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The purpose of this paper is to describe UWIRS (Ubiquitous Web Information Retrieval Solution), an agent‐based Web Information Retrieval (WIR) solution designed taking into account the unique features of the World Wide Web (WWW) and the limitations of existing WIR solutions for ubiquitous environments.

UWIRS can offer recommendation services by using the Multi‐Agent Vizier Recommendation Framework (Vizier). Vizier was designed under a generic approach and therefore can provide services to information retrieval applications so these may offer product recommendations that consider several adaptation/personalization dimensions (e.g. user dimension, context, among others).

Overall, the main challenge resides on: location, retrieval, integration and presentation of information from the WWW, quickly and accurately, to satisfy a user's singular information needs.

In UWIRS, agents cooperate in order to retrieve personalized information, considering user needs, goals, preferences and contextual features. UWIRS's agents are responsible for: interpreting user input and adding adaptation information by means of a query enrichment process; identifying and selecting the appropriate data sources taking into consideration the Profile Set (composed of User, Device and Information‐Provider Profiles); executing query routing and the information retrieval process; integrating and filtering the retrieved results; and lastly, coherent presentation of quality and relevant ubiquitous information (anytime, anywhere and anyhow) that satisfies the user's particular information needs and constraints associated to his/her access device.

The purpose of this paper is to design an application profile that will enable interoperability among research management systems, support research collaboration, and facilitate the management of research information.

The approach is based on the Singapore Framework for Dublin Core Application Profile, a framework for designing metadata schemas for maximum interoperability. The application profile is built from gathering stakeholders’ requirements in research community and integrates four types of research information, i.e., information on researchers, research projects, research outputs, and research reports, which benefits researchers, research managers, and funding agencies.

The resultant application profile is evaluated against widely used similar metadata schemas and requirements; and is found to be more comprehensive than the existing schemas and meets the collected requirements. Furthermore, the application profile is deployed with a prototype of research management system and is found works appropriately.

The designed application profile has implications for further development of research management systems that would lead to the enhancement of research collaboration and the efficiency of research information management.

The proposed application profile covers information entire the research development lifecycle. Both schema and information can be represented in Resource Description Framework format for reusing purpose and linking with other information. This enables users to share research information, co-operate with others, funding agencies and the community at large, thereby allowing a research management system to increase collaboration and the efficiency of research management. Furthermore, researchers and research information can be linked by means of Linked Open Data technology.

The importance of mobile services in our everyday life is growing while at the same time new interoperability issues arise due to hardware and software heterogeneity. Therefore, new architectural paradigms and models are needed to enhance software engineering methodologies with regard to platform independence and interoperability. This paper describes an UML pattern based approach for developing reconfigurable autonomous mobile services. Through the analysis of an mcommerce project, the relevance of our proposed architecture will be explained. Our focus lays on a generic reconfiguration mechanism based on profile matching from software modules. This profiling part will be further described and discussed. Finally, the applicability of our approach is investigated within a project about reconfigurable indoor navigation computers and a project about robot assisted sensor networks.

The aim of this paper is to describe a project to provide an online web portal that can be used as a front‐end for all university users – students, teachers, staff – and services, library, administration, e‐learning, and e‐mail.

The profile model proposed is mainly inheritable, defined by profile components with transactional templates, security rules and layout templates. This approach is being tested on a campus prototype portal. The prototype is an underway project in development at our university.

This paper explains that, even though different from the overall approaches, the basic profile and the profile management system proposed are solid alternatives when addressing personalization of organization users.

This new approach explains how user modelling applications can be integrated into any organization without the cost of reengineering the entire information system already in place.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the problem of privacy disclosure of third party applications in online social networks (OSNs) through Facebook, investigate the limitations in the existing models to protect users privacy and propose a permission-based access control (PBAC) model, which gives users complete control over users’ data when accessing third party applications.

A practical model based on the defined permission policies is proposed to manage users information accessed by third party applications and improve user awareness in sharing sensitive information with them. This model is a combination of interfaces and internal mechanisms which can be adopted by any OSN having similar architecture to Facebook in managing third party applications, without much structural changes. The model implemented in Web interface connects with Facebook application programming interface and evaluates its efficacy using test cases.

The results show that the PBAC model can facilitate user awareness about privacy risks of data passed on to third party applications and allow users who are more concerned about their privacy from releasing such information to those applications.

The study provides further research in protecting users’ privacy in OSNs and thus avoid the risks associated with that, thereby increasing users’ trust in using OSNs.

The research has proven to be useful in improving user awareness on the risk associated with sharing private information on OSNs, and the practically implemented PBAC model guarantees full user privacy from unwanted disclosure of personal information to third party applications.

The purpose of this paper is to describe applications, gadgets, and profiles that libraries have developed and distributed through the Facebook, iGoogle, and MySpace communities.

provides a general review.

Growing number of libraries and library‐related organizations are creating practical tools using Web 2.0 technologies.

Librarians need to keep abreast of and experiment with these new methods of packaging and delivering information.

This paper aims to provide insights into the moral values embodied by a popular social networking site (SNS), Facebook.

This study is based upon qualitative fieldwork, involving participant observation, conducted over a two‐year period. The authors adopt the position that technology as well as humans has a moral character in order to disclose ethical concerns that are not transparent to users of the site.

Much research on the ethics of information systems has focused on the way that people deploy particular technologies, and the consequences arising, with a view to making policy recommendations and ethical interventions. By focusing on technology as a moral actor with reach across and beyond the internet, the authors reveal the complex and diffuse nature of ethical responsibility and the consequent implications for governance of SNS.

The authors situate their research in a body of work known as disclosive ethics, and argue for an ongoing process of evaluating SNS to reveal their moral importance. Along with that of other authors in the genre, this work is largely descriptive, but the paper engages with prior research by Brey and Introna to highlight the scope for theory development.

Governance measures that require the developers of social networking sites to revise their designs fail to address the diffuse nature of ethical responsibility in this case. Such technologies need to be opened up to scrutiny on a regular basis to increase public awareness of the issues and thereby disclose concerns to a wider audience. The authors suggest that there is value in studying the development and use of these technologies in their infancy, or if established, in the experiences of novice users. Furthermore, flash points in technological trajectories can prove useful sites of investigation.

Existing research on social networking sites either fails to address ethical concerns head on or adopts a tool view of the technologies so that the focus is on the ethical behaviour of users. The authors focus upon the agency, and hence the moral character, of technology to show both the possibilities for, and limitations of, ethical interventions in such cases.

In profile monitoring, which is a growing research area in the field of statistical process control, the relationship between response and explanatory variables is monitored over time. The purpose of this paper is to focus on the process capability analysis of linear profiles. Process capability indices give a quick indication of the capability of a manufacturing process.

In this paper, the proportion of the non‐conformance criteria is employed to estimate process capability index. The paper has considered the cases where specification limits is constant or is a function of explanatory variable X. Moreover, cases where both equal and random design schemes in profile data acquisition is required (as the explanatory variable) is considered. Profiles with the assumption of deterministic design points are usually used in the calibration applications. However, there are other applications where design points within a profile would be i.i.d. random variables from a given distribution.

Simulation studies using simple linear profile processes for both fixed and random explanatory variable with constant and functional specification limits are considered to assess the efficacy of the proposed method.

There are many cases in industries such as semiconductor industries where quality characteristics are in form of profiles. There is no method in the literature to analyze process capability for theses processes, however recently quite a few methods have been presented in monitoring profiles. Proposed methods provide a framework for quality engineers and production engineers to evaluate and analyze capability of the profile processes.

Introduces the reader to the concepts and benefits of electronic cam capability in electronic motion control systems. General mechanical cam operation is discussed and the concept of electronic cam is described. A “rotary knife” application is used to illustrate how electronic cam can increase the quality of motion and simplify programming.

This article will examine the Z39.50 Information Retrieval protocol. It will look at some of the history of the protocol, its operation, and some of the major projects that have made use of it. There has been enough written (perhaps too much) about Z39.50 in the last several years so it is not intended to be a tutorial or detailed description of the protocol. The material that will be presented will try and put some context around the discussion. For those readers who are interested in delving into Z39.50 in a more technical manner, references to much of the material that has been written about it over the years will be provided at the end. Finally, the article will conclude with some thoughts on how technology and technological infrastructure have changed in the years since Z39.50 was initially developed and deployed, and where the protocol has so far lived up to its goals, and where it has perhaps failed to meet some of the high expectations that at least some people involved in the Z39.50 community held for it. The article will conclude with some of the author’s speculations (and they are really no more than that) of what the future role of Z39.50 is likely to be.