WETICE2008 Showcase Report

Michele Angelaccio, Berta Buttarazzi, Andrea D’Ambrogio Dipartimento di Informatica, Sistemi e Produzione

Università degli Studi di Roma "Tor Vergata”, Italy{angelaccio;buttarazzi;dambro}@info.uniroma2.it

Introduction

The 17th edition of the WETICE conference has introduced a special showcase session devoted to promote fruitful discussions on the latest technology developments, directions, problems, and requirements related to projects running in the context of Collaborative Working Environments. This showcase session included both poster presentations and a round table discussion followed by demos and panel exhibition. Seven poster papers have been submitted, and five of them have been accepted for presentation. This report describes the content of accepted posters with the summary of results and products delivered by the relevant projects. We would like to give a special thank to Manfred Bortenschlager and Massimo Mecella for their support to the organization of the showcase session.

Posters presentation

The following five poster papers have been presented during the showcase session:

1. “Supporting Dynamic Collaborations with inContext Interaction and Context-Based Technologies”, Giovanni Casella, Christian Melchiorre, Simona Stringa, (project inContext)

2. “POPEYE, a simple and reliable collaborative working environment over mobile ad-hoc networks”, Christian Melchiorre, Paolo Gianrossi, Marco Boero, (project POPEYE)

3. “Triple Space as a Global Semantic Coordination Middleware”, Lyndon Nixon, Kia Teymourian, (project TripCom)

4. “GeoCollaboration Location-based Collaboration in Emergency Scenarios”, Manfred Bortenschlager, Nic Goll, Elisabeth Haid, Harald Rieser, Renate Steinmann (project WORKPAD)

5. “ROME4EU. The Roman Orchestration Mobile Engine for Emergency Units”, Daniele Battista, Alessio De Gaetanis, Alessandro Pezzullo, Alessandro Russo, Costantino Saponaro, Massimiliano de Leoni, Massimo Mecella, (project WORKPAD)

Workshops on Enabling Technologies: Infrastructure for Collaborative Enterprises

978-0-7695-3315-5/08 $25.00 © 2008 IEEEDOI 10.1109/WETICE.2008.52

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The paper “Supporting Dynamic Collaborations with inContext Interaction and Context-Based Technologies” discusses the results obtained within the inContext project. The paper discusses the use of dynamic interaction patterns, currently unsupported by existing software services, to enable efficient collaboration amongst team members and effective participation of individuals in multiple teams. The presentation has focused on how the inContext project enables dynamic collaboration by exploring new techniques and algorithms for pro-active service aggregation, context-aware service adaptation and service provisioning.

The paper “POPEYE, a simple and reliable collaborative working environment over mobile ad-hoc networks” deals with collaborative working environments (CWE) built on top of Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANETs), free from constraints (such as a rigid client-server architecture). In this setting, the presentation has focused on P2P information sharing and collaboration within wireless ad hoc groups and has shown that whenever a fixed infrastructure is not a prerequisite virtual communities can emerge spontaneously and share data with the appropriate security and quality of service.

The paper, “Triple Space as a Global Semantic Coordination Middleware” has described the goal and the results of the TripCom project, that is to provide a highly scalable, semantically enhanced platform for automatic machine-based communication on the basis of Web services. To this purpose a Triple Space system has been introduced to innovatively combine these three research areas. The presentation has shown that the Triple Space architecture is able to support emerging global Web-based communication scenarios where semantics, autonomy, distribution, heterogeneity and coordination are vital.

The contribution of the paper “GeoCollaboration Location-based Collaboration in Emergency Scenarios” is to show that the adoption of the proposed approach as a mobile geographic information system on portable devices is necessary to support collaborative activities in Emergency Management scenarios. The presentation has described the mobile GIS functionalities, i.e., Map Viewing (an ortho image is enriched with diverse displayable layers of geographic features), Displaying Persons/Objects (positions of persons and objects can be dynamically updated in near real-time), and Annotating (positions and objects on the map can be annotated arbitrarily)

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Finally, the paper “The Roman Orchestration Mobile Engine for Emergency Units” has illustrated some of the results of the WORKPAD project, i.e., the design and implementation of process management systems (PMSs) entirely running on mobile devices. The presentation has focused on the use of such PMSs in mobile and highly dynamic situations, such as in coordinating operators/devices/robots/sensors during emergency situations. This is particularly important in scenarios for emergency management, such the ones addressed in the WORKPAD project.

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