I. INTRODUCTION TO EVALUATION. 1. Evaluation's Basic Purpose, Uses, and Conceptual Distinctions. 2. Origins of Modern Program Evaluation. 3. Recent Developments and Trends in Evaluation. II. ALTERNATIVE APPROACHES TO PROGRAM EVALUATION. 4. Alternative Views of Evaluation. 5. Objectives-Oriented Evaluation Approaches. 6. Management-Oriented Evaluation Approaches. 7. Consumer-Oriented Evaluation Approaches. 8. Expertise-Oriented Evaluation Approaches. 9. Adversary-Oriented Evaluation Approaches. 10. Participant-Oriented Evaluation Approaches. 11. Alternative Evaluation Approaches: A Summary and Comparative Analysis. III. PRACTICAL GUIDELINES FOR PLANNING EVALUATION. 12. Clarifying the Evaluation Request and Responsibilities. 13. Setting Boundaries and Analyzing the Evaluation Context. 14. Identifying and Selecting the Evaluative Questions and Criteria. 15. Planning How to Conduct the Evaluation. IV. PRACTICAL GUIDELINES FOR CONDUCTING AND USING EVALUATIONS. 16. Dealing with Political, Ethical, and Interpersonal Aspects of Evaluation. 17. Collecting, Analyzing, and Interpreting Quantitative Information. 18. Collecting, Analyzing, and Interpreting Qualitative Information. 19. Reporting and Using Evaluation Information. 20. Evaluating Evaluations. V. EMERGING AND FUTURE SETTINGS FOR PROGRAM EVALUATION. 21. Conducting Multiple-Site Evaluation Studies. 22. Conducting Evaluations of Organizations Renewal and Training in Corporate and Nonprofit Settings. 23. The Future of Evaluation. Appendix: Some General Areas of Competence Important in Education Evaluation.

http://platform.almanhal.com/Files/?ID=T2-41793-MLA0011322.pdf

تقويم البرنامج : طرق بديلة و إرشادات عملية = Program evaluation Alternative Approaches and Practical Guidelines

The increasing usage of smart embedded devices in business blurs the line between the virtual and real worlds. This creates new opportunities to build applications that better integrate real-time state of the physical world, and hence, provides enterprise services that are highly dynamic, more diverse, and efficient. Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) approaches traditionally used to couple functionality of heavyweight corporate IT systems, are becoming applicable to embedded real-world devices, i.e., objects of the physical world that feature embedded processing and communication. In such infrastructures, composed of large numbers of networked, resource-limited devices, the discovery of services and on-demand provisioning of missing functionality is a significant challenge. We propose a process and a suitable system architecture that enables developers and business process designers to dynamically query, select, and use running instances of real-world services (i.e., services running on physical devices) or even deploy new ones on-demand, all in the context of composite, real-world business applications.

/pdf/interacting-with-the-soa-based-internet-of-things-discovery-4mbdikes3q.pdf

Interacting with the SOA-Based Internet of Things: Discovery, Query, Selection, and On-Demand Provisioning of Web Services

Creating networks of “smart things” found in the physical world (e.g., with RFID, wireless sensor and actuator networks, embedded devices) on a large scale has become the goal of a variety of recent research activities. Rather than exposing real-world data and functionality through vertical system designs, we propose to make them an integral part of the Web. As a result, smart things become easier to build upon. In such an architecture, popular Web technologies (e.g., HTML, JavaScript, Ajax, PHP, Ruby) can be used to build applications involving smart things, and users can leverage well-known Web mechanisms (e.g., browsing, searching, bookmarking, caching, linking) to interact with and share these devices. In this chapter, we describe the Web of Things (WoT) architecture and best practices based on the RESTful principles that have already contributed to the popular success, scalability, and evolvability of the Web. We discuss several prototypes using these principles, which connect environmental sensor nodes, energy monitoring systems, and RFID-tagged objects to the Web. We also show how Web-enabled smart things can be used in lightweight ad-hoc applications, called “physical Mashups”, and discuss some of the remaining challenges towards the global World Wide Web of Things.

/pdf/from-the-internet-of-things-to-the-web-of-things-resource-4fhj0tezpx.pdf

From the Internet of Things to the Web of Things: Resource-oriented Architecture and Best Practices

Many efforts are centered around creating large-scale networks of “smart things” found in the physical world (e.g., wireless sensor and actuator networks, embedded devices, tagged objects). Rather than exposing real-world data and functionality through proprietary and tightly-coupled systems, we propose to make them an integral part of the Web. As a result, smart things become easier to build upon. Popular Web languages (e.g., HTML, Python, JavaScript, PHP) can be used to easily build applications involving smart things and users can leverage well-known Web mechanisms (e.g., browsing, searching, bookmarking, caching, linking) to interact and share these devices. In this paper, we begin by describing the Web of Things architecture and best-practices based on the RESTful principles that have already contributed to the popular success, scalability, and modularity of the traditional Web. We then discuss several prototypes designed in accordance with these principles to connect environmental sensor nodes and an energy monitoring system to the World Wide Web. We finally show how Web-enabled smart things can be used in lightweight ad-hoc applications called “physical mashups”.

A resource oriented architecture for the Web of Things

https://www.simondobson.org/softcopy/situation-recognition-pmc11.pdf

Review: Situation identification techniques in pervasive computing: A review

The acceptance of next-generation mobile communication systems depends to a large extent on the services and applications that can be offered to customers. Tailoring the services to actual user needs is considered to be crucial for the success of future wireless technology. The individual user, "I", has to be put in the center of service provisioning. In this article, we report the work developed by the Working Group 2 of the Wireless World Research Forum on a service infrastructure framework for the future wireless world. Major service capabilities such as personalization, ambient awareness, and adaptability are described along with a reference model focusing in I-centric communication.

I-centric communications: personalization, ambient awareness, and adaptability for future mobile services

The convergence of embedded systems and wireless communication enables interconnection of electronic devices to render control and provide information to the user. Offices, apartments, and public spaces are or in the near future will be able to deliver information and services to their occupants ranging from instant Internet access to configuration and control in a context dependent, personalized way. Despite progressing internetworking and sophistication, we are still dealing with islands of functionality rather than the invisible computer envisioned by Mark Weiser. We believe that the spread and acceptance of smart environments will depend on common standards as well as a simple and flexible way to access data and devices and compose services from existing ones. A good example of such a system is the World Wide Web, whose success is mainly due to the simplicity with which all kinds of content can be published and referenced. We present an access protocol to bring the Web's simplicity and holistic view on data and services to pervasive systems. Our approach is based on the representational state transfer architectural style and emphasizes abstraction of data and services as resources, interoperation via self describing data and service orchestration with loosely typed components. A particular concern is to provide for functionality in the absence of proxy nodes or infrastructure services like directory servers.

/pdf/prest-a-rest-based-protocol-for-pervasive-systems-3gc7qat7rb.pdf

pREST: a REST-based protocol for pervasive systems

In the last two years a variety of concepts for service integration and corresponding systems have gained momentum. On the one hand, they aim for the interworking and integration of classical telecommunications and data communications services, such as telephony, voicemail, facsimile, E-mail, paging, etc. On the other hand, they are focusing on universal service access from a variety of end user systems, including both fixed and mobile terminals. Such concepts or systems are designated as unified messaging. Most of the technical problems, resulting from the service integration, have been solved during the last years. However, service personalization is still an insufficiently solved problem of today's unified messaging systems. Different services have to be personalized in different ways. This paper investigates how different services could be personalized in a unified way. Therefore, several services, which are offered nowadays by unified messaging systems, are analyzed. In the second part of this paper a generic approach for service personalization are given. For illustrating the introduced approach, the last section describes a first realization.

Service personalization for unified messaging systems

Mobile environments, the Web, services, semantics, converge in the physical world forming a shared communication sphere. To ensure context-enabled interoperation on service platforms in such a sphere, developers need to have a shared specification of objects belonging to the sphere and their roles. We present context acquisition, context representation, context enabling and use in mobile service platforms, outline the main ontological enablers of the shared communication sphere, and illustrate their added value with a scenario.

/pdf/context-acquisition-representation-and-employment-in-mobile-gppx3g04fw.pdf

Context Acquisition, Representation and Employment in Mobile Service Platforms

In this paper we study the synergy between user behavior, context data, and semantic information in order to enable future services to adapt to different situations based on the recommendations of a service-independent recommender. Therefore, we propose a system that delivers context-aware recommendations, which are based on provided feedback, context data, and an ontology-based content categorization scheme. We provide a detailed overview of the specification, a short description of a possible service scenario and a discussion of the results.

Stefan Arbanowski

Papers

I-centric communications: personalization, ambient awareness, and adaptability for future mobile services

pREST: a REST-based protocol for pervasive systems

Service personalization for unified messaging systems

Context Acquisition, Representation and Employment in Mobile Service Platforms

Context-aware, ontology-based recommendations