Alexios Palinginis

Interplay of content and context

We examine the relationship between context engines and content management systems, showing by means of an example application how these should mutually interact with each other to ensure the timely delivery of relevant information. We show how a content management system can use context information to enrich its functionality and also how a general and abstract approach to content management can support context awareness. Information models of the general context engine and content management system that we have developed are presented, along with a description of how a symbiotic relationship of content and context can be achieved through the integration of these models.

Modelling context for information environments

Context-awareness has become an important consideration in the development of mobile and ubiquitous systems. While efforts have been made to develop general context models and application frameworks, it remains the case that often the notion of context supported is very restrictive and/or the representation of context is based on simple key-value pairs. As a result, most existing systems lack well-defined semantics and typing for context that would facilitate the general implementation, maintenance and adaption of context-aware systems. In this paper, we present a general context model that consolidates the models underlying many other approaches, while moving to a higher-level of abstraction in terms of semantic context description.

Content publishing framework for interactive paper documents

Paper persists as an important medium for documents and this has motivated the development of new technologies for interactive paper that enable actions on paper to be linked to digital actions. A major issue that remains is how to integrate these technologies into the document life cycle and, specifically, how to facilitate the authoring of links between printed documents and digital documents and services. We describe how we have extended a general web publishing framework to support the production of interactive paper documents, thereby integrating paper as a new web channel in a platform for multi-channel access.

Versions for Context Dependent Information Services

Context dependent information delivery is an important requirement of cooperative information systems supporting global and mobile access. These systems must be able to adapt the content, structure and presentation of information according to various factors such as the user, the access device and the task at hand. We present a versioning model designed to manage context-varying versions of content, structure and presentation database objects. Further, we describe how this has been integrated into a general web publishing platform to dynamically compose web documents according to the current context state.

A Modelling Approach to the Realisation of Modular Information Spaces

We present a metamodel which forms the basis for the design and implementation of modular information systems supporting a cooperative working environment. The model consists of four separate, but interconnected, sub-models dealing with all aspects of modular systems from the database meta and object model down to a possible storage model. The database connectivity metamodel is crucial in supporting the implementation of the database and connectivity models which enable users to dynamically dock on a foreign database module. At the centre is the user model which serves to tie the other sub-models together and this reflects our human-centric approach to cooperative environments. Consistency of each database module is maintained through our model of personal and shared workspaces. The global consistency of interconnected database modules can be achieved through synchronisation and cooperation of the conflicting parties over personal and history data.

OMS Connect: supporting multidatabase and mobile working through database connectivity

The authors present a general model of database connectivity for the controlled sharing and migration of information across databases as supported in the object-oriented database management system OMS Connect. A database may connect to one or more other databases, thereby enabling remote data to be viewed, processed and copied within the local database in such a way that consistency of the user working space can be maintained. Further the objects of the remote database may be extended locally with attributes and methods and additional classifications. Importantly, operation of the local database is not dependent on such a connection and remote objects may be replicated locally with explicit synchronisation points, thus making the system suitable for mobile computing.

PhD Symposium (PhDS) PC Co-chairs’ Message

We are proud to present the first Symposium for PhD students associated with the “On The Move confederated conferences”. The word ’symposium’ has two basic meanings. Firstly, it means ’the presentation and discussion of short essays on a common topic by different authors’, and secondly ’a merry feast’ or ’drinking together’. As this goes back to famous philosophers such as Socrates and Plato, who are we to deviate from this esteemed tradition of ’dulce et utile’ (as elegantly summarised by Horace).

Compiling Residuation for a Multiparadigm Symbolic Programming Language

This paper describes a new compilation method for the residuation mechanism underlying a multiparadigm language. Furthermore, it proposes the constraint functional and functional logic paradigms for the programming language of symbolic computation systems.The integration of functional and logic programming for the programming language of the symbolic computation system AlgBench is demonstrated using the residuation evaluation mechanism. The proposed multiparadigm language LAB could serve as a stand alone programming language. We present a residuation compiler and a collection of new commands and structures for a uniform abstract machine, an extension of the Warrens Abstract Machine (WAM), with a common memory for both functional and logic programms. Our implementation is done in an object-oriented way and it shows that the proposed approach and optimizations leads to a better execution and evaluation performance.