Tanguy Coenen

MuseUs: Case study of a pervasive cultural heritage serious game

This article describes a case study on MuseUs, a pervasive serious game for use in museums, running as a smartphone app. During the museum visit, players are invited to create their own exposition and are guided by the application in doing so. The aim is to provide a learning effect during a visit to a museum exhibition. Central to the MuseUs experience is that it does not necessitate a predefined path trough the museum and that it does not draw the attention away from the exposition itself. Also, the application stimulates the visitor to look at cultural heritage elements in a different way, permitting the construction of personal narratives while creating a personal exposition. Using a methodology derived from action research, we present recommendations for the design of similar applications and conclude by proposing a high-level architecture for pervasive serious games applied to cultural heritage.

Knowledge sharing over social networking systems: architecture, usage patterns and their application

The recent success of social networking sites like mySpace, Friendster, Orkut, LinkedIn, Ecademy and openBC indicates that extending ones social network through a virtual medium is a popular proposition The social networking paradigm can be integrated with the knowledge management field, in which sharing knowledge with others is a central issue This paper investigates how the social networking concept can be applied to support knowledge sharing between people Together with common features in the architecture of social networking systems, a number of platform independent usage patterns are discussed that can support knowledge sharing between members Finally, we present the open source KnoSoS system, which integrates the discussed architecture and usage patterns.

City of things: An integrated and multi-technology testbed for IoT smart city experiments

While smart cities have the potential to monitor and control the city in real-time through sensors and actuators, there is still an important road ahead to evolve from isolated smart city experiments to real large-scale deployments. Important research questions remain on how and which wireless technologies should be setup for connecting the city, how the data should be analysed and how the acceptance by users of applications can be assessed. In this paper we present the City of Things testbed, which is a smart city testbed located in the city of Antwerp, Belgium to address these questions. It allows the setup and validation of new smart city experiments both at a technology and user level. City of Things consists of a multi-wireless technology network infrastructure, the capacity to easily perform data experiments on top and a living lab approach to validate the experiments. In comparison to other smart city testbeds, City of Things consists of an integrated approach, allowing experimentation on three different layers: networks, data and living lab while supporting a wide range of wireless technologies. We give an overview of the City of Things architecture, explain how researchers can perform smart city experiments and illustrate this by a case study on air quality.

Turning a Corporate Folksonomy into a Lightweight Corporate Ontology

Companies use company-specific terminology that may differ from the terminology used in existing corporate ontologies (e.g. Tove) and therefore need their own ontology. However, the current ontology engineering techniques are time-consuming and there exists a conceptual mismatch among developers and users. In contrast, folksonomies or the flat bottom-up taxonomies constituted by web users’ tags are rapidly created. In this paper, we present an approach that cost-efficiently derives a lightweight corporate ontology from a corporate folksonomy. We tested it on the folksonomy of a European company and first results are promising: it shows that it creates additional value to the company.

LL-ADR: Action Design Research in Living Labs

Design Science research is a mainstream Information systems discipline, yet Living Lab literature seems not to leverage its insights. The paper describes how Living Labs can be conducted as Design Science Research (DSR) by adapting the Action Design Research method. The resulting method is named LL-ADR. A case is presented to indicate how LL-ADR can be applied and findings for both Living Labs and DSR are discussed.

Designing a smart city playground: Real-time air quality measurements and visualization in the City of Things testbed

While smart cities have the potential to monitor and control the city in real-time through sensors and actuators, there is still an important road ahead to evolve from isolated smart city experiments to real large-scale deployments. The City of Things testbed, which is a smart city testbed located in the city of Antwerp, Belgium wants to address the underlying research challenges by means of a multi-technology network infrastructure, the capacity to easily perform data experiments on top and a living lab approach to validate the experiments. The demo described in this paper showcases a first use case scenario, visualizing live air quality data that is monitored via sensors installed on top of mobile post vans, driving around in the City of Antwerp. By means of this test demo we will further detail how our generic test bed enables the dynamic integration and support of multiple wireless technologies, novel data processing use cases scenarios as well as the active user panel involvement.

Towards a Framework for Learning in the OSMA Serious Game Engine

Online multiplayer serious games offer a way to support learning in a gaming paradigm that is familiar to many players and has proven its effectiveness in providing sustainably enjoyable gameplay. We aim to decrease development cost for these games by providing a modular game design framework and a component-based technical architecture. The technical architecture and the game design framework will be implemented and iteratively refined through two proofs of concept.

The design and evaluation of a pervasive engagement game in a city neighborhood

We describe how a game was designed, implemented and evaluated aiming to increase the engagement of citizens with their neighborhood. 277 players participated. Survey results show that players got to know new people as a result of playing the game and that players had the intention to keep in touch with them. The system was found to be both fun and useful. The check-in mechanic, that allowed people to check-in together, scored highest in terms of both fun and usefulness. 3 different types of game components are proposed for guiding future designs: glue, attractor and mobiliser. Action Design Research is presented as a method that can be used to design and research pervasive engagement games.