Marco Brambilla

Equity in the City: On Measuring Urban (Ine)Quality of Life §

We merge contributions from the New Urban Economics and inequality measurement to assess quality of life (QOL) in a given city. We take the point of view of a city planner in favor of an even accessibility to amenities within the city. Instead of the average value of amenities computed in the Roback (1982) QOL index, our index captures the value of its multidimensional certainty equivalent. We apply this methodology to derive a QOL index for the city of Milan.

Human Computation for Organizations: Socializing Business Process Management

The advent of human computation fostered by the massive diffusion of social media in personal life will change also the workplace. We are witnessing the emergence of Social Business Process Management, defined as the integration of business process management with social media, with the aim of enhancing the enterprise performance by means of a controlled participation of external stakeholders to process design and enactment. This Chapter discusses a model-driven approach to the design of participatory and socially enacted business processes. Our proposal comprises a methodology for identifying relevant social requirements in business processes, a notation for expressing social process aspects (formulated as a BPMN 2.0 extension), and a technical framework for implementing social processes as Web applications integrated with public or private Web social networks. The work is part of the ongoing BPM4People project, an initiative funded by the Seventh Framework Programme of the European Commission.

A Software Engineering Approach based on WebML and BPMN to the Mediation Scenario of the SWS Challenge

Although Semantic Web Services are expected to produce a revolution in the development of Web-based systems, very few enterprise-wide design experiences are available; one of the main reasons is the lack of sound Software Engineering methods and tools for the deployment of Semantic Web applications. In this chapter, we present an approach to software development for the Semantic Web based on classical Software Engineering methods (i.e., formal business process development, computer-aided and component-based software design, and automatic code generation) and on semantic methods and tools (i.e., ontology engineering, semantic service annotation and discovery).

Percepción de justicia y actitudes hacia inmigrantes

Resumen La investigación sobre justicia ha demostrado que en ocasiones los individuos prefieren conseguir resultados peores para ellos pero justos, más que resultados beneficiosos pero injustos. La presente investigación explora los efectos de la percepción de justicia sobre las actitudes intergrupales, manipulando la cantidad de recursos asignados a autóctonos e inmigrantes de forma proporcional al número de habitantes en un lugar determinado. En la condición de justicia, el número de inmigrantes fue proporcional a la cantidad de recursos asignados, mientras en la condición de injusticia el número de inmigrantes y los recursos asignados no fueron proporcionales. El Estudio 1 (N = 149) mostró que en la condición de justicia, en comparación con la condición de injusticia, se redujo el prejuicio y el apoyo hacia políticas anti inmigración. En el Estudio 2 (N = 82) se replicaron algunos de los resultados del Estudio 1 en un contexto y con un exogrupo diferentes. Además, los participantes en la condición de justicia mostraron un mayor apoyo a un partido político pro-inmigración que los de la condición de injusticia. Se discuten las implicaciones de estos resultados.

The orientation model "in rooms"

Needs analysis in training graduate distance. The contribution descriz qualitative research based on analysis of online messages produced by all persons who have indicated their intention to join a degree course in Social Psychological Research Disciplines Universita di Milano-Bicocca.

Advanced Hypertext Implementation

This chapter discusses the software architecture called model-view-controller (MVC), used for improving the separation of concerns and modularity of software applications. Designing the overall architecture of an application requires addressing not only the hardware and network configuration, but also the software architecture. Various software-specific design objectives that drive the decision-making process are (1) separation of concerns, (2) evolvability, (3) reusability, and (4) software scalability. The MVC is conceived to better separate and insulate the three essential functions of an interactive application: the business logic of the application (the model), the interface presented to the user (the view), and the control of the interaction triggered by the users actions (the controller). The MVC architecture prescribes a sharp distinction of responsibilities among the components of the application: the model encapsulates the business actions required for answering a users request and keeps the state of the application, the view embodies the presentation logic for assembling the user interface, the controller is responsible for interpreting the users request, and the actions are the actual components that implement the business logic.

Chapter 1 – Technologies for Web Applications

Publisher Summary nThis chapter provides an overview of the technologies constituting the foundations for building data-intensive Web applications. The chapter begins by surveying the basic protocols and languages for the Web, such as hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP), hypertext markup language (HTML), and client-side scripting. Then, extensible markup language (XML) and the collateral extensible stylesheet language (XSL) technology are introduced as the new paradigm for content definition and exchange. To address the “data” part of data-intensive Web applications, a brief compendium on relational databases, structured query language (SQL), the most popular relational query language, and on the open database connectivity (ODBC) and Java database connectivity (JDBC) database interoperability standards, are included. The chapter then discusses the architectures for constructing HTML pages on the fly, including common gateway interface (CGI), Java servlets, server-side scripting, with a special mention of Java server pages (JSP) and Microsoft .NET custom tag libraries, and application servers. The challenging requirements of multi-device application development are addressed. The use of XML as an intermediate data format, and of SQL and XSL as the declarative languages for expressing the queries and transformations necessary to publish database content for multiple devices, are also reviewed.

Chapter 14 – Tools for Model-Based Development of Web Applications

Publisher Summary nThis chapter illustrates WebRatio, a tool specifically designed to support the development process of data-intensive Web applications. WebRatio consists of an entity-relationship and WebML editor, and a set of extensible stylesheet language (XSL)-based code generators, which transform an XML representation of the application into running page templates. WebRatio faces the dilemma of CASE tools between flexibility and automation by providing hooks for extending the core WebML primitives with custom units and style sheets, which can be integrated into the WebML diagrams and code generation process. The use of WebRatio enhances the Web development productivity in two ways: it speeds up analysis and design, exploiting user-friendly schema drawing tools, automatic documentation generation, and fast prototyping based on one-click database and page template generation; and it enables the automatic implementation of page templates and unit services, which eliminates a substantial fraction of the development effort. Applications produced with WebRatio exploit the model-view-controller (MVC) architecture and follow the guidelines for software design. Thus, the generated code meets the requirements of enterprise-class data-intensive Web applications.

Chapter 6 – Overview of the Development Process

Publisher Summary nThis chapter examines how the classic incremental and iterative development process advocated by the modern software engineering methodologies can be adapted to the specificity of data-intensive Web applications. The chapter discusses the fundamental inputs and outputs of a development process of a data intensive Web application. Web application development involves different actors with complementary skills and goals. The phases of the development process of a data-intensive Web application are shown diagrammatically. Application development undergoes several cycles of problem discovery/design refinement/implementation, and each iteration produces a prototype or partial version of the system. At each iteration, the current version of the system is tested and evaluated, and then extended or modified. Requirements specification is the activity in which the application analyst collects and formalizes the essential information about the application domain and expected functions. The input to requirements specification is the set of business requirements that motivate the application development and all the available information on the technical, organizational, and managerial context where the application must operate.

Chapter 5 – Advanced Hypertext Model

Publisher Summary nIn WebML, pages are the fundamental unit of computation. A WebML page may contain multiple units linked to each other to form a complex graph, and may be accessed by means of several different links, originating from other pages, from a unit inside the page itself, or from an operation activated from the same page or from another page. This chapter addresses the computation of a WebML page, which may take place after inter-page link navigation, intra-page link navigation, and content update operations. Understanding the page computation process helps in the subsequent development phases, and also unveils subtle modeling errors, corresponding to the page and unit configurations. The chapter also discusses the non-computable and nondeterministic hypertexts. Modeling errors can be easily spotted by means of syntactic checks analyzing the match between link and selector parameters, which may uncover ambiguities, lack of information, and type errors.