VoiceWeb

This chapter presents the state-of-the-art in usability issues and methodologies for VoiceWeb interfaces. It undertakes a theoretical perspective to the usability methodology and provides a framework description for creating and testing usable content and applications for conversational interfaces. The methodologies and their uses are discussed as well as certain technical issues that are of specific importance for each type of system. Moreover, it discusses the hands-on approaches for applying usability methodologies in a spoken dialogue web application environment, including methodological and design issues, resource management, implementation using existing technologies for usability evaluation in several stages of the design and deployment. Finally, the challenging usability issues and parameters of the emerging advanced speech-enabled web interfaces are presented.

A Framework for Early Usability Integration in Web Applications Development Process

Developing usable products becomes more and more important for software developers. Developing web applications it’s more challenging than developing desktop applications due to the various users that will interact with the final product. Satisfying users’ expectations becomes a very difficult task, as usability proves to be a very complex goal to achieve in the context of increased productivity targets in software engineering process. The present chapter focuses on the idea of rethinking the concept of usability moving from the traditional view of usability expressed in the internal characteristics of the product towards usability understood as deriving from the quality of interactions between humans, their work and the web design product. Usability is not only an add-on or a final result in the design process but it is embedded as a main concern within the design process itself. In order to build usable products, a great attention should be oriented to users and their needs, and this can be a very challenging task for software developer teams. In this chapter we will describe an interdisciplinary approach, based on applying social sciences techniques and methods that can be helpful in overcoming the difficulties in understanding the users. We will provide a short description of the proposed methods, a guide in applying these methods and a framework that integrates each of the proposed methods into the corresponding step of the web product development life cycle. The chapter ends with the presentation of two case studies showing the applicability of the proposed solution in real design contexts.

Measuring the Unmeasurable?

This chapter focuses on the adoption and adaptation of methodologies drawn from research in psychology for the evaluation of user response as a manifestation of the mental processes of perception, cognition and emotion. We present robust alternative conceptualizations of evaluative methodologies, which allow the surfacing of views, feelings and opinions of individual users producing a richer, more informative texture for user centered evaluation of software. This differs from more usual user questionnaire systems such as the Questionnaire of User Interface Satisfaction (QUIS). We present two different example methodologies so that the reader can firstly, review the methods as a theoretical exercise and secondly, applying similar adaptation principles, derive methods appropriate to their own research or practical context.

Analysis of Quality of Service Routing Algorithms

The routing problems can be divided into two major classes. They are 1) Unicast routing and 2) Multicast routing. The Unicast routing problem is as follows. Given a source node sr, a destination node dn, a set of QoS constraints qc and an optimization goal (optional), find the best feasible path from sr to dn, which satisfies qc. The Multicast routing problem is as follows. Given a source node sr, a set st of destination nodes, a set of constraints cts and an optimization goal (optional), find the best feasible path covering sr and all nodes in st, which satisfies cts. This article presents two such Unicast QoS based algorithms called as Source Routing and the proposed Heuristic Routing. A Client Server based model has been generated to study the performance of the two algorithms with respect to the message overhead, response time and path delay. The Experiments and the results are analyzed.

Automating the Generation of Joins in Large Databases and Web Services

In this data-centric world, as web services and service oriented architectures gain momentum and become a standard for data usage, there will be a need for tools to automate data retrieval. In this paper we propose a tool that automates the generation of joins in a transparent and integrated fashion in heterogeneous large databases as well as web services. This tool reads metadata information and automatically displays a join path and a SQL join query. This tool will be extremely useful for performing joins to help in the retrieval of information in large databases as well as web services.

Adaptability and Adaptivity in The Generation of Web Applications

This article proposes a generator for adaptive Web applications called GIWA. GIWA‘s objective is to facilitate the automatic execution of the design and the generation of Adaptable Web Applications (AWA). Characteristically, the effort in this work has to be pursued with special attention to both issues applied to AWA: adaptability and adaptivity. The architecture of GIWA is based on three levels: the semantic level, the conceptual level and the generation one. Using GIWA, designers specifies, at the semantic level the features of Web application. The conceptual level focuses on the creation of diagrams in WA-UML language; the extended UML by our new concepts and new design elements for adaptation. At the generation level, GIWA acquires all information about users’ preferences and their access condition. Consequently, the generated pages are adaptable to all these information. An evaluation and a validation of GIWA are given in this article to prove our adaptation.

Location-Aware Access Control for Mobile Workflow Systems

Workflow management systems (WfMS) are a special class of information systems (IS) which support the automated enactment of business processes. Meanwhile there are WfMS which allow the execution of tasks using mobile computers like PDA with the ability of wireless data transmission. However, the employment of workflow systems as well as mobile technologies comes along with special security challenges. One way to tackle these challenges is the employment of location-aware access control to enforce rules that describe from which locations a user is allowed to perform which activities. The data model behind access control in termed Access Control Model (ACM). There are special ACM for mobile information systems as well as for WfMS, but no one that addresses mobile as well as workflow specific aspects. In the article we therefore discuss the specific constraints such a model should be able to express and introduce an appropriate ACM. A special focus is on location constraints for individual workflow instances.

SWAMI

The rapid growth of the World Wide Web has complicated the process of Web browsing by providing an overwhelming wealth of choices for the end user. To alleviate this burden, intelligent tools can do much of the drudge-work of looking ahead, searching and performing a preliminary evaluation of the end pages on the user’s behalf, anticipating the user’s needs and providing the user with more information with which to make fewer, more informed decisions. However, to accomplish this task, the tools need some form of representation of the interests of the user. This article describes the SWAMI system: SWAMI stands for Searching the Web with Agents having Mobility and Intelligence. SWAMI is a prototype that uses a multi-agent system to represent the interests of a user dynamically, and take advantage of the active nature of agents to provide a platform for look-ahead evaluation, page searching, and link swapping. The collection of agents is organized hierarchically according to the apparent interests of the user, which are discovered on-the-fly through multi-stage clustering. Results from initial testing show that such a system is able to follow the multiple changing interests of a user accurately, and that it is capable of acting fruitfully on these interests to provide a user with useful navigational suggestions.

Multi-Agent Based Dynamic E-Learning Environment

Grids are increasingly being used in applications, one of which is e-learning. As most of business and academic institutions (universities) and training centres around the world have adopted this technology in order to create, deliver and manage their learning materials through the Web, the subject has become the focus of investigate. Still, collaboration between these institutions and centres is limited. Existing technologies such as grid, Web services and agents are promising better results. In this article the authors support building our architecture Regionally Distributed Architecture for Dynamic e-Learning Environment (RDADeLE) by combining those technologies via Java Agent DEvelopment Framework (JADE). By describing these agents in details, they prove that agents can be implemented to work well to extend the autonomy and interoperability for learning objects as data grid.

Message-Based Routing in Mobile Networks

This contribution provides an approach for an ad-hoc messaging network (AMNET), which uses simple store-and-forward message passing to spread data asynchronously. This approach focuses primarily on application-specific needs that can be covered by simple message passing mechanisms. In this paper, we will describe a network based on the AMNET approach. Results are derived by scenario analysis to provide insights into speeding up the network setup process and enable the use of AMNETs - even with a limited number of participants - by introducing a hybrid infrastructure and by adding mobile nodes.