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SEEMP is a European Project that promotes increased partnership between labour market actors and the development of closer relations between private and public Employment Services, making optimal use of the various actors’ specific characteristics, thus providing job-seekers and employers with better services. The need for a flexible collaboration gives rise to the issue of interoperability in both data exchange and share of services. SEEMP proposes a solution that relies on the concepts of services and semantics in order to provide a meaningful service-based communication among labour market actors requiring a minimal shared commitment.

Cloud Platform as a Service (PaaS) provides an environment for creating and deploying applications using one of popular development platforms. This paper presents a practical solution for building a service composition platform based on the GEMBus (GEANT Multi-domain Bus) that extends the industry accepted Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) platform with automated services composition functionality and core services to support federated network access to distributed applications and resources, primarily targeted for GEANT research and academic community. The ESB is widely used as a platform for SOA and Web Services based integrated enterprise solutions. However in existing practices ESB design is still based on manual development, configuration and integration. GEMBus with its extended functionality and orientation on distributed resources integration can be considered as a logical choice for creating cloud PaaS services composition and provisioning platform. The paper describes Composable Services Architecture that creates a basis for automated services composition and lifecycle management and explains how this can be implemented with GEMBus. The paper describes the combined GEMBus/ESB testbed and provides an example of the simple services composition.

Recent developments in data analysis and machine learning support novel data-driven operations. Event data provide social and environmental context, thus, such data may become essential for the workflow of data analytic pipelines. In this paper, we introduce our Business Event Exchange Ontology (BEEO), based on Schema.org that enables data integration and analytics for event data. BEEO is available under Apache 2.0 license on GitHub, and is seeing adoption among both its creator companies and other product and service companies. We present and discuss the ontology development drivers and process, its structure, and its usage in different real use cases.

Digital marketing is a domain where data analytics are a key factor to gaining competitive advantage and return of investment for companies running and monetizing digital marketing campaigns on, e.g., search engines and social media. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end approach to enrich marketing campaigns performance data with third-party event data (e.g., weather events data) and to analyze the enriched data in order to predict the effect of such events on campaigns’ performance, with the final goal of enabling advanced optimization of the impact of digital marketing campaigns. The use of semantic technologies is central to the proposed approach: event data are made available in a format more amenable to enrichment and analytics, and the actual data enrichment technique is based on semantic data reconciliation. The enriched data are represented as Linked Data and managed in a NoSQL database to enable processing of large amounts of data. We report on the development of a pilot to build a weather-aware digital marketing campaign scheduler for JOT Internet Media—a world leading company in the digital marketing domain that has amassed a huge amount of data on campaigns performance over the years—which predicts the best date and region to launch a marketing campaign within a seven-day timespan. Additionally, we discuss benefits and limitations of applying semantic technologies to deliver better optimization strategies and competitive advantage.

This paper describes MantisTable, an open source Semantic Table Interpretation tool, which automatically annotates tables using a Knowledge Graph. MantisTable provides a graphical interface allowing users to analyse the results of the semantic table interpretation process and validate the final annotations. The tool also provides a guided mode for viewing and editing annotations by users. Thanks to MantisTable features, it is possible to create semantic annotations and favour the publication and exchange of tabular data.

EW-Shopp is an innovation project, the aim of which is to build a platform for support of data linking, integration, and analytics in companies from the e-commerce, retail, and marketing industries. The project consortium joins several business partners from different sectors of e-commerce including marketing, price comparison, and both web and brick-and-mortar stores. The project is developing several pilot services to test the platform and inform its further development.

Cloud computing and Internet of Things are imposing a dramatic change in software development and delivery. Moreover, ICT solutions are paving innovation in every sector and therefore becoming a business factor for the success of any enterprise. The implications are manifold since technical issues need to be harmonised with social, organisational and legal aspects. In this paper we illustrate and comment the current trends to identify research directions to build services as comprehensive components accessible via APIs. The goal is to deliver services ecosystems, which call for open platforms to manage services that can connect and interact via shared protocols in dynamic heterogeneous contexts. Machine-readable semantic descriptions, microservices (single-function services), and containers (independent units of deployment) are discussed as building blocks for software architectures of the future.

This paper presents a subsystem of a comprehensive platform dedicated to data transformation, linking and extension of large data sets. Furthermore, we detail and discuss both the main requirements that have led to the design and development of the platform, and the devised approach, which is a direct outcome of the requirement elicitation and discussion phase. In particular, the platform supports both design and run time aspects of the data transformation process, which is reflected in the architecture. Some initial tests have been carried out on a prototype implementation of our architecture on data sets of ~1TB featuring promising performance.

We present Touch&Screen, a wide set of interaction techniques for the remote control of widgets (menu, lists, videos, maps etc.) for large screens through smartphones. After presenting the design of these widgets and the related control interfaces of the smartphone, we evaluated the interaction through two user studies. The first study (48 users) aimed to evaluate the user experience (naturalness, usability, etc.) and spontaneity of use. The second user study (12 users) aimed to evaluate our interaction techniques comparatively with direct touch and a commercial smartphone application designed to control cursors on distant screens. The evaluation results show that Touch&Screen is faster and more natural than existing solutions to control distant screens.

Web services are increasingly used as an effective means to create and streamline processes and collaborations among governments, businesses, and citizens. As the number of available Web services is steadily increasing, there is a growing interest in providing methodologies that address the design of Web services according to specific qualities of service (QoS) rather than functional descriptions only. In this paper, we present WSMoD (Web Services MOdeling Design), a methodology that explicitly addresses this issue. Furthermore, we exploit general knowledge available on services, expressed by ontologies describing services, their qualities, and the context of use, to help the designer in expressing service requirements. Ontologies are used to acquire knowledge among the entities involved in service design and to check the consistency of the Web service. The discussion of a QoS-based Web service design within a real case study bears evidence of the potentials of WSMoD.

Citizens managing life events are often challenged in finding the needed municipality services (MuSe) and understanding the specific delivery conditions of such services. The lack of a comprehensive view of available services on municipality portals and online systems makes the challenge harder. In this paper, we describe the MuSe ontology, developed in the context of an Italian project that: i) supports the creation of formal and machine-readable descriptions of services available to citizens; ii) enables for personalised recommendations of services based on citizen profiles. Moreover, the paper describes how such recommendations are defined by means of an innovative semantic solution for supply demand matchmaking and how such recommendations are shown to citizens.

YouTube4Two is an application that exploits the YouTube media library (through its API) to demonstrate a new style of social interaction. Two co-present people can share a video and act autonomously to navigate the related-video and comment lists, and search for videos. The novelty is that they can use their own smartphones connected via In- Ternet to control the shared application. The application has been designed according to the responsive-web-design (RWD) principle to smoothly pass from desktop interface (controlled by mouse and keyboard) to smartphone inter- face (with touch control). YouTube4Two introduces the multi-device responsive Web design (MD-RWD) style that extends the RWD style by introducing the separation be- Tween displayed content (on a shared screen) and displayed control commands (on personal smartphones) to support shared control over an application

Web services promise universal interoperability through integration of services developed by independent providers. The coming of the Cloud Computing paradigm extends the need to share resources (e.g., platform, infrastructure, data) that are accessible as Web services. This means that a key factor to build complex and valuable business processes among cooperating organizations relies on the efficiency of automate the discovering of appropriate Web services. The increasing availability of Web services that offer similar functionalities requires mechanisms to go beyond the pure functional discovery. This chapter proposes the evaluation of Web service contracts, which define non-functional properties (NFPs) and applicability conditions associated with Web services, as a solution to automate process composition and enactment. Today, there is a lack of tools and algorithms that fully support this solution due to several open issues. First, existing languages don't provide the right constructs for the specification of Web service contracts. Second, the lack of standard languages determines heterogeneity in Web service contract specifications raising interoperability issues. Third, Web service contract evaluation is only partially supported by existing discovery engines and composition tools when combining different services from different providers. This chapter proposes some research efforts on addressing these open issues.

The presence of heterogeneous communication protocols and interfaces prevents from giving self-managing capabilities to service systems. This paper proposes the exploitation of the widely adopted HTTP protocol to create a shared platform that fosters the definition of services that can be easily integrated and controlled. Such services will be provided with RESTful interface and interaction style to gather data and control behavior of sensors to support the development of sensor services integrated with other services in pervasive systems. © Springer-Verlag 2013.

This paper describes the basic ideas of the HyperReal project. It is centered on the definition of architectural abstractions to design modular RT systems. Basic components are reactive agents manipulating data and connectors supporting interactions among agents. Such components are not aware of control strategies, which are managed by a controller. The controller relies on a time-driven model of control, and separates planning and dispatching of actions. Plans are associated with virtual clocks that support the explicit management of time. The architectural abstractions allow designers to fully control the temporal behavior of the system and to reuse components to fit different application-oriented control models.

Service-Oriented Architectures (SOAs) are a widespread solution for realizing distributed applications. Empowered by semantic technologies these architectures will evolve in what is known as Semantically Enabled Service Oriented Architectures (SESAs) providing automatic support for various service related tasks such as discovery, ranking, composition, etc. Services are the core building blocks of both SOA-and SESA- based systems and therefore modelling various aspects of services becomes a fundamental challenge to any enterprise building SOA solutions. Among these aspects, non-functional properties of a service need to be addressed given the high dynamism of any SOA-based system. Non-functional properties descriptions are highly relevant for many of the service related tasks such as discovery, ranking, selection, and negotiation. This chapter investigates several research problems which arise in the area of Semantic Web services, namely how to describe non-functional properties of services, what models are required, and what is the proper language support for describing Non-functional Properties. Our solution was developed, and is part of the Web Service Modelling Ontology, one of the major initiatives in Semantic Web services area. We present a comprehensive set of ontological models for non-functional properties, our approach to attach non-functional properties descriptions to services, and the language support needed to formalize non-functional properties descriptions. © 2012, IGI Global.

The aim of a cooperative system is to coordinate and support group activities. Cooperative Systems Design Language (CSDL) is an experimental language designed to support the development of cooperative systems from specification to implementation. In CSDL, a system is defined as a collection of reusable entities implementing floor control disciplines and shared workspaces. CSDL tries to address the difficulties of integrating different aspects of cooperative systems: Cooperation control, communication, and system modularization. This paper presents CSDL as a specification language. Basic units are coordinators that can be combined hierarchically. A coordinator is composed of a specification, a body, and a context. The specification defines the cooperation policy; the body controls the underlying communication channels; and the context defines coordinators' interaction in modular systems. © 1994, IEEE

Currently, rich and diverse data types have been increasingly provided using the Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) model, a form of cloud computing services. However, data offered by DaaS are constrained by several data concerns that, if not automatically being reasoned properly, will lead to a wrong way of using them. In this paper, we support the assumption that data concerns should be explicitly modeled and specified in data contracts to support concern-aware data selection and utilization. Instead of relying on a specific definition of data contracts, we analyze contemporary data contracts and we present an abstract model for data contracts. Based on the abstract model, we propose several techniques for evaluating data contracts that can be integrated into data service selection and composition frameworks. We also illustrate our approach with some real world scenarios.

The purpose of this chapter is to introduce the SEEMP marketplace of employment mediators, detailing the business objectives and main features of the SEEMP integrated technology platform. The purpose of SEEMP is to enable the meeting of Job Offers from employers and CVs of job seekers by developing an e-marketplace, improving the business activity of brokers in an employment market currently characterised by: Multiplicity of the players on the market and diversity of the distribution networks: Job Seekers and CVs are distributed across many online databases, brokers and intermediaries. In order to be sufficiently visible, a candidate or an enterprise has to contact several intermediaries, for example temporary work agencies, employment websites, with a redundancy of information and multiplication of the effort needed to correctly classify, qualify and maintain their data. Lack of common standard for Job Offer and CV: The lack of standardized descriptions and search criteria shared by the intermediaries prevents them to exchange information easily and effectively. Insufficient information sharing among the players on the labour market: Inspite of various existing information systems for e-employment, data sharing between entities of intermediary networks remains insufficient. The same holdsfor the cooperation aspects among players in the market, which need cooperative information systems technology. This paper is organized as follows. In Sect. 2, we state the overall objectives of the SEEMP project and state the market vision of the project. In Sect. 3, we present the methodologies adopted in SEEMP in terms of minimal shared commitment that drives the SEEMP policies, and we describe the adopted best practices which help to clarify the agreement levels established for SEEMP and the SEEMP architecture used to implement the interoperability framework. In Sect. 4, we provide a demonstrative use case of the elements described in the paper; this use case is rather simple but proves difficult to solve at a European scale. Finally, in Sect. 5 we introduce some elements of discussion such as a comparison between SEEMP with EURES and other job boards and employment search engines, and set the stage for evaluating the SEEMP benefits for its intended actors; finally we give the concluding remarks.

The NEUROWEB project supports cerebrovascular researchers' association studies, intended as the search for statistical correlations between a feature (e.g., a genotype) and a phenotype. In this project the phenotype refers to the patients' pathological state, and thus it is formulated on the basis of the clinical data collected during the diagnostic activity. In order to enhance the statistical robustness of the association inquiries, the project involves four European Union clinical institutions. Each institution provides its proprietary repository, storing patients' data. Although all sites comply with common diagnostic guidelines, they also adopt specific protocols, resulting in partially discrepant repository contents. Therefore, in order to effectively exploit NEUROWEB data for association studies, it is necessary to provide a framework for the phenotype formulation, grounded on the clinical repository content which explicitly addresses the inherent integration problem. To that end, we developed an ontological model for cerebrovascular phenotypes, the NEUROWEB Reference Ontology, composed of three layers. The top-layer (Top Phenotypes) is an expert-based cerebrovascular disease taxonomy. The middle-layer deconstructs the Top Phenotypes into more elementary phenotypes (Low Phenotypes) and general-use medical concepts such as anatomical parts and topological concepts. The bottom-layer (Core Data Set, or CDS) comprises the clinical indicators required for cerebrovascular disorder diagnosis. Low Phenotypes are connected to the bottom-layer (CDS) by specifying what combination of CDS values is required for their existence. Finally, CDS elements are mapped to the local repositories of clinical data. The NEUROWEB system exploits the Reference Ontology to query the different repositories and to retrieve patients characterized by a common phenotype. (C) 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

The increasing availability of massive information on the Web causes the need for information aggregation by filtering and ranking according to user's goals. In the last years both industrial and academic researchers have investigated the way in which quality of services can be described, matched, composed and monitored for service selection and composition. However, very few of them have considered the problem of evaluating and certifying the quality of the provided service information to reduce irrelevant information for service consumers, which is crucial to improve the efficiency and correctness of service composition and execution. This paper discusses several problems due to the lack of appropriate way to manage quality and context in service composition and execution, and proposes a research roadmap for reducing irrelevant service information based on context and quality aspects. We present a novel solution for dealing with irrelevant information about Web services by developing information quality metrics and by discussing experimental evaluations.

Web service evaluation is a phase in Web service selection where discovered Web services are evaluated with respect to user requests, which means that the non functional properties (NFPs) offered by Web services are compared with the non functional properties requested by users. NFPs cover Quality of Service (QoS) aspects, but also other business-related properties, such as pricing, and properties not directly related to the service functionalities. The fact that users and providers can express their NFPs in very flexible ways makes the management of NFP a very complex task. The Policy Centered Meta-model (PCM) is a semantic-oriented model for sophisticated NFP descriptions that can be exploited to support Web service evaluation. In this paper, we propose a novel approach based on Hierarchical Constraint Logic Programming to handle PCM-based NFP descriptions along the Web service evaluation phase. © 2009 IEEE.

In this paper, we discuss the challenges posed by the NEUROWEB project, as a case study of ontological modeling at a knowledge interface between neurovascular medicine and genomics. The aim of the project is the development of a support system for association studies. We identify the notion of clinical phenotypes, that is, the pathological condition of a patient, as the central construct of the knowledge model. Clinical phenotypes are assessed through the diagnostic activity, performed by clinical experts operating within communities of practice; the different communities operate according to specific procedures, but they also conform to the minimal requirements of international guidelines, displayed by the adoption of a common standard for the patient classification. We develop a central model for the clinical phenotypes, able to reconcile the different methodologies into a common classificatory system. To bridge neurovascular medicine and genomics, we identify the general theory of biological function as the common ground between the two disciplines; therefore, we decompose the clinical phenotypes into elementary phenotypes with a homogeneous physiological background, and we connect them to the biological processes, acting as the elementary units of the genomic world.

Recently, the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model has been increasingly supported, becoming a major part of the new emerging cloud computing paradigms. Although SaaS exists in different forms, supporting and providing SaaS developed based Web services has attracted a large effort from industries and academics because this form of SaaS allows software to be easily composed and integrated to offer new services for customers. Even though various service composition techniques, based on functional and non-functional parameters, have been proposed, the issue of service contract compatibility has been neglected. This issue is of paramount importance in the Web services-based SaaS model because services are provided by different providers, associated with different contracts which are defined by different specifications. This paper proposes techniques for supporting service composers to deal with the heterogeneity of service contracts in service composition. We describe a novel approach for modeling and mapping different service contract specifications, and a set of techniques for evaluating service contract compatibility. Our techniques consider contract terms associated with data and control flows, as well as composition patterns. Illustrating scenarios are proposed to demonstrate the efficiency of our techniques. © 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.

The increasing availability of Web Services asked for investigating ways to automate the discovery process. Discovery processes enhanced with semantics can be recognize to be general, but often they lack the flexibility needed in specific domains. In this paper, we propose the flexible architecture of the discovery engine Glue 2, which comes with a powerful set of discovery components (for functional matching, non-functional matching, data fetching, etc.) that can be executed in different order as required by specific execution workflows. © 2008 IEEE.

The distribution of services spanning across organizational boundaries raises problems related to intellectual value that are less explored in current service oriented research. Being a way to manage the intellectual rights between service consumers and service providers, licenses are critical to be considered in services. A service license describes the terms and conditions for the use and access of the service in a machine interpretable way. The proliferation of services that offer similar functionalities requires the selection process to be enhanced together with consideration of licenses. In this paper, we analyze current service licensing practices and present a novel approach for service selection process based on matching the offered licensing specifications (primarily dealing with scope of rights and financial terms) by providers with the requested licensing specifications by consumers.

A service provider defines individual services with corresponding service licenses which consumers should follow. Often, service consumers are interested in selecting a service based oil certain licensing clauses. For a set of requested licensing clauses by a consumer, there can be several licenses that differ in the set; of offered license specifications. Thus, a license aware service selection process includes the discovery of a, set, of services that meets certain functional parameters and, in addition, the process evaluates these services in order to identify the ones that fulfill a set of license specifications as requested by a consumer. In this paper, we present a methodology and framework for service selection process, based oil matching the offered licensing specifications by providers with the requested licensing specifications by consumers.(1)

Background The huge amount of biological information, its distribution over the Internet and the heterogeneity of available software tools makes the adoption of new data integration and analysis network tools a necessity in bioinformatics. ICT standards and tools, like Web Services and Workflow Management Systems (WMS), can support the creation and deployment of such systems. Many Web Services are already available and some WMS have been proposed. They assume that researchers know which bioinformatics resources can be reached through a programmatic interface and that they are skilled in programming and building workflows. Therefore, they are not viable to the majority of unskilled researchers. A portal enabling these to take profit from new technologies is still missing. Results We designed biowep, a web based client application that allows for the selection and execution of a set of predefined workflows. The system is available on-line. Biowep architecture includes a Workflow Manager, a User Interface and a Workflow Executor. The task of the Workflow Manager is the creation and annotation of workflows. These can be created by using either the Taverna Workbench or BioWMS. Enactment of workflows is carried out by FreeFluo for Taverna workflows and by BioAgent/Hermes, a mobile agent-based middleware, for BioWMS ones. Main workflows' processing steps are annotated on the basis of their input and output, elaboration type and application domain by using a classification of bioinformatics data and tasks. The interface supports users authentication and profiling. Workflows can be selected on the basis of users' profiles and can be searched through their annotations. Results can be saved. Conclusion We developed a web system that support the selection and execution of predefined workflows, thus simplifying access for all researchers. The implementation of Web Services allowing specialized software to interact with an exhaustive set of biomedical databases and analysis software and the creation of effective workflows can significantly improve automation of in-silico analysis. Biowep is available for interested researchers as a reference portal. They are invited to submit their workflows to the workflow repository. Biowep is further being developed in the sphere of the Laboratory of Interdisciplinary Technologies in Bioinformatics – LITBIO.

The discovery of a semantic web service (SWS) is the act of locating a machine-processable description of a SWS-related resource that may have been previously unknown and that meets certain functional criteria. The increasing availability of services that offer similar functionalities requires the discovery process to be enhanced with a selection phase that considers non-functional properties (NFPs) of services. This paper proposes a model to describe these properties and a novel approach to service selection. Our approach is based on the design of matching rules by means of mediators defined by sets of rules stating the condition for successful matches. These rules are based on the ontological description of objects representing NFPs that are required and offered. In particular, we define a set of rule schemas to support mediation and matching for a class of user-defined NFP-constraints clustered according to specified constraint operators. Rules support matching for both qualitative and quantitative non-functional properties

One of the key factors for successful SOC-based systems is the ability to assure the achievement of Quality of Services. The knowledge and the enforcement of the Quality of Services allows for the defi- nition of agreements that are the basis for any business process. In this paper we discuss a method for the evaluation of qualities associated with services. This method is based on a set of quality evaluation rules that state the relations between Web services quality dimensions and process structure. The method is part of a design methodology that addresses quality issues along the service life-cycle. A case study in the e-placement field is presented to illustrate a practical use of the approach.

Due to the diffusion of ubiquitous computing environments, the need for adaptive applications to effectively support knowledge sharing, and improve context awareness without interfering with habitual work practices has gained importance. This paper presents the design of an application architecture that exploits an ontology-based knowledge management framework and a reflective middleware to support multi-channel applications. The development of the middleware is carried on in parallel with the development of a real application, SWIRLS, that aims to support the work in a hospital setting. SWIRLS is a case study with real technology and organizational problems that involves innovative devices, seamless interaction via different channels and domain-dependent knowledge management issues.

A number of dimensions are relevant in order to successfully support community life and development. These dimensions include the easiness and broad spectrum of participation, the provision of value in return to the contributions, the visibility of community activity, the support of different levels of membership, the openness to the external world, and the support for evolving phases of the community life. In this paper we present a system that has been designed in order to tackle those dimensions with a particular attention to participation issues. We present first the sources of requirements that have informed the system design and which include the user observation of two companies. Then we present the system, stressing the features of integration with the daily working environment and the provision of multiple situated views, as a means to address the elicited requirements. Finally, we compare our design choices with a broader set of requirements that we have derived from literature.

Background and purpose : The relationship between the radiation dose and the risk of the osteoradionecrosis is well known. However, the dose to the mandible is not routinely assessed in the radiotherapy for head and neck cancer. The aim of our study was to analyze the mandibular dose distribution in the patients administered curative radiotherapy for squamous cell carcinoma of the oropharynx. Moreover, the clinical results have been analyzed. Material and methods : We examined the clinical records and treatment plans in 18 patients treated with bifractionated radiotherapy for stage II–IV oropharyngeal cancer. In 17 patients, the total radiotherapy dose prescribed in the International Committee of Radiation Units and Measurements (ICRU) reference point was 74.4Gy administered in 62 fractions (1.2Gy twice daily with 6h interfraction interval) and one patient received a dose of 75.6Gy. The whole dose to the mandibular–orophryngeal region was delivered with 6MV photons. The mandible was contoured manually on computed tomographic scans and the point doses at the both mandibular condyles, ascending ramus, mental symphysis, molar and retromolar regions were assessed. Moreover, the cumulative dose–volume histograms (DHVs) were evaluated. The median follow-up period for alive patients is 30 months (range, 21–44+ months). Results : Tumor remission was observed in 17 patients: in 11 cases, complete remission was achieved and in six cases, only partial remission was possible. One patient was lost to follow-up before the first response evaluation. The median survival for all patients is 22 months (range, 3–44+ months). Ten patients are alive and seven died. In six cases, the cause of death was head and neck tumor and in one died due to pancreatic cancer (second primary). No late bone post-radiation complication was seen. The highest radiotherapy doses were observed in the retromolar regions. The mean percentage doses at the right and left retromolar regions were 101.3±3.8% (range, 90.2–109.1%) and 101.7±2.5% (range, 95.2–105.8%), respectively. Lower doses were seen in ascending ramus (the mean percentage doses at right and left ascending ramus were 97.3±8.5% and 97.8±7.6%, respectively), the molar regions (the mean percentage doses at right and left molar regions were 86.0±13.5% and 88.1±12.9%, respectively), and at the mandibular condyles (the mean percentage doses at the right and left mandibular condyles were 72.6±18% and 77.0±16.5%, respectively). The volume of the mandible ranged from 60.1 to 110.1cm 3 (a mean of of 82.3cm 3 ). In all patients, the maximum dose absorbed in the mandible was higher than the dose prescribed in the ICRU point and the mean maximum dose absorbed in the mandible was 105.7±2.1% (range, 102.4–110.6%). The percentage of mandibular volume receiving a dose higher than prescribed was 28.6±14.9% (range 10.2–58.1%). The area underlying the DVH curve, the maximum mandibular doses and the retromolar doses did not appear to statistically depend on use of wedge or mandibular volume. Conclusions : Radiotherapy for oropharyngeal cancer is associated with high doses to the retromolar mandibular regions (the dose can be higher than prescribed in the ICRU reference point), ascending ramus and molar regions. Lower doses are absorbed at the condyles and mental symphysis. The single dose point (for example, the ICRU reference point) could be not used as a representative for the mandibular dose. In our small series of patients treated with hyperfractionated irradiation, these dose heterogeneities were not correlated to the patient- and treatment-related factors and are not related to the increased risk of late bone complications. The clinical relevance of mandibular dose distribution remains to be established in larger series of patients treated with conventionally and unconventionally fractionated irradiation.

As Internet has become the de-facto standard for any modem application, software needs to be reconsidered to address collaboration issues. Aspects like awareness and knowledge management are becoming vital to effective interactive software products. In this scenario, middleware plays a key role as enabling technology toward the goal of development of integrated workspaces. This paper describes a novel collaborative software system and discusses its component-based architecture. The aim of the system is to integrate dispersed knowledge to deliver comprehensive workspaces. Component technology enables the development of open systems that can be easily modified to accommodate both new features and new interaction styles. In the future, collaboration services are envisaged to become part of middleware services.

In this paper we distinguish between two spatially oriented system design paradigms: weak and strong augmented reality. The weak augmented reality paradigm is then applied in the design of a system supporting co-operation and knowledge creation within a design centre. The system has been designed on the hints we got from two subsequent ethnographies of the work practice of creative designers. Since the design centre moved to a new location between our two sets of observations, we clearly focused our attention on the impact that space arrangements had on the practice of its members. The comparison between the two settings in terms of layout, ICT equipment, changes occurred in the practices and attitudes of the designers throughout these years, lead us to design a collaborative environment weakly augmenting the place where designers are working.

Event-driven and time-driven models exhibit a complementary nature, in the sense that they reflect the nature of the contrasting requirements that any real-time system must meet - i.e., performing actions “as soon as possible” or “at the right time”. Even if each of the models is sufficient to model a system, they should be intermixed to improve the expressiveness. This can be achieved by assuming one model as the primitive, and implementing the other on top of it. The paper introduces the rationale for choosing the time-driven model as the primitive, and discusses why this approach is possibly the most suitable for a wide range of control applications. In conclusion, a unifying model, based on the distinction between the atomic actions performed by reactive agents, the control performed by a time-driven control machine, and the planning performed by an event-driven planning machine, is introduced.

Currently, rich and diverse data types have been increasingly provided using the dataas- a-service (DaaS) model, a form of cloud computing services and the core element of data marketplaces. This facilitates the on-the-fly data composition and utilisation for several data-intensive applications in e-science and business domains. However, data offered by DaaS are constrained by several data concerns that, if not automatically being reasoned properly, will lead to a wrong way of using them. In this paper, we support the view that data concerns should be explicitly modelled and specified in data contracts to support concern-aware data selection and utilisation. We perform a detailed analysis of current techniques for data contracts in the cloud. Instead of relying on a specific representation of data contracts, we introduce an abstract model for data contracts that can be used to build different types of data contracts for specific types of data. Based on the abstract model, we propose several techniques for evaluating data contracts that can be integrated into data service selection and composition frameworks. We also illustrate our approach with some real-world scenarios and show how data contracts can be integrated into data agreement exchange services in the cloud.

Symbolic execution is a well known and powerful technique that allows to perform several activities as program testing, program formal verification, program specialization, etc. However, symbolic execution suffers from some problems which disable it to become a wide used technique. For instance, symbolic execution fails when dealing with indexed variables as arrarys, or dynamic data structures as pointers. In this paper we discuss the problem of symbolic execution of programs involving indexed variables by providing a formal definition of symbolic execution. From this starting point we present a practical technique of representing indexed variables that we argue to be more effective than other approaches found in literature. Finally, we present two examples of application of our technique. The former is an example of symbolic testing while the latter is a formal verification of a program.

The authors describe a technique and an environment-supporting specialization of generalized software components. The technique is based on symbolic execution. It allows one to transform a generalized software component into a more specific and more efficient component. Specialization is proposed as a technique that improves software reuse. The idea is that a library of generalized components exists and the environment supports a designer in customizing a generalized component when the need arises for reusing it under more restricted conditions. It is also justified as a reengineering technique that helps optimize a program during maintenance. Specialization is supported by an interactive environment that provides several transformation tools: a symbolic executor/simplifier, an optimizer, and a loop refolder. The conceptual basis for these transformation techniques is described, examples of their application are given, and how they cooperate in a prototype environment for the Ada programming language is outlined

Many available services have been designed for a single-channel world, Web and Internet typically. In a real world scenario, an ever-growing number of users take advantage of different kinds of communication channels and devices. In this paper, we propose a methodology to formalize the re-design process of these services to support multi-channel access in different contexts. The methodology considers the channel characteristics, the location of users and the context of use to characterize the new services. It has been tested in a case study: the Italian National Project of Identification and Registration of Bovine Animals. Copyright 2004 ACM.