Unai Aguilera

Enabling Flexible and Continuous Capability Invocation in Mobile Prosumer Environments

Mobile prosumer environments require the communication with heterogeneous devices during the execution of mobile services. These environments integrate sensors, actuators and smart devices, whose availability continuously changes. The aim of this paper is to design a reference architecture for implementing a model for continuous service execution and access to capabilities, i.e., the functionalities provided by these devices. The defined architecture follows a set of software engineering patterns and includes some communication paradigms to cope with the heterogeneity of sensors, actuators, controllers and other devices in the environment. In addition, we stress the importance of the flexibility in capability invocation by allowing the communication middleware to select the access technology and change the communication paradigm when dealing with smart devices, and by describing and evaluating two algorithms for resource access management.

Citizen-centric data services for smarter cities

Abstract Smart Cities use Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) to manage more efficiently the resources and services offered by a city and to make them more approachable to all its stakeholders (citizens, companies and public administration). In contrast to the view of big corporations promoting holistic “smart city in a box” solutions, this work proposes that smarter cities can be achieved by combining already available infrastructure, i.e., Open Government Data and sensor networks deployed in cities, with the citizens’ active contributions towards city knowledge by means of their smartphones and the apps executed in them. In addition, this work introduces the main characteristics of the IES Cities platform, whose goal is to ease the generation of citizen-centric apps that exploit urban data in different domains. The proposed vision is achieved by providing a common access mechanism to the heterogeneous data sources offered by the city, which reduces the complexity of accessing the city’s data whilst bringing citizens closely to a prosumer (double consumer and producer) role and allowing to integrate legacy data into the cities’ data ecosystem.

An Approach to Dynamic Knowledge Extension and Semantic Reasoning in Highly-Mutable Environments

AmI environments are dynamic. They change rapidly and continuously due to the appearance and disappearance of devices, people and changes in their situation. These changes need to be reflected in the context information which is collected and maintained by the Ambient Intelligence applications. In this work we present a semantic infrastructure whose context information can be dynamically enriched and extended by the dynamically discovered objects in the environment, and which enables to reason over it.

An architecture for automatic service composition in MANET using a distributed service graph

Mobile ad hoc networks (MANET) are wireless networks characterized by the dynamic nature of their members. The creation of these networks occurs in an unplanned manner and as a response to the distribution of services at each moment of its lifetime. The topology of a MANET can rapidly change and, therefore, these networks require mechanisms which allow participant devices to communicate with each other in spite of their mobility. A MANET can be applied in those situations where the deployment of a network without a fixed infrastructure is required. This research proposes a new protocol for the automatic composition of services in MANETs based on the construction and maintenance of a distributed service graph-DSG. This graph makes it possible to obtain the dependencies which exist among different services provided by the network devices, during a networks lifetime, still responding to the changes which could arise. Later, this graph will be used during the composition process to reduce the time needed to locate valid solutions. Finally, the proposed architecture is fully implemented and evaluated using a network simulator, in order to gain knowledge about its advantages and limitations.

Infrastructural Support for Ambient Assisted Living

This work describes several infrastructure contributions aimed to simplify the deployment of Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) environments so that elderly people can maximize the time they live independently, through the help of ICT, at their own homes. Three core contributions are reviewed: a) a multi-layered OSGi-based middleware architecture which enables adding new environment monitoring and actuating devices seamlessly, b) an easy-to-use elderly-accessible front-end to comfortably control from a touch screen environment services together with a custom-built alert bracelet to seek assistance anywhere at any time and c) a rule-based engine which allows the configuration of the reactive behaviour of an environment as a set of rules.

Service composition for mobile ad hoc networks using distributed matching

Ubiquitous computing envisions the existence of spaces which consist on objects with computational capabilities. These objects can be connected among each other forming wireless networks which could be very dynamic in their nature due to their mobility. Service composition aims to resolve users needs by creating work-flows which use available functionalities, provided by devices, by assembling them into new services. This work presents an architecture for service composition applied to mobile networks which reacts to those changes which can arise in the network topology. All nodes taking part in the network contain the same architecture meaning that the solution is performed in a peer-to-peer manner distributing the processing load among different nodes of the network. Applications needing to compose services will be constructed on top of the proposed architecture. The architecture has been fully implemented and evaluated using a network simulator.

Overcrowding detection in indoor events using scalable technologies

The increase in the number of large-scale events held indoors (i.e., conferences and business events) opens new opportunities for crowd monitoring and access controlling as a way to prevent risks and provide further information about the event’s development. In addition, the availability of already connectable devices among attendees allows to perform non-intrusive positioning during the event, without the need of specific tracking devices. We present an algorithm for overcrowding detection based on passive Wi-Fi requests capture and a platform for event monitoring that integrates this algorithm. The platform offers access control management, attendees monitoring and the analysis and visualization of the captured information, using a scalable software architecture. In this paper, we evaluate the algorithm in two ways: First, we test its accuracy with data captured in a real event, and then we analyze the scalability of the code in a multi-core Apache Spark-based environment. The experiments show that the algorithm provides accurate results with the captured data, and that the code scales properly.

Collaboration-Centred Cities through Urban Apps Based on Open and User-Generated Data

This paper describes the IES Cities platform conceived to streamline the development of urban apps that combine heterogeneous datasets provided by diverse entities, namely, government, citizens, sensor infrastructure and other information data sources. This work pursues the challenge of achieving effective citizen collaboration by empowering them to prosume urban data across time. Particularly, this paper focuses on the query mapper; a key component of the IES Cities platform devised to democratize the development of open data-based mobile urban apps. This component allows developers not only to use available data, but also to contribute to existing datasets with the execution of SQL sentences. In addition, the component allows developers to create ad hoc storages for their applications, publishable as new datasets accessible by other consumers. As multiple users could be contributing and using a dataset, our solution also provides a data level permission mechanism to control how the platform manages the access to its datasets. We have evaluated the advantages brought forward by IES Cities from the developers’ perspective by describing an exemplary urban app created on top of it. In addition, we include an evaluation of the main functionalities of the query mapper.

Towards Citizen Co-created Public Service Apps

WeLive project’s main objective is about transforming the current e-government approach by providing a new paradigm based on a new open model oriented towards the design, production and deployment of public services and mobile apps based on the collaboration of different stakeholders. These stakeholders form the quadruple helix, i.e., citizens, private companies, research institutes and public administrations. Through the application of open innovation, open data and open services paradigms, the framework developed within the WeLive project enables the co-creation of urban apps. In this paper, we extend the description of the WeLive platform presented at , plus the preliminary results of the first pilot phase. The two-phase evaluation methodology designed and the evaluation results of first pilot sub-phase are also presented.

Exploring LOD through metadata extraction and data-driven visualizations

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present a new approach toward automatically visualizing Linked Open Data (LOD) through metadata analysis. Design/methodology/approach – By focussing on the data within a LOD dataset, the authors can infer its structure in a much better way than current approaches, generating more intuitive models to progress toward visual representations. Findings – With no technical knowledge required, focussing on metadata properties from a semantically annotated dataset could lead to automatically generated charts that allow to understand the dataset in an exploratory manner. Through interactive visualizations, users can navigate LOD sources using a natural approach, in order to save time and resources when dealing with an unknown resource for the first time. Research limitations/implications – This approach is suitable for available SPARQL endpoints and could be extended for resource description framework dumps loaded locally. Originality/value – Most works dealing with LOD vi...