Technology Roadmap for Living Labs

The concept of “Living Labs” in general is not completely new in R&D. Available publications focused on local requirements and targeted on business specific needs. In this chapter available ICT for use in a Living Lab are assessed and an implementation roadmap on behalf of ICT is presented. Besides buzzwords like Web 2.0 and Triple Play, ICT enables fast and substantial advancements. To bring a clear view into the range of solutions the authors orient on an ICT layering-architecture and the client/server nature of today’s Web-technology. The roadmap takes into account currently applicable technologies and likely future trends. Technological maturity, social compliance, consumer acceptance and politics & marketregulation are considered in the critique. The breakdown shows that a few core technologies are not only sufficient for the skeletal structure, but also from the main bulk of a Living Lab infrastructure. Thus the technology for most of the desirable features of a Living Lab is on-hand, future functional extensions can be provided by open interfaces and a modular architecture of the system.

CRISS

Limited sensory information about a new environment often requires people with a visual impairment to rely on sighted guides for showing or describing routes around the environment. However, route descriptions provided by other blind independent navigators, (e.g., over a cell phone), can also be used to guide a traveler along a previously unknown route. A visually impaired guide can often describe a route as well or better than a sighted person since the guide is familiar with the issues of blind navigation. This chapter introduces a Collaborative Route Information Sharing System (CRISS). CRISS is a collaborative online environment where visually impaired and sighted people will be able to share and manage route descriptions for indoor and outdoor environments. It then describes the system’s Route Analysis Engine module which takes advantage of information extraction techniques to find landmarks in natural language route descriptions written by independent blind navigators.

The Semantic Web in Tourism

The emergence of the World Wide Web made available massive amounts of data. This data, created and disseminated from many different sources, is prepared and linked in a way that is well-suited for display purposes, but automation, integration, interoperability or context-oriented search can hardly be implemented. Hence, the Semantic Web aims at promoting global information integration and semantic interoperability, through the use of metadata, ontologies and inference mechanisms. This chapter presents a Semantic Model for Tourism (SeMoT), designed for building Semantic Web enabled applications for the planning and management of touristic itineraries, taking into account the new requirements of more demanding and culturally evolved tourists. It includes an introduction to relevant tourism concepts, an overview of current trends in Web Semantics research and a presentation of the architecture, main features and a selection of representative ontologies that compose the SeMoT.

The Geospatial Semantic Web

The Semantic Web (SW) and Geospatial Semantic Web (GSW) are considered the next step in the evolution of the Web. For most non-Web specialists, geospatial information professionals, and non-computer-science students these concepts and their impacts on the way we use the Web are not clearly understood. The purpose of this chapter is to provide this broad audience of non-specialists with a basic understanding of: the needs and visions driving the evolution toward the SW and GSW; the principles and technologies involved in their implementation; the state of the art in the efforts to create the GSW; the impacts of the GSW on the way we use the Web to discover, evaluate, and integrate geospatial data and services; and the needs for future research and development to make the GSW a reality. A background on the SW is first presented to serve as a basis for more specific discussions on the GSW.

Socio-Technical Challenges of Semantic Web

The Semantic Web holds significant implications for learning, culture, and non-native speakers, with culture and non-native speakers rarely being addressed in the literature. In that light this chapter goal explores how Semantic Web disseminates learning, and it addresses critical socio-technical and cultural challenges facing semantic web, potential users, and learners using it. The chapter identifies some of the causes of the socio-technical challenges, looking at two major styles of learning and the position of Semantic Web structure in them. The chapter also offers recommendations for addressing selected challenges facing the Semantic Web.

E-Learning and Solidarity

This chapter explores solidarity as a social dimension in the context of e-learning and the Semantic Web. Its aim is to explore where the students show more solidarity with each other—in online learning environments or in offline settings? In the context of this chapter, the term “solidarity between students” means the sharing of useful resources between group members. Online forums are the major Web service that we shall use to support solidarity online. In online forums, we can ask complex semantic questions knowing that someone will understand the meaning of the question and hopefully will give us a good answer to it. Add to forums the possibility of annotation with metadata and we can also depend on them to retrieve meaning rich historical information. The research is based on case studies with focus groups conducted with Portuguese higher education health students.

KC-PLM

This chapter defines a system and a methodology, the Knowledge Collaborative Product Lifecycle Management (KC-PLM) to better support the complete product lifecycle in the industry. The KC-PLM system intends to reduce the lead-time from new product development to production by providing and integrating knowledge platform, based on a semantic information repository, domain ontology, a domain specific language and on the user collaboration. These characteristics differentiate the KC-PLM system from others PLM systems, because it supports an intelligent rules engine, to extrapolate and make inference with historical solutions that allow the generation of new solutions. A real case study in automobile business shows the current proposal application and its benefits in a product concept phase.

Social Impact of Collaborative Services to Maintain Electronic Business Relationships

This chapter looks at the impact and opportunities of semantic technologies and Web services to business relationships and how social Semantic Web techniques foster e-business and collaborative networks in many dimensions. For this the authors follow the vision to support collaborative services for business relationship management within semantic services. Based on a newly approach for business partner management with ontologies in large business communities, the chapter elaborates the conceptual framework for the design and implementation of collaborative services. The often postulated adaptiveness and intelligence of novel collaborative structures, foremost collaborative networks, require new approaches to deal with the increasing difficulty to cope with the resulting complexity of relational ties in communities and business networks. This research strives to leverage the capabilities to deal with large number of business relationships. The chapter formulates a vision based on three stages developing digital business ecosystems. Semantic Web technologies, mainly modelling business partner profiles (BPP) with ontology, combined with sound techniques of information retrieval and selected concepts and methods of social network analysis build the conceptual framework. On this basis, a newly approach is elaborated which offers support for communication processes and complex interactions of business entities in collaborative spaces.

Multi-Agent Systems for Semantic Web Services Composition

The vision which is making its way in information technology is to encapsulate organizations’ functionalities within appropriate interfaces and advertise them as one or more Web services, which could be integrated, when brought into play, in workflows. This innovative idea brings with it new outstanding opportunities but also new great issues, related mainly to the ability to automatically discover and compose Web services. Several researchers belonging to the agent community are convinced that this technical area is a natural environment in which the agent technology features can be leveraged to obtain significant advantages. This chapter is aimed at briefly recalling the major results achieved by agent community and showing how their exploitation in the area of service-orientation systems could be very promising.

PolyOrBAC

With the emergence of Web Services-based collaborative systems, new issues arise, in particular those related to security. In this context, Web Service access control should be studied, specified and enforced. This work proposes a new access control framework for Inter-Organizational Web Services: “PolyOr- BAC”. On the one hand, the authors extend OrBAC (Organization-Based Access Control Model) to specify rules for intra- as well as inter-organization access control; on the other hand, they enforce these rules by applying access control mechanisms dedicated to Web Services. Furthermore, the authors propose a runtime model checker for the interactions between collaborating organizations, to verify their compliance with previously signed contracts. In this respect, not only their security framework handles secure local and remote accesses, but also deals with competition and mutual suspicion between organizations, controls the Web Service workflows and audits the different interactions. In particular, every deviation from the signed contracts triggers an alarm, the concerned parties are notified, and audits can be used as evidence for a judge to sanction the party responsible for the deviation.