2012, Nebeling, Michael, Speicher, Maximilian, Grossniklaus, Michael, Norrie, Moira C.

Many different automatic usability evaluation tools have been specifically developed for web sites and web-based services, but they usually cannot replace user testing. At the same time, traditional usability evaluation methods can be both expensive and time consuming. We will demonstrate CrowdStudy, a toolkit for crowdsourced testing of web interfaces that allows, not only to efficiently recruit larger amounts of test users, but also to evaluate web sites under many different conditions.

2010, Grossniklaus, Michael, Leone, Stefania, de Spindler, Alexandre, Norrie, Moira C.

Databases are now used in a wide variety of settings resulting in requirements which may differ substantially from one application to another, even to the point of conflict. Consequently, there is no database product that can support all forms of information systems ranging from enterprise applications to personal information systems running on mobile devices. Further, domains such as the Web have demonstrated the need to cope with rapidly evolving requirements. We define dynamic metamodel extension modules that support adaptive data management by evolving a system in the event of changing requirements and show how this technique was applied to cater for specific application settings.

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.

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.

2010, Grossniklaus, Michael, Leone, Stefania, de Spindler, Alexandre, Norrie, Moira C.

Most object databases offer little or no support for event-based programming over and above what is provided in the programming language. Consequently, functionality offered by traditional database triggers and event-condition-action (ECA) rules has to be coded in each application. We believe that a notion of triggers should be offered by object databases to facilitate application development and a clear separation of concerns. We present a general and flexible event model that unifies concepts from programming languages and database triggers. We describe an implementation of the model and how it can support the requirements of a rich variety of applications.

2010, Leone, Stefania, Grossniklaus, Michael, de Spindler, Alexandre, Norrie, Moira C.

Web 2.0 users may publish a rich variety of personal data to a number of sites by uploading personal desktop data or actually creating it on the Web 2.0 site. We present a framework and tools that address the resulting problems of information fragmentation and fragility by providing users with fine grain control over the processes of publishing and importing Web 2.0 data.

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.

2010, Grossniklaus, Michael, de Spindler, Alexandre, Zimmerli, Christoph, Norrie, Moira C.

In contrast to their relational counterparts, object databases are more heterogeneous in terms of their architecture, data model and functionality. To this day, this heterogeneity poses substantial difficulties when it comes to benchmark or interoperate object databases. While standardisation proposals have been made in the past, they have had limited impact as neither industry nor research has fully adopted them. We believe that one reason for this lack of adoption is that these standards were too restrictive and thus not capable of dealing with the heterogeneity of object databases. In this paper, we propose a uniform interface for access to object databases that is based on a flexible object model and algebra.

2010, Nebeling, Michael, Grossniklaus, Michael, Leone, Stefania, Norrie, Moira C.

Context-awareness is a requirement in many modern web applications. While most model-driven web engineering approaches have been extended with support for adaptivity, state-of-the-art development platforms generally provide only limited means for the specification of adaptation and often completely lack a notion of context. We propose a domain-specific language for context-aware web applications that builds on a simple context model and powerful context matching expressions.

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.