2) Creating a proper virtual environment for the formation of communities fordiscussion of themes and development of knowledge about the public software; 3) Developing publicity aboutthe environment for discussion and creation of knowledge; 4) Publicizing the relevance of the discussions andthe importance of the contributions. The needs identified for the second step are: 1) Developing publicity414
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010about the results (knowledge); 2) Publicizing the knowledge (results from discussions); 3) Creatingmechanisms capable of transferring the discussions and knowledge to the portal in a spontaneous andsustainable way. The group was released in October 10 2009 and amounts today to approximately 2000members and counts with seed codes available in all quality vectors that constitute the first version of theenvironment [10].3. FINAL CONSIDERATIONSThe ecosystem has been modeled using appropriate metho<strong>do</strong>logies for the treatment of complex ecosystems.Other metho<strong>do</strong>logies have been used whose structures stem from the Complex Thinking. With themetho<strong>do</strong>logy used important variables have been raised for the system as well as the relations between them.The material obtained has been used to define the BPS Reference Model as well as to allow the research groupthe identification of artifacts and emergent relations in the system. Among the systems which have beenidentified is 5CQualiBr, which has been introduced in this work.REFERENCES[1] Pertele, Anderson; Castro, Carlos A. J.; Meffe, Corinto; Bretas, Nazaré L.; Santos, Rogério S.; 2005. Materialização<strong>do</strong> Conceito de <strong>Software</strong> <strong>Público</strong>. IP - Informática Pública, v. 7, n. 2, setembro, pp. 19-28[2] Sistema de Inventário CACIC, http://www.softwarepublico.gov.br/<strong>do</strong>tlrn/clubs/cacic, last access in MAI/2010.[3] Meffe,Corinto, 2008. O avanço <strong>do</strong> <strong>Software</strong> <strong>Público</strong> <strong>Brasileiro</strong> Experiência Brasileira Linux Magazine. 49 (Dec.2008), 28-32. http://www.linuxnewmedia.com.br/images/uploads/pdf_aberto/LM_49_28_32_05_corp_soft_livre.pdf.[4] Meffe, C.; Entrevista para Revista Ciência e Cultura da SBPC. http://www.softwarelivre.org/news/7372, last accessMAY/2010.[5] Alves, A. M., Stefanuto, G., Salviano, C., Drummond, P., and Meffe, C. 2009. Learning path to an emergentecosystem: the Brazilian public software experience. In Proceedings of the international Conference on Managementof Emergent Digital Ecosystems (France, October 27 - 30, 2009). MEDES '09. ACM, New York, NY, 454-455.DOI= http://<strong>do</strong>i.acm.org/10.1145/1643823.1643910.[6] <strong>Software</strong> <strong>Público</strong> <strong>Brasileiro</strong>: muito além <strong>do</strong> compartilhamento de software; Angela M. Alves, Giancarlo N. Stefanuto,Paula F. Drummond de Castro, Sueli A. Varani; Revista InfoBrasil - Ano II - nr. 7 - junho/agosto de 2009[7] Um modelo de referência para o <strong>Software</strong> <strong>Público</strong> <strong>Brasileiro</strong>; Jarbas L. Car<strong>do</strong>so Jr., Marcos Antonio Rodrigues,Angela M. Alves; Revista InfoBrasil - Ano II - nr. 7 - junho/agosto de 2009[8] http://twitter.com/5CQualiBr[9] http://identi.ca/5cqualibr/[10] Um modelo de referência para o <strong>Software</strong> <strong>Público</strong> <strong>Brasileiro</strong>; Jarbas L. Car<strong>do</strong>so Jr., Marcos Antonio Rodrigues,Angela M. Alves; Revista InfoBrasil - Ano II - nr. 7 - junho/agosto de 2009[11] Alves, Angela, STefanuto, Giancarlo, Castro, Paula e Eleutério, Sueli Varani. Brazilian Public <strong>Software</strong> and itsImpact on Brazilian Society. In: International Conference on e-Government, 5, 2009, Boston, EUA. Proceedings of5th International Conference on e-Government. EUA: Academic Publishing Limited, 2009. P. 187-191.415
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISTHE INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE POSITIONING INIT GOVERNANCEProf. Dr. Claudio Gottschalg Duque* and Mauricio Rocha Lyra*/***UNB – Universidade de Brasília**UniCEUB – Centro Universitário de BrasíliaABSTRACTIT governance is supported by various models and standards such as COBIT, ITIL, ISO20000, ISO27002. The mainobjective of these models and standards is to give transparency to the actions and processes of IT. In a short study of eachthem, we observed that they <strong>do</strong> not present in your body space for the information architecture. If one of the goals of theInformation Architecture is to organize the information for decision making, how can this be out of context? Thisresearch aims to study the IT governance models in order to prepare a modification suggestion to place the informationarchitecture in each one of them.KEYWORDSGovernance, Information Architecture, Best Practice1. INTRODUCTIONMuch has been said about "best practices" of governance and the benefits of its a<strong>do</strong>ption in the corporatecontext and the management of technological resources. The necessity of align actions with strategic goals ispresent in most of texts about this theme.More than the result of the society reaction to the waywardness and accounting and financial frauddevelopments in the last decade with major international companies, governance is a natural evolution ofsociety toward greater control, transparency and responsibility in the conduction of business. Organizationgovernance means the ability of its leaders to effectively implement the principles, guidelines and controlsthat ensure, consistently and predictably, the attention to its corporate purpose and legal obligations.Corporate Governance was defined by IBGC (Instituto <strong>Brasileiro</strong> de Governança Corporativa) as "thesystem by which companies are directed and monitored, involving the relationship between shareholders,administrative council, board of directors and audit committee" (IBGC, 2005).Only IT resources with their computers, databases, systems and telecommunications, are able to field theinformation complexity and mass involved in their activities to ensure the necessary controls to the corporategovernance.Information technology offers unique challenges for its own governance. Demands for betterunderstanding and visibility of their internal processes, full alignment with business objectives and economicoperation of its infrastructure are some examples. Good IT governance is an essential requirement to ensurethe effective contribution of IT to the profitability of the company and to consolidate its strategic positioningfor the future.In this context, the IT Governance Institute (2005) defines IT governance as follows:"IT governance is the responsibility of senior management (including directors and executives),leadership, organizational structures and processes that ensure IT sustains and extends the strategies of thecompany and the goals of the organization."According to (Fernandes Abreu, 2008) the main goal of IT governance is to align IT resources withbusiness requirements, based on business continuity, care of business strategies and service to externalregulatory frameworks.In order to cope with these challenges some models, metho<strong>do</strong>logies, standards and tools have beendeveloped (by professional associations or encouraged by governments) to make the management of IT and416
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010work processes more transparent, understandable, manageable and reliable. CoBIT ( Control Objectives forInformation and Related Technology), ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library), CMMI(Capability Maturity Model integrated), ISO20000, ISO27002 are some of these initiatives that serves as rolemodels for the IT areas to ensure alignment of their processes to goals of the business and its owngovernance requirements.2. INFORMATION ARCHITECTUREWurman suggests that "information structures influence the interactions in the world the same way that thestructures of buildings stimulate or limit social interactions" (Wurman, 1991). He writes that structuresshould be created or planning information to meet the personal paths to knowledge. Technology is an aspectto be considered by the information architecture to enable the aggregation and provision of necessaryinformation in an organization (Wurman, 1991).According to (Hage<strong>do</strong>rn, 2009), Information Architecture is the art and science of organizing informationto satisfy information needs, which involves the processes of research, analysis, design and implementation.In his work, the ecology of information (Davenport, 1998) defines information architecture as a guide todesign and locate information within an organization, and it can be descriptive (involving a map of theinformation environment at present) or deterministic (offering a model of the environment at some futuretime).(Rosenfeld, Morville, 1998) defines information architecture as:'Information Architecture' is the metho<strong>do</strong>logy of 'draw' that applies to any 'information environment', thisbeing understood as a space located in a 'context', comprising 'contents' in flow, which serves to a communitof ‘ users'.According to (McGee; Prusak, 1994) the goal of an Information Architecture is to create a comprehensivemap of organizational data and then build systems based on this map. The model of information architectureof authors also provides:• Identify needs and requirements of information: on the planning of what should be <strong>do</strong>ne, must beobtained sources of information relevant to the institution;• Sorting, storage, processing and presenting information: when the information should be organizedand then displayed by the institution;• Develop products and information services: the choices of resources to facilitate the location andaccess information Users and other stakeholders in the success of AI, as professionals and experts of theinstitution, can contribute to the development of products;• Distributing and disseminating information: a process that identifies the needs of the users to meetthem even before they are expressed, through upgrades, additional services such as the use of search engines,etc.3. THE PROBLEMSo how is it possible to talk about the use of IT resources aligned to strategic planning without an appropriateInformation Architecture? How to make effective use of IT resources without thinking first in an InformationArchitecture?A preliminary analysis of the main models of IT governance and related international standards (eg:COBIT, ITIL, ISO20000, ISO27001, ISO27002) demonstrate that they were not constructed in compliancewith the concepts of Information Architecture mentioned previously.So what is the positioning of the information architecture in models of IT governance and its relatedinternational standards? How the information architecture can help to ensure that they facilitate theorganization of information for companies achieve their strategic goals?417
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADIS4. THE PROPOSALThis research pretends to study the IT governance models and related international standards and proposeadjustments in making possible to them to include the concepts of Information Architecture.To achieve this goal, we intend to perform a review of the Information Architecture literature trying totheir identify possible contributions to IT governance, study models of IT governance and relatedinternational standards in order to identify opportunities for improvement.The expected result for this research is an elaboration of a proposed adjustment in the models of ITgovernance and related international standards by inserting the contributions of Information Architecture.REFERENCESDavenport, T. H.; Prusack, L. Ecologia da informação. São Paulo: Futura, 1998.Fernandes, A.; Abreu, V. Implantan<strong>do</strong> a governança de TI. Da estratégia à gestão <strong>do</strong>s processos e serviços. Rio deJaneiro: Brasport, 2008.Hage<strong>do</strong>rn, K. The Information Architecture Glossary. USA, Março 2000. Disponível em:. Acesso em: 05 ago 2010.Mcgee, James; Prusak, Laurence. Gerenciamento Estratégico da Informação. Rio de Janeiro, Campus, 1994.Rosenfeld, L.; Morville, P. Information Architecture for the World Wide Web. USA: O'Reilly, 1998.Wurman, R. S. Ansiedade da Informação. São Paulo: Cultura Editores Associa<strong>do</strong>s, 1991.418
DoctoralConsortium
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010TOWARDS A DOMAIN-EXPERT CENTERED ONTOLOGYENGINEERING METHODOLOGY IN THE CONTEXT OFPUBLIC ADMINISTRATIONBernd Stadlhofer and Peter SalhoferFH JOANNEUM, University of Applied Sciences, Dept. of Information ManagementAlte Poststrasse 149, 8020 Graz, AustriaABSTRACTThis paper presents a proposal for a <strong>do</strong>ctoral thesis regarding the development of an ontology engineering metho<strong>do</strong>logyespecially dedicated for <strong>do</strong>main-experts in public administration. Numerous existing initiatives already show theenormous potential of Semantic Web technologies concerning transparency and citizen orientation of publicadministration agencies. In order to reach the next step of matureness of such semantically enriched E-Governmentapplications there arises the need for a well-defined ontology engineering process, which should be tackled by this thesis.Although there already exist a number of ontology engineering metho<strong>do</strong>logies in general the decentralized nature of thepublic sector in Europe with its diversity in local laws and regulations is hardly any considered. Emphasizinginvestigations towards human-centered computing and natural language processing should empower <strong>do</strong>main-experts toautonomously develop most parts of relevant ontologies. The resulting metho<strong>do</strong>logy will be a crucial success factortowards the goal of the deployment of ontology-driven E-Government applications on a large-scale.KEYWORDSE-Government, Ontology Engineering Metho<strong>do</strong>logy, Domain modeling, Human-centered computing1. MOTIVATIONApplying emerging semantic technologies in E-Government has been deeply investigated in numerousnational and transnational initiatives, lately (see section 2.2). These initiatives mostly investigate theestablishment of semantic interoperability between several stakeholders in public administration processes aswell as the deployment of public administration services as so called semantic web services. Thereby, theauthors of [2] observe the problem that the results from earlier projects described in section 2.2 are rarelyconsidered in latter ones even when carried out within the same program framework. Thus, a consolidatedview of semantic interoperability in E-Government is still missing and desirable in order to achieve the goalof semantic interoperability on a large scale.Latest semantic interoperability efforts mainly focus on modeling the meta-model for publicadministration (e.g. WSMO-PA service model by [23]), thus modeling an object model for serviceprovisioning in public administration – or modeling the top-level ontology for public administration.Certainly, this is one of the very first and most important aspects in order to reach the goal of semanticinteroperability. However, what has not been intensively investigated so far is the fact, that behind these toplevelontologies for public administration there is a second crucial type of ontologies namely <strong>do</strong>mainontologies. Such ontologies specify the vocabulary and knowledge basis of the specific <strong>do</strong>mains in publicadministration. E.g. public administration service providers offer procedures and services for the building<strong>do</strong>main, trade or industry <strong>do</strong>main, childcare, etc. Besides the vocabulary – the structural knowledge of<strong>do</strong>mains – also procedural knowledge is from major interest when building a knowledge basis for a specificcontext. There are some promising approaches available for modeling semantically enriched businessprocesses [24] [25] [26]. Whereas such efforts already found their way into aspects of cross border serviceprovisioning and collaboration, the back-office processes in public agencies are rarely considered in existingresearch approaches.421
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISThe field that covers the definition and building process of ontologies in general is described by the termontology engineering. In the context of ontology engineering numerous metho<strong>do</strong>logies and processes that actas modeling guidelines for ontology development have been described (see section 2.1). However, as most ofthe E-Government initiatives that cover the utilization of semantic technologies are rather in an early stage ofintegration into a productive environment and not focused on deployment of ontologies and semanticallyenriched E-Government applications on a large scale, relevant <strong>do</strong>main ontologies tend to be built on an adhoc basis rather than by following a well-defined engineering process.Even if there are quite a lot of metho<strong>do</strong>logies for the ontology engineering process available it isinteresting to observe, that most of these metho<strong>do</strong>logies emerged before the announcement of Tim BernersLee's famous vision of the Semantic Web [17]. Consequently, most of these metho<strong>do</strong>logies aren't preparedfor the decentralized nature of current information and knowledge management systems. Only DILIGENT[4] and HCOME [19] face this paradigm shift to decentralized systems. The nature of the publicadministration sector with its diversity in local laws and regulations isn't tackled by any of thesemetho<strong>do</strong>logies, anyway. Legislation and law is a crucial part in ontology engineering for publicadministration, though.Most of the metho<strong>do</strong>logies described in 2.1 identify the <strong>do</strong>main expert and ontology engineer as twoessential roles in the process of ontology engineering. The ontology engineer, mostly with softwareengineering background, thereby makes (implicitly or explicitly) use of knowledge elicitation methods inorder to acquire expert knowledge for a specific <strong>do</strong>main from the <strong>do</strong>main expert. This should enable theontology engineer to model a specific <strong>do</strong>main. In many cases the process of knowledge elicitation is quitecomplex. As a consequence it is inevitable that some knowledge is lost or some information is misinterpretedduring this process. Therefore, an ontology engineering metho<strong>do</strong>logy should empower the <strong>do</strong>main-experthimself/herself to model a specific <strong>do</strong>main. Most of the existing metho<strong>do</strong>logies, except in parts byDILIGENT [4] and HCOME [19], <strong>do</strong>n't include any attempts towards this goal. Besides the aspect ofknowledge-loss in the knowledge elicitation process also cost saving is an argument because classicalontology engineers are mostly not employed in the public agencies but in external software or knowledgeengineering companies. Thus, a lot of research is required in this field, which should also be addressed bythis thesis.As [18] points out, in ontology engineering for the public administration sector, legislation andenforcement of law on national, regional or local levels need to be incorporated and a variety of different“competent authorities” has to be involved. In many cases constraints probably might have to be weaklyencoded, accompanied by textual explanations and links to further information and supporting bodies. This isnecessary to reflect the special demands of a legal system and to safeguard legal certainty. Another aspecttackled by [18] is that, since law is complex, involved authorities are numerous and as expert knowledge isusually dispersed over the involved authorities, it is simply not possible to develop and maintain all relevantinformation at one central point.As pointed out in [21] the last few years have seen a growing body of research and practice in the field ofartificial intelligence and law for what concerns the construction of legal ontologies and their application tothe law <strong>do</strong>main. However, existing ontologies vary significantly, concerning their underlying structure an<strong>do</strong>rganization, the way they are constructed and how they are exploited in different applications [20]. Onemajor problem thereby is that different authors mean different things by the term ontology itself. As aconsequence the ontologies vary significantly in the way they are represented. These differences aresignificant in that they make it hard to compare different ontologies – “like the proverbial comparison ofapples and pears” [20]. Another aspect from [20] is that ontological choices are strongly influenced by thepurpose of the ontology. That is, the same knowledge will be structured or formalized differently dependingon how it will be used by the reasoner in reaching the desired conclusions in a specific context. This indicatesthat reusability is a good idea, but it can never be accomplished completely according to [20].Generally speaking, the two research disciplines “AI and law” and E-Government are closely related toeach other. What can be observed, though, is the fact that those two disciplines very rarely use results fromthe other discipline. Using results of AI and law in generating intelligent E-Government applications and viceversa brings a lot of potential and should be intensively promoted.Concluding to this section, the desire and need for an ontology engineering metho<strong>do</strong>logy in the context ofpublic administration, as proposed with this thesis, is obvious. The planned research focus and researchquestions are further explained in section 3.422
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 20102. RELATED RESEARCH2.1 Ontology EngineeringAs described in [1] and [5] a series of approaches have been reported for developing ontologies so far. Here anumber of these approaches are listed chronologically.Table 1. Ontology engineering metho<strong>do</strong>logiesYear, Metho<strong>do</strong>logyLiterature1990, Cyc [6]1995, TOVE [7],[8],[9]1996, KACTUS [10],[11]1996, METHONTOLOGY [12],[13],[14]1997, SENSUS [15]2001, On-To-Knowledge [16]2005, DILIGENT [4]2005, HCOME [19]2.2 Semantic Interoperability in e-governmentAs described in [2] a number of generic ontologies for public administration have been developed in majorsemantic interoperability-related projects, particularly among the European Commission's IST projects. E.g.,within the SemanticGov project (http://www.semantic-gov.org) a reference model of the E-Government<strong>do</strong>main, called Governance Enterprise Architecture (GEA), including an ontology for E-Governmentservices, was developed. An ontology for the conceptualization of E-Government services was alsodeveloped within the SmartGov project (http://smartgov.e-gov.gr). Similar efforts were made within theAccess-eGov project (http://www.accessegov.org). Moreover, the OntoGov project (www.ontogov.com)delivers a set of ontologies for modeling E-Government services, including a Legal ontology to describe legal<strong>do</strong>cuments, a Service ontology to describe public services, a Lifecycle ontology to describe informationflows and decision-making processes in public administration as well as a Web Service orchestrationontology.A rather pragmatic approach to model ontologies in the E-Government <strong>do</strong>main so that they can be easilyused to assist a citizen in formally expressing a goal that can in turn be used for public service discovery isdescribed in [3].2.3 Legal OntologiesA detailed discussion of related research in this field can be found in [20] and [22].423
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADIS3. RESEARCH AIM3.1 e-Government Meta-ModelIn order to minimize the diversity of relevant ontologies as discussed in section 1 and of course in order to beable to develop an ontology engineering metho<strong>do</strong>logy for public administration a basic meta-model has to beimplemented first. Related research in this field (see section 2.2) should be intensively used and analyzed.Existing work is mainly focused on the description of object models for service provisioning in publicadministration. Besides, further investigations towards finding abstract meta-concepts for particular <strong>do</strong>mainsas well as investigations towards finding a meta-model for the procedural knowledge of public agencies'back-office activities will be conducted within this <strong>do</strong>ctoral thesis.On the one hand, such a meta-model is a crucial basis to achieve semantically enriched E-Governmentapplications ready to use in a productive environment. On the other hand, results of this research focusshould be a step forward to reach a consolidated view of semantic interoperability in E-Government, stronglyrequested by [2].3.2 Human-centered Ontology EngineeringAs shortly mentioned in section 1 the process of ontology engineering today is a quite complex and softwaretechnologyoriented process. In order to formulate an ontology including more or less complex axioms andinference-rules it is nearly inevitable having some mathematics or software engineering background. Aim ofthis research focus is to investigate possibilities to empower the <strong>do</strong>main-expert himself/herself toautonomously develop most parts of a relevant <strong>do</strong>main-ontology. For this purpose tools and interfaces haveto be provided in order to simplify this complex task of ontology engineering. The HCOME metho<strong>do</strong>logy[19] already contributes a lot in this direction. There also exist other valuable approaches, especially in thefield of natural language processing (e.g. Oracle Policy Automation –http://www.oracle.com/us/industries/public-sector/058991.html). A comparison of existing work as well asfurther investigations in the field of human-centered computing in conjunction with ontology engineering inpublic administration should be part of this research focus.3.3 Ontology Engineering Metho<strong>do</strong>logy in the Context of PublicAdministrationAs already pointed out in section 1 most of today’s E-Government initiatives that cover the utilization ofsemantic technologies are rather in an early stage of integration into a productive environment and notfocused on deployment of ontologies and semantically enriched E-Government applications on a large scale.As a consequence, relevant <strong>do</strong>main ontologies tend to be built on an ad hoc basis rather than by following awell-defined engineering process. Based on the findings of 3.1 and 3.2, the research focus of this part of thethesis will be the definition of an ontology engineering metho<strong>do</strong>logy, especially designated for publicadministration. Ontology engineering for public administration and law might be a rather complex task (seeaspects of [18], summarized in section 1). One hypothesis thereby is obvious: Existing ontology engineeringmetho<strong>do</strong>logies <strong>do</strong>n't exactly fulfill the special requirements that might arise for the public administrationsector. Promising approaches from existing metho<strong>do</strong>logies should be strongly considered and evolved,though. Finally, a tool-suite should be developed to support ontology modeling based on the resultingmetho<strong>do</strong>logy. The tool-suite should especially be designed for non-software experts, based on the results of3.2.4. SCIENTIFIC APPROACHThe outcomes of initiatives described in section 2.2 underpin the enormous potential of semantic webtechnologies for the public administration sector and lead to the hypothesis that the importance of semanticsystems in public administration is rising. The main objective of this thesis is to develop a metho<strong>do</strong>logy424
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010including a tool-suite especially dedicated to the public administration sector to make the complex task ofontology engineering easier and achievable by <strong>do</strong>main experts with no or hardly any software engineering ormathematics background. One hypothesis behind this main objective is that the resulting quality ofontologies directly developed by <strong>do</strong>main experts is higher than the quality of ontologies developed by aclassical ontology engineer as no knowledge is lost or misinterpreted during the knowledge elicitationprocess. A second hypothesis is that the quality of ontologies that were developed following a well definedengineering process is significantly higher than by developing ontologies on an ad hoc basis. How to measurethe quality of an ontology is an open question, though and should also be investigated within this thesis.By means of a feasibility study it will be verified if the level of detail concerning rule/axiom definition aswell as taxonomy definition that can be reached by using the developed tool-suite is sufficient to be directlyoperational by semantic systems.Subsequently, it will be investigated within a pilot case if the developed metho<strong>do</strong>logy is appropriate for<strong>do</strong>main experts with no software engineering/mathematics background.Finally, a comparative exploratory case study will be conducted to analyze the influence of the overallmetho<strong>do</strong>logy in development speed, quality, interoperability and operationality.REFERENCES[1] Corcho O., Fernandez-Lopez M., Gomez-Perez A. Metho<strong>do</strong>logies, tools, and languages for building ontologies.Where is their meeting point? in: Data and Knowledge Engineering, pp. 41-64, 2002.[2] Ojo A., Janowski T., Estevez E. Semantic Interoperability Architecture for Electronic Government, in: Proceedings ofthe 10 th International Digital Government Research Conference, pp. 63-72, 2009.[3] Salhofer P., Stadlhofer B., Ontology Modeling for Goal Driven E-Government, in: Proceedings of the 42nd HawaiiInternational Conference on System Sciences, 5-8 January 2009, Big Island Hawaii, USA, IEEE, pp. 1-9, 2009.[4] Vrandecic D., Pinto S., Tempich C. and Sure Y. The DILIGENT knowledge processes, in: Journal of KnowledgeManagement, Vol. 9 No. 5, pp. 85-96, 2005.[5] Fernandez-Lopez M., Overview of Metho<strong>do</strong>logies for Building Ontologies, in: IJCAI99 Workshop on Ontologies andProblem-Solving Methods: Lessons Learned and Future Trends, Stockholm 1999.[6] Lenat D.B., Guha R.V., Building Large Knowledge-Based Systems: Representation and Inference in the Cyc Project,Addison-Wesley, Boston, 1990.[7] Uschold M., King M., Towards a Metho<strong>do</strong>logy for Building Ontologies, in: IJCAI95 Workshop on Basic OntologicalIssues in Knowledge Sharing, Montreal, 1995.[8] Grüninger M., Fox M.S., Metho<strong>do</strong>logy for the design and evaluation of ontologies, in: Workshop on BasicOntological Issues in Knowledge Sharing, Montreal, 1995[9] Uschold M., Grüninger M., Ontologies: Principles methods and applications, in: The Knowledge Engineering Review11 (2), pp 93-155, 1996.[10] Bernaras A., Laresgoiti I., Corera J., Building and reusing ontologies for electrical network applications, in: Proc.European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI 96), Budapest, Hungary, pp. 298-302, 1996.[11] Schreiber A., Wielinga B., Jansweijer W., The KACTUS view on the 'O' word. Technical Report, ESPRIT Project8145 KACTUS, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 1995.[12] Gomez-Perez A., Fernandez-Lopez M., deVicente A., Towards a Method to Conceptualize Domain Ontolologies, in:ECAI 96 Workshop on Ontological Engineering, Budapest, pp. 41-51, 1996.[13] Fernandez-Lopez M., Gomez-Perez A., Juristo N., METHONTOLOGY: From Ontological Art Towards OntologicalEngineering, AAAI Symposium on Ontological Engineering, Stanford, 1997.[14] Gomez-Perez A., Knowledge sharing and reuse, in: J. Liebowitz (Ed.), Handbook of Expert Systems, CRC, NewYork, Chapter 10, 1998.[15] Swartout B., Ramesh P., Knight K., Russ T., Toward Distributed Use of Large-Scale Ontologies, AAAI Symposiumon Ontological Engineering, Stanford, 1997[16] Staab S., Schnurr H.P., Studer R., Sure Y., Knowledge processes and ontologies, IEEE Intelligent Systems 16 (1),pp. 26-34, 2001.[17] Berners-Lee T., Hendler J., Lassila O., The semantic web, in: Scientific American, Vol 2001 No. 5, Web resource:http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-semantic-web, 2001, viewed on: 2010-05-27.[18] Liebwald D., Knowledge Representation and Modelling Legal Norms: The EU Services Directive, in: Proceedingsof the Third Workshop on Legal Ontologies and Artificial Intelligence Techniques, Barcelona, Spain, 2009.425
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADIS[19] Kotis K, Vouros A., Human-centered ontology engineering: The HCOME metho<strong>do</strong>logy, in: Knowledge andInformation Systems, 10(1), pp. 109-131, 2006.[20] Valente A., Types and Roles of Legal Ontologies, in Law and the Semantic Web, LNCS, Volume 3369/2005,Springer Berlin / Heidelberg, 2005, pp. 65-76[21] Venturi, G., Lenci, A., Montemagni, S., Vecchi, E. M., Agnoloni, T., Sagri, M. T., Towards a FrameNet resourcefor the legal <strong>do</strong>main, in Processing of legal texts, 2009.[22] Schweighofer, E., Learning and Verification of Legal Ontologies by Means of Conceptual Analysis, in: Proceedingsof the Third Workshop on Legal Ontologies and Artificial Intelligence Techniques, Barcelona, Spain, 2009, pp. 87-92.[23] Wang, X., Vitvar, V., Peristeras, V., Mocan, A., Gou<strong>do</strong>s, S., Tarabanis, K., WSMO-PA: Formal Specification ofPublic Administration Service Model on Semantic Web Service Ontology, in: Proceedings of the 40 th HawaiiInternational Conference on System Sciences, 2007, pp.96a[24] Yan, Z., Cimpian, E., Zaremba, M., Mazzara, M.: BPMO: Semantic Business Process Modeling and WSMOExtension. The IEEE International Conference on Web Services 2007 (ICWS 2007), Salt Lake City, Utah, USA, July,2007.[25] Nitzsche, J., Wutke, D., van Lessen, T., An Ontology for Executable Business Processes. Workshop on SemanticBusiness Process and Product Lifecycle Management (SBPM 2007), in conjunction with ESWC 2007. Innsbruck,Austria, June 7, 2007.[26] Nitzsche, J., van Lessen, T Karastoyanova, D., Leymann, F.: BPEL for Semantic Web Services. In: Proceedings ofthe 3rd International Workshop on Agents and Web Services in Distributed Environments (AWeSome'07), November2007.426
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010WebFDM: A WEB APPLICATION FLEXIBLEDEVELOPMENT METHODOLOGYAdelaide BianchiniComputer Science and Information Technology Department, Universidad Simón BolívarValle de Sartenejas, Caracas 1080. Venezuela. abianc@usb.veABSTRACTOver the past decade several metho<strong>do</strong>logies have been proposed to improve the quality of Web application development.There are proposals that provide techniques and mechanisms to specify the product model, but leave apart some aspectsabout the process development model for shaping the development and the generation of products based on differentsituations. Besides, some industry and academic methods are not flexible enough to react according to the differentsituations and conditions of the projects to be. These conditions may include application type and complexity, models tobe created, development team characteristics, technological resources and other requirements. This paper presentsWebFDM, a flexible method for the development of web applications in conjunction with a Case Tool - COHESION. Thisflexible method will be aligned to Situational Method Engineering principles and Web Engineering foundations. As aresult of this research, we will obtain a metho<strong>do</strong>logy able to tailor for project conditions and an instance of the COHESIONCase Tool, configured according to the metho<strong>do</strong>logy.KEYWORDSWeb application development, Web Engineering, Situational Method Engineering.1. INTRODUCTIONThe complexity of Web applications has grown significantly: from static systems (Web sites) oriented toinformation content dissemination, to dynamic systems like online transactions, e-banking, e-commerceapplications, etc. Over the past decade several metho<strong>do</strong>logies have been proposed to improve the quality ofWeb application development, such as OOHDM (Schwabe and Rossi, 1995), OOWS (Pastor et al., 2003),WebML (Ceri et al., 2000) and UWE (Koch and Kraus, 2002). In fact, considerable attention has been givento Web Engineering, a discipline that provides a systematic and disciplined approach for developing,<strong>do</strong>cumenting and maintaining Web applications.However there are methods that can be considered generic, thus they are used in any kind of Webapplication, different <strong>do</strong>mains and in diverse situations. In practice, a rigid or generic method <strong>do</strong>es not fitwell for every Web Application <strong>do</strong>main (Vlaanderen et al., 2008). There is a common agreement about thesteps or phases that methods in Web Engineering follow, because all of them establish a typical process: fromrequirements elicitation to implementation, and for each phase they propose the use of different techniquesand procedures. There is, also, an agreement about the products generated and the process to be followed, butthey prescribe complex tasks rather than broad guidelines (Selmi et al., 2008). For example, a veryexhaustive requirement elicitation phase may be unnecessary in small-size Web applications, or with lowlevel of complexity.Some proposals leave apart aspects about the process development model for shaping the developmentand the generation of products based on different situations. A situation is the combination of circumstancesat a given moment, possibly in a given organization. A situation affects the way of working and the producttypes to be delivered, and can be a combination of different <strong>do</strong>main, specific type of web application,complexity level of the application, capacities of the working team, times and costs related to thedevelopment, and other characteristics. In each new development, the designers have to adapt or extend, insome way, the method to support the new Web project (Vlaanderen et al., 2008).427
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISThe discipline to build project-specific method based on a situation is called Situational MethodEngineering. It proposes strategies to select methods, called method fragments (from a repository), to create anew one based on characteristics of the development circumstances (Brinkkemper, 1996).Based on the above observations, there is an interest in the following research issues: Is it possible to set aweb application development metho<strong>do</strong>logy based on different situations, using the principles of SituationalMethod Engineering and the foundations of Web Engineering? Which indicators or attributes are adequateenough to characterize a web application development?The idea behind this proposal is that Web applications development needs flexible approaches that allowdevelopers to configure the process and to generate the product models, according to a set of attributes aboutthe project characteristics and situation. Also the flexible approach has to guide the developers in the creationof models and artifacts, needed to specify the Web application to be implemented.To achieve the flexible approach we are designing and developing WEBFDM (Bianchini et al., 2005), ametho<strong>do</strong>logy for the development of Web applications and a CASE tool, we call COHESION (Bianchini et al.,2007), which brings full support in the use of the metho<strong>do</strong>logy.This paper is organized as follows: related works are presented in section 3. The proposal is described insection 3. Finally, conclusions are presented in section 4.2. RELATED WORKSBased on the literature review, few proposals considered the possibilities of adaptation based on adevelopment situation. In (Engels et al., 2006) it is proposed a meta-process that uses and observes somecharacteristics about the project to be developed, and promotes the transition from an agile method to adisciplined one. In (Kraiem et al., 2010) it is proposed the construction of new methods based on existingfragment methods, based on Situational Method Engineering, and also provides three types of guidance fordevelopers: (i) the selection of the most appropriate design process-model; (ii) the selection of the mostappropriate method fragments, and (iii) the application of selected method fragments. In (Vlaanderen et al.,2008), the OOWS method metamodel is defined with the purpose of applying Situational MethodEngineering, in order to improve the development of CMS (Content Management System), because OOWSmethod “lacks expressiveness to define Web Applications in some <strong>do</strong>mains as CMS” (Vlaanderen et al.,2008). In (Weerd et al., 2006), the authors state that web application development methods <strong>do</strong> not cover thespecific needs of a method for web content management implementations and present WEM (WebEngineering Method) as an assembly-based Situational Method Engineering approach applied to develop anew design method for the <strong>do</strong>main of CMS. In (Luinenburg et al., 2008) is proposed the Method AssociationApproach, which selects and constructs methods from five model-driven Web modeling approaches to fit theproject <strong>do</strong>main. A research about identifying indicators of characteristics of Web applications has beenproposed by (Selmi et al., 2005). In a study about practical application of Web Engineering, conducted by(Escalona et al., 2007), there is an interesting proposal to categorize the complexity of Web applicationsthrough requirements elicitation.3. PROPOSAL DESCRIPTIONAll mature methods in Web Engineering provide techniques and mechanisms to specify the product model,including content, presentation (interface and interaction) and hypertext, but leave apart some aspects aboutprocess and product development models for shaping the development process according to differentsituations. A metho<strong>do</strong>logy can be view as a collection of methods, or method fragments, used to address theproblem of Web application design and implementation, at different levels of abstraction.The existing methods in Web Engineering follow the well-known framework proposed by (Fraternali,1999) and (Retschitzegger and Schwinger, 2000) to modeling web applications at different abstraction levelsand also considers the customization in all dimensions. In the other hand, considering the principles ofSituational Method Engineering, we can view the framework as a collection of methods needed toaccomplish Web applications development. This interpretation is shown in Fig. 1.428
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010Figure 1. Modeling dimensions for web application. adapted from (Retschitzegger and Schwinger, 2000).The fundamental aspect related to this proposal is WEBFDM, -Web application Flexible DevelopmentMetho<strong>do</strong>logy- based on MVC architectural pattern. The method is supported by a CASE Tool –COHESIÓN.At this moment, both metho<strong>do</strong>logy and CASE Tool are used to design and implement Web applications atUniversidad Simón Bolívar (Caracas). COHESIÓN is a Web application developed with WebFDM andCOHESIÓN itself. It actually host around 300 designs including student projects, and complete Webapplications.The generic development process as proposed in WebFDM is shown in Fig. 2, and consists of thefollowing phases:• Web Project Characterization, which includes the evaluation of project conditions and thedevelopment situation.• Requirements Elicitation and Specification;• Conceptual Design, which includes Data Design, Functional Design (to accomplish the transactionrequirements), Navigation Design, Interface Design and Information Architecture;• Implementation;• Testing and Validation;• Evolution and Maintenance Plan Design.Figure 2. The generic development process in WebFDMThe life-cycle model specifies the sequencing of processes and products involved in the development ofan application. WebFDM follows the iterative and incremental process model, so in each increment thedesigner builds or enriches the products created; at each iteration the current design version is tested and thenit is possible to modify or extend the achieved product.WEBFDM was conceived as an agile metho<strong>do</strong>logy, and while using it and COHESIÓN, we noted the needto incorporate extensions in order to provide guidance to designers. Based on the fact that any development429
ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISproject involves different characteristics and conditions, we decide to include in WebFDM (and inCOHESIÓN) mechanisms in order to make the metho<strong>do</strong>logy flexible. This implies that WebFDM, in anydifferent development, will be tailored for project conditions or characteristics, and an instance of theCOHESIÓN CASE Tool will be set for that development.COHESIÓN follows the Model-Driven Development approach: it uses models and transformations ofmodels in different phases of the development. The core component is the Model Compiler Engine which is amodel transformer developed with the idea that the target can be defined (at least implicitly) using ametamodel. At this moment, COHESIÓN generates code that runs with the Jakarta Struts and Struts2(implemented in Java), well known frameworks that implement MVC Model 2. It can also generate code forthe Django framework (in Phyton) and Portlets.The COHESIÓN CASE Tool is concurrent, different users can access and modify the same design project.Supporting WebFDM, the COHESIÓN CASE Tool is a collection of method fragments that allows to recordrequirements, define a representation model and actors, list use cases, specify navigation and personalizeactions according to actors (for customization), modeling the interaction between user and system, CRUDmodeling, among other features. Therefore, WebFDM is aligned to the framework showed in Fig.1.The current status of the COHESION CASE Tool that supports the use of WebFDM, including thosemethod fragments under development, is shown in Fig. 3. A complete explanation of the methods developedand implemented in COHESIÓN is available in (Suárez, Bianchini and Pérez, 2010).Figure 3. Components of COHESIÓN CASE Tool supporting WebFDMA special component of COHESIÓN is the Web Development Characterization Engine (WDCE) that canguide the developer in the use of COHESIÓN for a given project. It is based on diverse indicators thatcharacterize the final product, and then the developers will know what models have to be created and thedevelopment process to be followed. Currently we have identified a preliminary set of attributes tocharacterize Web application and project situation. Once the Web application, to be developed, is beingcharacterized through the WDCE, then the metho<strong>do</strong>logy using COHESION will guide the designer in theselection of models and process model needed to reach the application deployment.4. CONCLUSIONSThe aim of this <strong>do</strong>ctoral proposal is twofold: i) A full definition of WebFDM as a methods collection thatfollows the framework proposed by (Fraternali, 1999) and (Retschitzegger and Schwinger, 2000), in order toachieve a metho<strong>do</strong>logy that covers all aspects needed for Web application development based on thefoundations of Web Engineering and the principles of Situational Method Engineering; ii) The identificationof the set of attributes and indicators useful to characterize a Web application development (situation); thepreliminary set of attributes includes characteristics of the final application (type and complexity), the work430
IADIS International Conference <strong>WWW</strong>/<strong>Internet</strong> 2010environment, available resources, scale and size of the project, in other words the specific situation of thedevelopment.The expected contribution of this work is that WebFDM metho<strong>do</strong>logy and COHESIÓN will incorporate thefeatures and configuration mechanisms necessary to make the metho<strong>do</strong>logy a flexible, model-drivendevelopment of Web applications with the CASE Tool support, able to shape the development process andthe generation of models and products based on proper situation.REFERENCESBianchini, A., Ortega, M. and Suárez, A. 2005.Una Meto<strong>do</strong>logía de Diseño de Aplicaciones Web bajo el Patrón MVC.Jornadas Chilenas de Computación - 2005. Proceedings XIII Encuentro Chileno de Computación 2005. Valdivia,Chile, November.Bianchini, A., Blanch, R., Ortega, M. and Suárez, A. 2007. Diseño de una herramienta para el desarrollo de aplicacionesWeb basadas en Struts. Proceedings CIAWI IADIS Iberoamericana. Vila Real, Portugal, 2007.Brinkkemper S. 1996. Method engineering: engineering of information systems development methods and tools.Information & <strong>Software</strong> Technology, 38(4), 275-280.Ceri, S. et al. 2000. Web modeling language (WebML): a modeling language for designing web sites. <strong>WWW</strong>9/ComputerNetworks, 33, (1–6), pp. 137–157.Engels, G., Lohmann, M., and Wagner, A. 2006. The Web Application Development Process. In Kappel G., Pröll B.,Reich S., Retschitzegger W. (Editors): Web Engineering - The Discipline of Systematic Development of WebApplications, pp. 197-218. John Wiley and Sons Ltd.Escalona M. J. et al. 2007. Practical Experiences in Web Engineering. Advances in Information Systems Development,pp. 421-433.Fraternali, P. 1999. Tools and Approaches for Developing Data-Intensive Web Applications: A Survey. ACM ComputingSurveys, 31 (3), September, pp. 227-263.Koch, N. and Kraus, A. 2002. The Expressive Power of UML-based Web Engineering. Proceedings of 2nd InternationalWorskhop on Web-oriented <strong>Software</strong> Technology (IWWOST 02).Kraiem, N., et al. 2010. A Situational Approach for Web Applications Design. IJCSI International Journal of ComputerScience Issues. Vol. 7, Issue 3, No 1, May 2010, pp. 37-51.Pastor, O., Fons, J. and Pelechano, V. 2003. OOWS: A method to develop web applications from web-orientedconceptual models. Proceedings of 3rd international workshop on web oriented software technology. Ovie<strong>do</strong>: LuisOlsina, Oscar Pastor, Gustavo Rossi, Daniel Schwabe Editors.Retschitzegger, W. and Schwinger, W. 2000. Towards Modeling of DataWeb Applications: A Requirement’sPerspective. Proceedings of the Americas Conference on Information Systems (AMCIS 2000), Long Beach, CA.August.Selmi, S., Kraiem, N. and Ben Ghezala, H. 2005. Toward a comprehension view of Web Engineering. Proceedings ofInternational Conference in Web Engineering ICWE 2005, LNCS 3579. Springer-Verlag, Berlin Heidelberg, pp. 19-29. Sidney, AustraliaSelmi, S., Kraiem, N. and Ben Ghezala, H. 2008. Guidance in Web Applications Design. Proceedings of Model DrivenInformation Systems Engineering: Enterprise, User and System Models MoDISE-EUS 2008, pp. 114-125.Montpellier, France.Schwabe, D. and Rossi, G. 1995.The Object Oriented Hypermedia Design Model. Communications of the ACM, Vol. 38,#8, pp 45-46, August.Suárez, A., Bianchini, A. and Pérez, C.A. 2010. COHESIÓN: A Model-Driven Development Tool for Web Applications.Internal Report. Computer Science and Information Technology Department. Universidad Simón Bolívar. Caracas.September.Vlaanderen, K., Valverde, F. and Pastor, O. 2008. Improvement of a Web Engineering Method Applying SituationalMethod Engineering. Proceeding International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems, ICEIS 2008, pp. 147-154.Weerd I. van de et al., 2006. A situational implementation method for web-based content management systemapplications:Method Engineering and Validation in Practice. <strong>Software</strong> Process: Improvement and Practice 11(5), pp.521-538.431
AUTHOR INDEXAhmed, R. ......................................................355Aldehim, G. ...................................................168Alshamari, M..................................................168Alves, A. ........................................................413Anacleto, J........................................................35Andrade, L. ......................................................27Andreolini, M. ...............................................201Angelis, F. .....................................................382Antunes, D. ............................................267, 369Aşkar, P. .........................................................262Astolfi, G. ........................................................35Atwood, J. .......................................................65Banhesse, E. ..................................................308Baranauskas, M. ......................................143,183Barbosa, J. ........................................................19Barhoush, M. ...................................................65Barla, M..........................................................227Barros, M........................................................328Berndt, G. ......................................................319Bezerra, J. ......................................................127Bezerra, V. .....................................................287Bianchini, A. ..................................................427Bieliková, M...................................................227Binder, M. .....................................................333Bittencourt, I. .................................................120Blomme, D. ...................................................323Boehm-Peters, A. ...........................................406Bona, L. .........................................................350Braun, I. .........................................................282Bueno, J..................................................350, 361Camilleri, V............................................377, 409Capovilla, F. ...................................................350Casolari, S. .....................................................201Castilho, M.....................................................350Castro, P. ........................................................413Cetin , Y. .........................................................81Chmieliauskas, A ...........................................339Cini, L.............................................................377Côgo, F. .........................................................143Coria, S...........................................................373Costa, A. ........................................................328Costa, E. .........................................................120Cunha, D. .......................................................135Darbyshire, P.................................................. 192Desruelle, H. ................................................. 323Direne, A........................................................ 350Doria, P. ........................................................ 211Doria, S. ........................................................ 219Dorn, M. ........................................................ 333Dossena, C. ................................................... 293Duarte, J. ....................................................... 350Duque, C. ...................................................... 416Eriksson, N....................................................... 11Ermalai, I. ...................................................... 387Fantinato, M. ..................................................... 3Feldmann, M. ................................................ 319Feng, W. ........................................................ 277Fernandes, S. ................................................. 267Ferreira, R. .................................................... 120Figueire<strong>do</strong>, J................................................... 135Francesconi, A. ............................................. 293Franco, L.......................................................... 19Freitas, D. ........................................................ 35Freitas, F. ...................................................... 120Gagliardi, R. .................................................. 382García, L. ............................... 159, 267, 350, 361Garofalakis, J. .................................................. 73Gerhold, L. .................................................... 333Gielen, F......................................................... 323Gimenes, I. ......................................................... 3Gkotsis, G. ..................................................... 298Gomes, R........................................................ 328Görlitz, R. ........................................................ 49Goto, H............................................................. 42Guimarães, C. ........................................ 267, 369Haralampopoulos, D. ..................................... 345Heinrich, M. .................................................. 406Hiramatsu, M. ................................................ 403Hirata, C. ....................................................... 127Holanda, O. ................................................... 120Hori, Y. ......................................................... 257Hübsch, G. .................................................... 175Iacob, C. ........................................................ 112Ilgaz, H. ......................................................... 262Imai, Y. ......................................................... 257Ishikawa, H. ................................................... 151
Jang, C. ..........................................................244Kappler, D. ....................................................192Karacapilidis, N. ............................................298Karetsos, S. ....................................................345Kasmire, J. .....................................................339Kawamura, T. ................................................101Kümpel, A. ....................................................282Li, J.................................................................277Liebing, C.......................................................175Lima, R...........................................................120Lima, T...........................................................393Lyra, M...........................................................416M. Jr., A. ........................................................267Macha<strong>do</strong>, D. ...................................................350Maekawa, Y. ..........................................400, 403Majima, Y...............................................400, 403Makino, H.......................................................403Martens, F. .....................................................319Martinez, M....................................................308Martins, C.........................................................19Mayhew, P. ....................................................168McDonald, T. ..................................................57Melnikoff, S. ..................................................287Melo Filho, D. ...............................................120Melo, L...........................................................120Menezes, H.......................................................27Meng, T. .........................................................277Miranda Júnior, A................... 159, 350, 361, 369Montebello, M........................................377, 409Nakagawa, H. .................................................101Nakajima, Y. .................................................403Nakamura, Y. ................................................403Neagul, M. .....................................................397Nuhoğlu, P......................................................303Ohsuga, A. .....................................................101Orji, R. .............................................................81Ozkan, S. .........................................................81Paiano, R. ......................................................313Pandurino, A...................................................313Panica, S.........................................................397Pappis, C. .......................................................298Paula, A. ........................................................369Paula Junior, L. ..............................................350Pereira, R. ......................................................143Pessôa, M. ......................................................413Petcu, D. .........................................................397Piccolo, L. .....................................................183Polzonetti, A. .................................................382Rashid, A.......................................................... 49Re, B. ............................................................. 382Rosa, J.............................................................. 19Salhofer, P...................................................... 421Salviano, C. ................................................... 308Sammut, M..................................................... 409Santos, C. ....................................................... 393Santos, M. ....................................................... 89Schill, A. ........................................ 175, 282, 319Seip, B. ............................................................ 49Serbanati, L. .................................................. 272Shin, I. ........................................................... 101Shiraishi, K. .................................................. 257Silva, A. ......................................................... 135Silva, F. .......................................................... 350Silva, J............................................................ 143Silva, M. .......................................................... 35Silva, P. ........................................................... 89Silva, R. ......................................................... 267Silva, S. .......................................................... 143Siqueira, S. ...................................................... 27Soga, M. ........................................................ 400Spillner, J. ...................................... 175, 282, 319Spohn, M. .............................................. 211, 219Stadlhofer, B. ................................................. 421Stefanone, M. ................................................ 244Stefanuto, G. ................................................. 413Strandvik, P...................................................... 11Sugiyama, B..................................................... 35Sunye, M. ...................................................... 350Tahara, Y........................................................ 101Tekoglu, H. ................................................... 333Times, V........................................................... 89Tole<strong>do</strong>, M. ......................................................... 3Tosi, S. .......................................................... 201Trattner, C. ..................................................... 234Triantafillidis, G............................................... 73Trindade, D. .................................................. 267Tsirakis, N...................................................... 298Turck, F.......................................................... 323Usluel, Y. ...................................................... 303Varani, S. ...................................................... 308Vasilateanu, A................................................ 272Vasiu, R.......................................................... 387Vecchiato, D....................................................... 3Villena, J. ........................................................ 35Wario, R. ......................................................... 57Xia, Y............................................................. 277
Yildiz, B. .......................................................303Yokoyama, S. ................................................151Zacharias, V. ....................................................49Zhang, B. .......................................................277Zhu, L.............................................................112
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