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Some of the most interesting developments within computer system design in recent years have emerged from an exploration of the ways everyday objects and artefacts can be augmented with computational resources. Often under the rubric of "ubiquitous computing", research programmes in Europe, North America and Japan have directed substantial funding towards these initiatives, and leading industrial and academic research laboratories have developed a diverse range of ubiquitous computing "solutions". These developments mark an important shift in system design, a shift that is having a corresponding impact on social science research. Surprisingly though, given the growing commitment to the ubiquitous and the tangible, there is a mundane, even humble artefact that pervades our ordinary lives that has received less attention than one might imagine. This artefact is paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to explore new metaphors for interaction design on tabletop system. Tabletop systems are shared horizontal surface for co-located collaboration, which leads to original problems when designing interactions. We propose two metaphors based on the paper: the peeling metaphor, and the slot metaphor, and then suggest a way of using them to design new interactions for solving some of the problems of tabletop systems: documents organization, documents transmission and documents duplication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many design activities depend on communicative activities around collaboratively produced prototypes. A common communication practice in producing text documents is to add annotation in the form of comments. Previous research indicates that electronic paper-prototyping can be used to rapidly create simple prototypes of interactive systems, such as websites. Little is known, however, about how to provide and maintain variety of communication channels around such electronic paper-prototypes to enable end-users and other stakeholders to contribute to design dialogues. This paper presents Gabbeh, an electronic paper-prototyping tool, and reports on an evaluation using the tool in a simulated design exercise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Content preparation is essential for web design [25]. The objective of this paper is to establish a theoretical foundation for the development of methods to evaluate the effectiveness of content preparation in information technology operations. Past studies identify information as the dominant concern of users, and delivery mechanism as a secondary concern [20]. The best presentation of the wrong information results in a design with major usability problems and does not aid the user in accomplishing his task. This paper shifts the focus of existing usability evaluation methods. It attempts to fill the void in usability literaoture by addressing the information aspect of usability evaluation. Combining the strengths of content preparation and usability evaluation yields major implications for a broad range of IT uses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to the progress of Internet technology and the increase of distributed information on networks, the present knowledge management has been based more and more on the performance of various experienced users. In addition to the increase of electronic documents, the use of paper documents has not been reduced because of their convenience. This paper describes a method of tracking paper document locations and contents using radio frequency identification (RFID) technology. This research also focused on the expression of a task process and the seamless structuring of related electronic and paper documents as a result of task knowledge formalization using information organizing. A system is proposed here that implements information organization for both Web documents and paper documents with the task model description and RFID technology. Examples of a prototype system are also presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Papers in HCI play different roles, whether to inspire, solve industrial problems or further the science of HCI. There is a potential conflict between the different views, and a danger that different forms of validity are assumed by author and reader — deliberately or accidentally. This paper reviews some of the issues in this complex area and makes practical recommendations. In particular, the paper introduces the term "cross-validity" to help make explicit the issues, problems and means to tackle them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Health-e-Child project aims to develop an integrated healthcare platform for European paediatrics. In order to achieve a comprehensive view of children's health, a complex integration of biomedical data, information, and knowledge is necessary. Ontologies will be used to formally define this domain knowledge and will form the basis for the medical knowledge management system. This paper introduces an innovative methodology for the vertical integration of biomedical knowledge. This approach will be largely clinician-centered and will enable the definition of ontology fragments, connections between them (semantic bridges) and enriched ontology fragments (views). The strategy for the specification and capture of fragments, bridges and views is outlined with preliminary examples demonstrated in the collection of biomedical information from hospital databases, biomedical ontologies, and biomedical public databases. Keywords: Vertical Knowledge Integration, Approximate Queries, Ontology Views, Semantic Bridges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we will propose our ideas for a semantically ready competency model. The model will allow semantic enrichment on different levels, creating truly meaningful competencies. The aim of this model is to provide a flexible approach for (re)use, matching, interpretation, exchange and storage for competencies. Our competency model is based on the DOGMA ontology framework and the proposed IEEE standards RCD and SCRM. We will focus on the model itself and how semantics can be applied to it as these elements form the basis for any kind of processing on them. Keywords: competence, competency, RCD, semantics, DOGMA, e-HRM, HRM, occupation, ontology, Semantic Web. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transfusion Ontology is a simple task-based ontology developed in the emergency health care domain. Taking the assumption that ontologies are instruments for supporting exchange of information among parties, the principles governing the design of this ontology was mainly based on the identification of the interactions of messages to be exchanged among parties. This paper shows how this simple design principle is able to guide a whole ontology construction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Today's mobile data applications aspire to deliver services to a user anywhere - anytime while fulfilling his Quality of Service (QoS) requirements. However, the success of the service delivery heavily relies on the QoS offered by the underlying networks. As the services operate in a heterogeneous networking environment, we argue that the generic information about the networks' offered-QoS may enable an anyhow mobile service delivery based on an intelligent (proactive) selection of ‘any' network available in the user's context (location and time). Towards this direction, we develop a QoS-predictions service provider, which includes functionality for the acquisition of generic offered-QoS information and which, via a multidimensional processing and history-based reasoning, will provide predictions of the expected offered-QoS in a reliable and timely manner. We acquire the generic QoS-information from distributed mobile services' components quantitatively (actively and passively) measuring the applicationlevel QoS, while the reasoning is based on statistical data mining and pattern recognition techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a community such as conferences, numerous service providers and service users exist, and people interact using contexts. With the improvements in context-awareness computing and mobile computing technologies, human-computer interactions for exchanging contexts started increasing. In this paper, we introduce some interaction techniques such as tag interaction and service discovery interaction using a mobile device to provide an efficient user interface to exchange contexts in a conference room. We identified typical situations in which these interactions can be used in a paper, poster session, and for providing individual information among the attendees. We analyzed the two interaction techniques to be suitable to improve the interactions for exchanging contexts in a conference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes some results of a project that studied how multimedia can help the worker in an assembly task. The test case was a deep-cut assembly of a grid-anode for a cathodic protection system. A multimedia tool was implemented and compared with the conventional support method for the same task. The tool helps the worker by providing training and background information. During the task the tool acts as a guide and a set of well-defined instructions. The comparison of the methods was done by means of a field experiment. The results show that the use of the implemented tool helps to produce a slight increase to the quality of the work. However, the execution time of the work was not better when using the multimedia tool. According to a user questionnaire done in the test situation, the multimedia tool was more useful and easier to use, and gave the users more confidence than the conventional support method. It can be said that the use of multimedia support helps the worker to produce better quality in the task. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Software Engineering track received 63 papers from which 7 papers were selected after an intensive reviewing and selection process. Many good papers could not be selected due to lack of space in the program. The selected papers cover a diverse range of topics within software engineering: from software reliability prediction to middle-ware for component management to runtime validation and code generation. The paper by Roychoudhury, Negi and Mitra analyzes programs loops for estimating program execution time. They use constraint propagation techniques to detect infeasible paths followed by timing analysis that employ memoization techniques. The paper by Sengupta and Cleaveland presents the operational semantics of timed message sequence charts to help detect errors and inconsistencies in specifications. Tripathi and Mall present a method for making predictions about reliability of software during the software development process itself when the failure data from the field cannot be available. The paper by Wang presents a logic programming framework for integrating architecture description languages (ADLs) which allows tools developed for one ADL to be used even though the architectural specification is written in another ADL. In a similar vain, the paper by Stevenson, Fu and Dong presents a framework for automated and validated realization of software architecture designs. The paper by Bhattarcharjee and Shyamsundar presents a method for validated code generation for activity diagrams which are useful in model driven design of software. Finally, the paper by Mousavi et al presents techniques that exploit symmetry for tackling the state-space explosion problem that arises in model checking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The multiple viewed search engine presented here retrieves documents of an indicated search area and displays a matrix of the distribution of the clustering from two aspects of the retrieval result. The search engine provides a visual and semantic bird's-eye view of the entire retrieval result. In addition, the characteristic words of each cluster are displayed in the matrix, and supports narrowing of the search. Furthermore, it is possible to immediately change the analysis criteria or the number of clusters and to use a zooming function. Thus, various retrieval conditions for a query can be attempted immediately and continuously. As a case study, this paper performs several analyses on the electronic journal Zoological Science using a multiple viewed search engine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the recent proliferation of documents, automatic metadata extraction from document becomes an important task. In this paper, we propose a novel template matching based method for header metadata extraction form semi-structured documents stored in PDF. In our approach, templates are defined, and the document is considered as strings with format. Templates are used to guide finite state automaton (FSA) to extract header metadata of papers. The testing results indicate that our approach can effectively extract metadata, without any training cost and available to some special situation. This approach can effectively assist the automatic index creation in lots of fields such as digital libraries, information retrieval, and data mining. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inter-organizational business cooperations can be described from different viewpoints each fulfilling a specific purpose. Since all viewpoints describe the same system they must not contradict each other, thus, must be consistent. Consistency can be checked based on common semantic concepts of the different viewpoints. This is sufficient for equal concepts, while weakly related concepts, e.g. related to runtime behavior of viewpoints, have to be considered explicitly. In this paper we identify dynamic consistency issues correlated to the runtime behavior between value and coordination viewpoints on behalf of an example. In particular, an issue class on occurrence estimations of execution options and an issue class on granularity differences in modelling are identified and illustrated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An efficient searching system is needed to offer the exact result of diverse web information to the user. Due to this reason, it is important to extract and analyze the user requirements in the distributed information environment. The searching method proposed in this paper uses the keyword as well as its context information for effective searching. Moreover, the proposed searching method is extracted keywords by using the new keyword extraction method also proposed in this paper, and it is executed web searching based on keyword mining profile generated by the extracted keywords. Unlike the conventional searching method, which searched for information by representative words, the proposed searching method is more efficient and exact. This is because data are searched by the example-based query including the content information as well as the representative words. Moreover, this searching method makes a domain keyword list for a quick search. The domain keyword is the representative word of a special domain. The performance of the proposed algorithm is analyzed in a series of experiments to identify its various characteristics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we propose a human-robot interface in networked and multi-sensored environments. The human robot interface is an essential part of intelligent robotic system. Through the human robot interface, human being can interact with the robot. Especially, in multi-sensored environment, the human robot interface can be developed with remarkably extended functionality. Generally, handheld device such as PDA is a suitable for human robot interface because of its mobility and network ability. In this paper, we select PDA as device of human robot interface. In the implemented framework, the robot user can monitor what happens in multi-sensored environment and control the mobile robot easily and intuitively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Industrial safety can be regarded as a major issue of industrial environments nowadays. This is why industries are currently spending huge amounts of resources to improve safety in all levels by reducing risks of causing damages to equipment, human injuries or even fatalities. This paper describes how Virtual Reality, Human Factors and Rule-based technologies are used in the framework of the VIRTHUALIS Integrated Project towards industrial training, safety management and accident investigation. The paper focuses mainly on the VR system specification and basic modules, while at the same time it presents the main system modules that synthesize the tool as a whole. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Model checking Web service behaviour has remained limited to checking safety and liveness properties. However when viewed as a multi agent system, the system composition can be analysed by considering additional properties which capture the knowledge acquired by services during their interactions. In this paper we present a novel approach to model checking service composition where in addition to safety and liveness, epistemic properties are analysed and verified. To do this we use a specialised system description language (ISPL) paired with a symbolic model checker (MCMAS) optimised for the verification of temporal and epistemic modalities. We report on experimental results obtained by analysing the composition for a Loan Approval Service. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) makes application development flexible in such a way that services are composed in a highly distributed manner. However, because of the flexibility, it is often hard for users to define application configurations properly. Regarding the security concerns we address in this paper, though WS-SecurityPolicy provides a standard way to describe security policies, it is difficult for users to make sure that the defined policies are valid. In this paper, we discuss the validation of WS-SecurityPolicy in the context of Service Component Architecture, and propose a method called syntactic validation. Most enterprises have security guidelines, some of which can be described in the format of Web services security messages. There also exist standard profiles for Web services such as the WS-I Basic Security Profile that also prescribes message formats. Since those guidelines and profiles are based on accepted best practices, the syntactic validation is sufficiently effective for practical use to prevent security vulnerabilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The nature of the conscious experience of love is a puzzle to people all around the world. Many of us want to understand our love in order to make it more sustainable. An application developed for this purpose is presented in this paper: Rose is a self-evaluation application that aims to help individuals evaluate and understand the many dimensions of their love. Rose is freely available on the Internet. In this paper, we summarize the results of everybody who has taken part in the on-line self-evaluation using this application. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Timely traffic identification is critical in network security monitoring and traffic engineering. Traditional methods using well-known ports, protocols and precise signature matching are no longer accurate with the proliferation of new applications. Recently, applying pattern recognition methods to classify network application traffic based on the flow parameters (e.g. port, flow duration, etc.) has become increasing popular. However, many methods developed in the previous works are either too complex to be applied in real-time, or suffer from lower accuracy due to the insufficient knowledge of the application. In this paper, we first give an overview on the developments of pattern recognition methods as traffic classification tools. We then develop two separate pattern recognition methods: one with supervised learning, and one with un-supervised learning, and apply them to classify traffic captured from a campus backbone network. The supervised learning method (an optimized SVM method) yields approximately 99.41% accuracy for the collected traffic. The un-supervised learning method (an entropy based clustering method) gets the average accuracy of 92.41% for the top 20 traffic generating hosts during the same time period. Performance test on a single PC with 3GHz Pentium 4 processors and 1GB of memory show that both methods can handle more than 10000 network flows per second, close to real time requirements for many situations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The development of video games is a complex software engineering activity bringing together large multidisciplinary teams under stringent constraints. While much has been written about how to develop video games, there has been as yet little attempt to view video game development from a quality perspective, attempting to enumerate the quality attributes that must be satisfied by game implementations, and to relate implementation techniques to those quality attributes. In this paper, we discuss desired quality attributes of 3D computer games, and we use the development of our own Life is a Village game to illustrate architectural tactics that help achieve these desired qualities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes a metamodeling strategy of Service Level Agreements for Digital Video Broadcasting services based on Service Level Agreement Language(SLAng). The purpose of the paper is to provide a detailed analysis of SLAs in this domain and provide a motivation for modeling and automating their management. We also discuss why precise and machine readable SLAs can improve the levels of automation in SLA Management thereby reducing potential violations. The meta-modeling approach based on the Model Driven Architecture(MDA) described in this paper also simplifies the integration of a SLA Management systems with other infrastructure that delivers the service to the client. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses an adaptive modulation technique combined with space-frequency block coded OFDM(SFBC OFDM) over frequency selective channels and evaluates the performance in terms of the outdated channel state information(CSI) in mobile environments. This paper employs the Alamouti's diversity scheme in multiple input multiple output OFDM (MIMO OFDM) and an adaptive modulation with enhanced performance. Adaptive modulation scheme shows very attractive performance when the CSI is perfect. The CSI for bit loading in MIMO OFDM can be obtained from the singular value decomposition(SVD) of MIMO channel. But, SFBC OFDM system based on Alamouti's diversity scheme does not require the SVD process. Through various simulations, the performance of SFBC OFDM employing adaptive modulation is compared with that of fixed modulation. Also, in adaptive modulation scheme, the effects of the outdated CSI under mobile environments are shown [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we describe a framework for the application of semantic granularities to the Semantic Web. Given a data source and an ontology formalizing qualities which describe the source, we define a dynamic granularity system for the navigation of the repository according to different levels of detail, i.e., granularities. Semantic granularities summarize the degree of informativeness of the qualities, taking into account both the individuals populating the repository, which concur in the definition of the implicit semantics, and the ontology schema, which gives the formal semantics. The method adapts and extends to ontologies existing natural language processing techniques for topics generalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The growing development of web-based reputation systems in the 21st century will have a powerful social and economic impact on both business entities and individual customers, because it makes transparent quality assessment on products and services to achieve customer assurance in the distributed web-based Reputation Systems. The web-based reputation systems will be the foundation for web intelligence in the future. Trust and Reputation help capture business intelligence through establishing customer trust relationships, learning consumer behavior, capturing market reaction on products and services, disseminating customer feedback, buyers' opinions and end-user recommendations. It also reveals dishonest services, unfair trading, biased assessment, discriminatory actions, fraudulent behaviors, and un-true advertising. The continuing development of these technologies will help in the improvement of professional business behavior, sales, reputation of sellers, providers, products and services. Given the importance of reputation in this paper, we propose ontology for reputation. In the business world we can consider the reputation of a product or the reputation of a service or the reputation of an agent. In this paper we propose ontology for these entities that can help us unravel the components and conceptualize the components of reputation of each of the entities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Service-Oriented computing can be characterized as the motivating force for interoperable web applications. Businesses that embark on service-oriented technology are inclined to an effective interoperation with other businesses. This interoperation not only can expand businesses' markets but also allow the provision of quality services to citizens for carrying out their everyday transactions. However for an effective utilization of service-oriented computing a variety of other technologies must be involved namely semantics, pragmatics, effective search techniques, intelligent agents and pervasive services. In this paper we focus in one of the phases of service-oriented computing, the web service discovery, and propose an effective pragmatic and pervasive methodology that will enable potential business partners to discover the web servicesThe term web services, as in this paper, is used to refer to semantic web services./processes of their interest. We are particularly emphasizing on the importance of pragmatics and their application during web service discovery, because only a pragmatic consideration can provide complete and unambiguous meaning to web service usage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When using electronic services, people are often asked to provide personal information. This raises many privacy issues. To gain the trust of the user, service providers can use privacy policy languages such as P3P to declare the purpose and usage of this personal information. User agents can compare these policies to privacy preferences of a user and warn the user if his privacy is threatened. This paper extends two languages: P3P and APPEL. It makes it possible to refer to certified data and credentials. This allows service providers to define the minimal level of assurance. It is also shown how different ways of disclosure (exact, blurred, verifiably encrypted...) can be specified to achieve more privacy friendly policies. Last, the paper describes a privacy agent that makes use of the policies to automate privacy friendly information disclosure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wireless PAN Mesh Network (WMN) is currently going to be standardized and enhanced to take full advantages of the flexible and heterogeneous networks. Although the standard (802.15.5) is under-construction, WMNs are expected to become popular as they have the ability to connect all kinds of current networks. So far, there is no applied architecture which is efficient enough to completely solve routing and security problems in WMN. To assist IEEE P805.15 in routing and security aspects, in this paper, we propose an adaptive algorithm for detecting bogus nodes when they attempt to intrude into the network by attacking routing protocol. In addition, a procedure to find the most optimal path between two nodes is presented along with adaptive pre-conditions for WMNs. We also show that our algorithm is robust according to the mobility of the nodes and it is easy to implement in currently proposed architectures. It can work with many kinds of wireless networks as well as can reduce computational costs. Keywords: Wireless PAN Mesh Networks, Security, Intrusion Detection, Clustering, Optimal Path, Routing, Attack on Routing Protocol. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

OLAP provides an efficient way for business data analysis. However, most up-to-date OLAP tools often make the analysts lost in the sea of data while the analysts usually focus their interest on a subset of the whole dataset. Unfortunately, OLAP operators are usually not capsulated within the subset. What's more, the users' interests often arise in an impromptu way after the user getting some information from the data. In this paper, we give the definition of users' interests and propose the user-defined virtual cubes to solve this problem. At the same time, we present an algorithm to answer the queries upon virtual cube. All the OLAP operators will be encapsulated within this virtual cube without superfluous information retrieved. Experiments show the effectiveness and efficiency of the virtual cube mechanism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

CE-ants (Cross Entropy ants) is a distributed, robust and adaptive swarm intelligence system for dealing with path management in communication networks. This paper focuses on strategies for adjusting the overhead generated by the CE-ants as the state of the network changes. The overhead is in terms of number of management packets (ants) generated, and the adjustments are done by controlling the generation rate of ants traversing the network. The self-tuned strategies proposed in this paper detect state changes implicitly by monitoring parameters and ant rates in the management system. Rate adaptation is done both in the network nodes and in the peering points of the virtual paths. The results are promising, and compared to fixed rate strategies the self-tuned strategies show a significant saving (70-85%) in number of packets, and has similar (even slightly better) data packet delay and service availability. The rate adaptation in network nodes provides fast restoration with short path detection times and hence also high service availability. The implicit self-tuned ant rate in the path endpoints improves the convergence time on link state events without flooding the network with management packets in steady state when these are not required. Keywords: Cross Entropy, swarm intelligence, CE-ants, network management, restoration time, service availability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Document clustering is classifying a data set of documents into groups of closely related documents, so that its resulting clusters can be used in browsing and searching the documents of a specific topic. In most cases of such as application, a set of new documents are incrementally added to the data set and there can be a large variation in the number of words in each document. This paper proposes an incremental document clustering method for an incrementally increasing data set of documents. The normalized inverse document frequency of a word in the data set is introduced to cope with the variation of the number of words in each document. Furthermore, an average link method for document clustering instead of using one similarity measure used in two similarity measures: a cluster cohesion rate and a cluster participation rate. Furthermore, a category tree for a set of identified clusters is introduced to assist the incremental document clustering of newly added documents. In this paper, the performance of the proposed method is analyzed by a series of experiments to identify their various characteristics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Internet Technology Track received around 60 papers and the papers were reviewed by the International program committee and finally 9 papers have been selected for presentation (6 full and 3 short papers). As the track chair, I would like to thank all the authors who submitted their papers in this track and all the PC members who reviewed the papers in timely fashion. The paper presentation in this track is organized into three sessions, (1) Internet Search and Query, (2) E-commerce, (3) Web Browsing. I hope you enjoyed your presence in these sessions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Distributed Computing track of ICDCIT 2005 received 181 papers. Based on the review by the members of the Program Committee, 16 full and 9 short papers were selected for inclusion in the proceedings of the conference. The accepted papers cover a wide range of topics in Distributed Computing. Design of MAC protocol, network architecture and routing protocol for Wireless Ad-Hoc Networks seem to attract the attention of many researchers. 5 of the 16 accepted full papers fall in this area. The other popular areas include, Network Security, Sensor Networks, Fault Detection and Recovery and Grid Computing. Each of these areas will have at least 3 papers in the proceedings. The Distributed Computing track will also have papers in the areas of Cellular Networks, Peer-to-Peer Networks, Optical Networks, Information Retrieval, QoS and Mobile IP. We have put together a program that covers many important areas of Distributed Computing. We hope you will find the papers in this track informative, interesting and useful. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We welcome our workshop attendees to a very interesting collection of discussions. We received many papers and had to limit the acceptance rate to 40those papers submitted. The papers cover a range of topics from Infrastructure, Service Discovery, Personalization, Environments, Security, Privacy, to Wireless and Sensor Networks showing the scope of interests and activities represented by the PerSys participants. We would like to thank everyone who submitted a paper and believe you will all find the presentations and discussions stimulating and worthwhile. The reviewers of the papers have done a terrific job in helping authors prepare better final papers and deserve special thanks for completing the job promptly. Last, we would like to thank the organizers of the conference a sincere thanks for the hard work they have put in to providing us with the opportunity to gather, present, listen, and discuss our research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes a new control system interface which utilises the user's eye gaze to enable severely disabled individuals control electronic devices easily. The system is based upon a novel human computer interface, which facilitates simple control of electronic devices by predicting and responding to the user's possible intentions, based intuitively upon their point of gaze. The interface responds by automatically pre-selecting and offering only those controls appropriate to the specific device that the user looks at, in a simple and accessible manner. It therefore affords the user conscious choice of the appropriate range of control actions required, which may be executed by simple means and without the need to navigate manually through potentially complex control menus to reach them. Two systems using the head-mounted and the remote eye tracker respectively are introduced, compared and evaluated in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The state of the art in vehicle configuration is still very much characterized by a face-to-face sales situation. In addition, web browsers are becoming market places. But direct sales over the internet, without contact with a sales person constitute still a small segment of the market, of only a few percent for European manufacturers. The internet is more used as a medium to gather information. A standardised DIYD vehicle configuration is thus a must for European manufacturers today. This paper presents an Intelligent DIY e-commerce system for vehicle design, based on Ontologies and 3D Visualization, that aims at enabling a suitable representation of products with the most realistic possible visualisation outcome. The platform, designed for the automotive sector, includes all the practicable electronic commerce variants and its on-line product configuration process is controlled by an ontology, that was created using the OWL Web Ontology Language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a new method for robustly extracting moving objects in an environment with varying illuminations. The proposed method applies background subtraction scheme based on hue and hue gradient to minimize the effect of the illumination change. First, we train the background images in the HSI color space and build the Gaussian background model with respect to the hue and hue gradient. Next, image subtraction is performed between the trained background image and the current input image based on the Gaussian background model. Finally, the morphological operations are applied to remove the background noise. In this paper, we compare the previous subtraction schemes to our method applied to both the hand and body tracking in order to prove the robustness of the proposed method in sudden illumination changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of personal electronic equipment has significantly increased during recent years. Augmented Reality (AR) technology enables mobile devices to provide a very rich user experience by combining mobile computing with connectivity and location-awareness. In this paper we discuss the approach and development of an Augmented Reality-based personal assistant, combining the familiar interface of a human person with the functionality of a location-aware digital information system. The paper discusses the main components of the system, including the anthropomorphic user interface as well as the results of an initial prototype evaluation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In real life, most of the tasks we perform throughout the day are first person tasks. Shouldn't these same tasks be realized from a first person point of view in virtual reality? This paper presents a first person Projection-based Visuo-Haptic Environment, and virtual prototyping and data exploration applications taking advantage of the first person visuo-haptic features of this configuration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we propose a device that indicates the direction of an obstacle that is encroaching into the path of a visually impaired person who is walking. Our proposed system, which would resemble a pair of eyeglasses, first detects an obstacle and then indicates its direction and distance to the wearer through puff of air to the forehead. This paper describes the preliminary testing for presenting distance information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the development and maturity of Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) to support business-to-business transactions, enterprises are using Web services to expose the public functionalities associated with internal systems and business processes. Semantic Web service infrastructure achieves automatic data integration to enable enterprises to collaborate and compete effectively in a dynamic global environment. In this paper, we deal with two important aspects of enterprise information integration, namely process integration and data convergence. This paper talks about solution strategies for global enterprise system which provides unified information and agile solution with greater ease and simplicity. Today's Web data lacks machine understandable semantics making it impossible to achieve data integration with the Web service. Hence, the semantic Web services in action to overcome the limitations of information finding, information extracting, information representing, information interpreting and information maintaining. This paper takes you through a case study simulating semantic Web paradigm (and semantic Web services) over a leasing business system. It also portrays the various advantages and explains the hurdles in accepting the semantic Web technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is an architectural approach to development that turns traditional techniques upside down. SOA encourages organizations to think in terms of actual business services and the associated data, rather than low level technology details. Instead of developing applications from the ground up, SOA frees organizations to start with high level business definitions for data, interfaces, documents, and processes. SOA then maps these high level service definitions onto new or existing infrastructure, regardless of the details, location, or programming language in which the systems were written. In this paper we share our practical experience regarding application of SOA to a very large and complex enterprise transformation. By transformation we mean modernization of legacy applications, operating systems, server components, development of new applications, and business process automation with incremental deployment option using either a traditional distributed heterogeneous environment or a set of Virtual machines deployed on a set of utility computing platforms (on-demand computing). Transforming a large and complex enterprise requires digital visibility into the holistic view of the enterprise. This holistic view is captured as a set of interrelated models. Models are digital representations of the enterprise business architecture, the associated technology architecture, and their semantic dependencies. Models are stored in a living and manageable repository with impact analysis capability to accommodate for SOA modernization to be driven by the business needs. We describe our 3D Visible Enterprise (3D-VE) modeling methodology as the analysis phase of our SOA approach. We then describe how such analysis guided us through modernization styles, where each style prescribes the transformation of a legacy entity into its modernized form while following our SOA governance. In this approach the modernization requirements are mapped into the appropriate transformation styles and finally to technical implementation. The mapping follows our SOA governance, a set of guidelines regarding transformation style selection, and the SOA design & run time governance. Relevant SOA standards and products supporting modernization implementation are used to carry the implementation. In particular, some aspect of modernization approach and Unisys SOA governance are described as well. In this paper we tried to describe three important areas of our overall SOA solution methodology, namely the 3D VE modeling, the Architecture Driven Modernization and applied SOA governance to the ADM style. Our plan is to publish subsequent papers each describing the details of our SOA solution methodology, specifically the modeling phase, the tools and methods used to implement the applied ADM styles, criteria selecting ADM style, the SOA governance and the associated SOA standards and products. The paper concludes with lessons learned through such a complex transformation, especially the importance of the front-end business process analysis leading us to identify the components or a subset of the enterprise computing environment for systematic and incremental SOA transformation. Finally we discuss some of the pros and cons of the transformation applying SOA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we address coordination of services in complex business processes. As the main coordination mechanism we rely on a channel-based exogenous coordination language, called Reo, and investigate its application to service-oriented architectures. Reo supports a specific notion of composition that enables coordination of individual services, as well as complex composite business processes. Accordingly, a coordinated business process consists of a set of web services whose collective behavior is coordinated by Reo. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Business Process Execution Language(BPEL) has been recognized as a standard for the service orchestration in Service Oriented Architecture(SOA). Due to the pivotal role played by BPEL in service composition, the reliability of a business process becomes critical for a SOA system, especially during its evolution. Regression testing is well known as an effective technology to ensure the quality of modified programs. To reduce the cost of regression testing, a subset of test cases is selected to (re)run, known as regression test selection. Previous work addressing this problem will fail in the presence of concurrent control flow, which is an important and widely used feature of BPEL in describing service orchestration. In this paper, a regression testing approach for BPEL business processes is presented. In this approach, an impact analysis rule is proposed to identify the test paths affected by the change of BPEL concurrent control structures. Based on the impact analysis result and process changes identification, the impacted test paths are classified into reusable, modified, obsolete and new-structural paths. Experiments show that our approach is feasible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The area of service oriented computing stretches between two extremes: On the one hand industry has pushed a whole stack of WS-* standards and tools to support the integration of distributed services into business applications. These standards are used in production environments and are applied successfully, e.g. in the area of enterprise application integration. However, the expensive and labor intensive task of putting together services and maintaining and administering the composed applications has to be done manually. In contrast, academia is busily working on numerous efforts leveraging ontology based semantics and various AI planning techniques to automate these tasks. Yet, up to now the developed technologies have rarely if ever been applied in industry. In our opinion, this has two main reasons: there is high cost involved in creating the necessary comprehensive ontologies and businesses are reluctant to trust semantic technologies. In this paper we bring together the extremes in order to combine their strengths. We show how to flexibly integrate advanced semantic service discovery, composition and invocation technology into manually created standard BPEL processes. Our approach leaves it to the discretion of the developer to flexibly choose an appropriate degree of automation for the process at hand and thus offers him complete control over the usage of semantic technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A key function of a Service Oriented Architecture is the separation between business logic and the platform of its implementation and deployment. Much of the focus in SOA research has been on service design, implementation, composition, and placement. In this paper we address the challenge of configuring the hosting infrastructure for SOA service deployment. The functional and non-functional requirements of services impose constraints on the configuration of their containers at different levels. Presently, such requirements are captured in informal documents, making service deployment a slow, expensive, and error-prone process. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach to formally capturing service deployment best-practices as model-based patterns. Deployment patterns capture the structure of a solution, without bindings to specific resource instances. They can be defined at different levels of abstraction supporting reuse, and role-based iterative refinement and composition. We show how we extended an existing model driven deployment platform to support pattern based deployment. We formally define pattern semantics, validation, and refinement. We also present an algorithm for automatically instantiating such patterns on multiple distributed service environments. Our approach has been verified in a large prototype that has been used to capture a variety of functional and non-functional deployment constraints, and demonstrate their end-to-end maintenance and realization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Currently scientists and practitioners are discussing Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) as an approach to reconcile business requirements and IT. The alignment of business and technology in organizations is a key challenge in the discipline of Enterprise Architecture (EA). Therefore the contribution starts with a discussion of SOA as an EA integration concept to synchronize business requirements and IT architecture in an efficient way. Differentiating methodological and technological aspects of EA the paper shows the need for methods in the field of domain analysis supporting the design of a SOA. The main contribution of the paper is an algorithm based modeling tool and methodology to support service domain clustering. Service clusters are being used for service definition and management. Due to enormous complexity it is necessary to support architects by finding and defining appropriate clusters. For modeling interdependencies in EA the paper's focus is on business processes, information systems and interfaces. Our approach adopts network-centric algorithms used in the field of social network analysis to define and/or identify service domain clusters in complex scenarios. Edge remover algorithm is used to compute the relevant model aspects. The results of our approach will be demonstrated in a case study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]