Birgit Pröll

Customisation for ubiquitous web applications: a comparison of approaches

Ubiquitous web applications adhering to the anytime/anywhere/anymedia paradigm are required to be customisable meaning the adaptation of their services towards a certain context. Several approaches for customising ubiquitous Web applications have been already proposed, each of them having different origins and pursuing different goals for dealing with the unique characteristics of ubiquity. This paper compares some of these proposals, trying to identify their strengths and shortcomings. As a prerequisite, an evaluation framework is suggested which categorises the major characteristics of customisation into different dimensions. On the basis of this framework, customisation approaches are surveyed and compared to each other, pointing the way to next-generation customisation approaches.

Assisting Tourists on the Move- An Evaluation of Mobile Tourist Guides

The penetration of high-end mobile devices equipped with GPS and enhanced with multimedia features together with decreasing mobile data prices have resulted in larger usage of mobile services. One of the application domains particularly well-suited for mobile services is tourism, not least since tourists can be assisted especially during the vacation itself. Currently, there is a proliferation of such mobile tourist guides, proposing an unmanageable number of diverse functionalities. To counteract this situation, the contribution of this paper is threefold. First, an evaluation framework is proposed, comprising both, a classification of mobile tourist services and a categorization of their delivery aspects in terms of several orthogonal dimensions. Second, on basis of this framework, four representative mobile tourist guides are evaluated, thereby demonstrating the frameworks applicability. Third, several lessons learned are discussed, thereby shedding light on the current state of effort in the area of mobile tourist guides.

Ubiquitous access to cultural tourism portals

Web-based tourism information systems are more and more required to provide besides traditional tourism information about hotel facilities and infrastructure also cultural content comprising material heritage, performing art, folk tradition, handicraft or simply habits of everyday life. These cultural Web applications are required not to offer online brochures only, but rather to provide both, value and service. This paper focuses on two crucial aspects of cultural Web applications comprising quality of content and quality of access. As an example for achieving quality of content in terms of comprehensiveness and cross-national nature, the MEDINA portal is presented, allowing one-stop access to cultural information of fourteen Mediterranean countries. In order to provide quality of access, the notion of ubiquity is introduced, allowing to customize Web applications towards different kinds of contexts, thus supporting the cultural tourist with device-independent, time-aware, location-aware, and personalized services.

Crowd-Sensing Meets Situation Awareness: A Research Roadmap for Crisis Management

When disaster strikes, human lives may depend upon emergency organizations rapid establishment of Situation Awareness (SAW) to take the appropriate decisions and actions. Recently, systems emerged, enabling humans to act as crowd sensors contributing valuable crisis information via mobile devices through social media channels. This should allow enhancing situational pictures gained through traditional SAW systems, as employed in control center domains. A common understanding about the necessary functionality of such crowd-sensed SAW systems for crisis management, however, is not yet reached nor is a detailed comparison thereof available up to now. This paper makes a first attempt towards this by a reference architecture incorporating crowd-sensed crisis information into SAW systems. Based on that, a systematic catalog of evaluation criteria is derived and used for an in-depth comparison of nine existing systems, thereby highlighting current capabilities and directions for further research.

User profile integration made easy: model-driven extraction and transformation of social network schemas

User profile integration from multiple social networks is indispensable for gaining a comprehensive view on users. Although current social networks provide access to user profile data via dedicated APIs, they fail to provide accurate schema information, which aggravates the integration of user profiles, and not least the adaptation of applications in the face of schema evolution. To alleviate these problems, this paper presents, firstly, a semi-automatic approach to extract schema information from instance data. Secondly, transformations of the derived schemas to different technical spaces are utilized, thereby allowing, amongst other benefits, the application of established integration tools and methods. Finally, as a case study, schemas are derived for Facebook, Google+, and LinkedIn. The resulting schemas are analyzed (i) for completeness and correctness according to the documentation, and (ii) for semantic overlaps and heterogeneities amongst each other, building the basis for future user profile integration.

Pinpointing Tourism Information onto Mobile Maps — A Light-Weight Approach

Location-based systems in the area of tourism, so-called mobile tourist guides, combine geographic information and tourism information in order to deliver relevant content to tourists on the spot. Existing systems often adhere to a heavy-weight approach. This means that, firstly, some do not build on existing tourism information systems, secondly, most of them do not employ standards for accessing geographical information systems, and thirdly, the majority employ a thick client. To tackle these issues, we propose a light-weight approach for location based systems. A major focus is on configurability, allowing to easily making existing tourism information location-aware, by pinpointing points of interest to geographical positions on a map. To demonstrate the applicability of the framework, a prototype of a mobile tourist guide has been implemented for the city of Linz, Austria, which delivers geographic data in form of maps or aerial photos and information about local points of interest.

A light-weight framework for location-based services

Context-aware mobile systems aim at delivering information and services tailored to the current user’s situation [1], [10]. One major application area of these systems is the tourism domain, assisting tourists especially during their vacation through location-based services (LBS) [4], [7]. Consequently a proliferation of approaches [2], [5], [8], [9], [12], [15], [17], [18] can be observed, whereby an in-depth study of related work has shown that some of these existing mobile tourism information systems exhibit few limitations [3], [19]: First, existing approaches often use proprietary interfaces to other systems (e.g. a Geographic Information System – GIS), and employ their own data repositories, thus falling short in portability and having to deal with time consuming content maintenance. Second, often thick clients are used that may lack out-of-the-box-usage. Third, existing solutions are sometimes inflexible concerning configuration capabilities of the system. To deal with those deficiencies, we present a lightweight framework for LBS that can be used for various application domains. This framework builds on existing GIS standards, incorporates already available Web content, can be employed out-of-the-box, and is configurable by using a Web-based interface. The applicability of the framework is demonstrated by means of a prototype of a mobile tourist guide.

Online Booking On The Net — Problems, Issues and Solutions

Web-based tourist information systems are more and more required not to offer online brochures only, but rather to provide both, value and service. One of the first Web-based tourist information systems that recognized this requirement was the Austrian system TIScover. TIScover realizes a lot of very origin concepts like decentralized data maintenance, internationality, and sophisticated online booking mechanisms. According to prominent market reports, especially online booking will grow rapidly in the travel market. This paper identifies the issues and problems one has to deal with in the context of online booking based on the experiences made in TIScover.

Mining the disaster hotspots - situation-adaptive crowd knowledge extraction for crisis management

When disaster strikes, emergency professionals rapidly need to gain Situation Awareness (SAW) on the unfolding crisis situation, thus need to determine what has happened and where help and resources are needed. Nowadays, platforms like Twitter are used as real-time communication hub for sharing such information, like humans on-site observations, advice and requests, and thus can serve as a network of “human sensors” for retrieving information on crisis situations. Recently, so-called crowd-sensing systems for crisis management have started to utilize these networks for harvesting crisis-related social media content. However, up to now these mainly support their human operators in the visual analysis of retrieved messages only and do not aim at the automated extraction and fusion of semantically-grounded descriptions of the underlying real-world crisis events from these textual contents, such as providing structured descriptions of the types and locations of reported damage. This hampers further computational situation assessment, such as providing overall description of the on-going crisis situation, its associated consequences and required response actions. Consequently, this lack of semantically-grounded situational context does not allow to fully implement situation-adaptive crowd knowledge extraction, meaning the system can utilize already established (crowd) knowledge to correspondingly adapt its crowd-sensing and knowledge extraction process alongside the monitored situation, to keep pace with the underlying real-world incidents. In the light of this, in the present paper, we illustrate the realization of a situation-adaptive crowd-sensing and knowledge extraction system by introducing our crowdSA prototype, and examine its potential in a case study on a real-world Twitter crisis data set.

Security of grid structures under disguised traffic attacks

Models of rectangular grid structures were constructed in the form of a colored Petri net. The basic model consists of a matrix of switching nodes that deliver packets to computing nodes which are attached to the matrix borders and produce and consume packets. Since grid structures are often employed to solve boundary value problems, square and torus surfaces were studied and generalized to hypercube and hypertorus in multidimensional space using a grid node that aggregates switching and computing nodes. Traffic guns were added to the models to represent traffic attacks. Simulation in CPN Tools revealed simple and dangerous traffic gun configurations, such as a traffic duel, focus, crossfire, and side shot, which bring the grid to complete deadlock at less than 5xa0% of the grid peak load. Comparably low gun intensity targeted to induce deadlock areas within a grid (network) is a key characteristic of disguised traffic attacks. The aim of future work will be to develop counter-measures for these attacks.