Using the Web While Offline

Whilst access to the internet is becoming increasingly ubiquitous in highly populated, urban areas, for much of the planet web connectively is still largely absent. This is mainly due to geographic remoteness, but bad connectivity or governmental controls might also prevent web users from accessing desired resources. The authors have previously outlined a general approach to cope with such situations, which they termed “Web in your Pocket” (WiPo). WiPo assumes that the user has a smart device to which appropriate data, ideally in curated form, can be pre-loaded so that it remains accessible offline. In this chapter, the authors present the potential usability of WiPo by considering three important use-cases (tourism, health, and search and rescue) demonstrating the vast potential of WiPo. The chapter concludes by considering the practical issues that need to be overcome before it might be implemented in real-world situations.

Development of Adaptive Social Network Based on Learners' Thinking and Learning Styles

Adaptive social network sites (ASNS) are an innovative approach to a web learning experience delivery. They try to solve the main shortcomings of classical social networks—“one-size-fits-all” approach and “lost-in-hyperspace” phenomena—by adapting the learning content and its presentation to needs, goals, thinking styles, and learning styles of every individual learner. This chapter outlines a new approach to automatically detect learners' thinking and learning styles, and takes into account that thinking and learning styles may change during the learning process in unexpected and unpredictable ways. The approach is based on the Felder learning styles model and Hermann thinking styles model.

Effective Entity Linking and Disambiguation Algorithms for User-Generated Content (UGC)

The exponential growth of data emerging out of social media is causing challenges in decision-making systems and poses a critical hindrance in searching for the potential information. The major objective of this chapter is to convert the unstructured data in social media into the meaningful structure format, which in return brings the robustness to the information extraction process. Further, it has the inherent capability to prune for named entities from the unstructured data and store the entities into the knowledge base for important facts. In this chapter, the authors explain the methods to identify all the critical interpretations taken over to find the named entities from Twitter streams and the techniques to proportionally link it with appropriate knowledge sources such as DBpedia.

A Personalized Approach for Web Service Discovery in Distributed Environments

Web services are meaningful only if potential users may find and execute them. Universal description discovery and integration (UDDI) help businesses, organizations, and other web services providers to discover and reach to the service(s) by providing the URI of the WSDL file. However, it does not offer a mechanism to choose a web service based on its quality. The standard also lacks sufficient semantic description in the content of web services. This lack makes it difficult to find and compose suitable web services during analysis, search, and matching processes. In addition, a central UDDI suffers from one centralized point problem and the high cost of maintenance. To get around these problems, the authors propose in this chapter a novel framework based on mobile agent and metadata catalogue for web services discovery. Their approach is based on user profile in order to discover appropriate web services, meeting customer requirements in less time and taking into account the QoS properties.

Integrating Tagging Software in Web Application

Tag software is included in web applications to facilitate categorization and classification of information. Generally, freely available tag software is adapted or new code written to incorporate tagging. However, there is an absence of requirement and design document for tagging, even academically. It becomes difficult to know the features that can be included in tag software; also, not all features may be required. This chapter presents a framework for integration of tag software in web applications. The framework has four components corresponding to phases of the software development lifecycle. For requirement, a weighted requirement checklist is presented to ease requirement selection. A metric, software estimation, is defined for quantifying selected requirement. A logical design defined for design phase displays interaction of entities with users. For development, best mechanisms are suggested to web applications. Software engineering artefacts are provided to help during testing. A case study is presented where estimation and design is applied to freely available tag software.

A Software Engineering Perspective for Development of Enterprise Applications

Enterprise applications are the DNA of any organization, and they hold the business logic, handle large amount of data, support multiprogramming, are easily maintainable, scalable, have high performance and are able to choreograph or orchestrate modules, and are fortified from attacks and vulnerabilities. These enterprise applications are the backbone of any organization and enhance the productivity and efficiency of the organization to a greater extent, thus ensuring the continuity in the business. So, after seeing the need and development of enterprise application, in this chapter, the authors present the idea of developing and discussing enterprise applications.

Social Network Analysis

The study of social network analysis has grown in popularity in the past decades and has been used in many areas. It is an interesting and useful field that gained an increasing popularity due to the explosion of social media that has emerged with advances in communication systems, which play a critical role in forming human activities and interactions in social systems. The authors present some techniques from a data mining perspective and statistical graph measure that can be used in various applications such as to perform community detection, clustering in a social network, identify spurious and anomalous users, predict links between vertices in a social network, model and improve the information diffusion, design trust models, and improve other applications. Then, the authors provide a recent literature review of such applications and thus outline challenges of social network applications.

Supporting Structural Evolution of Data in Web-Based Systems via Schema Versioning in the tXSchema Framework

τXSchema is a framework for creating and validating temporal XML documents, while using a temporal schema that consists of three components: a conventional XML schema document annotated with a set of temporal logical and physical annotations. Each one of these components can evolve over time to reflect changes in the real world. In addition, schema versioning has been long advocated to be the most efficient way to keep track of both data and schema evolution. Hence, in this chapter the authors complete τXSchema, which is predisposed from the origin to support schema versioning, by defining the operations that are necessary to exploit such a feature and make schema versioning functionalities available to end users. Precisely, the authors' approach provides a complete and sound set of change primitives and a set of high-level change operations, for the maintenance of each component of a τXSchema schema, and defines their operational semantics. Furthermore, they propose a new technique for schema versioning in τXSchema, allowing a complete, integrated, and safe management of schema changes.

UX Challenges and Best Practices in Designing Web and Mobile Solutions

The design of web and mobile applications is one of the most challenging fields of the current information technology landscape. Increasingly, companies intend to have a strong presence in the information society, which allows them to advertise their products, services, make online business, interact with customers, among others. However, the development and design of web and mobile solutions have numerous challenges and best practices that should be known and applied. In this chapter, the authors adopt a qualitative methodology based on multiple case studies that allow them to identify a total of six challenges and best practices that are later confronted and compared with the recent findings on the coverage of the topic.

Dynamic Quota Calculation System (DQCS)

One of the most important IT sectors that requires big data management is mobile data communication systems (MDCS) of GSM companies. In the charging mechanism of current MDCS, a subscriber “surfs” on the internet that creates data traffic and a counter subtracts the amount of data used by the user from the subscriber's quota. In other words, instant constant quota values are assigned to subscribers without concern for their previous amount of internet usage in current MDCS. Moreover, constant quota values cause constant charge calls in control traffic that are repeated for all new quota requests. Thus, performance degradation occurs because of the repetition of quota request calls and allocations. In this chapter, a dynamic quota calculation system (DQCS) is proposed for dynamic quota allocations and charging in MDCS using data mining approaches as two cascaded blocks. The first block is self-organizing map (SOM) clustering based on a sliding window (SW) methodology followed by the second block, which is the markov chain (MC); the overall system is denoted as “SOM/SW and MC.”