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Mobile widgets represent applications exploiting web technologies and providing specific functionalities in an efficient and user‐friendly way. Owing to the low or medium complexity of the mobile widgets, their development may be simplified and optimized through automatic mechanisms. This paper aims to address this issue.

This paper presents an approach to the automatic generation of widgets, which is based on the separation of concerns between the specification of their structural and functional characteristics, and their appearance. The structural and functional features are expressed at a high abstraction level through the authors' Widget Markup Language, while their appearance through pre‐defined or personalized templates. The authors' automatic generator of mobile widgets translates the XML‐based documents containing the widgets description based on the Widget Markup Language into functional widgets for various available technologies.

The main non‐functional properties of the authors' widget generator are related to its extensibility towards new technologies, and the structural and functional aspects of the widgets. The validation of their solution has been done through various case studies, among which they mention the DISCo widget, a mobile widget which provides academic information for the students of the Computer Science Department at the University of Milano‐Bicocca in Italy.

The main advantages of the authors' approach for the development of mobile widgets can be summarized as following: adherence to the Write‐Once‐Run Everywhere paradigm, which allows developers to save time and to not have to be aware of all the differences among the different technologies; the high‐level specification of a widget is simpler than its creation from scratch, and is, therefore, accessible to a greater number of potential developers; separation between the specification and the graphical layout of the widgets; generating widgets can consider, in addition to the platform, the characteristics of devices such as screen resolution or pointing mechanism, saving the developer the management of these aspects and industrial production of widgets, such as scalable management of creating and updating a large number of applications.

This paper aims to present a collaborative mashup platform for dynamic integration of heterogeneous data sources. The platform encourages sharing and connects data publishers, integrators, developers and end users.

This approach is based on a visual programming paradigm and follows three fundamental principles: openness, connectedness and reusability. The platform is based on semantic Web technologies and the concept of linked widgets, i.e. semantic modules that allow users to access, integrate and visualize data in a creative and collaborative manner.

The platform can effectively tackle data integration challenges by allowing users to explore relevant data sources for different contexts, tackling the data heterogeneity problem and facilitating automatic data integration, easing data integration via simple operations and fostering reusability of data processing tasks.

This research has focused exclusively on conceptual and technical aspects so far; a comprehensive user study, extensive performance and scalability testing is left for future work.

A key contribution of this paper is the concept of distributed mashups. These ad hoc data integration applications allow users to perform data processing tasks in a collaborative and distributed manner simultaneously on multiple devices. This approach requires no server infrastructure to upload data, but rather allows each user to keep control over their data and expose only relevant subsets. Distributed mashups can run persistently in the background and are hence ideal for real-time data monitoring or data streaming use cases. Furthermore, we introduce automatic mashup composition as an innovative approach based on an explicit semantic widget model.

Mashups have been studied extensively in the literature; nevertheless, the large body of work in this area focuses on service/data level integration and leaves UI level integration, hence UI mashups, almost unexplored. The latter generates digital environments in which participating sources exist as individual entities; member applications and data sources share the same graphical space particularly in the form of widgets. However, the true integration can only be realized through enabling widgets to be responsive to the events happening in each other. The authors call such an integration “widget orchestration” and the resulting application “mashup by orchestration”. This article aims to explore and address challenges regarding the realization of widget‐based UI mashups and UI level integration, prominently in terms of widget orchestration, and to assess their suitability for building web‐based personal environments.

The authors provide a holistic view on mashups and a theoretical grounding for widget‐based personal environments. The authors identify the following challenges: widget interoperability, end‐user data mobility as a basis for manual widget orchestration, user behavior mining – for extracting behavioral patterns – as a basis for automated widget orchestration, and infrastructure. The authors introduce functional widget interfaces for application interoperability, exploit semantic web technologies for data interoperability, and realize end‐user data mobility on top of this interoperability framework. The authors employ semantically enhanced workflow/process mining techniques, along with Petri nets as a formal ground, for user behavior mining. The authors outline a reference platform and architecture that is compliant with the authors' strategies, and extend W3C widget specification respectively – prominently with a communication channel – to foster standardization. The authors evaluate their solution approaches regarding interoperability and infrastructure through a qualitative comparison with respect to existing literature, and provide a computational evaluation of the behavior mining approach. The authors realize a prototype for a widget‐based personal learning environment for foreign language learning to demonstrate the feasibility of their solution strategies. The prototype is also used as a basis for the end‐user assessment of widget‐based personal environments and widget orchestration.

The evaluation results suggest that the interoperability framework, platform, and architecture have certain advantages over existing approaches, and the proposed behavior mining techniques are adequate for the extraction of behavioral patterns. User assessments show that widget‐based UI mashups with orchestration (i.e. mashups by orchestration) are promising for the creation of personal environments as well as for an enhanced user experience.

This article provides an extensive exploration of mashups by orchestration and their role in the creation of personal environments. Key challenges are described, along with novel solution strategies to meet them.

This purpose of this paper is to present ISML-MDE, a model-driven environment that includes ISML, a platform-independent modeling language for enterprise applications; ISML-GEN, a code generation framework to automatically generate code from models; and LionWizard, a tool to automatically integrate different components into a unified codebase.

The development comprises five stages: standardizing architecture; refactoring and adapting existing components; automating their integration; developing a modeling language; and creating code generators. After development, model-to-code ratios in ISML-MDE are measured for different applications.

The average model-to-code ratio is approximately 1:4.6 when using the code generators from arbitrary models. If a model transformation is performed previously to the code generation, this ratio raises to 1:115. The current validation efforts show that ISML properly supports several DSL essential characteristics described by Kahraman and Bilgen (2015).

ISML-MDE was tested on relatively small applications. Further validation of the approach requires measurement of development times and their comparison with previous similar projects, to determine the gains in productivity.

The value of ISML-MDE can be summarized as follows: ISML-MDE has the potential to significantly reduce development times, because of an adequate use of models and transformations. The design of ISML-MDE addresses real-world development requirements, obtained from a tight interaction between the researchers and the software development company. The underlying process has been thoroughly documented and it is believed it can be used as a reference for future developments of MDE tools under similar conditions.

This paper aims to report the development and key features of a novel virtual reality system for assembly planning and evaluation called Haptic Assembly and Manufacturing System (HAMS). The system is intended to be used as a tool for training, design analysis and path planning.

The proposed system uses the physics-based modelling (PBM) to perform assemblies in virtual environments. Moreover, dynamic assembly constrains have been considered to reduce the degrees of freedom of virtual objects and enhance the virtual assembly performance.

To evaluate the effectiveness and performance of HAMS, the assembly of various mechanical components has been carried out, and the results have shown that it can be effectively used to simulate, evaluate, plan and automatically formalise the assembly of complex models in a more natural and intuitive way.

The collision detection performance is the bottleneck in any virtual assembly system. New methods of collision shape representation and collision detection algorithms must be considered.

HAMS introduces the use of dynamic assembly constraints to enhance the virtual assembly performance. HAMS also uses features not yet reported by similar systems in the literature. These features include: automatic or manual definition of assembly constraints within the virtual assembly system; the implementation of control panels and widgets to modify simulation parameters during running time to evaluate its influence on simulation performance; assembly data logging such as trajectories, forces and update rates for post-processing, further analysis or its presentation in the form of chronocyclegraphs to graphically analyse the assembly process.

The purpose of this study is to determine a comprehensive model of millennial usage of interactive technologies in the current marketing environment based upon actual behavior.

A data mining approach using decision tree analysis (DTA) generates two comparative models (i.e. millennial versus generation X and millennial versus baby boomers) of interactive media usage across 21 technology applications. A large national sample (n=3,289) sourced from the Kantar Retail IQ constitutes the data for the models.

Millennial respondents indicate significantly higher usage of interactive media compared to both generation X and boomers across 14 applications. Models indicate that millennials use interactive technologies for utilitarian/information gathering purposes as well as for entertainment. However, they are less likely to purchase online compared to their older counterparts.

Models provide evidence that both supports and extends previous research into interactive media from a uses and gratifications perspective. Findings suggest theoretical directions for research for economic versus emotional uses of interactive media.

Findings suggest that while millennials are adept at using technology for research and interactive purposes they tend to buy in stores, presenting opportunities for multiple channel marketers and challenges for those who market online exclusively.

The paper provides a realistic, comprehensive empirical model of interactive consumer behaviors across three prominent US cohorts within the current generational cycle.

This paper aims to review seven artificial intelligence tools that are useful in assembly automation: knowledge‐based systems, fuzzy logic, automatic knowledge acquisition, neural networks, genetic algorithms, case‐based reasoning and ambient‐intelligence.

Each artificial intelligence tool is outlined, together with some examples of their use in assembly automation.

Artificial intelligence has produced a number of useful and powerful tools. This paper reviews some of those tools. Applications of these tools in assembly automation have become more widespread due to the power and affordability of present‐day computers.

Many new assembly automation applications may emerge and greater use may be made of hybrid tools that combine the strengths of two or more of the tools reviewed in the paper. The tools and methods reviewed in this paper have minimal computation complexity and can be implemented on small assembly lines, single robots or systems with low‐capability microcontrollers.

It may take another decade for engineers to recognize the benefits given the current lack of familiarity and the technical barriers associated with using these tools and it may take a long time for direct digital manufacturing to be considered commonplace… but it is expanding. The appropriate deployment of the new AI tools will contribute to the creation of more competitive assembly automation systems.

Other technological developments in AI that will impact on assembly automation include data mining, multi‐agent systems and distributed self‐organising systems.

The novel approaches proposed use ambient intelligence and the mixing of different AI tools in an effort to use the best of each technology. The concepts are generically applicable across all industrial assembly processes and this research is intended to prove that the concepts work in manufacturing.

The World Wide Web has undergone a rapid transition from the originally static hypertext to an ubiquitous hypermedia system. Today, the Web is not only used as a basis for distributed applications (Web applications), moreover it serves as a generic architecture for autonomous applications and services. Many research work has been done regarding the modeling and engineering process of Web applications and various platforms, frameworks and development kits exist for the efficient implementation of such systems. Concerning the modeling process, many of the published concepts try to merge traditional hypermedia modeling with techniques from the software engineering domain. Unfortunately, those concepts which capture all facets of the Web’s architecture become rather bulky and are eventually not applicable for a model‐driven Web application development. Moreover, there is a need for frameworks which address both, the modeling process and the implementation task and allow a model driven, semi‐automatic engineering process using CASE tools. This paper outlines the DaVinci Web Engineering Framework which supports the modeling as well as the semi‐automated implementation of Web applications. The DaVinci Architectural Layer specifies a persistent, hierarchical GUI model and a generic interaction scheme. This allows the elimination of the hypermedia paradigm, which turned out to be rather practical when building Web applications.