Anne Le Calvé

Fairtrace: Applying Semantic Web Tools and Techniques to the Textile Traceability

This paper presents solutions that leverage Semantic Web Technologies (SWT) to allow pragmatic traceability in supply-chains, especially for the textile industry. Objectives are the identification of the supply-chain, order management, tracking and problem reporting (such as dangerous substance detection). It is intended to be a generic platform supporting potentially any kind of industrial supply-chain, to be usable in harsh environments (mobile appliances) without any kind of communications possibility and to be fully usable to non-IT people, including for the modelling of the production processes. The developed solutions also allow the consumer to benefit from the traceability through information pages available by scanning the QR codes available on the finished products (clothes, clocks, etc.). This paper presents: (i) the methodology applied to achieve those functionalities, (ii) the design and implementation choices, and (iii) the test results. The main value of this paper is the usage of the Semantic Web in real-world industrial traceability solutions, which were tested in real supply-chains in Switzerland and India. The commercialization of the developed solutions has started.

Mining and Visualizing Social Data to Inform Marketing Decisions

Most of todays commercial companies heavily rely on social media and community management tools to interact with their clients and analyze their online behaviour. Nonetheless, these tools still lack evolved data mining and visualization features to tailor the analysis in order to support useful marketing decisions. We present an original methodology that aims at formalizing the marketing need of the company and develop a tool that can support it. The methodology is derived from the Cross-Industry Standard Process for Data Mining (CRISP-DM) and includes additional steps dedicated to the design and development of visualizations of mined data. We followed the methodology in two use cases with Swiss companies. First, we developed a prototype that aims at understanding the needs of tourists based on Flickr and Instagram data. In that use case, we extend the existing literature by enriching hashtags analysis methods with a semantic network based on Linked Data. Second, we analyzed internal customer data of an online discount retailer to help them define guerilla marketing measures. We report on the challenges of integrating Facebook data in the process. Informal feedback from domain experts confirms the strong potential of such advanced analytic features based on social data to inform marketing decisions.

Personal information management based on semantic technologies

Due to the development of new technologies (digital cameras, smart phones, new data formats, etc.) people are led to deal with an increasing amount of information. Moreover, the advent of the web as a main distribution channel imposes to manage heterogeneous types of data and to deal with the issue of finding efficiently the pertinent information becomes more and more important. Several approaches such as semantic annotation, data mining, virtual and interactive visualizations are nowadays available to address these specific issues. However, so far, they have not been jointly exploited in order to take advantage of their respective strong points. In this paper we introduces a novel approach that combines semantic annotation, data mining, virtual queries and interactive visualization techniques aiming to provide the user with a personal information manager capable of dealing with heterogeneous database formats (relational, semantic, etc.). As a proof of the concept and its feasibility, in this paper we present a first prototype of the framework Memoria-Mea, that integrates these different approaches.

A Language and a Methodology for Prototyping User Interfaces for Control Systems

The BATIC3S project (Building Adaptive Three-dimensional Interfaces for Controlling Complex Control Systems) proposes a methodology to prototype adaptive graphical user interfaces (GUI) for control systems. We present a domain specific language for the control systems domain, including useful and understandable abstractions for domain experts. This is coupled with a methodology for validation, verification and automatic GUI prototype generation. The methodology is centered on metamodel-based techniques and model transformations, and its foundations rely on formal models. Our approach is based on the assumption that a GUI can be induced from the characteristics of the system to control.

MEMODULES as Tangible Shortcuts to Multimedia Information

Tangible User Interfaces (TUIs) are emerging as a new paradigm for facilitating user interaction with the digital world by providing intuitive means to link the physical and digital worlds. The MEMODULES project has the objective of developing, experimenting and evaluating the concept of tangible shortcuts (reminders), facilitating (a) the control of devices in the everyday life and also (b) the categorization of information in order to ease or improve information access and retrieval. The project aims at facilitating the user interaction with multimedia information by supporting both the creation and management of tangible links to digital content. Moreover, our research investigates the opportunity of a more complex, multi-sensorial combination of objects and multimedia information by combining multiple interaction modalities - such as voice and gesture - with interactive information visualizations. In order to address these issues we propose a user-oriented framework, called Memodules Framework, enabling end users to turn everyday objects into Memodules. The framework provides a single platform that combines end-user programming, tangible interaction, multimodality and personal information management issues. Memodules framework is built upon MemoML (Memodules Markup Language) and SMUIML (Synchronized Multimodal User Interaction Markup Language) models, which guarantee framework flexibility, extensibility and evolution over time.

City Eye: Accessibility for All

In todays world, making a good travel plan is not an easy task for most people. However, the situation is even more complicated for people with disabilities. For them, even simple trips, such as travelling to visit a museum or an exposition, have become extremely difficult. A wide variety of travel planning needs to be made days or months in advance, such as where, when, and how to travel, as well as how to get around and how to choose a suitable means of transportation. As a response in this ongoing project, our intention is to apply our proposed solution of linked data technologies in the domains of tourism services and e-governance to build a smart city. In particular, we want to provide useful travel information to people with disabilities and to make their travelling easier.