Kam Kees van der Sluijs

A generic component for exchanging user models between web-based systems

Educational web-based systems exemplify the increasing need for personalisation. Applications that adapt to individual users need a model of the user that contains as accurate data as possible. On the web, learners use multiple educational systems and spend their time over many applications: these are individually limited in their user modelling but can gain from joining forces. This boils down to establishing semantic interoperability of user or learner models. While semantic interoperability is hard, the emerging Semantic Web (SW) might offer just the mechanisms we need. In this paper, we develop the Generic User model Component (GUC): a generic software that utilises SW technology to support the exchange of user model data between applications. For a semantically effective user model exchange, GUC allows the configuration of a distributed management of mappings between user models. Thus, applications can choose different levels of uniting user models to maximise their personalisation.

Hera-S: web design using sesame

Web application design methods traditionally aim to reduce complexity in implementing Web applications. However, these methods struggle with providing the necessary dynamics and flexibility to keep up with the increasing users demand for personalization and feedback mechanisms. We present Hera-S, based on Sesame and the SeRQL query language that does provide the necessary flexibility. Hera-S allows designers the plain use of the Semantic Web languages RDFS and OWL for designing the domain model and the context data model, thus enabling re-use of existing data models and opening up the RDF instance data to queries and updates via the Sesame RDF-framework.

Considering additional adaptation concerns in the design of web applications

The design of Web applications traditionally relies heavily on the navigation design. The Web as it evolves now brings additional design concerns, such as omni-presence, device-dependence, privacy, accessibility, localization etc. Many of these additional concerns are occurrences of user- or context-dependency, and are typically realized by transformations of the application (design) that embed adaptation in the navigation. In this paper we focus on how to extend an application with new functionality without having to redesign the entire application. If we can easily add functionality, we can separate additional design concerns and describe them independently. Using a component-based implementation we show how to extend a Web application to support additional design concerns at presentation generation level. Furthermore, we demonstrate how an Aspect-Oriented approach can support the high-level specification of these (additional) design concerns at a conceptual level.

Semantics-based framework for personalized access to TV content: the iFanzy use case

The ICT landscape is developing into a highly-interactive distributed environment in which people interact with multiple devices (e.g. portable devices such as mobile phones and home equipment such as TV’s) and multiple applications (e.g. computer programs such as Web browsers and dedicated Web services) [1]. Globally, the industry is being driven by the shift away from old models - from physical space to digital space. New methods emerge for getting content such as TV programs via the Web. Almost half of the people want to watch TV content on their PC’s; they want to make a bridge between a TV and a PC, perhaps even sitting in a home office [2]. The information overload is enormous and the content presented is hardly adapted to the prior knowledge, to the preferences and to the current situation of the user.

On Temporal Cardinality in the Context of the TOWL Language

The TOWL language is a temporal ontology language built on top of OWL-DL that enables descriptions involving time and temporal aspects such as change and state transitions. Extending OWL-DL into a temporal context does not only relate to providing the adequate expressiveness for such a goal, but also ensuring that static concepts preserve their meaning in a temporal environment. One such concept relates to cardinality. In this paper, we discuss temporal cardinality in the context of the TOWL language, and provide a possible approach towards representing temporal cardinality in this context.

Engineering semantic-based interactive multi-device web applications

To build high-quality personalized Web applications developers have to deal with a number of complex problems. We look at the growing class of personalized Web Applications that share three characteristic challenges. Firstly, the semantic problem of how to enable content reuse and integration. Another problem is how to move away from a sluggish static interface to a responsive dynamic one as seen in regular desktop applications. The third problem is adapting the system into a multi-device environment. For this class of personalized Web applications we look at an example application, a TV recommender called SenSee, in which we solve these problems in a metadata-driven way. We go into depth in the techniques we used to create a solution for these given problems, where we particularly look at utilizing the techniques of Web Services, Web 2.0 and the Semantic Web. Moreover, we show how these techniques can also be used to improve the core personalization functionality of the application. In this paper we present our experience with SenSee to demonstrate general engineering lessons for this type of applications.

From adaptation engineering to aspect-oriented context-dependency

The evolution of the Web requires to consider an increasing number of context-dependency issues. Therefore, in our research we focus on how to extend a Web application with additional adaptation concerns without having to redesign the entire application. Based on a generic transcoding tool we illustrate here how we can add adaptation functionality to an existing Web application. Furthermore, we consider how an aspect-oriented approach can support the high-level specification of such additional concerns in the design of the Web application.

Exploiting User Tags to Build a Semantic Cultural Heritage Portal

Based on a metadata structure that intelligently builds a semantically linked data set, the Chi Explorer Web application discloses cultural heritage collections to the general public.

Automatic Generation of Semantic Metadata as Basis for User Modeling and Adaptation

With the help of the simple and world-wide accepted technique of tagging, users can help to collaboratively provide metadata over previously uncharted collections of multimedia documents. However, the semantics of tags are rather limited and not always as helpful in disclosing a dataset as a proper ontology can be. In this paper we introduce the Relco framework that applies syntactic, semantic and collaborative techniques to connect tags to ontological concepts, which helps to quickly get more semantics about a tag. We demonstrate the applicability of our techniques in two concrete Web applications: one in the educational domain and one in the cultural heritage domain. For the former we describe how students are better able to find the information in socially tagged videos and in the latter we also show how the used techniques allow building a faceted browser over the previously uncharted multimedia objects and we show which techniques could be applied to control the quality of user driven annotation.