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As ubiquitous virtual reality (U-VR) systems become more and more popular and several systems coexist all together, sharing events between them in order to improve the user experience and increase their scope and functionality will be mandatory. Since U-VR systems have a dynamic and decoupled nature, and they have their own event model, we propose in this paper a semantic publish/subscribe infrastructure that lies on a description logics reasoner and OWL ontologies for managing heterogeneous event models and performing the matching of events and subscriptions in such U-VR systems.

Learning is a never ending activity for humans; it takes place everywhere and even when we do not realize. However, current learning environments make students deal with lectures, mostly associated with low control of the situation and implicit motivation. In contrast, previous researches have shown that sports, games or hobbies are activities that make people reach optimal experiences where self-motivation, control of the situation, high level of concentration and enjoyment are present. Some current efforts to design next generation of learning environments make use of ubiquitous systems to encourage students to perform learning activities everywhere and at anytime. However, those approaches lack the affective factor related to optimal experiences. To address that problem we present eCoology, an edutainment application that creates a ubiquitous learning environment with emotional features, and discuss some experimental results obtained from users that tested eCoology.

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