Daniela Bourges-Waldegg

The fluid computing middleware: bringing application fluidity to the mobile Internet

The fluid computing middleware allows application data to flow, as a liquid, between devices. The middleware, based on the model-view-controller design pattern, transforms a collection of devices into a cooperative platform and provides application programmers with appropriate abstractions to use generic data management services, such as data replication and synchronization of arbitrary data structures. Relieved from managing this underlying complexity, programmers can focus on developing new application functionality. In particular, they can program applications that seamlessly transition between devices and connectivity degrees, by relying on the fluid real-time optimistic replication mechanism. By shifting the focus from the network and devices to the data, fluid computing enables new interaction paradigms, where users can access and manipulate their data from any of their devices transparently. Applications, then, become multidevice - a characteristic that can be applied to both single-user and collaboration scenarios.

Combination of RSS newsfeeds and forms for driving Web-based workflow

This paper proposes a novel application of the popular content syndication format RSS (really simple syndication) to improve the user experience of humans interacting with electronic workflows. We will discuss this in relation to a more general solution, formidable, for developing and deploying electronic business processes that consist of a mixture of automatic and human-facing steps

Deriving Expertise Profiles from Tags

We propose a novel approach to the problem of expertise mining in an enterprise, taking advantage of online social applications deployed within the enterprise. Based on the assumption that the users’ interactions with such social software reflect to some extent their expertise, we devise a probabilistic method for identifying the main areas of expertise of users based solely on their set of tags extracted from a social bookmarking system. We base our approach on statistical language models, which we adapt to fit our unique setting. We train and validate our model on a real world dataset extracted from two IBM-internal applications. Our results show that our approach provides a viable alternative to other methods that rely on documents extracted from the enterprise corpora.

Generation of Java Beans to access XML data

Describes a technique to automatically generate a set of Java Beans accessing data encoded according to some XML document type definition (DTD). This technique does not support any XML-based markup but can be applied to a sufficiently large class of XML-compliant markup language to make the approach of practical interest. The generated Java Beans can be used as data accessors to deliver dynamic or static content for markup pages used in an Internet-style application. We briefly describe the technology environment into which our solution is embedded and provide an in-depth treatment of the mapping from XML data on to a flattened relational data model, including an example to illustrate our approach.

Managed portal appliance: an experiment in extending the reach of Web applications

In the typical Web application, a client renders markup and the application or service is implemented as a set of tiered functions in the network. However, clients can contain resources useful for an application and network connections cannot always be assumed. In this paper, we consider extending the reach of a Web application to include: 1) access to and use of local client resources, and 2) operation while disconnected from the network. We, however, try to preserve desirable programming model and management characteristics of Web applications. We propose a system architecture and discuss an initial implementation using a portal as an example Web application.