Paolo Bussotti

Functional model of a sense‐emerging assistant for knowledge construction and management

Purpose – This paper aims at presenting the functional model of a “sense‐emerging assistant knowledge management system” (SEA‐KMS) intended to assist the emergence of sense in activities supporting the user in the attribution of full sense to what he is doing.Design/methodology/approach – The design of this KMS is based on the theoretic background of narrative/passion semiotics and the concept of sense as oriented meaning of actions. SEA‐KMS is designed to provide user‐supportive functions to help the user in understanding the value of his activity: contextualise the user in his activity in relation to the overall activities as well as give him personalised assistance from the theoretical and practical aspects of the activity in order to mitigate working situations possibly felt as alienating.Findings – Assisting the user in attributing full sense to the value of his activity fosters his further knowledge construction, which will eventually result in a more effective and satisfactory accomplishment of the...

Trust-enabling decision support system for e-tourism intermediation

We present a trust-enabling intermediation system architecture for intelligent decision support in e-tourism applications, namely the Trust Intermediary Service Provider (TISP) system. The purpose of the present work is twofold: to propose a trust-building conceptual framework to account for customer trust in e-commerce applications; and to present a system architecture for knowledge-based decision-making support in the e-tourism context, as a technological demonstration fitting most of the trust-enabling mechanisms in the conceptual framework. The presented system aims to demonstrate the technological feasibility of a semantic-web-based architecture capable of meeting personalised needs and interests in interacting with an e-tourism intermediary, while allowing mechanisms to support trust building and maintenance. The core TISP components are designed for high reusability and are based on advanced knowledge-management-enabling technologies as well as design patterns derived from the Semantic Web (SW) and artificial intelligence fields of study.

Improving Information Systems Interoperability and Flexibility Using a Semantic Integration Approach

Current enterprise service bus solutions suffer a scalability constraint connected with the needed number of managed service interfaces. To address this issue, we propose a semantic layer to reduce complexity of service orchestration and data integration processes. By endowing ESB solutions with the semantic layer and its related core semantic services, we introduce uniform interfaces for managed services and give an implementation perspective for improving information-systems interoperability through a semantic service bus middleware.

Orchestra!: An Internet Service for Distributed Musical Sessions and Collaborative Music Development and Engineering

This paper proposes a platform for musical sessions distributed over the Internet and for music development and engineering. The system is based on a distributed software architecture and it’s universally accessible through a simple http-client (a browser). Orchestra! is a service that offers a common working environment and tools to the users, as well as a platform that provides a layer of common functionality for existing musical and groupware tools and for the development of new ones.

Evaluating the Impact of Architectural Models on Virtual Organizations Knowledge-Exchange Dynamics

When designing online social networks and collaborative environments, Internet architects need to analyze how relational structures generated by interacting actors are influenced by adopted system-level architectural components. Effective analysis of such socio-technical interrelations is best achieved through a modeling framework and proper simulation tools. We present a virtual organization reference model (VORM) supporting modeling and simulation of VO exchange dynamics. The VORM is based on three components: a descriptive framework easing social-exchanges formalization and description, a behavioral framework giving directions for behavioral modeling of social exchanges and an architectural framework focused on modeling of user-perceivable architectural components. A simulation for a VO engaged in knowledge exchanges has then been developed to exemplify the application of the VORM and to evaluate the impact of reputation, recommendation and identity management systems on the simulated social network.

The Role of the Trust Intermediary in the Information and Knowledge Society

The evolution of the Internet encourages us to think that universal and pervasive access is going to be possible in the near future, from the technological point of view. However there are many other problems that we have to address before, in order to bring the Internet to the desired state of an Information and Knowledge Society for all. The incredible widening of possible users is also determining problems for personalization of services. Adaptive interfaces represent one of the solutions, but they need to backed-up by an adequate network architecture. This paper describes and analyses this conceptual architecture.