Providing end-user facilities to simplify ontology-driven web application authoring

Generally speaking, emerging web-based technologies are mostly intended for professional developers. They pay poor attention to users who have no programming abilities but need to customize software applications. At some point, such needs force end-users to act as designers in various aspects of software authoring and development. Every day, more new computing-related professionals attempt to create and modify existing applications in order to customize web-based artifacts that will help them carry out their daily tasks. In general they are domain experts rather than skilled software designers, and new authoring mechanisms are needed in order that they can accomplish their tasks properly. The work we present is an effort to supply end-users with easy mechanisms for authoring web-based applications. To complement this effort, we present a user study showing that it is possible to carry out a trade-off between expressiveness and ease of use in order to provide end-users with authoring facilities.     

MMM: a Web-based system for sharing statistical computing modules

This prototype method management system (MMM), implemented with Web technologies, supports distributed authoring and execution of computational software modules among an interdisciplinary group of developers and users. Heterogeneous data formats, programming languages, and computing platforms pose various challenges whenever researchers are sharing and combining software modules, especially when the collaboration occurs across different traditions of scientific computing. To meet these challenges, we designed and implemented MMM. MMM is a collection of middleware services to support the interaction between software users and developers, and to facilitate the sharing of software modules across heterogeneous networks. The system design follows the World Wide Web paradigm: developers (providers) install their modules on the network in a way that allows users (consumers) to access and execute them. A prototype is available on the Web     

An XML-based Quality of Service Enabling Language for the Web

In this paper, we introduce an XML-based hierarchical QoS markup language, called HQML, to enhance distributed multimedia applications on the World Wide Web (WWW) with quality of service (QoS) capability. The design ofHQML is based on two observations: (1) the absence of a systematic QoS specification language, that can be used by distributed multimedia applications on the WWW to utilize the state-of-the-art QoS management technology and (2) the power and popularity of XML to deliver richly structured contents over the Web. HQML allows distributed multimedia applications to specify all kinds of application-specific QoS policies and requirements. During runtime, the HQML Executor translates the HQML file into desired data structures and cooperates with the QoS proxies that assist applications in end-to-end QoS negotiation, setup and enforcement. In order to make QoS services tailored toward user preferences and meet the challenges of uncertainty in the distributed heterogeneous environments, the design of HQML is featured as interactive andflexible . In order to allow application developers to create HQML specifications correctly and easily, we have designed and developed a unified visual QoS programming environment, called QoSTalk. In QoSTalk, we adopt a grammatical approach to perform consistency check on the visual QoS specifications and generate HQML files automatically. Finally, we introduce the distributed QoS compiler, which performs the automatic mappings between application- and resource-level QoS parameters to relieve the application developer of the burden of dealing with low-level QoS specifications.     

The second wave. Netscape on usability in the services-basedInternet

It's common to talk about the usability of browser technology, and how the advent of easy-to-use Web browsers has opened the Internet to unprecedented numbers of people with little or no technical sophistication. It's less common to consider the usability of the entire Internet architecture, and the World Wide Web in particular, by users at all levels: programmer developers, administrators, Webmasters and end-users alike. Netscape Communications offers an application architecture and programming model to extend the same usability that created the information-based (first-wave) Internet to a services-based (second-wave) Internet     

Toward an OSGi-based infrastructure for context-aware applications

Applications and services must adapt to changing contexts in dynamic environments. However, building context-aware applications is still complex and time-consuming due to inadequate infrastructure support. We propose a context-aware infrastructure for building and rapidly prototyping such applications in a smart-home environment. This OSGi-based infrastructure manages context-aware services reliably and securely and efficiently supports context acquisition, discovery, and reasoning. A formal, ontology-based context model enables semantic context representation, reasoning, and knowledge sharing. We propose an ontology-based context model that leverages Semantic Web technology and OWL (Web Ontology Language). OWL is an ontology markup language that enables context sharing and context reasoning. Based on our context model, we also propose a service-oriented context-aware middleware (SOCAM) architecture, including a set of independent services that perform context discovery, acquisition, and interpretation.     

基于时序逻辑的超文本描述

将基于时序逻辑的多媒体脚本描述模型从线性顺序时空关系描述推广到非线性时空关系的文本描述,提出了一种新的超文本模型,通过该模型可将超文本的观点,链和超文本结构的逐步求精过程在一个统一的框架内描述,使用该模型设计的一个超文本标注语言已经实现,并基于该语言开发了一个交互式超文本编著环境。     

对线程池模式的分析及其实现

对于并行处理且处理过程相同时,采用线程池技术是一种简单而高效的机制,尤其用在Web服务器或应用服务器时它能显著地改善服务器应用程序的性能.本文主要介绍了企业级应用程序设计的线程池模式的思想,并用java提供了创建和实现组件的标准设计技术,这些组件用来解决通常并行程序所带来的风险。在设计上采用了工作线程来派遣和处理并行任务,并提供了一种基于面向对象的安全线程池框架,在框架中开发人员和最终用户可以配置和控制线程资源。     

ExPAGS:一种可扩展的Web页面开发工具

Web页面开发工具已经成为Web应用系统开发的基本手段,然而目前的大部分Web页面开发工具都不支持用户自定义Web页面组件的开发,使得这些工具的可扩展性较差,不能够满足Web应用系统开发的要求.针对此问题,提出了一种Web页面组件动态加载的模型,并用该模型成功地将一个已有的页面开发工具PAGS(Page Auto-generating System)改进为可扩展的Web页面开发工具:ExPAGS,有效降低了原PAGS工具的开发和维护复杂度,能够更灵活地支持Web应用系统的开发,取得了良好的应用效果.     

基于JSON的异构Web平台的设计与实现

随着互联网覆盖领域的不断扩大以及编程语言的不断更新和迅速发展,Web平台需要兼顾越来越多的异构情况。JSON具有语言独立性和平台无关性的特点,与其他轻量级的数据交换格式相比有着显著优势,逐渐成为目前Web平台理想的数据交换格式。Java和Python作为Web开发中两种长期占据主要使用比例的编程语言,越来越多地被开发者在同一个系统中使用。目前如何通过独立数据格式将前后端以及不同的开发语言之间进行连接就成为了一个典型问题。针对这个问题,实现了一种基于JSON的异构平台。在基于Java和Python两种语言进行Web异构平台开发的基础上,以JSON数据格式作为异构平台的统一交换格式以实现前后端的数据通信,同时将JSON数据作为Java和Python的连接方式,得到了较好的效果,并通过一个实验室管理系统的核心功能作为应用示例进行了具体说明。     

Intelligent Assistance in Authoring Dynamically Generated Web Interfaces

Since its emergence in the early 1990s, the WWW has become not only an information system of unprecedented size, but a universal platform for the development of services and applications. However, most of the advances in web technologies are intended for professional developers, paying poor attention to end-users with no programming abilities but with explicit needs of creating and customizing web-based presentations. This provides a strong motivation for end-users to act as designers at some point, leading to an emerging role of new computing-related professionals to be considered. This paper is an effort to leverage such difficulties by providing intelligent mechanism to assist end-users in web-based authoring tasks. To carry out such a challenge, intelligent user-monitoring techniques are exploited to obtain high-level information that will be used to infer the user’s preferences and assist him throughout the interaction. Furthermore, we report on how iteration patterns can be applied to avoid repetitive tasks that are automatically carried out on behalf of the user. In order to bring off a feasible trade-off between expressivity and ease of use, a user experiment to obtain the user’s perception and evaluate the hit-rate of our system is also presented.     

基于XQuery扩展的异构语义Web服务发现

语义Web服务发现作为分布式计算的前提和关键,备受研究者关注。多种语义Web服务描述语言的存在给异构语义Web服务的发现带来了挑战。本文提出了一种支持异构语义Web服务描述语言的发现框架i XQuery。该框架从两个方面扩展XQuery,使其支持异构语义Web服务的结构化查询与逻辑推理、模糊匹配的联合查询。一方面i XQuery利用XQuery的外部函数机制,建立了多种类型的相似度比较函数;另一方面i XQuery制定了一个统一的语义Web服务抽象描述本体,并建立了语义Web服务语言SAWSDL与OWLS与该本体之间的映射,并利用XQuery的用户自定义函数机制,建立了一系列用于抽取异构语义Web服务中信息的抽象描述操作子。最后,介绍了基于i XQuery框架的异构语义Web服务匹配器H-i Matcher。     

多媒体编著语言的设计与实现

根据基于时序逻辑和XYZ系统思想的多媒体数据描述模型,设计并实现了一种新的多媒体编著语言MAL(multimedia authoring language),该语言具有抽象描述、同步描述、逐步求精设计的描述等能力,将多媒体节目中媒体对象的建模和多媒体节目的设计过程在一个统一的框架内进行描述.以该语言实现为核心，研制了一个交互式可视多媒体编著环境.     

iMashup: a mashup-based framework for service composition

The Web has undergone a tremendous change from a primarily publication platform towards a participatory and"programmable"platform,where a large number of heterogeneous Web-delivered services(including SOAP and RESTful Web services,RSS and Atom feeds)are emerging.It results in the creation of Web mashup applications with rich user experiences.However,the integration of Web-delivered services is still a challenging issue.It not only requires the developers’tedious eforts in understanding and coordinating heterogeneous service types,but also results in the time-consuming development of user interfaces.In this paper,we propose the iMashup composition framework to facilitate mashup development and deployment.We provide a unified mashup component model for the common representation of heterogeneous Web-delivered service interfaces.The component model specifies necessary properties and behaviors at both business and user interface level.We associate the component model with semantically meaningful tags,so that mashup developers can fast understand the service capabilities.The mashup developers can search and put the proper mashup components into the Web browser based composition environment,and connect them by data flows based on the tag-based semantics.Such an integration manner might prevent some low-level programming eforts and improve the composition efciency.A series of experimental study are conducted to evaluate our framework.     

Orchestrating Web Services with BPEL

Effective Web services demand careful synchronization on various abstraction levels. The Business Process Execution Language supports modeling and executing business processes from both the user and systems perspectives. In this way, Web services application developers can use BPEL to orchestrate service interactions in a global system view and to manage individual interactions based on outside events. More and more Web service providers are using BPEL to integrate their services independently of vendors and related programming languages. In this column, we introduce BPEL and presents some guidelines for using it in your Web services management.     

基于契约式设计的Java编译器实现

本文通过实现一个基于VeriJava语法与语义检查、验证的编译器,试图在编译阶段通过对方法,类等先决条件与后置条件的验证,在逻辑上保证方法的正确性,帮助开发人员在开发的过程中及时找到设计错误或协调沟通问题,促进交流与理解,使开发过程更为完善。     

An authoring technology for multidevice Web applications

The rapid proliferation of mobile computing devices has increased the complexity and cost of cross-platform application development. Multidevice authoring technology (MDAT) lets developers build a generic application common to multiple devices and customize it for specific devices. We developed MDAT an end-to-end development methodology and toolset, to reduce the complexity of creating interactive, form-based Web applications that execute on heterogeneous devices. Web application refers to conventional, servlet-based Web applications as well as portlet applications. A portlet is a Web application component that a Web portal server aggregates with other portlets.     

Groupware development support with technology patterns

Groupware development support should educate developers on how to design groupware applications and foster the reuse of proven solutions. Additionally, it should foster communication between developers and end-users, since they need a common language and understanding of the problem space. Groupware frameworks provide solutions for the development of groupware applications by means of building blocks. They have become a prominent means to support developers, but from our experience frameworks have properties that complicate their usage and do not sufficiently support groupware developers. We argue for a pattern approach to support the technical aspects of groupware development. Patterns describe solutions to recurring issues in groupware development. They serve as educational and communicative vehicle for reaching the above goals. In this article, we provide a pattern language focusing on technical issues during groupware development. Experiences when using the language in an educational setting and a product development setting have shown that the patterns are a supportive means for the proposed goals.     

A crowdsourcing method to develop virtual human conversational agents

Educators in medicine, psychology, and the military want to provide their students with interpersonal skills practice. Virtual humans offer structured learning of interview skills, can facilitate learning about unusual conditions, and are always available. However, the creation of virtual humans with the ability to understand and respond to natural language requires costly engineering by conversation knowledge engineers (generally computer scientists), and incurs logistical cost for acquiring domain knowledge from domain experts (educators). We address these problems using a novel crowdsourcing method entitled Human-centered Distributed Conversational Modeling. This method facilitates collaborative development of virtual humans by two groups of end-users: domain experts (educators) and domain novices (students). We implemented this method in a web-based authoring tool called Virtual People Factory. Using Virtual People Factory, medical and pharmacy educators are now creating natural language virtual patient interactions on their own. This article presents the theoretical background for Human-centered Distributed Conversational Modeling, the implementation of the Virtual People Factory authoring tool, and five case studies showing that Human-centered Distributed Conversational Modeling has addressed the logistical cost for acquiring knowledge.     

VisualTPL: A visual dataflow language for report data transformation

Data transformation, an important part of report generation, converts the layout of source data into a new layout suitable for presentation. Many report tools have been developed for end-users to specify data transformation. However, current report tools only support a limited set of report layouts. This paper proposes a visual dataflow programming language, called VisualTPL, to resolve this problem. Data transformation is accomplished by writing graphical dataflow programs, which manipulate tables as first-class objects with a set of extendable table operations. A report tool, called VisualTPS, has been developed to offer an easy and intuitive end-user programming environment. Reports with sophisticated layouts can be created through top-down decomposition and incremental development. An evaluation has been conducted to assess end-users' performance with VisualTPL. The results indicated that end-users could learn VisualTPL in a short time and create complicated report layouts all by themselves. And, in comparison with a commercial report tool, VisualTPL offered end-users similar performances and was preferred over the commercial tool.     

The management and mining of multiple predictive models using the predictive modeling markup language

We introduce a markup language based upon XML for working with the predictive models produced by data mining systems. The language is called the predictive model markup language (PMML) and can be used to define predictive models and ensembles of predictive models. It provides a flexible mechanism for defining schema for predictive models and supports model selection and model averaging, involving multiple predictive models. It has proved useful for applications requiring ensemble learning, partitioned learning and distributed learning. In addition, it facilitates moving predictive models across applications and systems.