Craig W. Thompson

3D Social Virtual Worlds: Research Issues and Challenges

Todays social virtual worlds (SVW) are beginning to realize Stephensons vision of the metaverse: a future massive network of interconnected digital worlds. Tens of millions of people already use these kinds of environments to communicate, collaborate, and do business. Big companies are also moving into these digital realms. Thus, in a context in which the Web is becoming increasingly social, we believe that SVWs are beginning to shape the knowledge-based and glo balized societies and economies of tomorrow. Obviously, an urgent need exists to further understand SVWs and their implications for theory and practice. This article constitutes a first attempt to bring researchers into some of the business, social, technical, legal, and ethical issues related to SVWs. We anticipate that researchers will need to build new theories and concepts for SVWs, to explore the frontiers between reality and virtuality.

Architecture of an open object-oriented database management system

The architecture of the open object-oriented database (OODB) management system, its requirements, and its computational model, which builds database functionality as an extensible collection of transparent extensions to existing programming languages, are described. The way in which open OODBs system architecture is decomposed into a kernal meta-architecture and a collection of modules implementing specific behavioral extensions is discussed. The potential risks of the open OODB architecture are reviewed.<<ETX>>

MENU-BASED NATURAL LANGUAGE UNDERSTANDING

This paper describes the NLMenu System, a menu-based natural language understanding system. Rather than requiring the user to type his input to the system, input to NLMenu is made by selecting items from a set of dynamically changing menus. Active menus and items are determined by a predictive left-corner parser that accesses a semantic grammar and lexicon. The advantage of this approach is that all inputs to the NLMenu System can be understood thus giving a 0% failure rate. A companion system that can automatically generate interfaces to relational databases is also discussed.

Talk to your semantic Web

Using natural language to communicate with computers remains a grand-challenge question. The authors LingoLogic interface technology can be seen as a widely useful human interface technology that can extend the semantic Web.

Object-oriented databases: design and implementation

Object-oriented database systems (OODBS), which aim at meeting the data modeling, performance, cooperative design, and version management requirements of next-generation applications, such as CAD, CAM, CASE, hypermedia, and expert systems, are discussed. Key features of OODBS are presented, a taxonomy of approaches is provided, and architectural and implementation issues, design alternatives, and tradeoffs are examined. A variety of OODB systems, both research prototypes and commercial systems, are summarized. Industry efforts to accelerate a consensus that can lead to standards in the OODB are discussed. >

Architecting RFID Middleware

Radio frequency identification is a wireless identification technology that relies on cheap tags that can be attached to objects and that nearby readers can track. The computer science and computer engineering department at the University of Arkansas started a project aimed at developing open-source RF middleware to address this latter problem. In this article, we describe that softwares development and the challenges and benefits of large-scale software development in universities

Next-Generation Virtual Worlds: Architecture, Status, and Directions

It seems likely that the Web as we know it will undergo several paradigm shifts in the coming years: its content will expand from 2D documents to also accommodate 3D virtual worlds; with new technologies like RFID and smartphones, be able to link to a place or thing (in the real or virtual world) and associate more metadata annotations with things in the real and virtual worlds to create increasingly smart semantic worlds. But to realize these promises, the virtual world and ubiquitous computing communities will need architectures that are standard enough to become pervasive and flexible enough to expand beyond the applications we have today. This article describes some of the motivations and requirements for common core architectures for virtual worlds and introduces a track of articles that aim to change the way humans interact with the Web and their world.

RFID Meets the Internet

After several years of development, networked RFID is moving beyond the early adopter phase as more and more industry sectors are using this technology for increasingly diverse applications. Two main technological advances have made this possible: the wider availability of very low-cost and higher-range passive RFID tags that require no battery to operate, and the use of the Internet to interconnect standalone RFID systems and software through robust fixed- and mobile-communication networks. This special issue presents some recent work in RFID middleware, services, overlaying, and the network edge.

Modeling Healthcare Logistics in a Virtual World

One of the main themes of these columns has been pervasive computing - exploring a collection of technologies that could work together to make it easier to usher in the Internet of things. In this paper, we review enabling technologies, then take a look at how we can use virtual worlds (in particular, Second Life) to accelerate pervasive computings development.

Beyond designing for motivation: the importance of context in gamification

Most design advice for the development of successful gamification systems has focused on how best to engage the end user while imbuing the system with playfulness. This paper argues that it is also critical for designers to focus on the broad context of the systems deployment, including the identification of stakeholder requirements, requirements from the hosting organization, deep understanding of the diversity of the target population, understanding of limits in the agency of the target users, and constraints arising from the post-deployment environment. To illustrate the importance of such contextual and stakeholder analysis, the paper presents issues and associated solutions that were discovered through the creation of a childrens nutrition and fitness education gamification system. The problems identified through a broad analysis of context significantly altered the design of the system and led to the realization that the initially conceptualized project would have been unusable. The paper concludes with concrete lessons for designers.