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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.

The navigational model, in many methods for hypermedia development, is built based on the structural elements. The dynamic aspects that affect the navigation are not taken in account, although some recent approaches include these dynamic aspects after the generation of a navigational model based on the data structures. In this work we show how to obtain navigational models from process models, as a result the navigational model are more realistic. The method follows a model driven and object oriented approach, for the definition of model transformations. The transformations between the elements in the process model and the navigational model are given. Finally, the applications of that rules are shown through an example.

Because of the complexity of emergency procedures, the stressful situations during which they're executed, the emergency plan must be meticulously designed so that safety managers can quickly find needed information. Regardless of the complex procedures it describes and the trying situations where it would be used, the plan's success is always measured by how effective the evacuation is. Thus, safety-conscious organizations continually try to improve their emergency procedures and the way they present them in the emergency plan. Integrating incoming information during an emergency and correlating this information with the plan's procedures is a manual task for many safety managers. The danger is that the emergency plan can quickly become a bottleneck during the very emergency for which it describes procedures to resolve it. We've faced this problem in the context of improving and optimizing the plain-text emergency plan for the subway system of Valencia, Spain, a mid-sized city. In 1998, the Metro Valencia Safety Office began developing a system to improve its emergency plan. The Hypermedia Emergency Plan has been operational since June 2000 at the Metro Valencia's Traffic Control Office. Our solution was to turn the emergency plan into a multimedia software system that integrates text, audio, video, 3D models, and animations for handling emergencies in underground metropolitan transportation. From our experience with the Hypermedia Emergency Plan, and with the advent of many new technologies (such as mobile computing, wireless networks, Web services, and digital libraries), we're convinced that the time has come to tackle this challenge.

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).

Despite the increasing interest in the Document Engineering community, a formal definition of document workflow is still to come. Often, the term refers to an abstract process consisting in a set of tasks to contribute to some document contents, and some techniques are being developed to support parts of these tasks rather than how to generate the process itself. In most proposals, these tasks are implicit in the business processes running in an organization, lacking an explicit document workflow model that could be analysed and enacted as a coherent unit. In this paper, we propose a document-centric approach to document workflow generation. We have extended the feature-based document meta-model of the Document Product Lines approach with an organiza-tional metamodel. For a given configuration of the feature model, we assign tasks to different members of the organization to con-tribute to the document contents. Moreover, the relationships between features define an ordering of the tasks, which may be refined to produce a specification of the document workflow model automatically. The generation of customized software manuals is used to illustrate the proposal.

Variable Data Printing solutions provide means to generate documents whose content varies according to some criteria. Since the early Mail Merge-like applications that generated letters with destination data taken from databases, different languages and frameworks have been developed with increasing levels of sophistication. Current tools allow the generation of highly customized documents that are variable not only in content, but also in layout. However, most frameworks are technology-oriented, and their use requires high skills in implementation-related tools (XML, XPATH, and others), which do not include support for domain-related tasks like identification of document content variability.In this paper, we introduce DPLfw, a framework for variable content document generation based on Software Product Line Engineering principles. It is an implementation of the Document Product Lines (DPL) approach, which was defined with the aim of supporting variable content document generation from a domain-oriented point of view. DPL models document content variability in terms of features, and product line-like processes support the generation of documents. We define the DPLfw architecture, and illustrate its use in the definition of variable-content emergency plans.

[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.

Presentation building applications lack good support to slide reuse. In this paper, we introduce SliDL, a digital library that facilitates slide reuse by flattening the presentation-based structure of current systems and providing slide retrieval facilities. The service-oriented architecture of SliDL enables slide sharing between different applications. We have developed clients for Microsoft PowerPoint 2007 and OpenOffice.org Impress.

VOICE is a tool for cataloguing digital images using a voice-based user interface. The goal of VOICE is to ease the introduction of descriptive metadata associated to single images or collections of pictures, so that the data entered can be used later for keyword-based image retrieval. We have developed two versions of the tool, standalone VOICE and VOICE4Picasa. The latter is and add-in to Picasa which calls the former without need to switch from one application to the other one. In our demonstration, we will show the features of both systems, adding metadata to pictures and using Picasa's retrieval features to find images in our collections.

Citation analysis needs an in-depth transformation. Current systems have been long criticized due to defects such as lack of coverage and low accuracy of the citation data. Surprisingly, incorrect or incomplete data are used to make important decisions about researchers' careers. We argue that a new approach based on the collection of citation data when they are actually generated (that is, during the edition of papers) can overcome current limitations, and propose a new framework in which the research community as a whole is the owner as well as beneficiary of a Global Citation Registry characterized by high quality citation data. The registry will be accessible for all the interested parties and will be the source over which the different impact models can be applied.

This demo shows a set of tools for managing and performing document transformations. These tools share a common infrastructure consisting on a set of Web Services and programming libraries to define semantic mappings and generate the corresponding transformation template automatically. The framework is currently being used on the Bibshare project to support the conversion between metadata formats, as well as in other domains related to Digital Libraries and Software Engineering.

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.

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.

In this paper we deal with the problem of secure access to metadata information in Grid computing environments. The heterogeneity of the eventual data providers (with different local database management systems) and the enforcement of security policies for a vast number of potential data consumers are the two key problems to be solved. We present XSQL, a technology that solves the heterogeneity problem but lacks adequate security mechanisms for its use in grid like environments. As a consequence, we propose an advanced have security infrastructure with the necessary elements to be able to enforce complex policies based on identity and context information like roles and groups. The approach presented here results in authorization schemas that need no additional coding from data providers and, as a result, require little deployment efforts.

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.

In this paper we propose a distributed ant colony algorithm to solve large scale orienteering problem instances. Our approach is based on a multi-colony strategy where each colony works in an independent portion (cluster) in the original graph. This results in no need for communicating pheromones information among colonies and in increasing speedup. We have implemented our algorithm as a .NET Web services infrastructure following a grid computing philosophy and we provide some promising experimental results to show the feasibility and effectiveness of our approach