Searching the world wide web for local services and facilities: A review on the patterns of location-based queries

Many queries sent to search engines refer to specific locations in the world. Location-based queries try to find local services and facilities around the user’s environment or in a particular area. This paper reviews the specifications of geospatial queries and discusses the similarities and differences between location-based queries and other queries. We introduce nine patterns for location-based queries containing either a service name alone or a service name accompanied by a location name. Our survey indicates that at least 22% of the Web queries have a geospatial dimension and most of these can be considered as location-based queries. We propose that location-based queries should be treated different from general queries to produce more relevant results.

Superstring: A scalable service discovery protocol for the wide-area pervasive environment

Arguably, the world has become one large pervasive computing environment. Our planet is growing a digital skin of a wide array of sensors, hand-held computers, mobile phones, laptops, web services and publicly accessible web-cams. Often, these devices and services are deployed in groups, forming small communities of interacting devices. Service discovery protocols allow processes executing on each device to discover services offered by other devices within the community. These communities can be linked together to form a wide-area pervasive environment, allowing processes in one p u p tu interact with services in another. However, the costs of communication and the protocols by which this communication is mediated in the wide-area differ from those of intra-group, or local-area, communication. Communication is an expensive operation for small, battery powered devices, but it is less expensive for servem and workstations, which have a constant power supply and 81'e connected to high bandwidth networks. This paper introduces Superstring, a peer to-peer service discovery protocol optimised fur use in the wide-area. Its goals are to minimise computation and memory overhead in the face of large numbers of resources. It achieves this memory and computation scalability by distributing the storage cost of service descriptions and the computation cost of queries over multiple resolvers.

Handling and communicating uncertainty in chained geospatial web services

Recent developments in service-oriented and distributed computing have created exciting opportunities for the integration of models in service chains to create the Model Web. This offers the potential for orchestrating web data and processing services, in complex chains; a flexible approach which exploits the increased access to products and tools, and the scalability offered by the Web. However, the uncertainty inherent in data and models must be quantified and communicated in an interoperable way, in order for its effects to be effectively assessed as errors propagate through complex automated model chains. We describe a proposed set of tools for handling, characterizing and communicating uncertainty in this context, and show how they can be used to 'uncertainty- enable' Web Services in a model chain. An example implementation is presented, which combines environmental and publicly-contributed data to produce estimates of sea-level air pressure, with estimates of uncertainty which incorporate the effects of model approximation as well as the uncertainty inherent in the observational and derived data.

A semantic web environment for component model

Component-based development (CBD) has become an important emerging topic in the software engineering field. It promises long-sought-after benefits such as increased software reuse, reduced development time to market and, hence, reduced software production cost. Despite the huge potential, the lack of reasoning support and development environment of component modeling and verification may hinder its development. Methods and tools that can support component model analysis are highly appreciated by industry. Such a tool support should be fully automated as well as efficient. At the same time, the reasoning tool should scale up well as it may need to handle hundreds or even thousands of components that a modern software system may have. Furthermore, a distributed environment that can effectively manage and compose components is also desirable. In this paper, we present an approach to the modeling and verification of a newly proposed component model using Semantic Web languages and their reasoning tools. We use the Web Ontology Language and the Semantic Web Rule Language to precisely capture the inter-relationships and constraints among the entities in a component model. Semantic Web reasoning tools are deployed to perform automated analysis support of the component models. Moreover, we also proposed a service-oriented architecture (SOA)-based semantic web environment for CBD. The adoption of Semantic Web services and SOA make our component environment more reusable, scalable, dynamic and adaptive.

Internet banking service quality:an investigation of interrelationships between construct dimensions

Service quality measurement in Internet banking services is an area of growing interest to researchers and managers. This research investigates the interrelationships between the dimensions comprising the Internet banking service quality construct through structural equation modelling. Five Internet service quality dimensions are identified: access, web interface, trust, attention and credibility. Credibility is modelled as an outcome of the causal variables of access, web interface, trust and attention. Trust and attention emerges as key dimensions in explaining the credibility dimension. Access is found to be a common antecedent of trust, attention and Web interface dimensions. Implications from the findings are offered.

Cross ontology query answering on the semantic web:an initial evaluation

PowerAqua is a Question Answering system, which takes as input a natural language query and is able to return answers drawn from relevant semantic resources found anywhere on the Semantic Web. In this paper we provide two novel contributions: First, we detail a new component of the system, the Triple Similarity Service, which is able to match queries effectively to triples found in different ontologies on the Semantic Web. Second, we provide a first evaluation of the system, which in addition to providing data about PowerAqua's competence, also gives us important insights into the issues related to using the Semantic Web as the target answer set in Question Answering. In particular, we show that, despite the problems related to the noisy and incomplete conceptualizations, which can be found on the Semantic Web, good results can already be obtained.

AquaLog : an ontology-driven question answering system to interface the semantic web

The semantic web (SW) vision is one in which rich, ontology-based semantic markup will become widely available. The availability of semantic markup on the web opens the way to novel, sophisticated forms of question answering. AquaLog is a portable question-answering system which takes queries expressed in natural language (NL) and an ontology as input, and returns answers drawn from one or more knowledge bases (KB). AquaLog presents an elegant solution in which different strategies are combined together in a novel way. AquaLog novel ontology-based relation similarity service makes sense of user queries.

Sierra : cooperative request-response for resource management in disasters using semantic web principles

Disasters cause widespread harm and disrupt the normal functioning of society, and effective management requires the participation and cooperation of many actors. While advances in information and networking technology have made transmission of data easier than it ever has been before, communication and coordination of activities between actors remain exceptionally difficult. This paper employs semantic web technology and Linked Data principles to create a network of intercommunicating and inter-dependent on-line sites for managing resources. Each site publishes available resources openly and a lightweight opendata protocol is used to request and respond to requests for resources between sites in the network.

LEAPS:a semantic web and linked data framework for the Algal biomass domain

In this paper we present, LEAPS, a Semantic Web and Linked data framework for searching and visualising datasets from the domain of Algal biomass. LEAPS provides tailored interfaces to explore algal biomass datasets via REST services and a SPARQL endpoint for stakeholders in the domain of algal biomass. The rich suite of datasets include data about potential algal biomass cultivation sites, sources of CO2, the pipelines connecting the cultivation sites to the CO2 sources and a subset of the biological taxonomy of algae derived from the world's largest online information source on algae.

A Survey on the Integration of Enterprise Applications as a Service

The present paper discusses the process of multi-lateral integration of the business applications, which requires the construction of a common infra-structure, acquires the format of a service and leads to release of the individual construction of a private infra-structure by every participant in the process.

webComputing Service Framework

Presented is webComputing – a general framework of mathematically oriented services including remote access to hardware and software resources for mathematical computations, and web interface to dynamic interactive computations and visualization in a diversity of contexts: mathematical research and engineering, computer-aided mathematical/technical education and distance learning. webComputing builds on the innovative webMathematica technology connecting technical computing system Mathematica to a web server and providing tools for building dynamic and interactive web-interface to Mathematica-based functionality. Discussed are the conception and some of the major components of webComputing service: Scientific Visualization, Domain- Specific Computations, Interactive Education, and Authoring of Interactive Pages.

Modernizing Legacy Physics Applications for Reuse in Web and SOA

This paper concerns the application of recent information technologies for creating a software system for numerical simulations in the domain of plasma physics and in particular metal vapor lasers. The presented work is connected with performing modernization of legacy physics software for reuse on the web and inside a Service-Oriented Architecture environment. Applied and described is the creation of Java front-ends of legacy C++ and FORTRAN codes. Then the transformation of some of the scientific components into web services, as well as the creation of a web interface to the legacy application, is presented. The use of the BPEL language for managing scientific workflows is also considered.

Fast Information Retrieval in the Open Grid Service Architecture

This is an extended version of an article presented at the Second International Conference on Software, Services and Semantic Technologies, Sofia, Bulgaria, 11–12 September 2010.

Majestic Gamification:a case study in the adoption of a service innovation

Purpose: A case study is presented concerning a gamified awards system designed to encourage software users to explore a suite of tools, and to share their expertise level in profile pages. Majestic is a high-tech business based in the West Midlands (UK) w hich offers a Link Intelligence database using a Software as a Service (SaaS) business model. Customers leverage the database for tasks including Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) by using a suite of web-based tools. Getting to know all the tools and how they can be deployed to good effect represents a considerable learning challenge, and Majestic were aware that. Design/methodology/approach: We present the development of Majestic Awards as a case study highlighting the most important design decisions. Then we reflect on the development process as an example of innovation adoption, thereby identifying resources and cu ltura l factors which were critical in ensuring the success of the project. Findings: The gamified awards system makes learning the tools an enjoyable, explorative experience. Success factors included identifying a clear business goal, the process/ project f it, senior management buy in, and identifying the knowledge and resources to resolve t echnical issues. Originality/value: Prior to gamification of the system, only the most expert users regu larly utilized all the tools. The user base is now more knowl edgable about the system and some users choose to use the system to publicize their expertise.

Architecture of remote monitoring and diagnosis system based on service-oriented architecture(SOA)

In view of the increasingly complexity of services logic and functional requirements, a new system architecture based on SOA was proposed for the equipment remote monitoring and diagnosis system. According to the design principles of SOA, different levels and different granularities of services logic and functional requirements for remote monitoring and diagnosis system were divided, and a loosely coupled web services system was built. The design and implementation schedule of core function modules for the proposed architecture were presented. A demo system was used to validate the feasibility of the proposed architecture.