Search

Learning about databases is indispensable for individuals studying software engineering or computer science or those involved in the IT industry. We analyzed a remote educational escape room for teaching about databases in four different higher education courses in two consecutive academic years. We employed three instruments for evaluation: a pre- and posttest to assess the escape room's effectiveness for student learning, a questionnaire to gather students' perceptions, and a Web platform that unobtrusively records students' interactions and performance. We show novel evidence that educational escape rooms conducted remotely can be engaging as well as effective for teaching about databases.

To provide web services adapted to the users’ functional capabilities, diversity must be considered from the conceptualization and design phases of the services’ development. In previous work, we proposed a model that allows the provisioning of adapted interfaces based on users’ identity and their functional attributes to facilitate this task to software designers and developers. However, being these identities and attributes self-declared by the users may impact reliability and usability. In this work, we propose an extension of our model to resolve these deficiencies by delegating the identity and attributes provision to external certified entities. The European electronic Identification, Authentication and Trust Services (eIDAS) regulation established a solution to ensure the cross-border mutual recognition of Electronic Identification (eID) mechanisms among the European Member States. This research aims to provide an extension of this regulation mentioned above (eIDAS) to support functional attributes and connect our previously proposed model to this extended eIDAS network. Thanks to this proposal, web services can guarantee adapted and personalized interfaces while improving the functionalities offered without any previous configuration by users and, in a reliable way, since the functional attributes belong to the users’ official eID. As the attributes set provided by eIDAS nodes only contains citizens’ personal and legal ones, we also propose a mechanism to connect the eIDAS network to external attribute providers that could extend the eIDAS profile of users with their functional attributes. We have deployed a pilot to validate the proposed model consisting of an identity provider, an eIDAS node supporting the extended reference code and an attribute provider supporting functional attributes. We have also designed and implemented a simple service that supports eID authentication and serves adapted interfaces based on the retrieved extended eIDAS profile. Final

Although many courses in computer science and software engineering require students to work on practical assignments, these are usually toy projects that do not come close to real professional developments. As such, recent graduates often fail to meet industry expectations when they first enter the workforce. In view of the gap between graduates? skills and industry expectations, several institutions have resorted to integrating open-source software development as part of their programs. In this pilot study, we report on the results of the contributions of eleven students to the FIWARE open-source project as part of their final year project. Our findings suggest that both teachers and students have a positive perception towards contributing to the FIWARE open-source initiative and that students increased their knowledge of technologies valued by the industry. We also found that this kind of project requires an additional initial effort for the students as well as for the instructor to monitor their progress. Consequently, it is important that the instructors have previous experience in FIWARE, as many of the students need help during the process.

The European electronic IDentification, Authentication and trust Services (eIDAS) regulation makes available a solution to ensure the cross-border mutual recognition of electronic IDentification (eID) mechanisms among Member States. However, the basic set of attributes currently provided by each country only contains citizens’ personal and legal attributes, preventing e-services to take full advantage of citizens’ domain-specific information, such as academic or medical data. In this article, we propose an extension of the eIDAS specification to support academic attributes as part of citizens’ profiles. In addition, we present an architecture to enable the connection of eIDAS nodes to national attribute providers to enrich citizens’ profiles with additional academic attributes. We have deployed the eIDAS extension in the specific case of the Spanish eIDAS infrastructure, and we have connected it to an attribute provider of the Technical University of Madrid (UPM). We have also improved a set of institutional services of that university by enabling the connection to eIDAS and enhancing the features offered to students based on their academic profiles retrieved from the eIDAS extended infrastructure. Finally, we have evaluated the resulting services thanks to real students from two different countries, concluding that the widespread adoption of the proposed solution in the academic services of European universities will greatly improve their quality and usability.

In recent years, a new business paradigm has emerged which revolves around effectively extracting value from data. In this scope, providing a secure ecosystem for data sharing that ensures data governance and traceability is of paramount importance as it holds the potential to create new applications and services. Protecting data goes beyond restricting who can access what resource (covered by identity and Access Control): it becomes necessary to control how data are treated once accessed, which is known as data Usage Control. Data Usage Control provides a common and trustful security framework to guarantee the compliance with data governance rules and responsible use of organizations’ data by third-party entities, easing and ensuring secure data sharing in ecosystems such as Smart Cities and Industry 4.0. In this article, we present an implementation of a previously published architecture for enabling access and Usage Control in data-sharing ecosystems among multiple organizations using the FIWARE European open source platform. Additionally, we validate this implementation through a real use case in the food industry. We conclude that the proposed model, implemented using FIWARE components, provides a flexible and powerful architecture to manage Usage Control in data-sharing ecosystems.

Secure electronic identification (eID) is one of the key enablers of data protection, privacy, and the prevention of online fraud. However, until now, the lack of common legal basis prevented European Member States from recognizing and accepting eIDs issued in the other Member States. The electronic identification and trust services (eIDAS) regulation provides a solution to these issues by ensuring the cross-border mutual recognition of eIDs. FIWARE is a European initiative that provides a rather simple yet powerful set of application programming interfaces (APIs) that ease the development of smart applications in multiple vertical sectors and oriented to the future internet. In this paper, we propose a model that enables the connection of FIWARE OAuth 2.0-based services with the eID authentication provided by eIDAS reference. Thanks to this model, services already connected with an OAuth 2.0 identity provider can be automatically connected with eIDAS nodes for providing eID authentication to European citizens. For validating the proposed model, we have deployed an instance of the FIWARE identity manager connected to the Spanish eIDAS node. Then, we have registered two services, a private videoconferencing system, and a public smart city deployment, and extended their functionalities for enriching the user experience leveraging the eID authentication. We have evaluated the integration of both services in the eIDAS network with real users from seven different countries. We conclude that the proposed model facilitates the integration of generic and FIWARE-based OAuth 2.0 services to the eIDAS infrastructure, making the connection transparent for developers.