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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] 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 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.

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).

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

peer-reviewed Collaborative writing and editing typically use annotations to coordinate edition tasks, comment the content, add relevant references, or clarify confusing content. Despite that wikis are among the most widely used hypertext systems for performing such collaborative activities, they have little support to annotations. In this paper, we propose to use spatial hypertext layers as the solution for the management of annotations in wikis. We have extended ShyWiki, a spatial hypertext wiki environment, with Multilayer Superimposed Information features. In addition, we present the results of a study that shows the value of spatial hypertext layers for locate, organize and group annotations in interest groups under a wiki interface.

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.

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.

An emergency event can be chronologically divided into three phases: prevention, response, and investigation. Preventive actions attempt to anticipate all emergency situations and describe procedures intended to avoid undesirable outcomes. Unfortunately, not all circumstances can be predicted and some cannot be avoided. When undesirable situations occur, an emergency response action has to be set off. The response phase is very complex because decisions have to be made in a very short time and sometimes without the desirable information. An investigation usually follows any incident in order to find out the causes of the emergency, assess the effectiveness of the response, and generate recommendations for future preventive and response actions (Ochoa, Neyem, Pino, & Borges, 2006). Concerning the emergency response phase, actions are usually carried out by several teams which should work in a manner as cooperative and articulated as possible to eliminate or reduce the impact of the disaster. These teams usually follow established procedures to deal with emergencies contained in emergency plans. In most events, actions are coordinated centrally but decisions are made at both central and local levels. Information plays an important role in these decisions. According to Dykstra (2003), when things go wrong in emergency management, the reasons are generally related to breakdowns in information, communication, and/or coordination.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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