Transparent access to relational, autonomous and distributed databases using semantic web and service oriented technologies

With the constant grow of enterprises and the need to share information across departments and business areas becomes more critical, companies are turning to integration to provide a method for interconnecting heterogeneous, distributed and autonomous systems. Whether the sales application needs to interface with the inventory application, the procurement application connect to an auction site, it seems that any application can be made better by integrating it with other applications. Integration between applications can face several troublesome due the fact that applications may not have been designed and implemented having integration in mind. Regarding to integration issues, two tier software systems, composed by the database tier and by the “front-end” tier (interface), have shown some limitations. As a solution to overcome the two tier limitations, three tier systems were proposed in the literature. Thus, by adding a middle-tier (referred as middleware) between the database tier and the “front-end” tier (or simply referred application), three main benefits emerge. The first benefit is related with the fact that the division of software systems in three tiers enables increased integration capabilities with other systems. The second benefit is related with the fact that any modifications to the individual tiers may be carried out without necessarily affecting the other tiers and integrated systems and the third benefit, consequence of the others, is related with less maintenance tasks in software system and in all integrated systems. Concerning software development in three tiers, this dissertation focus on two emerging technologies, Semantic Web and Service Oriented Architecture, combined with middleware. These two technologies blended with middleware, which resulted in the development of Swoat framework (Service and Semantic Web Oriented ArchiTecture), lead to the following four synergic advantages: (1) allow the creation of loosely-coupled systems, decoupling the database from “front-end” tiers, therefore reducing maintenance; (2) the database schema is transparent to “front-end” tiers which are aware of the information model (or domain model) that describes what data is accessible; (3) integration with other heterogeneous systems is allowed by providing services provided by the middleware; (4) the service request by the “frontend” tier focus on ‘what’ data and not on ‘where’ and ‘how’ related issues, reducing this way the application development time by developers.

Organizational modeling with a semantic wiki: formalization of content and automatic diagram generation

A key to maintain Enterprises competitiveness is the ability to describe, standardize, and adapt the way it reacts to certain types of business events, and how it interacts with suppliers, partners, competitors, and customers. In this context the field of organization modeling has emerged with the aim to create models that help to create a state of self-awareness in the organization. This project's context is the use of Semantic Web in the Organizational modeling area. The Semantic Web technology advantages can be used to improve the way of modeling organizations. This was accomplished using a Semantic wiki to model organizations. Our research and implementation had two main purposes: formalization of textual content in semantic wiki pages; and automatic generation of diagrams from organization data stored in the semantic wiki pages.

Tábula: uma framework para o desenvolvimento de aplicações REST

O desenvolvimento de aplicações web nos nossos dias é uma área importante, devido à disseminação do acesso à Internet e à utilização do browser como uma aplicação cliente universal. A aplicação web típica em HTML está sendo desafiada por tecnologias que permitem interfaces ricas que comunicam com um backend através de serviços. As ferramentas existentes para criar aplicações web ainda não adoptaram esta abordagem e o suporte existente é omissa em oferecer programadores ferramentas dinâmicas e fáceis de usar. Web Services tradicionais baseados em SOAP e Representacional State Transfer (REST) são alternativas para a comunicação entre o frontend e no backend. O REST ganhou recentemente visibilidade e a sua menor dificuldade de aprendizagem parece adequada para muitas aplicações. No entanto, a falta de normas leva a implementar serviços REST de muitas formas diferentes, mesmo na mesma plataforma, não existindo um acordo comum sobre como descrevê-los. Nesta dissertação, propomos uma nova framework para o desenvolvimento rápido de aplicações baseadas em REST. Para esse efeito, especificações e serviços de administração são apresentadas a fim de resolver os problemas de configuração de uma camada de serviços baseada em REST. Além disso, é apresentada uma nova abordagem para processar os pedidos, permitindo também a aplicação dos princípios AOP. Finalmente, é apresentada a implementação de uma framework que suporte estas especificações. Neste âmbito, temos por objectivo expor as potencialidades dinâmicas desta framework, tendo em vista a maximização da produtividade do programador na criação de aplicações baseadas em REST, minimizando o reinício do servidor e suportando dinamicamente uma ampla gama de mudanças.

Wow!: objects

Nowadays computers have advanced beyond the desktop into many parts of everyday life and objects. To achieve this we have to make the computer invisible, and making a computer invisible is not a matter of size of the hardware, it’s all about how the human perceives the computer. To make this possible, the interaction with the computer has to be done in an alternative way, such that the user doesn’t notice the usual computer interfaces (mouse and keyboard) when using it. Therefore this thesis focuses on physical objects that are interactive to achieve various purposes like persuasive objects for stress relief, persuasive objects to help the process of teaching, persuasive objects for fun, persuasive objects to display internet information and persuasive objects to make people feel more in community (exchange virtual emotions), persuasive objects are going to be created and evaluated to see if they have the power to simplify and turn our lives better. The persuasive objects developed employ technology like sensors, actuators, microcontrollers, and computer/web services’ communication. This Master thesis starts by presenting a comprehensive introduction of what are persuasive objects and some general information about several areas that are related to our persuasive objects like stress relief, work experience, multimedia education and other major aspects. It continues by describing related work done in this area. Then we have a detailed view of each persuasive object and finally this thesis finishes with a general conclusion and notion of future work.

Developing an ontology for e-tourism using the Zachman framework

Orientador: António Jorge Cardoso

WAMM: wiki aided meta modelling

All over the world, organizations are becoming more and more complex, and there’s a need to capture its complexity, so this is when the DEMO methodology (Design and Engineering Methodology for Organizations), created and developed by Jan L. G. Dietz, reaches its potential, which is to capture the structure of business processes in a coherent and consistent form of diagrams with their respective grammatical rules. The creation of WAMM (Wiki Aided Meta Modeling) platform was the main focus of this thesis, and had like principal precursor the idea to create a Meta-Editor that supports semantic data and uses MediaWiki. This prototype Meta-Editor uses MediaWiki as a receptor of data, and uses the ideas created in the Universal Enterprise Adaptive Object Model and the concept of Semantic Web, to create a platform that suits our needs, through Semantic MediaWiki, which helps the computer interconnect information and people in a more comprehensive, giving meaning to the content of the pages. The proposed Meta-Modeling platform allows the specification of the abstract syntax i.e., the grammar, and concrete syntax, e.g., symbols and connectors, of any language, as well as their model types and diagram types. We use the DEMO language as a proofof-concept and example. All such specifications are done in a coherent and formal way by the creation of semantic wiki pages and semantic properties connecting them.