2009, Barbieri, Davide Francesco, Braga, Daniele, Ceri, Stefano, Della Valle, Emanuele, Grossniklaus, Michael

Social semantic data are becoming a reality, but apparently their streaming nature has been ignored so far. Streams, being unboun- ded sequences of time-varying data elements, should not be treated as persistent data to be stored “forever” and queried on demand, but rather as transient data to be consumed on the fly by queries which are regis- tered once and for all and keep analyzing such streams, producing an- swers triggered by the streaming data and not by explicit invocation. In this paper, we propose an approach to continuous queries and real- time analysis of social semantic data with C-SPARQL, an extension of SPARQL for querying RDF streams.

2009, Barbieri, Davide Francesco, Bozzon, Alessandro, Braga, Daniele, Brambilla, Marco, Campi, Alessandro, Ceri, Stefano, Della Valle, Emanuele, Fraternali, Piero, Grossniklaus, Michael, Martinenghi, Davide

Answering multi-domain queries requires the combination of knowledge from various domains. Such queries are inadequately answered by general-purpose search engines, because domain- specific systems typically exhibit sophisticated knowledge about their own fields of expertise. Moreover, multi-domain queries typically require combining in the result domain knowledge possibly coming from multiple web resources, therefore conventional crawling and indexing techniques, based on individual pages, are not adequate. In this paper we present a conceptual framework for addressing the composition of search services for solving multi-domain queries. The approach consists in building an infrastructure for search service composition that leaves within each search system the responsibility of maintaining and improving its domain knowledge, and whose main challenge is to provide the “glue” between them; such glue is expressed in the format of joins upon search service results, and for this feature we regard our approach as “data-driven”. We present an overall architecture, and the work that has been done so far in the development of some of the main modules.

2009, Gaedke, Martin, Grossniklaus, Michael, Díaz, Oscar

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Web Engineering, ICWE 2009, held in San Sebastian, Spain in June 2009. The 22 revised full papers and 15 revised short papers presented together with 8 posters and 10 demonstration papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 90 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on accessibility and usability, component-based web engineering: portals and mashups, data and semantics, model-driven web engineering, navigation, process, planning and phases, quality, rich internet applications, search, testing, web services, SOA and REST, and web 2.0.

2008, Leone, Stefania, Grossniklaus, Michael, Norrie, Moira C.

A new form of personal information fragmentation is arising due to the rapid growth in Web 2.0 applications and their use for the management of data typically associated with desktop applications. We propose a data management architecture that allows data to be shared between desktop and Web 2.0 applications. The architecture supports a separation of concerns between the management of personal data and its publication on the Web to social networks.

2009, de Spindler, Alexandre, Grossniklaus, Michael, Lins, Christoph, Norrie, Moira C.

Current mobile phone technologies have fostered the emergence of a new generation of mobile applications. Such applications allow users to interact and share information opportunistically when their mobile devices are in physical proximity or close to fixed installations. It has been shown how mobile applications such as collaborative filtering and location-based services can take advantage of ad-hoc connectivity to use physical proximity as a filter mechanism inherent to the application logic. We discuss the different modes of information sharing that arise in such settings based on the models of persistence and synchronisation. We present a platform that supports the development of applications that can exploit these modes of ad-hoc information sharing and, by means of an example, show how such an application can be realised based on the supported event model.

2009, Barbieri, Davide Francesco, Braga, Daniele, Ceri, Stefano, Valle, Emanuele Della, Grossniklaus, Michael

C-SPARQL is an extension of SPARQL to support continuous queries, registered and continuously executed over RDF data streams, considering windows of such streams. Supporting streams in RDF format guarantees interoperability and opens up important applications, in which reasoners can deal with knowledge that evolves over time. We present C-SPARQL by means of examples in Urban Computing.

2008-07, Vancea, Andrei, Grossniklaus, Michael, Norrie, Moira C.

In most web mashup applications, the content is generated using either web feeds or an application programming interface (API) based on web services. Both approaches have limitations. Data models provided by web feeds are not powerful enough to permit complex data structures to be transmitted. APIs based on web services are usually different for each web application, and thus different implementations of the APIs are required for each web service that a web mashup application uses. We propose a database-driven approach to web mashups that supports integration at the database level and enables mashup developers to work with a uniform abstract model and have direct access to powerful features of database systems. We describe how we have implemented this approach based on an object-oriented database system with a rich object model and a generic proxy mechanism for data integration and synchronisation.

2009, Brambilla, Marco, Cabot, Jordi, Grossniklaus, Michael

Current Web applications embed sophisticated user interfaces and business logic. The original interaction paradigm of the Web based on static content pages that are browsed by hyperlinks is, therefore, not valid anymore. In this paper, we advocate a paradigm shift for browsers and Web applications, that improves the management of user interaction and browsing history. Pages are replaced by States as basic navigation nodes, and Back/Forward navigation along the browsing history is replaced by a full-fledged interactive application paradigm, supporting transactions at the interface level and featuring Undo/Redo capabilities. This new paradigm offers a safer and more precise interaction model, protecting the user from unexpected behaviours of the applications and the browser.

2009, de Spindler, Alexandre, Grossniklaus, Michael, Norrie, Moira C.

Developments in mobile phone technologies have opened the way for a new generation of mobile social applications that allow users to interact and share information. However, current programming platforms for mobile phones provide limited support for information management and sharing, requiring developers to deal with low-level issues of data persistence, data exchange and vicinity sensing. We present a framework designed to support the requirements of mobile social applications based on a notion of P2P data collections and a flexible event model that controls how and when data is exchanged. We show how the framework can be used by describing the development of a mobile application for collaborative filtering based on opportunistic information sharing.

2008, de Spindler, Alexandre, Leone, Stefania, Grossniklaus, Michael, Norrie, Moira C.

Various mobile social applications have proposed the use of ad-hoc network connectivity as a means of detecting user encounters and shared social contexts. These applications range from simple opportunistic information sharing to techniques for collaborative filtering in mobile settings. However, it can be difficult and costly to test the underlying assumption that repeated physical copresence can be used as a measure of user similarity. We have therefore developed a framework that allows existing online social platforms such as Facebook to be coupled with simple, standard mobile applications in order to test such hypotheses. The central idea is to map the physical copresence of users to connections in virtual social networks and then exploit the rich support for developing pluggable applications to measure user similarity within these networks.