Joaquim Sousa Pinto

User Provided Cloud Computing

Web 2.0 started a paradigm shift concerning content generation. Users spend hours browsing and producing contents to share, most of the times, freely. During these activities, their laptops and home PCs are considerably underused. By combining the amount of idle processing capacity with increasingly fast internet accesses, every computer can be considered as a computational “nearby” resource. The question is: what to do with them? This paper explores how these resources can be used to give something back to the user in a secure and private way.

The Building Blocks of a PaaS

Traditional cloud computing providers enable developers to program and deploy applications in the cloud by using platform as a service (PaaS) providers. Despite the benefits of such an approach, this service model usually comes with a high level of the lock in effect into the service provider. The lock in effect occurs when a software developer needs to change its cloud provider. When this happens, it usually means a major application rewrite, specific for the new PaaS. This paper details the initial results of a project whose goal is to build a PaaS where vendor lock in does not occur. With this PaaS, developers wishing to deploy their applications into the cloud may continue to program using their usual development environments. There are no necessary changes required to make the application PaaS compatible. As a proof of concept, we developed an open source PaaS management application as a regular web application and then deployed it on the cloud.

PC workstation for Ethernet monitoring and management

The authors present a monitoring and management workstation for IEEE 802.3 networks (Ethernet) based on a PC-AT. The monitor performs traffic analysis, detects active machines in the network, maintains a network database with information regarding network topology and machines, filters specific packets or protocols, and can also work as a traffic generator. The system has a user friendly interface simplifying the interaction with the network manager.<<ETX>>

Cloud Computing: A Platform of Services for Services

This article describes the state of the art of cloud computing, focusing on its features and on the variety of services and applications that can be placed inside a cloud system, such as databases, processing, cloud gaming, storage and backup, etc.. This article also assesses and highlights the advantages and disadvantages of using cloud computing by companies and provides an overview of cloud computing trends and solutions currently available.

SInBAD - A Digital Library to Aggregate Multimedia Documents

The University of Aveiro is currently developing SInBAD, an integrated system for digital libraries and archives. The aim of the project is to build an information system to support the aggregation of multimedia documents such as books, photographs, and audiovisual resources. All these resources are part of the academic life and identity of the University. The architecture adopted in SInBAD is divided into 3 subsystems - Library, Archive and Jazz - and is Web Service oriented. Also, documents are distributed by several Agents in a dynamic manner. The basic description model used in the documents is the element set defined by the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, although each subsystem may use specific data structures according to the document type and format. In this paper we present the created system, pointing out the interoperability and the web service oriented architecture. Also, despite its distributed nature, users may search simultaneously in all documents.

An Integrated Courseware Editor Based on OLE Technology

We described an integrated courseware editor based on OLE technology. Our courseware editor integrates existing applications like, drawing programs, spreadsheets, sound recorders and text processors into one consistent hypermedia environment. Based on a metaphor of an “electronic” overhead projector both authoring and reading of hypermedia documents are combined in one modeless editor. Our current prototype will be demonstrated at the poster session.

GlobaliD - Privacy Concerns on a Federated Identity Provider Associated with the Users' National Citizen's Card

Personal information sharing is one of the most common online activities. Most of the times we feel forced to give up about some privacy in order to share a piece of information with others. This paper reflects on the anonymity, integrity, privacy of users’ personal information and it’s scattering across the Web by taking an approach to digital identity management concept. Consequently it also reflects on the users’ information certification and accountability. In this paper we purpose a Federated Identity Management solution for the Web to decrease the privacy issues and avoid the lost of anonymity that may occur when users exchange their particular information within web contexts. We will use a collection of publicly available strong identification mechanisms, such as the users (Portuguese) National Electronic Citizen Identity Card, and a Federated Identity initiative to create the GlobaliD, a Federated Identity Provider to address the previously mentioned reflections. Our aim with the development of GlobaliD is to take a step further in the digital identity management and therefore in the privacy and anonymity safety of the users identity Online by making it more versatile, responsible, trustworthy, integrity and privacy safe, anonym and thus secure.

Web annotation system based on Web services

Annotation tools allow users to complement existing documents with comments, suggestions or other information. Currently, desktop annotation tools are much more sophisticated than those available for annotating Web documents. EspiritUs is a Web services based system designed to allow users to create, share, and search annotations on the Web. In this article we analyze in detail existing Web annotation tools, present the adopted architecture based on XML technologies, describe the system implementation and present two possible annotation scenarios. Finally, we present some conclusions and guidelines for future work for this project.

Hypermedia authoring tools based on OLE technology

This paper report on recent and on going work related to the design of a set of hypermedia authoring tools intended to produce courseware, to be used for self learning or distance learning and training environments in a cooperative way. These tools have roots in a standalone hypermedia editor developed to create courseware, to which were added other tools to enhance its usability, namely a hypermedia player to view courseware in self study mode, and a hypermedia browser to create, to navigate and to display graphically the hypermedia document structure. The underlying metaphors are the overhead projector, the transparency and the layer. This system was developed for the MS-Windows environment, supporting OLE technology. We discuss the impact that such technology might have on the “look and feel” of hypermedia learning material and we describe the implementation of a Hypermedia Editor, Browser and Player tools.Part of this work is carried out in the context of the Co-Learn European project, which is aiming to design and to implement a third generation cooperative learning environment.

User Profiles in Corporate Scenarios

In an organizational/corporative environment, each user can perform different roles throughout the time. Dynamic user profiles can be used to accomplish this variation specification. A user profile is a set of information about a given user in a given context and on a specific period of time. The concept of dynamic profiling simply means that the relevant information about the user can vary in time. User profiling is usually related to web advertisement of goods and services for a user in a Web site, by means of gathering information of the users interests and then harvesting the web over these interests. The profile discussed in this paper is service related, directly depending from the users condition in an organization.