Marco Padula

Personalized web browsing experience

In this paper we propose a Web-based software system that allows the realization of a highly personalized Web browsing experience. The system is based on two relevant elements: the Intelligent Agent and the pCard document. The Intelligent Agent analyzes the Web sites visited by the users collecting information useful to her/his characterization and crosses such information with the personal preferences expressed by the user her/himself. The user profile is stored in a document written in pCard format that we have defined as an evolution of the vCard format.

A Collaborative System for Environment and Tourism Information Authoring and Web Publishing: An Institutional Case Study

Information intensive activities are usually carried out by heterogeneous work groups: collaboration is needed to reach a common goal that stems from different individual tasks such as data harvesting, aggregation and presentation, dealing with a large amount of highly fragmented information that could overload the working procedure nowadays adopted. Furthermore, the persons involved in such activities often operate from remote locations and in different times and are characterized by different skills and cultures. This requires that the workflow of the complete information cycle should be analysed to design the complex information system which can effectively support the diversified tasks fitting the requirements and habits of all the operators. A complex system can nowadays be developed by integrating already available components and by making them inter-operable. Environment heritage conservation and tourism promotion refer to a complex production chain where private companies and public institutions are involved with specific interests and skills. A relevant amount of the information needed and produced by their activities are referred to the territory, therefore is represented as geo-referenced data.

Knowledge management for designing business workflows through semantic compositions of web services

This paper presents a workflow management system called task management system (TMS) devoted to help end users to combine and integrate distributed tasks through visual composition strategies. The TMS is devoted to support human resources in performing their working activities and in exploiting their knowledge and expertise. The TMS network allows employees, who are experts of a specific domain, to design a workflow, to visually validate its execution and to execute it at use time. In particular, the paper describes how workflow designers use TMS to transform the task analysis documents prepared by domain experts into a description of the workflow. The retrieved components are web services that are available in remote or local repositories representing distributed knowledge bases of business tasks. The TMS offers transparent invocation methods for invoking services by means of a semantic discovery engine designed for exploiting a taxonomy of web services.

TMS for Multimodal Information Processing

Many working processes are complex and composed by heterogeneous atomic tasks, e.g. editing, assembling data from different sources (as databases or laboratorys devices) with texts, images or learning objects, or submitting them to processing components to retrieve information, to render them, re-format, submit to computations, and other types of information processing. All these complex processes are extremely difficult to be modeled and automatized without having a flexible, multimodular evolutionary system in place. Support to information from different modalities increases the performance of a computer system originally designed for a task with a unimodular nature. In this paper, we discuss the idea of task management system (TMS) as a component based system which offers a virtual workbench to search, acquire, describe and assemble computational agents performing single autonomous tasks into working processes. We sustain that TMS is a cutting edge platform to develop SW solutions for problems related to workflow automatization and design. The architecture we propose follows the conceptual track of the TMS to allow composition and arrangement of atomic modules into a complex system: a core configuration of the system can be extended with a set of task/components, chunks of activities which are considered basic to working flow composition. The workflow designer selects the relevant chunks from system repositories, drags them into a working system area and assembles them into a working process. Complex activities could be formally described, implemented and applied with a consequent advantage for personnel re-organization toward more conceptual activities.

The TeleSCoPE Code. Quality standards for telehealth practice across Europe

The TeleSCoPE project was inspired by COM (2008) 689 Action of the EC in order to address the increasing widespread use of telehealth and provide a means of raising trust and acceptance among users. The implementation of a EU Code of Practice for Telehealth Services was not only the main objective of TeleSCoPE, but also represented a first milestone in a mainstreaming process by which such services could be accredited. Such accreditation would help ensure that telehealth services across the EU achieved an appropriate quality benchmark. This paper will illustrate the main steps involved in the process leading to the Codes adoption. This included, among others, these relevant factors: technology solutions, confidence from users, quality standards analysis, consultation stage, response from providers, draft code versions and update with guidelines on offered services. The Code can have a positive impact on start-up service initiatives as well as considerable benefits on involved users. In fact, telehealth services based on a common quality standard can help cost reductions, procedure and standardisation patterns, protocols and interoperability requirements.

Perspectives and Methods in the Development of Technological Tools for Supporting Future Studies in Science and Technology

The term “future studies” refers to studies based on the prediction and analysis of future horizons, able to examine the long-term impact of policies and technologies, and to anticipate emerging social challenges. Those studies experience today an emerging interest, also due to the large sets of data made available by the social media and big data phenomena. This paper presents a review of widely adopted approaches in these study activities, with three levels of detail scale: starting from a wide scale mapping of related disciplines, the second level focuses on the traditionally adopted methodologies and, on the level of greater detail, the paper describes methodological and software analysis tools that cope also with the semantic web and social media aspects.

Interactive Task Management System Development Based on Semantic Orchestration of Web Services

In recent years, end users are increasingly requiring to adapt and shape the software artifacts they use, thus becoming developers of their tools without being or willing to become computer experts. Capitalizing on the experience gained in the collaboration with an Italian research and certification institution, this paper proposes a Task Management System based on a Web service architecture, aimed at supporting the activities of workflow designers of this institution. The objective is to create a system that assists such domain experts in designing workflows through semantic orchestration of existing Web services, permitting them to use the knowledge and expertise they possess.

A Design Methodology for Multimodal Interactive Systems: A Pragmatical Approach

A methodology is described to design and generate virtual environments that a) support the activities of practitioners skilled with the experimental knowledge of their specific domain; b) offer multimodal interaction styles customized to the culture and skills of the target community of practitioners; c) are tailorable, customizable and adaptive to the context of activity; d) support the exchange of information among users of different communities; e) support the gathering of usability data from the field and from the designers work. The methodology is based on a network of software shaping workshops for designing and developing multimodal interactive systems. Each workshop can be customized to and tailorable by the members of a community according to their performing task. In the methodologypsilas perspective, each member of the design team (software engineers, HCI experts and domain-experts) is provided with an appropriate workshop, a virtual environment which can be accessed both from desktop and mobile devices and allows workers to manage and share a knowledge repository. The implemented workshops are described using an XML-based language, which permits the functional specification of e-documents: this specification is materialized in different ways and with different languages (SVG, HTML) according to the device in use. The network of workshops which is at the base of the methodology, has been developed following a pragmatical path through different specific pilot domains which suggested functionalities to be added step by step.