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The arising of new technologies ranging from smartphones to social networks is constantly increasing interactions between people. In the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) community, adapting technology to human nature is the key concern of User-Centered Design (UCD). However, UCD tends to neglect the emerging social dimension of technology: users are consulted in the design process, but they do not have any direct involvement or creative control over the developed technological solutions. On the other hand, the collaborative and social nature of the design process is getting increasingly explicit in the Product Design community, where well-established participatory approaches are applied to involve stakeholders, designers, and end-users in the creative process of new products. In this paper, we first provide a deep analysis of the state of the art of participatory approaches in the research literature. Then, we investigate how their integration with UCD leads not only to empower the role of end-users as active collaborators of designers towards a more democratic crowd-based UCD process, but also to create innovation in the design process. We advocate that such innovation can be obtained by giving the right voice not only to the users who reach consensus in the design process but also to the marginals. We provide an explorative model, some experiments, and a sketch of the user interface to support our claim. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The design of interactive systems to be used in mobile and pervasive scenarios, such as emergency management, requires novel methodologies which combine user-centred design approaches and software engineering approaches tailored for distributed architectures. In this paper, the methodology adopted in a successful research project is presented together with a case study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent database applications are typically oriented towards a large set of non-expert users, and therefore, they need to be equipped with suitable interfaces facilitating the interaction with the system. Moreover, the incorporation of the time dimension in database systems is a desirable feature. Indeed, several temporal data models and the corresponding textual query languages have been proposed. However, there is a limited amount of research concerning the investigation of user-oriented languages for querying temporal databases. Our proposal addresses such a need. In particular, we propose a visual query environment, namely Temporal Visual Query Environment (TVQE) which provides an easier interaction of the user with temporal databases. The system adopts a diagrammatic representation of the database schema (including temporal classes and relationships) and a “graphical notebook” as interaction metaphor. In our approach, non-database experts are released from syntactical difficulties which are typical of textual languages, and they can easily express temporal queries by means of elementary graphical operations (e.g. click on a node label). Differently from many proposals in the field of visual query languages, the language underlying TVQE is provided with formal syntax and semantics. It is based on a minimal set of temporal graphical primitives (TGPs), which are defined on a Temporal Graph Model (TGM), with visual syntax and object-based semantics. In this paper we mainly concentrate on the formal aspects of TVQE, and provide some hints on the visual interaction mechanisms and implementation issues. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The Italian Public Administration (PA) represents an important testbed for fulfilment of software usability in real settings. This is due to the volume of existing applications, the various types of ongoing projects and the potential users to whom the produced applications are addressed (both internal PA users and citizen-users). Most acquisitions of computer products in the PA are made in terms of ad hoc developments. This type of development could provide, in principle, the best condition for usability purposes, i.e. a constant contiguity between designers and users. Unfortunately, this does not lead to user-centred projects and usable products in reality.To analyse the current situation and propose improvements, the Italian authority which controls the software diffusion in PAs (Autorita` per l'Informatica nella Pubblica Amministrazione—AIPA) created a working group, the Usability Working Group— UWG. Among the various activities of the group, two tests carried out for the PA on two different development designs of interactive systems gave several hints. The UWG also produced the guidelines for setting up PA contracts including usability as a key requirement for the interactive systems to be supplied. This paper reports the tests, compares the results with the ISO 13407 (1999) standard, and outlines the main indications coming from the proposed guidelines. Finally, the outcome and influence of the UWG activities on the PA contracts is discussed. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

One of the main problems in the database area is to define query languages characterized by both high expressive power and ease of use. In this paper, we propose a system to query databases, using diagrams as a standard user interface. The system, called Query by Diagram* (QBD*), makes use of a conceptual data model, a query language on this model, and a graphical user interface. The conceptual model is the Entity-Relationship Model; the query language, whose expressive power allows recursive queries, supports visual interaction. The main characteristics of the interface are ease of use and the availability of a rich set of primitives for schema selection and query formulation. Furthermore, we compare the expressive power of QBD* and G+, which are the only languages allowing recursive queries to be expressed graphically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents ARCA, a software system that enables semantic search and exploration over a book catalog. The main purpose of this work is twofold: to propose a general paradigm for a semantic enrichment workflow and to evaluate a visual approach to information retrieval based on extracted information and existing knowledge graphs. ARCA has been designed and implemented following a user-centered design approach. Two different releases of the system have incrementally and iteratively developed and evaluated. The first release has evaluated the quality and usefulness of the extracted data. The second release, whose design was a refinement based on the previous evaluation results, was assessed by several users. Moreover, a comparative test with other information retrieval systems was conducted in order to study the potential added-value of the system. ARCA is employed in a real editorial scenario to visually search and explore the books of a publishing house. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Phishing is the fraudulent attempt to obtain sensitive information by disguising oneself as a trustworthy entity in digital communication. It is a type of cyber attack often successful because users are not aware of their vulnerabilities or are unable to understand the risks. This article presents a systematic literature review conducted to draw a “big picture” of the most important research works performed on human factors and phishing. The analysis of the retrieved publications, framed along the research questions addressed in the systematic literature review, helps in understanding how human factors should be considered to defend against phishing attacks. Future research directions are also highlighted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective : In this paper we present a Visual Query System, which allows users to graphically build queries over data streams and traditional relational data. The Visual Query System runs on top of a DSMS (Data Stream Management System). Methods : The system has been designed and implemented following the user-centered design approach. Two different releases of the system have been incrementally and iteratively designed and evaluated. The first release has been evaluated using heuristic evaluation. The second release, whose design was a refinement based on the results of the foregoing heuristic evaluation, was evaluated by several users. Moreover, a comparative evaluation involving users has been conducted on the second release. Results : The paper presents the visual query system, and the results ofthe various evaluations. Conclusion : Visual Query Systems for data streams are an effective tool for industrial engineers in querying and analyzing data streams from equipments. Practice and implications : The proposed visual query system has been employed in real industrial scenarios in order to visually query and analyze data streams produced by industrial machines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

That the already vast and ever-increasing amounts of data still do present formidable challenges to effective and efficient acquisition of knowledge is by no means an exaggeration. The knowledge discovery process entails more than just the application of data mining strategies. There are many other aspects including, but not limited to: planning, data pre-processing, data integration, evaluation and presentation. The human-vision channel is capable of recognizing and understanding data at an instant. Effective visual strategies can be used to tap the outstanding human visual channel in extracting useful information from data. Unlike is the case with most research efforts, the exploitation should be employed not just at the beginning or at the end of the knowledge discovery process but across the entire discovery process. In essence, this calls for the development of an effective user/visual component, the development of an overall framework that can support the entire discovery process/all discovery phases, and the strategic placement of the visual component in that framework. Key issues of this component will be the open architecture, allowing extensions and adaptations to specific mining environments, and the precise semantics and syntax, allowing an optimal integration between the presentation and the computation. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

In the present global society, information has to be exchangeable in open and dynamic environments, where interacting users do not necessarily share a common understanding of the world at hand. This is particularly true in P2P scenarios, where millions of autonomous users (peers) need to cooperate by sharing their resources (such as data and services). We propose the Esteem approach (Emergent Semantics and cooperaTion in multi-knowledgE EnvironMents), where a comprehensive framework and a platform for data and service discovery in P2P systems are proposed, with advanced solutions for trust and quality-based data management, P2P infrastructure definition, query processing and dynamic service discovery in a context-aware scenario. In Esteem, semantic communities are built around declared interests in the form of manifesto ontologies and their autonomous nature is preserved by allowing a shared semantics to naturally emerge from the peer interactions. Inside the borders of semantic communities data and services are discovered, queried and invoked in a resource sharing scenario, where the context in which users interoperate and the trust of exchanged information are also relevant aspects to take into account. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Of late there has been a growing interest and effort toward meeting the requirements of persons with special needs. However, most of the accessibility standards and guidelines that have been proposed have been developed by adopting a domain independent and often 'technical' perspective. Such proposals are therefore often not sufficient to achieve accessibility goals in specific application areas such as eLearning. This paper presents a boosting approach/framework toward the development of more effective and usable accessibility indications for authors of didactic content, which are currently being fed and tested within the Italian context of the VICE project. This approach is intended to take into account the aforementioned issue and to make a step forward with respect to existing accessibility proposals and approaches in the eLearning domain. In particular, we discuss our design method for increasing the quality of eLearning materials for learners with special needs and an authoring tool, aLearning, to support eLearning content authors in their development of didactic material matching those needs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A letter to the editor is presented in response to the article "Toward 2020 Science" and related set of News Features and Commentaries in the Number 440, 2006 issue.