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This paper aims at presenting the preliminary results of a research work that seeks to understand the users' response to semantic based technologies, in the context of enterprise sponsored virtual communities. The research follows a qualitative methodology based on an action research approach. It particularly focuses on the socio-cognitive processes that underlie users' learning and acquisition methods when training and interacting with a new knowledge management approach bayed on semantically enabled technologies in a collaborative, and sometimes virtual, learning/working environment. The outcomes of this research are expected to provide an assessment framework for a deeper level understanding of the cognition process in what concerns the evolution of individuals knowledge, opinions, beliefs, and thoughts about ontology based systems.

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This paper proposes a framework for a virtual classroom application based on a Virtual Collaboration System (VCS), which is being developed under the VISNET II Network of Excellence (NoE)1, and discusses adaptation technologies that enable seamless access to classroom sessions while intellectual property and digital rights are managed. The proposed virtual classroom framework enables academic institutions to conduct their collaborative lecture series, to which registered students will be able to attend remotely and interactively over the Internet. Furthermore, the general public may also follow the classroom sessions under certain restrictions imposed by the participating institutions. In order to facilitate seamless access to a heterogeneous audience that is composed of users with various preferences and privileges accessing the classroom sessions over different network infrastructures and using terminal devices with diverse capabilities, context-aware content adaptation is required to meet constraints imposed by the usage context and enhance the quality of the user experience. Thus, this paper describes the concepts and functionalities of a context-aware content adaptation platform that suits the requirements of such multimedia application scenarios. This platform is able to consume low-level contextual information to infer higher-level contexts, and thus decide the need for and type of adaptation operations to be performed upon the content. In this way, it is aimed to meet usage constraints while also satisfying restrictions imposed by the Digital Rights Management (DRM) to govern the use of protected content.

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L-systems have been used in Computer Graphics, namely for modelling plants, as well as in a few experiments to model urban environments. However, the lack of geospatial awareness is a limitation and in spite of some developments like open L-systems, that introduced the ability to communicate with the environment, there was a need for more flexibility. This paper presents Geospatial L-systems, a new extension of L-systems that incorporates geospatial awareness, and shows an application in the area of expeditious modelling of urban environments. A modelling system, named XL3D, generates virtual urban environments automatically from a XML based document that contains a modelling specification and accesses data sources in an interoperable way. The integration of geospatial L-systems in this modelling system has increased the potential for automation and the potential to generate virtual urban environments with a higher level of detail and visual fidelity, with a lower level of complexity of the modelling processes. These facts are shown in a case study where a virtual urban environment, taken from an area in the Porto downtown, is generated by this solution.

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The IEC-61499 standard defines a framework in which distributed control applications may be developed, and how these are interpreted and executed. With the distributed nature of the control applications, many new issues also need to be taken into account. Most of these arise due to the new error model and failure modes of the distributed hardware on which the distributed application is being executed. On the other hand, the distributed nature of the hardware also allows new capabilities to be explored, such as improved reliability through masking of faults. Fault tolerance is usually achieved by the use of replication. Replication at the software level allows for much smaller granularity, but all replicas must be kept synchronised in order to produce the same output data and events. To achieve replica determinism all replicas must process the same set of inputs in the same order, and the outputs of the replicas must somehow be consolidated. The IEC 61499 framework however does not explicitly handle the replication of software components. In this paper we propose a replication model for IEC-61499 applications, and discuss which mechanisms and protocols may be used for their support. In short, replica determinism is achieved through the use of distributed synchronised clocks, atomic multicast protocols, as well as timed messages. ©2007 IEEE.

Abstract