Tutorials



June 20th


Multi-Dimensional Context-Aware Adaptation for Web Applications full-day from 9.00 to 17.30 (Coffee Breaks at 10.30 and 15.30 and Lunch at 12.30)
Jean Vanderdonckt and Vivian Genaro Motti

Presenters:

Jean Vanderdonckt is a professor in Computer Science at Université catholique de Louvain (Belgium), Louvain School of Management (IAG-LSM) where he leads the Louvain Interaction Laboratory (LILAB). LILAB members conduct research, development, and consulting services in the domain of user interface engineering, a domain that is located midway between software engineering, human-computer interaction, and usability engineering. Jean Vanderdonckt is the founder and the coordinator of the UsiXML Consortium (www.usixml.org) that structures activities towards the definition and the usage of UsiXML (User Interface eXtensible Markup Language) as a common User Interface Description Language. He is the coordinator of HCI activities within the Similar network of excellence (www.similar.cc), The European research taskforce creating human-machine interfaces SIMILAR to human-human communication), and the scientific coordinator of the ITEA2 Call3 UsiXML project. He is also a founding member of the European COST n°294 Action MAUSE (www.cost294.org) on usability engineering and the next one called TwinTide. He represents Belgium for the ISO 24744 standard. He is a Senior member of IEEE, ACM, SIGCHI. He and the BCHI team has co-authored and edited several books and published more than 100 publications in the fields of software engineering and HCI.

Vivian Genaro Motti is a PhD Candidate at Université catholique de Louvain and a member of Louvain Interaction LAboratory (LILAB) where she researches about user interface adaptation in context-aware applications. She is a research assistant for Serenoa Project. She obtained her Master degree at University of Sao Paulo (ICMC – Sao Carlos, SP, Brazil) in 2009. There she investigated usability issues in ubiquitous computing using user-centered design techniques. She has teaching experience in Hypermedia, Human-Computer Interaction, and Web Technologies. She published papers in EICS, ACM Symposium on Document Engineering (DocEng), EuroITV, WebMedia. Her experience as a researcher include topics such as: web 2.0, mashups, ubiquitous computing, usability, and accessibility.

Abstract. Most of the web applications developed nowadays consider a pre-defined context of use: an able-bodied user in a stable environment using a Desktop PC. However, the context of use varies, users compose a heterogeneous group, with different profiles, wishes and requirements, they interact from different platforms and using different modalities. Therefore, implementing a web application taking into account a specific context of use may difficult or even prevent the user interaction, and implementing different versions of the application for each context of use requires significant efforts. In order to improve the usability, accessibility and to accommodate different scenarios of use the applications can be adapted. Adaptation consists in transforming certain aspects of an application in different levels according to the context of use. Many efforts have been reported in both domains of research and development aiming to support the development of adaptive or adaptable applications. These efforts are wide spread, therefore it is a hard task to find unified and consistent knowledge that joins information about adaptation in an efficient way to support its implementation. The main goal of this tutorial is to present an overview of the state of the art of adaptation for web interfaces concerning multi‐dimensionality and context‐awareness. The specific goals include: (i) the presentation of fundamental concepts, such as: what is adaptation, relevant context information for adaptation and how to consider it to implement context aware adaptive and adaptable applications for web, multi‐dimensions for adaptation; (ii) the presentation of techniques currently used to adapt web applications, as well as, the methods, models and user‐interface languages in this domain; (iii) the presentation of adaptive and adaptable web applications to illustrate: the context‐awareness and multi‐dimension adaptation in practice.

Engineering the Personal Social Semantic Web half-day afternoon from 14.00 to 17.30 (Coffee Break at 15.30)
Fabian Abel and Geert-Jan Houben

Presenters:

Fabian Abel is working as postdoc in the Web Information Systems group at Delft University of Technology. His research focuses on user modeling and personalization in the Social Web. Fabian did his PhD work at L3S Research Center and was concerned with (distributed) user modeling on the Social Se- mantic Web covering topics like linking, integrating and enriching user models as well as personalized retrieval of social media content (thesis: "Contextualiza- tion, User Modeling and Personalization in the Social Web"). He published more than 40 scientific articles in the field of Social and Semantic Web. In 2010, he co-organized different workshops related to user modeling and personalization on the Social Web like LUPAS at ESWC or UDISW at IUI. In 2011, Fabian continues these efforts and is co-organizing the workshop on User Profile Data on the Social Semantic Web (UWeb) at ESWC 2011 and guest editor of a special issue on the "The Personal and Social Semantic Web" for the Semantic Web Journal.

Geert-Jan Houben, full professor at Delft University of Technology, is expert in Web-based information systems engineering and Semantic Web technology, and author of over 100 scientific publications in the areas of Web engineering and user-adaptation. He is heading the Hera research program on Web infor- mation systems, adaptation & personalization, Web query and transformation languages, and SemanticWeb technologies. He (co-) organized, chaired, or served as PC member for numerous conferences and workshops in the field (including more than 10 workshops related to personalization and (Semantic) Web), was PC Chair for UMAP, and serves as editorial board member or managing editor for journals in the area, e.g. for ACM TWEB and JWE.

Abstract. Social Web sites, such as Facebook, YouTube, Delicious, Flickr and Wikipedia, and numerous other Web applications, such as Google and Amazon, rely on implicitly or explicitly collected data about their users and their activities to provide personalized content and services. As these applications become more and more connected on the Semantic Web, a major challenge is to allow various applications to exchange, reuse, and integrate the user data from different sources. Such data comes in different avors: user data such as user profiles, social networking/tagging/blogging data, etc. as well as usage data like clickthrough data or query logs. The amount of user data available on the Web is tremendously growing so that sharing and mining these heterogeneous data corpora distributed on the Web is a non-trivial problem that poses several challenges to the Web engineering community. In this tutorial we discuss how we can engineer the Personal Social Semantic Web, a Web where user modeling and personalization is featured across system boundaries. Therefore, we learn user modeling and personalization techniques for Social Web systems. We dive into social tagging, social networking and micro-blogging services and examine appropriate modeling and mining techniques for these systems. We discuss Semantic Web and Linked Data principles that allow for linkage and alignment of distributed user data and show how we can exploit the Social Semantic Web to personalize user experiences. This tutorial is composed of four modules: (i) user modeling, (ii) personalization, (iii) linkage and alignment and (iv) Personal Social Semantic Web. In each module we give an overview of related work and recent trends, discuss selected models, algorithms and techniques in detail and provide various hands-on coding examples.

June 21st


Automating the Use of Web APIs through Lightweight Semantics full-day from 9.00 to 17.30 (Coffee Breaks at 10.30 and 15.30 and Lunch at 12.30)
Carlos Pedrinaci, Maria Maleshkova, Guillermo Álvaro Rey and Dong Liu

Presenters:

Dr. Carlos Pedrinaci is a research fellow of the Knowledge Media Institute at the Open University. He holds an MSc in Computer Science and a PhD in Artificial Intelligence from the University of the Basque Country (Spain). Carlos has published over 50 papers in major conferences and international journals around Semantic Web Services, Knowledge-Based Systems, Knowledge Engineering and Business Process Analysis. Carlos has worked in several international research projects in the area of services such as OBELIX (EU FP5 STREP), DIP (EU FP6 IP), SUPER (EU FP6 IP) and SOA4All (EU FP7 IP). Dr. Pedrinaci has presented several tutorials on Semantic Web Services and their application to enterprises in major conferences such as ICSC 2008, ESWC 2007, ISWC 2007, ICIW 2007. He has also co-organised summer schools notably the Service and Software Architectures, Infrastructures and Engineering (SSAIE) 2009 and 2010.

Maria Maleshkova is a PhD student focusing on supporting and enhancing the creation of semantic annotations over Web services. She holds a Dipl.- Inform. from the University of Karlsruhe (TH), Germany, and has previously been involved in the organization of the International Semantic Web Conference in 2008 and the Beyond SAWSDL workshop 2009. Maria has been a co-organiser and a lecturer at several conference tutorials, including the Service and Software Architectures, Infrastructures and Engineering (SSAIE) Summer School in 2009 and 2010 and the 1st Karlsruhe Summer School on Service Research 2010.

Guillermo Álvaro Rey is a senior researcher at iSOCO in Madrid, Spain. He holds a degree in Telecommunications Engineering from the Technical University of Madrid (UPM) and he also obtained a M.Sc. by Research in the Distributed Systems Group of Trinity College Dublin (TCD). In 2008, after three years of work in a project at the Research and Development division of Telefónica (Telefónica I+D), he joined iSOCO to work in areas such as Semantic Web Services and Web 2.0.

Dr. Dong Liu is currently working as a research associate in the Knowledge Media Institute, The Open University. He holds a Ph.D. in computer science from Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications (China). He has been involved in the several EU-funded research projects such as SUPER and SOA4All. His research interests include semantic Web service and Linked Data.

Abstract. Web services have already achieved a solid level of acceptance and play a major role for the rapid development of loosely-coupled component-based systems, overcoming heterogeneity within and between enterprises. Current developments in the world of services on the Web are marked by the proliferation of Web APIs and Web applications, commonly referred to as RESTful services, which show high potential and growing user acceptance. Still, despite the achieved progress, the wider adoption of Web APIs is hindered by the fact that their implementation and publication hardly follow any standard guidelines or formats. REST principles are indeed a good step in this direction but the vast majority of the APIs do not strictly adhere to these principles. As a consequence, in order to use them, developers are obliged to manually locate, retrieve, read and interpret heterogeneous documentation, and subsequently develop custom tailored software, which has a very low level of reusability. In summary, most tasks during the life-cycle of services require extensive manual effort and applications based on existing Web APIs suffer from a lack of automation. This tutorial introduces an approach and a set of integrated methods and tools to address this drawback, making services more accessible to both experts and non-expert users, by increasing the level of automation provided during common service tasks, such as the discovery of Web APIs, their composition and their invocation. The tutorial covers i) the conceptual underpinnings, which integrate Web APIs with state of the art technologies from the Web of Data and Semantic Web Services; ii) the presentation of an integrated suite of Web-based tools supporting service users; iii) and hands-on examples illustrating how the tools and technologies presented can help users in finding and exploiting existing Web APIs.

Improving Quality in Use of Web Applications in a Systematic Way half-day morning from 9.00 to 12.30 (Coffee Break at 10.30)
Luis Olsina and Philip Lew

Presenters:

Luis Olsina is a full Professor in the Engineering School at the National University of La Pampa, Argentina, and heads the Software and Web Engineering R&D group (GIDIS_Web). His research interests include Web engineering, particularly, Web quality assurance strategies, quantitative evaluation methods, quality improvement, and ontologies. He earned a PhD in the area of software engineering and a MSE from National University of La Plata, Argentina. In the last 14 years, he has published over 80 refereed papers, and participated in numerous regional and international events both as program committee chair and member. Particularly, he co-chaired the Web Engineering Workshop held in USA in the framework of ICSE 2002 (Int’l Conference on Software Engineering); the ICWE 2002 congress (held in Argentina) and ICWE 2003 (held in Spain); in addition to LA-Web 2005 and 2008 editions and the WE track at WWW’06 (held in Edinburgh, UK). He has been an invited speaker at several conferences and professional meetings, and presented tutorials, for instance, at ICWE’05 (Int’l Conference on Web Engineering held in Australia), ICWE’09 (held in Spain), CEESEC’10 (held in Moscow) and graduate courses in different countries. Recently, Luis and his colleagues have co-edited the book titled Web Engineering: Modelling and Implementing Web Applications published by Springer, HCIS Series, 2008.

Philip Lew is a Professor at the Software School at Beihang University where he teaches Software Quality Assurance. He is also the CEO of XBOSoft, a firm dedicated to providing software quality assurance and testing services. He frequently speaks and provides guidance to private enterprises in the area of test process improvement, software quality metrics, risk-based testing strategies, and test automation. His research interests include software improvement methods, measurement and evaluation of software learnability, usability and user experience. He earned a PhD in Computer Science and Engineering from Beihang University in Beijing, China, and a Bachelor and Master of Engineering from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.

Abstract. Today’s web-based applications (WebApps) containing complex business logic and sometimes critical to operating the business, are now requiring increased focus on understanding and improving their quality. One of the first steps to evaluate quality is to define requirements usually through quality models. The ISO 25010 standard describes one such model for general usage in specifying and evaluating software quality requirements. However, ISO 25010 is intended as a general guideline to be adapted based on a specific information need and context, i.e. for evaluating WebApps. In addition, some of ISO model concepts, while founded strongly in theory, are difficult to realize in a real situation particularly when it comes to measuring and evaluating quality in use (QinU). Therefore, WebApps and their quality evaluation has been the subject of abundant research. However, models have been used mostly for the purpose of understanding, rather than improving. In this tutorial, we propose utilizing a quality modeling framework to instantiate quality models with the specific purpose to not only to understand the current situation of an entity, but also to improve it. Our approach instantiates models for both external quality (EQ) and QinU, resulting in a requirements tree for both followed by evaluation. In modeling terms, QinU characteristics and attributes need to be related to EQ characteristics and attributes. That is to say, does the software’s new (and improved) version have a positive impact on its QinU? To answer this question for WebApps, we began by first proposing to augment the ISO 25010 standard through using the 2Q2U (Quality, Quality in use, actual Usability and User experience) modeling framework to include information quality as a characteristic of internal/external quality because this is a critical characteristic of WebApps. We further proposed to include learnability in use as a characteristic of usability in use to account for the learning process and the importance of context of use during learning. Using ISO 25010 premise that the relationships ‘depends on’ and ‘influences’ exist between EQ and QinU, we instantiate models for both EQ and QinU specifically for the purpose of improving the QinU of a WebApp. To carry ISO 25010 further, we show a cyclic strategy for improvement and development of relationships. Improving is driven by understanding these relationships, namely, ‘depends on’, and ‘influences’ in alignment with the ISO 25010 quality life cycle model. This is illustrated with a case study showing the underlying strategy from model instantiation to application improvement.