Showing papers on "Web standards published in 2018"

webMUSHRA — A Comprehensive Framework for Web-based Listening Tests

Abstract: For a long time, many popular listening test methods, such as ITU-R BS.1534 (MUSHRA), could not be carried out as web-based listening tests, since established web standards did not support all required audio processing features. With the standardization of the Web Audio API, the required features became available and, therefore, also the possibility to implement a wide range of established methods as web-based listening tests. In order to simplify the implementation of MUSHRA listening tests, the development of webMUSHRA was started. By utilizing webMUSHRA, experimenters can configure web-based MUSHRA listening tests without the need of web programming expertise. Today, webMUSHRA supports many more listening test methods, such as ITU-R BS.1116 and forced-choice procedures. Moreover, webMUSHRA is highly customizable and has been used in many auditory studies for different purposes.

Multi-tool accessibility assessment of government department websites:a case-study with JKGAD.

Abstract: PURPOSE Nature of being accessible to all categories of users is one of the primary factors for enabling the wider reach of the resources published through World Wide Web. The accessibility of websites has been analyzed through W3C guidelines with the help of various tools. This paper presents a multi-tool accessibility assessment of government department websites belonging to the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir. A comparative analysis of six accessibility tools is also presented with 14 different parameters. MATERIALS AND METHODS The accessibility analysis tools used in this study for analysis are aChecker, Cynthia Says, Tenon, wave, Mauve, and Hera. These tools provide us the results of selected websites accessibility status on Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 1.0 and 2.0. RESULTS It was found that there are variations in accessibility analysis results when using different accessibility metrics to measure the accessibility of websites. In addition to this, we have identified the guidelines which have frequently been violated. It was observed that there is a need for incorporating the accessibility component features among the selected websites. This paper presents a set of suggestions to improve the accessibility status of these sites so that the information and services provided by these sites shall reach a wider spectrum of audience without any barrier. Implications for rehabilitation The following points indicates that this case study of JKGAD websites comes under Rehabilitation focused on Visually Impaired users. Due to the universal nature of web, it should be accessible to all according to WCAG guidelines framed by World Wide Web Consortium. In this paper we have identified multiple accessibility barriers for persons with visual impairment while browsing the Jammu and Kashmir Government websites. Multi-tool analysis has been done to pin-point the potential barriers for persons with visually Impaired. Usability analysis has been performed to check whether these websites are suitable for persons with visual impairment. We provide some valuable suggestions which can be followed by developers and designers to minimize these potential accessibility barriers.Based on aforementioned key points, this article helps the persons with disability especially Visually Impaired Users to access the web resources better with the implementation of identified suggestions.

Monitoring Indoor Air Quality by using IoT Technology

Abstract: Millions of people worldwide die prematurely as a consequence of air pollution. Many of these deaths occur in large cities, where exhaust from cars, factories, and power plants fills the air with hazardous particles. Indoor air pollution can be higher than outdoor concentrations up to ten times due to incorrect functionality of heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) system. Internet of Things can help to perform a real time monitoring of indoor air quality by using embedded electronics, software, sensors, and connectivity. One approach that is gaining momentum is the Web of Things, that uses web architecture and web standards as a framework for creating IoT applications. In this paper, an IoT platform for monitoring indoor air quality is presented. The implementation is based on the Web of Things concept and uses CoAP protocol to collect data from sensors. Hardware platform developed for this project is also presented and implementation details are described.

A structural-semantic web service selection approach to improve retrievability of web services

Abstract: Fil: Garriga, Martin. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Cientificas y Tecnicas; Argentina. Universidad Nacional del Comahue. Facultad de Informatica; Argentina

Towards an open Web Audio plugin standard

Abstract: Web Audio is a recent W3C API that brings the world of computer music applications to the browser. Although developers have been actively using it since the first beta implementations in 2012, the number of web apps built using Web Audio API cannot yet compare to the number of commercial and open source audio software tools available on native platforms. Many of the sites using this new technology are of an experimental nature or are very limited in their scope. While JavaScript and Web standards are increasingly flexible and powerful, C and C++ are the languages most often used for real-time audio applications and domain specific languages such as FAUST facilitate rapid development with high performance. Our work aims to create a continuum between native and browser based audio app development and to appeal to programmers from both worlds. This paper presents our proposal including guidelines and proof of concept implementations for an open Web Audio plug-in standard - essentially the infrastructure to support high level audio plug-ins for the browser.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) for Web Accessibility: Is Conformance Evaluation a Way Forward?

Abstract: The term "artificial intelligence" is a buzzword today and is heavily used to market products, services, research, conferences, and more. It is scientifically disputed which types of products and services do actually qualify as "artificial intelligence" versus simply advanced computer technologies mimicking aspects of natural intelligence. Yet it is undisputed that, despite often inflationary use of the term, there are mainstream products and services today that for decades were only thought to be science fiction. They range from industrial automation, to self-driving cars, robotics, and consumer electronics for smart homes, workspaces, education, and many more contexts. Several technological advances enable what is commonly referred to as "artificial intelligence". It includes connected computers and the Internet of Things (IoT), open and big data, low cost computing and storage, and many more. Yet regardless of the definition of the term artificial intelligence, technological advancements in this area provide immense potential, especially for people with disabilities. In this paper we explore some of these potential in the context of web accessibility. We review some existing products and services, and their support for web accessibility. We propose accessibility conformance evaluation as one potential way forward, to accelerate the uptake of artificial intelligence, to improve web accessibility.

Videolization: knowledge graph based automated video generation from web content

Abstract: Web content nowadays can also be accessed through new generation of Internet connected TVs. However, these products failed to change users’ behavior when consuming online content. Users still prefer personal computers to access Web content. Certainly, most of the online content is still designed to be accessed by personal computers or mobile devices. In order to overcome the usability problem of Web content consumption on TVs, this paper presents a knowledge graph based video generation system that automatically converts textual Web content into videos using semantic Web and computer graphics based technologies. As a use case, Wikipedia articles are automatically converted into videos. The effectiveness of the proposed system is validated empirically via opinion surveys. Fifty percent of survey users indicated that they found generated videos enjoyable and 42 % of them indicated that they would like to use our system to consume Web content on their TVs.

Context Gathering in Meetings: Business Processes Meet the Agents and the Semantic Web

Abstract: Semantic Web, Space Based Computing and agent technologies provide for a more sophisticated and personalised context gathering and information sharing experience. Environments which benefit from these properties are often found in direct social situations such as meetings. In the business world such meetings are often artificially structured according to a process which does not necessarily fit the physical (and virtual) environment in which a meeting takes place. By providing simple ontologies to structure information, agents and spacebased information sharing environment with reasoning capabilities we can provide for a much richer social interaction environment.

Web of things based IoT standard interworking test case: demo abstract

Abstract: The Web of Things (WoT) Interest Group (IG) in the World Wide Web Consortium is actively working on standard technologies for IoT interworking. In this IG, they aim to reduce costs through the global reach of Web standards, to enable open markets of services, and to unleash the power of the network effect. In this paper, we introduce the WoT works and show the result of implementation for applying WoT to our IoT device.

Advancing Cognitive Cities with the Web of Things

Abstract: Currently, the Internet of Things (IoT) is employed to establish connections among smart things as well as between smart things and individuals. It is used in various applications for smart cities. However, the IoT has several drawbacks, such as a lack of common standards, which would be required if as many things as possible are to be connected. The Web of Things (WoT) (i.e., the IoT extended using Web standards) possesses common standards and has many other advantages over the IoT. This article elaborates on both approaches, compares them, and summarizes the potential uses of the WoT in cognitive cities. With the WoT, processes in cognitive cities can be simplified and living standards improved. Thus, the WoT is suitable for addressing the challenges faced by today’s cities.

CoderLabs: A cloud‐based platform for real‐time online labs with user collaboration

Abstract: In this paper we describe the architecture of a real time environment for numerous remote experiments. The environment is created with web standards as HTML5 such that no plug-in needs to be installed by the user. Users are able to use the remote lab simultaneously and in collaboration. This collaboration between users is made feasible by adopting a message broker. Finally, by using Google Coder, developers can easily change or create the user interface of their remote experiments and share experiments in the cloud.

On the Development of a Collaborative Search System.

Abstract: Collaborative search is an active area of research in the IR community (and has been for many years)—despite this, there is a lack of open-source tools available to jump-start research in collaborative search. It is common for collaborative search researchers to implement their own tooling, leading to unnecessary duplicate engineering efforts. In this work, we describe the design process and challenges in implementing SearchX, an open-source collaborative search system, built using modern Web standards. SearchX implements essential features of collaborative search as found in the literature. In the design process, we focused on providing support for modern research needs (such as running crowdsourcing experiments and fast prototyping). We open-sourced SearchX https://github.com/felipemoraes/searchx-frontend (front-end) and https://github.com/felipemoraes/searchx-backend (back-end).

phpMs: A PHP-Based Mass Spectrometry Utilities Library.

Abstract: The recent establishment of cloud computing, high-throughput networking, and more versatile web standards and browsers has led to a renewed interest in web-based applications. While traditionally big data has been the domain of optimized desktop and server applications, it is now possible to store vast amounts of data and perform the necessary calculations offsite in cloud storage and computing providers, with the results visualized in a high-quality cross-platform interface via a web browser. There are number of emerging platforms for cloud-based mass spectrometry data analysis; however, there is limited pre-existing code accessible to web developers, especially for those that are constrained to a shared hosting environment where Java and C applications are often forbidden from use by the hosting provider. To remedy this, we provide an open-source mass spectrometry library for one of the most commonly used web development languages, PHP. Our new library, phpMs, provides objects for storing and manipulati...

Privacy in Web Service Transactions: A Tale of More than a Decade of Work

Abstract: The web service computing paradigm has introduced great benefits to the growth of e-markets, both under the customer to business and the business to business models The value capabilities allowed by the conception of web services, such as interoperability, efficiency, just-in-time integration, etc, have made them the most common way of doing business online With the maturation of the web services underlying functional properties and facilitating standards, and with the proliferation of the amounts of data they use and they generate, researchers and practitioners have been dedicating considerable efforts to the related emerging privacy concerns The literature contains number of research works on these privacy concerns, each addressing them from a different focal point We have explored the available literature on web services privacy during transactions, to present, in this paper, a thorough survey of the most relevant published proposals We identified 20 works that address privacy related problems in web services consumption We categorize them based on the approach they take and we compare them based on a proposed evaluation framework, derived from the adopted techniques and addressed requirements

SADICO: Self-ADaptIve Approach to the Web Service COmposition

Abstract: Web service Compositions are rapidly gaining acceptance as a fundamental technology in the web field They are becoming the cutting edge of communication between different applications all over the web With the need for the ubiquitous computing and the pervasive use of mobile devices, the context aware web service composition becomes a hot topic The latter aims at adapting the web service composition behavior according to the user’s context, such as his specific working environment, language, type of Internet connection, devices and preferences Many solutions have been proposed in this area Nevertheless, the adaptation was carried out only at the run-time and it partially covered the user’s general context In this paper, we proposed a self-adaptive approach to the context-aware web service composition named SADICO for Self ADaptIve to the web service COmposition Our approach studied a generic context, based on MAPE model (Monitoring, Analysis, Planning, and Execution) to ensure self-adaptation

Planning Process Instances with Web Services

Abstract: Planning is an important approach to developing complex app lications composed of web services, based upon semantic annotations o f these services. Despite numerous publications in recent years, the problem s considered in the literature typically do not require planning as it has been w ell-defined in computer science. This could lead to confusion about which tech nologies are being designated, and raises the question of what whether plannin g is an appropriate technology for services. We describe the essential features of planning technology a nd note its advantages, which include the dynamic synthesis of processes and the lac k of need to verify the correctness of the message exchange. We show that planning technology really is necessary by givi n an example of web service composition that cannot be solved with simpler t echnologies as could previously published examples. We describe the basics of adapting planning to web service co mposition. We restrict its use to process instance synthesis in order to simp lify exploration of some fundamental issues. A major issue is that web services are us ually incompletely modeled. We illustrate this with a second example. We show so me additional semantic annotations of web services can be used to solve the pr oblems similar to the example when used in conjunction with re-planning.

Digital Open Annotation with Hypothesis: Supplying the Missing Capability of the Web

Abstract: Hypothesis is an open-source technology developed by a non-profit organization that enables a conversation across all the content on the Web, a rich and interconnected exchange that goes well beyon...

Semantic Models in Web based Educational System Integration

Abstract: Web based e-Education systems are an important kind of information systems that benefited from Web standards for implementation, deployment and integration. In this paper we propose and evaluate a semantic Web approach to support the features and interoperability of a real industrial e-Education system in production. We show how ontology-based knowledge representation supports the required features, their extension to new ones and the integration of external resources (e.g. official standards) as well as the interoperability with other systems. We designed and implemented a proof of concept in an industrial context that was qualitatively and quantitatively evaluated and we benchmarked different alternatives on real data and real queries. We present a complete evaluation of the quality of service and response time in this industrial context and we show that on a real-world tesbed Semantic Web based solutions can meet the industrial requirements, both in terms of functionalities and efficiency compared to existing operational solutions. We also show that an ontology-oriented modelling opens up new opportunities of advanced functionalities supporting resource recommendation and adaptive learning.

Indoor Air Quality Monitoring Sensor for the Web of Things

Abstract: Many Internet of Things platforms use dedicated software coupled with proprietary devices and interfaces, creating silo solutions with no interoperability. The Web of Things paradigm promotes using open Web standards to connect physical objects to the Internet through an application layer. In this paper, we propose a low-cost, indoor air quality monitoring sensor implementing a minimal servient building block recommended by the Web of Things Working Group of the World Wide Web Consortium. The proposed sensor runs a Web server on a low-power system-on-chip microcontroller, which provides temperature, relative humidity and carbon dioxide measurements to the Internet through a REST API. Any client on the Internet able to manage the HTTP protocol may access this sensor, making it compatible with any air quality monitoring platform that uses HTTP.

Combining Multiple Web Accessibility Evaluation Reports Using Semantic Web Technologies

Abstract: This work paper describes a process for automatic combination of testing reports for the accessibility of Web applications, obtained by different testing tools and applying different standards on Web accessibility. Interoperability is guaranteed using semantic Web technologies, which allow describing the reports by RDF (Resource Description Framework) triples. The reports refer to elements of a knowledge base consisting of vocabularies, ontologies and rules of inference, in which the conceptual relations between accessibility standards, as WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) or Section 508 among others, are formalized. A software prototype that uses the Apache Jena framework for implementing the process is presented.

Mobile-PrivAccess: Method for Analyzing Accessibility in Mobile Applications from the Privacy Viewpoint Abiding by W3C

Abstract: Despite accessibility is a right ensured by the legislation, it is still a challenge to People with Disability and Limitations (PwDaL), considering Limitations, for instance, those deriving from aging and low literacy. In Digital Systems (DS) restrictions on use by PwDaL are easily found which even more excludes them from society which preponderantly interacts with the technology. Recognizing the importance of ensuring accessibility and privacy to PwDaL we investigated the problems of accessibility and digital privacy in the context of mobile applications and proposed the Mobile-PrivAccess method. This method allows applying the W3C directives to assess the accessibility to mobile applications privacy resources, without the participation of PwDaL. The absence of these users spares unnecessary efforts at the preliminary stages of the application assessment. The method based on an inspection technique is a four-stage structured process with established goals containing support artifacts for specific phases. For applying the method, two professionals with knowledge on and or experience in digital inclusion for PwDaL and/or in the W3C standards are required. For verifying the viability of the method proposed an experiment was performed adopting the proposed method to assess the accessibility of the Waze App [13] in three operating systems, as follows: Android, iOS and Windows Phone. The results demonstrated the viability of the method indicating that Waze meets few success criteria and presents a number of accessibility barriers to different PwDaL profiles.

Discovery and auto-composition of semantic web services

Abstract: In order to facilitate the on-demand delivery of new services for mobile terminals as well as for fixed phones, we propose a user-centric solution based on Semantic Service-Oriented Architecture (SSOA) for instant building and delivery of new services composed with existing Web services discovered and assembled on-the-fly. This solution, based on semantic descriptions of Web services, is made of three main mechanisms: a semantic service discoverer, transparent for the user, allows to find the pertinent Web services matching with the user's original request, expressed vocally or by a SMS or a simple text ; a semantic service composer, using the semantic descriptions of the Web services, allows to combine and orchestrate the discovered services in order to build a new service fully matching the user's request, and a service deliverer makes the new service immediately accessible by the user. 1 SEMANTIC WEB SERVICES Web services, as they are easily accessible from any point of Internet through an Application server, are suitable to build rapidly on-demand applications. From the point of view of their internal complexity, Web services (WS) can be divided into two families : elementary WS and composite WS. Elementary WS provide a basic service, comparable to mathematical libraries, and contain a low level of data transformation, embedded in few algorithms; for example, translation services are elementary WS. In the contrary, composite WS provide a high level service and contain many levels of data accesses and transformations, given by the cooperation of several elementary services. Such a composite service, resulting of the composition of several processes logically assembled, can be called an orchestrated service; for example, reservation services or securedpayment services are composite orchestrated WS. If the development of elementary WS is obviously the domain of specialized software engineers, the emerging technology of semantics, associated to web services, allows a end user, through an appropriate application accessible from his preferred phone (mobile or fixed), to build transparently and to use some new services made by an assembly of existing elementary WS, discovered and orchestrated on-thefly. "Transparently", because the process of discovery, composition and delivery of the new service has to be totally transparent for the user whose the only demand is to get a new easy-to-use service immediately responding to his original easy-expressed request. A second advantage of the semantic technology attached to WS is to allow keeping only the semantic descriptions of the requested services, instead of the orchestrated resulting service, because the semantic descriptions can be processed and re-processed at any time, permitting a dynamic re-discover, re-orchestrate and re-deliver of a "new" new service, matching better with the original request. 2 EASY-EXPRESSING NEW SERVICES Let us develop a concrete use case to explain the functioning of our solution. For example, a user wants to get a french translation of the latest CNN news.

Web Semantic Technologies in Web Based Educational System Integration

Abstract: Web based e-Education systems are an important kind of information systems that benefited from Web standards for content, implementation, deployment and integration. An e-Education system requires the collaboration of many actors in a complete ecosystem: public authorities (e.g. Ministry) and knowledge engineers, who build official reference standards; teachers and pedagogical engineers, who build digital pedagogical resources; and IT engineers who build digital platforms for e-Learning. In this article we propose and evaluate a Semantic Web approach to support the features and interoperability of a real industrial e-Education system in production. We show how ontology-based knowledge representation supports the required features, their extension to new ones and the integration of external resources (e.g. official standards) as well as interoperability with other systems and knowledge sharing between different actors. Our proof of concept is entirely based on Semantic Web technologies and complies with the industrial constraints; we qualitatively and quantitatively evaluated it and performed a benchmark of different alternatives on real data and real queries. We present an in-depth evaluation of the quality of service and response time in this industrial context that shows on a real-world testbed that Semantic Web based solutions can meet the industrial requirements, both in terms of services and efficiency compared to existing operational solutions.

Toward characterizing HTML defects on the Web

Abstract: Summary HTML is being massively used as an interface to provide services to users. Web developers are producing and changing sites at a high pace while trying to support the latest HTML standards. In this context, it is common to find websites that do not comply with the standards and fail to be correctly processed by browsers. Considering this dynamic environment and the increasingly large diversity of browsers with frequent updates, the appearance of problems in web pages is a common, sometimes severe, and hard-to-track problem. In this short communication, we describe the initial design of an approach that will be used to obtain information regarding the characteristics of HTML documents on the Web and extract indicators of representative errors made by their developers. Preliminary results show nearly 90% of the pages analyzed having at least one type of error and the prevalence of a small number of error types.

The effects of web accessibility certification on the perception of companies’ corporate social responsibility

Abstract: While websites are generally effective communication tools for information sharing, marketing, public relations, etc., people with disabilities and elderly individuals encounter considerable difficulty in accessing information through websites. To minimize this, countries around the world have made web accessibility compulsory by law and have implemented web accessibility certification programs. Therefore, the goal of this study is to analyze the effects of web accessibility certification on the perception of companies’ corporate social responsibility (CSR). We conducted an experiment in which participants were instructed to browse the websites of two private Korean enterprises that had been granted web accessibility certification. The participants then completed a four-item questionnaire measuring some components of CSR. We analyzed the collected data using logistic regression analysis and multivariate analysis of variance. We also interviewed some of the participants after the experiment to collect more qualitative data. The analysis of results indicates that web accessibility certification marks significantly influence web users’ perceptions of the CSR of the companies that post the marks on their websites. The qualitative data also facilitate practical recommendations for effective web accessibility certification marks. The findings of this study add to the body of knowledge on web accessibility. This study thus contributes to both research and practice in the field of web accessibility.

Jwig: yet another framework for maintainable and secure web applications

Abstract: Although numerous frameworks for web application programming have been developed in recent years, writing web applications remains a challenging task. Guided by a collection of classical design principles, we propose yet another framework. It is based on a simple but flexible server-oriented architecture that coherently supports general aspects of modern web applications, including dynamic XML construction, session management, data persistence, caching, and authentication, but it also simplifies programming of server-push communication and integration of XHTML-based applications and XML-based web services. The resulting framework provides a novel foundation for developing maintainable and secure web applications.

Web 2.0 and Health Information Technology: Theories and Applications

Abstract: This chapter describes the overview of Web 2.0 technologies; Web 2.0 applications in learning and education; Web 2.0 applications in academic libraries; Web 2.0 applications in Knowledge Management (KM); the perspectives of Health Information Technology (health IT); the multifaceted applications of health IT; IT and Technology Acceptance Model (TAM); and the significance of health IT in the health care industry. Web 2.0 is the platform of the network which spans all connected services so that users can utilize them more efficiently. Web 2.0 technologies have various benefits by enhancing the opportunities for business collaboration and by sharing knowledge through online communities of practice toward gaining improved organizational performance. Health IT includes utilizing technology to electronically store, protect, retrieve, and transfer the information in modern health care. Health IT has great potential to improve the quality, safety, and efficiency of health care services in the health care industry.