Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

In this paper, an active and autonomous e-learning system–Active e-Learning Space (ALS) is presented. ALS is a P2P-based learning environment that supporting dynamic construction of hierarchical and self-managed learning community. In ALS, student can construct or join a learning community according to the learning requirement, learning collaboratively with others. ALS is composed of three parts: (1) ALS server accomplishes e-learning information management and services; (2) Participating sites constitute a pastry-based p2p overlay network supporting message multi-casting and uni-casting, and resources sharing; (3) ALS e-Learning application, which is running on the top of the p2p network, realizes an active learning community.

Contextual collaboration seamlessly integrates existing groupware technologies into a uniform user experience that combines synchronous and asynchronous interactions. This user experience is usually supported by a contextual collaboration infrastructure that needs to efficiently cope with the fast switching and integration of different modes of interaction. This paper experiments with a new model for contextual collaboration based on the notion of generic shared objects. We describe a native implementation of this model and evaluate its behavior under different media traffic conditions. We compare the native implementation with an alternative implementation that integrates existing notification and meeting servers to deliver the same model behavior. We discuss trade-offs and limitations of those two implementations.

Functional and non-functional requirements must be taken into account early in the development process of groupware applications in order to make appropriate design decisions, e.g. spatial distribution of group members and group awareness, which are related to the main characteristics exhibited by CSCW systems (communication, coordination and collaboration). This research work presents a proposal intended to facilitate the development of groupware applications considering non-functional requirements such as reusability, scalability, etc. In order to achieve these objectives, the proposal focuses on the architectural design and its implementation, with emphasis on the use of a realization of the technological Linda coordination model as the basis for this implementation. The outcome is a distributed architecture where application components are replicated and event control is separated. This work is part of a conceptual and methodological framework (AMENITIES) specially devised to study and develop these systems.

Groupware is evolutionary and difficult to develop and maintain. Thus, its code becomes unstructured and difficult to evolve. In this paper, a groupware development approach based on components organized according to the 3C collaboration model is proposed. In this model, collaboration is analyzed based on communication, coordination and cooperation. Collaboration requirements, analyzed based on the 3C model, are mapped onto software components. These components aid developers to assembly groupware. The RUP-3C-Groupware, which is a groupware development process, is used for that purpose. This process is a RUP extension focused on groupware domain, and is the result of 8 years of experience with the development of collaborative services for the AulaNet Project. The proposed approach is applied as a case study to the development of the new version of the AulaNet environment. In order to instantiate the environment’s communication services, 3C based component kits were developed for the case study. The components allow composition, re-composition and customization of services to reflect changes in the collaboration dynamics.

Collaborative learning systems can benefit from service-oriented computing, allowing educators to integrate external tools, offered as services by software providers, in order to support the realization of collaborative learning situations. Since finding and selecting appropriate services is a challenging issue, the Ontoolcole ontology has been developed in order to support the semantic search of CSCL services intended for the use of educators. This paper presents significant enhancements made in Ontoolcole from a prior version. Namely, Ontoolcole incorporates an artifact module, a task-level coordination module and the description of static information resources, further improving the capabilities to describe complex CSCL tools such as stateful applications or decomposable group tasks. An experiment with real educators has been carried out to evaluate whether Ontoolcole can be employed by educators to search CSCL services. Evaluation results show that Ontoolcole’s abstractions can fit educators’ questions based on their real practice while retrieving useful tools for their educational needs.

The FernUniversität in Hagen uses the web-based collaborative learning platform CURE to implement different collaborative learning scenarios such as seminars or lab courses. In these scenarios, students form groups and collaboratively solve tasks given by the teachers. Interviews with students that have used CURE showed major interest in using CURE nomadically without the need for permanent internet access. Nomadic use would allow students to work with CURE content at any time and place while maintaining the advantages of a shared, synchronized CSCL environment once they are online again. In this article, we describe which requirements we have identified for a nomadic use and how we extended CURE to fulfill these requirements.

People in modern cities like to participate and collaborate in local governments by means of suggestions and complaints submission. However, citizens are not used to work with administrative procedures; moreover many of them do not like to spend time in administrative queues. In this paper we show some empirical results obtained by the Complaints and Suggestions Web-Based Collaborative Procedure (CS-WCP) in its first year of service in the Albacete Town-Council (Spain). Before showing those results, the CS-WCP is described. Administrative procedures in town councils, intelligent agents, workflow processes and Web-based computing are mixed in the CS-WCP system. Notifications by means of e-mails and messages facilitate user-to-civil servant and system-to-user communication and collaboration.

In order to encourage users to participate more actively and bring more contributions to peer-to-peer (p2p) online communities, we propose to create a motivational community visualization based on the social comparison theory. This paper describes the design of static version and a dynamic version of this visualization developed in our lab, explains the advantages and the disadvantages of the static version and the reason why we decided to develop the dynamic version. This paper also gives a detailed evaluation on the dynamic version.

This paper proposes a conceptual model standardizing the meeting information structures underlying several scenarios o PDA use in meetings. The paper characterizes the memory and process components necessary to support XML-based interoperability between meeting systems. The scenarios, information model and architecture were validated through their adoption in three applications, developed by different teams and covering quite different domains. The applications, encompassing several meeting scenarios and adopting multifaceted device combinations, demonstrate the high level of interoperability supported by the proposed conceptual model.

Many modern working environments are characterized by the need to manage multiple activities simultaneously. This is the case for instance of hospital work, which also demands a high degree of mobility and collaboration among specialists. These working conditions have motivated us to design and implement mobileSJ, a mobile information management tool based on the concept of working spheres. The tool allows users to gather information related to a working sphere, including documents, contacts and pending tasks. The tool assists users when switching between tasks, facilitates the sharing of activity related information with colleagues, as well as the synchronization of information among multiple devices, including handheld computers and public displays.