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The growing use of information technologies in the educational cycles has raised new requirements for the development of Personalized Learning Materials in terms of content reuse, customization, ease of creation and efficiency of production. In practical terms, the goal is the development of tools for creating reusable, granular, durable, and interoperable Learning Objects (LO), and to compose such objects into meaningful courseware pieces. Several LO development tools require special technical skills in the instructors to exploit reuse and customization features. In addition, the absence of study of the learner's characteristics in the LO authoring process leads sometimes to produce learning materials that don't meet learners' needs and preferences. In this paper, we explore a new way to reuse and personalization based on two principles. First, we have applied product linebased document engineering tools to create the so-called Learning Object Authoring Tool (LOAT), which supports the development and the personalization of learning materials following the Cisco's Reusable Information Object strategy. And second, we used ontologies to provide instructors with extensive knowledge about the learner's characteristics and recommends materials that fits Learners' learning style to increase reuse of learning content.

[EN] Emergency plans are the tangible result of the preparedness activities of the emergency management lifecycle. In many countries, public service organizations have the legal obligation to develop and maintain emergency plans covering all possible hazards relative to their areas of operation. However, little support is provided to planners in the development and use of plans. Often, advances in software technology have not been exploited, and plans remain as text documents whose accessibility is very limited. In this paper, we advocate for the definition and implementation of plan management processes as the first step to better produce and manage emergency plans. The main contribution of our work is to raise the need for IT-enabled planning environments, either at the national or organization-specific levels, which can lead to more uniform plans that are easier to evaluate and share, with support to stakeholders other than responders, among other advantages. To illustrate our proposal, we introduce SAGA, a framework that supports the full lifecycle of emergency plan management. SAGA provides all the actors involved in plan management with a number of tools to support all the stages of the plan lifecycle. We outline the architecture of the system, and show with a case study how planning processes can benefit from a system like SAGA., We thank J. Marzal and R. Garrido, from the UPV Prevention Service, for their cooperation in the early design of SAGA. The work of J.H. Canós, M.C. Penadés, M. Llavador and A. Gómez is partially funded by the Spanish Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia (MEC) under grant TIPEx (TIN2010-19859-C03-03). The work of M.R.S. Borges is partially supported by grant nos. 560223/2010-2 and 308003/2011-0 from CNPq (Brazil) and grant no. E-26/103.076/2011 from FAPERJ (Brazil). The cooperation between the Brazilian and the Spanish research groups was partially sponsored by the CAPES/MECD Cooperation Program, Project #169/PHB2007-0064-PC.

The study of resilience in the emergency management field is nowadays in effervescence. Traditionally, the robustness of organizations against disasters is based on several pillars: equipment, staff training, organization and, especially, planning. All of these dimensions are aimed at increasing the preparedness and recovery of organizations against disasters. While the approaches to resilience in emergency management focus on the processes that implement these dimensions, we approach resilience-building processes from a different perspective: instead of focusing on planning-related activities, we pay attention to the principal outcome of such activities, namely emergency plan. We show how the management of the emergency plan can contribute to reinforcing an organization's resilience. First, we identify the major resilience-related emergency plan components and suggest improved emergency plans that consider the characteristics that contribute to resilience. Secondly, we show how to reinforce the resilience of the organizations that have emergency plans. Our study is based on QuEP, a quality-based framework for the assessment and improvement of emergency plan management within organizations. We have extended and integrated the resilience characteristics as practices of the QuEP's maturity level hierarchy to make up QuEP + R. We describe its resilience model and give details of a supporting tool, currently under development. © 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved., The work of M. C. Penades and J. H. Canos& was partially funded by MINECO under grant CALPE (TIN2015-68608-R) and A.G. NCifiez received support from SENESCYT scholarship program of the Republic of Ecuador.

[EN] In emergency response organizations, information technologies are not adequately explored. Sometimes, the mere adoption of new information technologies is not productive, as their efficient use depends on other interrelated technologies and the environment where they are installed. This work describes a model to help organizations understand their capability in respect to the adoption of these technologies. The model also helps the performing of the evaluation from different perspectives, making it suitable to collaborative evaluation. Using the proposed model, an organization can measure its maturity level in different aspects of the evaluation and guide the investment on its capabilities. Part of the model has been developed for emergency response organizations and the information technology dimension of the model has been applied to two fire department installations., Marcos R. S. Borges was partially supported by grants No. 560223/2010-2 and 480461/2009-0 from CNPq (Brazil). Work of José H. Canós is partially funded by the Spanish Ministerio. de Educación y Ciencia (MEC) under grant TIPEX (TIN2010–19859-C03-03). The cooperation between the Brazilian and the Spanish research groups was partially sponsored by the CAPES/MECD Cooperation Program, Project #169/ PHB2007-0064-PC.

[EN] Emergencies are critical situations that demand immediate action to avoid adverse consequences to life and property. Recent events around the world highlight the importance of the theme. A key challenge in Emergency Management is decision-making under time pressure, with an overload of unconfirmed, uncertain and conflicting information, including the management of many people, with distinct and possibly fluid roles, in different places. Collaboration in these settings is an interesting element, since emergency response generally involves multiple agencies and the public, which, having different views, protocols and priorities, must act in concert to handle the situation. In addition, an increasing amount of virtual information is necessary to inform and manage volunteers. The goal of this workshop is to identify and map the main challenges of collaboration in crisis situations, review current research methods and approaches to address them and address the lack of formal processes, structures, methodologies and tools., Adriana S Vivacqua is partially supported by CNPq grant 308425/2012-0 and FAPERJ grant E26/103.029/2012. Vaninha Vieira is partially supported by CNPq grant 490084/2013-3

The growing use of information technologies in the educational cycles has raised new requirements for the development of In-teractive Learning Materials in terms of content reuse, customi-zation, and ease of creation and efficiency of production. In practical terms, the goal is the development of tools for creating reusable, granular, durable, and interoperable learning objects, and to compose such objects into meaningful courseware pieces. Current learning object development tools require special technical skills in the instructors to exploit reuse and customization features, leading sometimes to unsatisfactory user experiences. In this paper, we explore a new way to reuse and customization following Product Line Engineering principles and tools. We have applied product line-based document engineering tools to create the so-called Learning Object Authoring Tool (LOAT), which supports the development of learning materials following the Cisco s Reusable Information Object strategy. We describe the principles behind LOAT, outline its design, and give clues about how it may be used by instructors to create learning ob-jects in their own disciplines., This project has been funded with support from the European Commission. This publication [communication] reflects the views only of the author, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein. The work of J.H. Canós and M.C. Penadés is partially funded by the Spanish MEC under grant TIPEx (TIN2010-19859-C03-03).

One of the main concerns in the organization and management of public transportation is passenger safety before an emergency. This is even more critical in the case of subway transportation, where risks are higher in the case of fire. Handling a critical emergency is a stressing task, in which large amounts of information must be used in order to make the right decision in a very short time. In this paper, we describe a pioneering application of hypermedia technology consisting of the integration of all the information needed to handle emergencies in a large hypermedia document. It reduces the response time remarkably by integrating text, graphics, sound, video and 3D models in a user-friendly interface. The authors and the Safety Office of Metro Valencia, the public transportation company of Valencia, developed it jointly between 1998 and 2000. We outline some of the technical decisions made during the project, as well as some of the lessons learned concerning the development of large hypermedia projects.

Context - Advances in customization have highlighted the need for tools supporting variable content document management and generation in many domains. Current tools allow the generation of highly customized documents that are variable in both content and layout. However, most frameworks are technology-oriented, and their use requires advanced skills in implementation-related tools, which means their use by end users (i.e. document designers) is severely limited. Objective - Starting from past and current trends for customized document authoring, our goal is to provide a document generation alternative in which variants are specified at a high level of abstraction and content reuse can be maximized in high variability scenarios. Method Based on our experience in Document Engineering, we identified areas in the variable content document management and generation field open to further improvement. We first classified the primary sources of variability in document composition processes and then developed a methodology, which we called DPL based on Software Product Lines principles to support document generation in high variability scenarios. Results - In order to validate the applicability of our methodology we implemented a tool DPLfw to carry out DPL processes. After using this in different scenarios, we compared our proposal with other state-of-the-art tools for variable content document management and generation. Conclusion - The DPLfw showed a good capacity for the automatic generation of variable content documents equal to or in some cases surpassing other currently available approaches. To the best of our knowledge, DPLfw is the only framework that combines variable content and document workflow facilities, easing the generation of variable content documents in which multiple actors play different roles., This work has been partially funded by the Spanish Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad under Grant TIPEx (TIN2010-19859-C03-03).

[EN] Having the right information at the right time is crucial to make decisions during emergency response. To fulfill this requirement, emergency management systems must provide emergency managers with knowledge management and visualization tools. The goal is twofold: on one hand, to organize knowledge coming from different sources, mainly the emergency response plans (the formal knowledge) and the information extracted from the emergency development (the contextual knowledge), and on the other hand, to enable effective access to information. Formal and contextual knowledge sets are mostly disjoint; however, there are cases in which a formal knowledge piece may be updated with some contextual information, constituting composite knowledge. In this paper, the authors extend a knowledge framework with the notion of composite knowledge, and use spatial hypertext to visualize this type of knowledge. The authors illustrate the proposal with a case study on accessing to information during an emergency response in an underground transportation system., A preliminary version of this paper was presented at the 7th Intemational Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (ISCRAM 201 O), held from May 2 to 5, 2010 in Seattle, WA (USA). The work of J. H. Canós, M. C. Penadés and M. Llavador is partially funded by the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología (MICINN) underprojects DEEPEN (TIN2009-08084) and TlPEx (TIN2010-19859-C03-03). The work of C. Solis is funded by Science Foundation Ireland, grant 03/CE2/1303_1, to LERO. The workofM. R S. Bruges is partially supported by grantsNo. 304252/2008-5 and480461/2009-0, respectively, from CNPq (Brazil). The work of A. S.Vivacquais partially supportedby FAPERJ (Brazil).M. Llavadorwas theholderoftheMECFPU grant no. AP2005-3356. The cooperation between the Brazilian and the Spanish research groups was partially sponsored by the CAPES/MECD Cooperation Program, Project #169/PHB2007-0064-PC.

non-peer-reviewed Emergency plans are fundamental for the speedy and effective response in disaster situations. Plans are often constructed by teams of experts, who apply their expertise to define response procedures, but lack part of location-specific knowledge that can be very relevant to make decisions during responses. Such knowledge is, however, in the minds of people who use those spaces every day, but are not involved in the planning processes. In this paper, we advocate for citizens' involvement in emergency plan elaboration via Public Participation, a mechanism long time used in other areas of egovernment. We define the steps of a collaborative process for the elicitation of citizen's knowledge via Public Participation. A summary of the results of an initial case study is used to demonstrate the feasibility of our proposal for improving emergency plans

The natural disasters occurred recently became one of the main press reports, especially the lack of adequate tools to manage emergency response. One of the aspects observed is the participation of field teams in the resolution of a crisis situation, mostly limited in sending information and executing tasks. Despite the importance of this communication, it is necessary to improve the interaction. Few studies have focused on how the operative use of information technology will affect the Command and Control System. More over, the development of more robust of new technologies and new mobile devices indicate new opportunity for the field teams to use information technology to support their activities. This paper presents a proposal of an information system to support interaction between emergency response teams and to evaluate their impact in a response organization.

In emergency response organizations with very limited resources, information technologies are not adequately explored. In such organizations, the simple adoption of new information technologies is not productive, as their efficient use depends on many other interrelated technologies. This work describes a model to help understanding these interrelationships. The model allows the cooperative evaluation of an organization through different perspectives. Using the model, an organization can measure its maturity level and guide the investment in emergency response capabilities. The information technology dimension of the model has been applied to the firefight organization in Brazil.

In emergency response organizations with very limited resources, information technologies are not adequately explored. In such organizations, the simple adoption of new information technologies is not productive, as their efficient use depends on many other interrelated technologies. This work describes a model to help understanding these interrelationships. The model allows the cooperative evaluation of an organization through different perspectives. The model also helps the performing of the evaluation from different perspectives, making it suitable to collaborative evaluation. Using the model, an organization can measure its maturity level and guide the investment in emergency response capabilities. The information technology dimension of the model has been applied to the firefight organization in Brazil.

We introduce a process-based approach to navigational design of hypermedia applications. Unlike most current methods, which use the information structure as the basis for building the navigational structure, we start from a workflow-like process model to create a two-level navigational model. On one hand, the strong navigational schema is composed of nodes called activity views and links derived from control flow relationships of the process model. On the other hand, a weak navigational schema is developed for each activity view based on the information a given actor has to use to perform the associated activity. Our approach allows designers to solve in a natural way the problems where the business processes prevail over the information structure.

Currently, software architecture is presented as a solution for the design and development of complex and large software systems. One of the main advantages of the use of software architectures is reuse [1]. Software architectures allow us to reuse software at different levels of abstraction (simple components, architectural styles, etc.) for different purposes (general and domainspecific). Reuse improves the time and cost invested in the development and maintenance processes of software.

Interoperability has been one of the most challenging issues of last decade. Different solutions with various levels of sophistication have been proposed, such as wrappers, mediators, and other types of middleware. In most solutions, the Extensible Markup Language (XML) has been accepted as the de facto standard for the interchange of information due to its simplicity and flexibility.

An emergency response activity usually involves several teams from different organizations working cooperatively for the purpose of saving lives or properties. These teams have to make many decisions under time pressure to accomplish their goals. Most decisions require contextual knowledge coming from the emergency settings, including those which report the activities of other emergency teams. The goal of this paper is to describe a system which aims at storing and disseminating the contextual knowledge required by teams during the course of an emergency.

Service Oriented Computing [1] is consolidating as the dominant paradigm for software development of this decade. The support it has received from researchers, practitioners and –most important –the software industry demonstrates the suitability of this approach. This means that current software systems must evolve in this direction in order to keep aligned with technology, providing a set of services that can be invoked by programs instead of end users.

Virtual Organizations (VO) consisting of heterogeneous institutions and individuals that share resources dynamically and in a coordinated way to support collaborative problem-solving are emerging in many fields. Consequently, new types of distributed infrastructures known as Grids have been proposed to cope with these new sharing requirements. Grids offer sets of collective services to support collaborative tasks which are distributed in nature and need asynchronous communication. Existing approaches to this problem lack of flexibility, adaptability and are tightly bound to the collective service that is provided. We present here a generic event model to build collective services that requires no programming, is extensible and can accommodate different event vocabularies. An implementation is also described using standard Web technologies like Java Servlets, XML, XSLT, and XSQL.

We describe an experiment carried out to compare the use of the Rational Unified Process and eXtreme Programming in the development of an information system, from a learning and training perspective. The experience was carried out with upper-level undergraduate students of the School of Computer Science at the Valencia University of Technology. We summarize the results obtained, from which some interesting conclusions can be obtained.

The advent of the Internet has led to dramatic changes in the cultural habits of citizens, the most remarkable of which is undoubtedly the democratization of the access to the culture. Focusing in the museum world, we foresee a new generation of information systems providing compatibility with the sensorial richness of existing in-place visits, augmentation of visits with virtual information so that artworks are better understood, dynamic content management, and ubiquity. In this paper we introduce the notion of Hybrid Museum as a virtual organization consisting of a physical museum where visitors are present, plus a distributed heterogeneous collection of sources of catalogued artwork, a middleware infrastructure to provide ubiquitous access to those sources and a wireless infrastructure so that disseminations may be available to visitors at any moment. We aim at building hybrid museums by integrating heterogeneous distributed sources that are managed and operated independently. We identify the different services hybrid museums must provide, and use the grid architectural model which has been successfully tested in other virtual organizations, to define their architectural features. Finally, we also describe MoMo, an implementation of a hybrid museum running on market-based handheld PCs to prove the feasibility of our ideas.

One of the main trends in software development in the last years is to use prototypes for validating requirements specifications at early phases of the software lifecycle. Moreover, the Automation-BasedParadigm provides an alternative to software construction, using formal methods as a basis for introducing automation in the development process. Among these methods, formal specification languages appear as the necessary tool for generating prototypes in an automatic process. FMOL is a formal Functional and Object-Oriented specification language, developed for specifying OO-Databases Conceptual Schemata. This paper describes the language and presents an enhancement of the prototyping environment introduced in [1]: the addition of logic variables that provides a powerful query language through the execution of specifications via conditional narrowing.

Present-day museums are not mere passive institutions for the preservation of a society's cultural heritage. They have become instead learning environments, research centres and even tourist attractions. The paper introduces the notion of a hybrid museum (HM) in which wireless personal digital devices (PDAs) are used to tailor digital contents to the visitor to enrich both the learning and entertainment experience. The paper describes a fully functional hybrid museum infrastructure (MoMo) implemented with the.NET compact framework running on the PocketPC platform. Several research challenges that had to be faced during the implementation of the system such as the exploration of large sets of information on PDAs are also presented; and the customisation and personalisation of the displayed contents using a modified partial prediction matching algorithm are also discussed.