Web Information Systems Research Articles

Mobile web information systems (MobiWIS 2013)

This issue of Computing contains the revised and extended versions of a selection of the best papers from the 10th International Conference on Mobile Web Information Systems,MobiWIS 2013, held in Paphos, Cyprus, inAugust 2013.MobiWIS proposes itself as the premier venue to present and discuss all aspects related to issues and solutions of mobile technologies when it comes to the engineering of mobile and web-based information systems. The topics covered by the conference were Mobile Web and Social Applications,Middleware/SOA,MobileWeb Searching, Contextand Location-Aware Services, DataManagement, Mobile Cloud Services,Mobile Internet of Things, Mobile Web Security, Trust and Privacy, Mobile Networks, Protocols and Applications,MobileCommerce andBusiness Services,HCI. Thewide range of topics shows that the field is complex and dynamic and that it is called to respond to the new challenges posed by a rapid evolution of use and technology. The best papers of MobiWIS 2013 were selected by the MobiWIS PC chairs based on their quality. Their authorswere invited to submit revised and significantly extended versions. All invited papers were reviewed again by selected members of the Program Committee of the conference and checked for quality.

A Decade of Model Driven Web Services Composition Frameworks

Now a day, enterprises are implementing their Web Information Systems using Service Oriented Architecture. SOA applications are basically composition of services. To accomplish a business activity, these services are composed using services composition languages/standards, which define the execution order of services invocations and their interaction patterns. Services composition is a very complex process consist of several phases or steps and further subdivided into sub-process and sub-steps. Over the past decade, many researchers have come up with their proposed services composition frameworks consisting of different phases and steps and the whole life cycle is defined. Mostly these frameworks are using the Model Driven Software Development approach to develop Web Information Systems and UML is used as a modelling language for business process modelling. Later on system artefacts are automatically generated from these models. In this study, a survey is presented showing the progress made by these researchers in the area of service composition and discusses different services composition frameworks presented by the most prominent researchers for the development of Web Information Systems.

Editorial for the special issue on advanced information systems for the Web

For more than twenty years, we are witnesses to novel approaches, intense development and continuous deployment of Web Information Systems that by now empower nearly all aspects of daily life. The fast-paced advancement of the Web and its supporting systems and tools have been assisted by efficient methods for accessing data placed in aggregations of web-servers, databases, and collections, by novel techniques for the provision of highavailability for data, and finally, by policies for the orderly operation of the co-existing and collaborative virtual ecosystems. Global virtual communities are being formed on the web and systems and tools supporting their operations constitute a vibrant and rather rich source for both contemporary research and development on the World-Wide Web. The WISE series of Conferences have provided for almost fifteen years a global forum in which novel ideas and proposals are disseminated. The 13th International Conference of Web Information Systems Engineering (WISE’12) was held in Paphos, Cyprus in November 2012. The conference attracted 194 submissions of which 44 were finally presented. In this special issue, we offer extended versions of selected works from the WISE’12 conference. Six papers make up this issue of the World Wide Web Journal and examine a diverse range of topics in contemporary Web research. The first paper, entitled “A Web-based Approach to Data Imputation” outlines WebPut, an approach that addresses the data imputation problem. As data incompleteness is widespread in WWW information systems, WebPut serves as an effective information extraction method to offer plausible answers using either syntactic patterns or common context terms; they are used as auxiliary information to overcome the problem of incomplete

An End-User Oriented Visual Programming Language

With the promotion of IT applications and the rise of Web 2.0, mass users' individual requirements continue to emerge. How to quickly meet increasing development and maintenance requirements has been a critical problem of software development. Is it possible for end-users to develop software This paper chooses Web information systems as the research field, studies the end-user programming technology, and designs an end-user oriented visual domain-specific language VUDSL for university Web information systems. VUDSL programming tools are also implemented, to support end-users without the knowledge of software engineering to develop target information systems by visual programming.

Advances in mobile web information systems

Over the years, advances in mobile technologies are gradually bringing the full potential of desktop computers to potable mobile devices. As a matter of the fact that the number of mobile phone users is already much higher than desktop users, most Internet andWeb based services such as search engine querying, news reading, multimedia downloading, instant messaging, online shopping, and also social networking will soon be accessed mainly through a large variety of mobile devices instead of desktop computers. This theme issue looks at the new development in mobileWeb information systems such as location-based applications, mobile payment systems, mobile context-aware applications, and mobile Web data search engines. It is based on the regular submissions and the extended best papers from the 9th International Conference on Mobile Web Information Systems (MobiWIS 2012), which was held at Niagara Falls, Ontario,

Transnational 3D modeling, geopotential evaluation and active fault assessment in the Alpine Foreland Basins – the project GeoMol

The Alpine Foreland Basins bear a multitude of natural subsurface resources (geopotentials) which can contribute substantially to boost green energy. Sustainable planning and management of geopotentials requires a holistic, transnational and three-dimensional evaluation of the geological fundamentals. Facing different data availability and policy in the Geological Survey Organizations (GSOs) in charge, transnational collaboration calls for a maximum of coordination from the very beginning of the data preparation and the 3D modeling processes, based on concerted proceedings and best practice in seismic processing and interpretation, 3D modeling and geopotential assessment, and demands a geo data infrastructure for full interoperability among the partners and the dissemination of seamless results.This article outlines the objectives and scope of the GeoMol project and summarizes the state of the art of its achievements to provide cross-border harmonized information via a web accessible exchange and information system.

AMASE: A framework for supporting personalised activity-based learning on the web

Personalised web information systems have in recent years been evolving to provide richer and more tailored experiences for users than ever before. In order to provide even more interactive experiences as well as to address new opportunities, the next generation of Personalised web information systems needs to be capable of dynamically personalising not just web media but web services as well. In particular, eLearning provides an example of an application domain where learning activities and personalisation are of significant importance in order to provide learners with more engaging and effective learning experiences. This paper presents a novel approach and technical framework called AMASE to support the dynamic generation and enactment of Personalised Learning Activities, which uniquely entails the personalisation of media content and the personalisation of services in a unified manner. In doing so, AMASE follows a narrative approach to personalisation that combines state of the art techniques from both adaptive web and adaptive workflow systems.

Facet of Modeling Web Information Systems from a Document-Centric View

The modeling of Information Systems in general, and Web Information Systems (WIS) especially, is a permanent issue so that there have been already several attempts and proposals for representing various facets of WIS. In our proposed approach, we focus on the organizational and business activity modeling and we concentrate on documents that represent the information of enterprises in the form of unstructured and semi-structured documents. The compilation of documents mirrors implicitly or explicitly the structure of enterprises, the interrelationship of business processes, and activities and tasks within processes. The documents represent, at the same time, the system roles along with tasks and activities. Our modeling approach concentrates on the co-existence and co-operation of documents and activities of business. The Story Algebra, or more generally the process algebra approach provides a formal framework that promises a formal describing method for modeling precisely the event triggered processes coupled with data in document format within an Enterprise Architecture Framework.

Design of a RESTful Web Information System for Drug Prescription and Administration

Drug prescription and administration processes strongly impact on the occurrence of risks in medical settings for they can be sources of adverse drug events (ADEs). A properly engineered use of information and communication technologies has proven to be a promising approach to reduce these risks. In this study, we propose PHARMA, a web information system which supports healthcare staff in the secure cooperative execution of drug prescription, transcription and registration tasks. PHARMA allows the easy sharing and management of documents containing drug-related information (i.e., drug prescriptions, medical reports, screening), which is often inconsistent and scattered across different information systems and heterogeneous organization domains (e.g., departments, other hospital facilities). PHARMA enables users to access such information in a consistent and secure way, through the adoption of REST and web-oriented design paradigms and protocols. We describe the implementation of the PHARMA prototype, and we discuss the results of the usability evaluation that we carried out with the staff of a hospital in Florence, Italy.

Analogy Queries in Information Systems — A New Challenge

Besides the tremendous progress in web-related technologies, interfaces to access the web or large information systems have largely stayed at the level of keyword searches and categorical browsing. This paper introduces analogy queries as one of the essential techniques required to bridge the gap between today's interfaces and future interaction paradigms. The intuitive concept of analogies is directly derived from human cognition and communication practices, and is in fact often considered to be the core concept of human cognition. In brief, analogies form abstract relationships between concepts, which can be used to efficiently exchange information and knowledge needs or transmit even complex concepts including important connotations in a strictly human-centred and natural fashion. Building of analogy-enabled information systems opens up a number of interesting scientific challenges, e.g. how does communication using analogies work? How can this process be represented? How can information systems understand what a user provided analogy actually means? How can analogies be discovered? This paper aims at discussing some of these questions and is intended as a corner stone of future research efforts.

SHARED WEB INFORMATION SYSTEMS FOR HERITAGE IN SCOTLAND AND WALES – FLEXIBILITY IN PARTNERSHIP

Abstract. The Royal Commissions on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland and Wales were established in 1908 to investigate and record the archaeological and built heritage of their respective countries. The organisations have grown organically over the succeeding century, steadily developing their inventories and collections as card and paper indexes. Computerisation followed in the late 1980s and early 1990s, with RCAHMS releasing Canmore, an online searchable database, in 1998. Following a review of service provision in Wales, RCAHMW entered into partnership with RCAHMS in 2003 to deliver a database for their national inventories and collections. The resultant partnership enables both organisations to develop at their own pace whilst delivering efficiencies through a common experience and a shared IT infrastructure. Through innovative solutions the partnership has also delivered benefits to the wider historic environment community, providing online portals to a range of datasets, ultimately raising public awareness and appreciation of the heritage around them. Now celebrating its 10th year, Shared Web Information Systems for Heritage, or more simply SWISH, continues to underpin the work of both organisations in presenting information about the historic environment to the public.

Web Information System Platforms for Publishing Spatial Data

The best tools to manage the exchange of information and services between heterogeneous subjects through new technological tools with particular reference to information systems are certainly the Web-based information systems. Leveraging the infrastructure of the Web, these systems may be able to handle multimedia data, to perform distributed and cooperative applications based on service, in addition to customizing applications and related data. This paper provides an overview on Web Information Systems with particular reference to GIS, presenting a description of the usage scenarios and a comparison between two significant platform for publishing spatial data.

A survey on security visualization techniques for web information systems

Purpose – By reviewing different information visualization techniques for securing web information systems, this paper aims to provide a foundation for further studies of the same topic. Another purpose of the paper is to discover directions in which there is a lack of extensive research, thereby encouraging more investigations.Design/methodology/approach – The related techniques are classified first by their locations in the web information systems architecture: client side, server side, and application side. Then the techniques in each category are further classified based on attributes specific to that category.Findings – Although there is much research on information visualization for securing web browser user interface and server side systems, there are very few studies about the same techniques on web application side.Originality/value – This paper is the first published paper reviewing extensively information visualization techniques for securing web information systems. The classification used her...

A hybrid system of pedagogical pattern recommendations based on singular value decomposition and variable data attributes

To carry out effective teaching/learning processes, lecturers in a variety of educational institutions frequently need support. They therefore resort to advice from more experienced lecturers, to formal training processes such as specializations, master or doctoral degrees, or to self-training. High costs in time and money are invariably involved in the processes of formal training, while self-training and advice each bring their own specific risks (e.g. of following new trends that are not fully evaluated or the risk of applying techniques that are inappropriate in specific contexts).This paper presents a system that allows lecturers to define their best teaching strategies for use in the context of a specific class. The context is defined by: the specific characteristics of the subject being treated, the specific objectives that are expected to be achieved in the classroom session, the profile of the students on the course, the dominant characteristics of the teacher, and the classroom environment for each session, among others. The system presented is the Recommendation System of Pedagogical Patterns (RSPP). To construct the RSPP, an ontology representing the pedagogical patterns and their interaction with the fundamentals of the educational process was defined. A web information system was also defined to record information on courses, students, lecturers, etc.; an option based on a unified hybrid model (for content and collaborative filtering) of recommendations for pedagogical patterns was further added to the system. RSPP features a minable view, a tabular structure that summarizes and organizes the information registered in the rest of the system as well as facilitating the task of recommendation. The data recorded in the minable view is taken to a latent space, where noise is reduced and the essence of the information contained in the structure is distilled. This process makes use of Singular Value Decomposition (SVD), commonly used by information retrieval and recommendation systems. Satisfactory results both in the accuracy of the recommendations and in the use of the general application open the door for further research and expand the role of recommender systems in educational teacher support processes.

A Web Information System Application on Forest Legislation: The Case of Greek Forest Principles

The Greek forest legislation is a very complicated issue, because of the existence of too many laws concerning the same topic. The definition of forest is critically important as it controls the scope of forest science. Numerous legitimate definitions of forest and forestlands have been published by the Greek authorities. A need to categorize and classify some complex parts of the Greek forest legislation is obviously essential. Nowadays new web technologies and Information and Communication Systems (ICTs) offer amazing capabilities for settlement of such projects. This paper presents a Web based Information System (WIS) that attempts to become a source of information about the Greek forest legislation. The WIS was named Gre.Fo.L (Greek Forest Legislation) and at this version (v.2.1) represents the definitions of the basic forest principles, located in the Greek legislation, through a historical review. The findings relate to the legitimate definitions since the establishment of the Greek state. Gre.Fo.L is designed to also study other environmental issues as it intends to expand in later versions.

Complex Risk Analysis of Natural Hazards through Fuzzy Logic

The paper presents a fuzzy logic approach to complex risk analysis in regard to each of the natural hazards for a given monitoring region. This approach is based on the available statistical data and the expert knowledge. The calculations of the complex risk are done for five regions in SW Bulgaria (Dupnitsa, Blagoevgrad, Simitli, Kresna and Sandanski). The proposed risk analysis is envisaged to be implemented as a part of a Web information system for risk management of natural disasters. 

Automating the database schema evolution process

Supporting database schema evolution represents a long-standing challenge of practical and theoretical importance for modern information systems. In this paper, we describe techniques and systems for automating the critical tasks of migrating the database and rewriting the legacy applications. In addition to labor saving, the benefits delivered by these advances are many and include reliable prediction of outcome, minimization of downtime, system-produced documentation, and support for archiving, historical queries, and provenance. The PRISM/PRISM++ system delivers these benefits, by solving the difficult problem of automating the migration of databases and the rewriting of queries and updates. In this paper, we present the PRISM/PRISM++ system and the novel technology that made it possible. In particular, we focus on the difficult and previously unsolved problem of supporting legacy queries and updates under schema and integrity constraints evolution. The PRISM/PRISM++ approach consists in providing the users with a set of SQL-based Schema Modification Operators (SMOs), which describe how the tables in the old schema are modified into those in the new schema. In order to support updates, SMOs are extended with integrity constraints modification operators. By using recent results on schema mapping, the paper (i) characterizes the impact on integrity constraints of structural schema changes, (ii) devises representations that enable the rewriting of updates, and (iii) develop a unified approach for query and update rewriting under constraints. We complement the system with two novel tools: the first automatically collects and provides statistics on schema evolution histories, whereas the second derives equivalent sequences of SMOs from the migration scripts that were used for schema upgrades. These tools were used to produce an extensive testbed containing 15 evolution histories of scientific databases and web information systems, providing over 100 years of aggregate evolution histories and almost 2,000 schema evolution steps.

Preface to special issue on Cyberworlds 2011

The present special issue is devoted to the state-of-the-art research on virtual worlds. It has extended versions of five articles presented at the International Conference on Cyberworlds 2011, Banff, Alberta, Canada. As stated in the Cyberworlds conference mission statement, cyberworlds are information worlds or communities created on cyberspace by participants collaborating, either intentionally or spontaneously. As information worlds, they accumulate information regardless whether or not anyone is in, and they can be with or without 2D or 3D visual graphics appearance. The examples of such cyberworlds are communities created in different social networking services, 3D shared virtual environments, and multiplayer online games. Cyberworlds are closely related to the real world and have a serious impact on it. Applications exist in such areas as e-business, e-commerce, e-manufacturing, e-learning, e-security, and emedicine. The five presented papers are all connected by a similar focus: learning, recognition and security. Specifically, their focus is on exploration and learning process in endogenous games, haptic shape and texture recognition, biometric security facial image recognition and neural-network learning, crowd simulation and impostor rendering for security systems, and web and geographic information system exploration and learning.

A Methodology for Ontology Building

Ontology is generally defined as an explicit specification of conceptualization which involves the exploration of concepts and its relationships in the domain of interest. Ontology is used to share knowledge across semantic web services, agents and information systems. Therefore the ontology engineer should follow a methodology during the ontology construction to ensure its reliability. This paper presents ontology building methodologies such as Uschold and king [3], Viral Hepatitis Ontology design Methodology [4] and Amaya Berneras et al [9].Moreover the paper presents Rheumatoid and Osteoarthritis ontologies which belong to the medical domain and a proposal for a new methodology applied to build the two medical ontologies. What distinguishes the proposed methodology is the execution of knowledge representation which involves the use of conceptualization and inference rules.

Service-Oriented Development of Web Information Systems

Service-Oriented Development of Web Information Systems