UML-CI: A reference model for profiling critical infrastructure systems

The study of critical infrastructure systems organization and behavior has drawn great attention in the recent years. This is in part due to their great influence on the ordinary life of every citizen. In this paper, we study critical infrastructures’ characteristics and propose a reference model based on the Unified Modeling Language (UML). This reference model attempts to provide suitable means for the task of modeling an infrastructure system through offering five major metamodels. We introduce each of these metamodels and explain how it is possible to integrate them into a unique representation to characterize various aspects of an infrastructure system. Based on the metamodels of UML-CI, infrastructure system knowledge bases can be built to aid the process of infrastructure system modeling, profiling, and management.     

Hume box calculus: robust system development through software transformation

Hume is a contemporary programming language oriented to systems with strong resource bounds, based on autonomous concurrent “boxes” interacting across “wires”. Hume’s design reflects the explicit separation of coordination and computation aspects of multi-process systems, which greatly eases establishing resource bounds for programs. However, coordination and computation are necessarily tightly coupled in reasoning about Hume programs. Furthermore, in Hume, local changes to coordination or computation, while preserving input/output correctness, can have profound and unforeseen effects on other aspects of programs such as timing of events and scheduling of processes. Thus, traditional program calculi prove inappropriate as they tend to focus exclusively either on the coordination of interacting processes or on computation within individual processes.     

Examining influencing factors of post-adoption usage of mobile internet: Focus on the user perception of supplier-side attributes

Key supplier-side factors that affect the usage level of mobile Internet were identified and the procedural mechanism among the independent and dependent variables was investigated. For this, a research model was introduced to describe associations among four external variables (access quality, service variety, cost rationality, and ease of use), an intermediate variable (usefulness) and a dependent variable (the usage level of mobile Internet). Through the on-line survey, data were gathered from actual mobile Internet users. Confirmatory factor analysis and path analysis were applied to test the overall integrity of the research model and of proposed hypotheses. All four external variables affected user perceptions on the usefulness of mobile Internet. Among them, service variety and cost rationality had a relatively larger influence on perceived usefulness. Perceived usefulness of the mobile Internet had a positive effect on its usage, confirming the important role of usefulness as a significant mediator between the four external variables and the dependent variable. Meanwhile, the cost rationality was the only external variable with direct influence on the MI usage. Theoretical and practical implications of the study results are discussed.     

An ontological modelling of user requirements for personalised information provision

The knowledge economy offers opportunity to a broad and diverse community of information systems users to efficiently gain information and know-how for improving qualifications and enhancing productivity in the work place. Such demand will continue and users will frequently require optimised and personalised information content. The advancement of information technology and the wide dissemination of information endorse individual users when constructing new knowledge from their experience in the real-world context. However, a design of personalised information provision is challenging because users’ requirements and information provision specifications are complex in their representation. The existing methods are not able to effectively support this analysis process. This paper presents a mechanism which can holistically facilitate customisation of information provision based on individual users’ goals, level of knowledge and cognitive styles preferences. An ontology model with embedded norms represents the domain knowledge of information provision in a specific context where users’ needs can be articulated and represented in a user profile. These formal requirements can then be transformed onto information provision specifications which are used to discover suitable information content from repositories and pedagogically organise the selected content to meet the users’ needs. The method is provided with adaptability which enables an appropriate response to changes in users’ requirements during the process of acquiring knowledge and skills.     

Analysis of MySpace user profiles

Online social networks have attracted millions of users, who have integrated social network web sites into their daily life. Users participate to the changes and to the evolution of these sites because they are producers and reviewers of contents that help them to maintain the existing social relationships, make new friends, collaborate and enrich experiences. This paper presents a study of the characteristics of the users of MySpace web site, with the objective of studying relationships and interactions among users and deriving hints about their behavior. The analysis relies on data collected by monitoring the web site for 12 weeks. Typical user behaviors have been derived and classes of users characterized by different levels of participation to the social network have been identified. In particular, the analysis reveals that most of the users actively participate to the social network and specify many personal details. Social networks web sites allow access to such details; the sharing of information about users and their relationships can lead to non-ethic online activities, which threat the privacy and the security of users themselves.     

ID-Services: an RFID middleware architecture for mobile applications

The use of RFID middleware to support application development for and integration of RFID hardware into information systems has become quite common in RFID applications where reader devices remain stationary, which currently represents the largest part of all RFID applications in use. Another field for applying RFID technology which is offering a huge set of novel possibilities and applications are mobile applications, where readers are no longer fixed. In order to address the specific issues of mobile RFID-enabled applications and to support developers in rapid application development, we present ID-Services, an architecture for an RFID middleware that is designed to support mobile applications. The ID-Services approach has been used to implement MoVIS (Mobile Visitor Information System), a mobile application which allows museum visitors to request individually adapted multimedia information about exhibits in an intuitive way.     

Dynamic content-page identification for media-rich websites

Knowledge of the information goal of users is critical in website design, analyzing the efficacy of such designs, and in ensuring effective user-access to desired information. Determining the information goal is complex due to the subjective and latent nature of user information needs. This challenge is further exacerbated in media-rich websites since the semantics of media-based information is context-based and emergent. A critical step in determining information goals lies in the identification of content pages. These are the pages which contain the information the user seeks. We propose a method to automatically determine the content pages by taking into account the organization of the web site, the media-based information content, as well as the influence of a specific user browsing pattern. Given a specific browsing pattern, in our method, putative content pages are identified as the pages corresponding to the local minima of page-content entropy values. For an (unknown) user information goal this intuitively corresponds to modeling the progressive transition of the user from pages with generic information to those with specific information. Experimental investigations on media rich sites demonstrate the effectiveness of the technique and underline its potential in modeling user information needs and actions in a media-rich web.     

RUSHES—an annotation and retrieval engine for multimedia semantic units

Multimedia analysis and reuse of raw un-edited audio visual content known as rushes is gaining acceptance by a large number of research labs and companies. A set of research projects are considering multimedia indexing, annotation, search and retrieval in the context of European funded research, but only the FP6 project RUSHES is focusing on automatic semantic annotation, indexing and retrieval of raw and un-edited audio-visual content. Even professional content creators and providers as well as home-users are dealing with this type of content and therefore novel technologies for semantic search and retrieval are required. In this paper, we present a summary of the most relevant achievements of the RUSHES project, focusing on specific approaches for automatic annotation as well as the main features of the final RUSHES search engine.     

Deliberate word access: an intuition,a roadmap and some preliminary empirical results

No doubt, words play a major role in language production, hence finding them is of vital importance, be it for writing or for speaking (spontaneous discourse production, simultaneous translation). Words are stored in a dictionary, and the general belief holds, the more entries the better. Yet, to be truly useful the resource should contain not only many entries and a lot of information concerning each one of them, but also adequate navigational means to reveal the stored information. Information access depends crucially on the organization of the data (words) and the access keys (meaning/form), two factors largely overlooked. We will present here some ideas of how an existing electronic dictionary could be enhanced to support a speaker/writer to find the word s/he is looking for. To this end we suggest to add to an existing electronic dictionary an index based on the notion of association, i.e. words co-occurring in a well balanced corpus, the latter being supposed to represent the average citizen’s knowledge of the world. Before describing our approach, we will briefly take a critical look at the work being done by colleagues working on automatic, spontaneous or deliberate language production,—that is, computer-generated language, simulation of the mental lexicon, or WordNet (WN),—to see how adequate they are with regard to our goal.