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Electric mobility as a service (eMaaS) is suggested as a possible solution to ease transportation and lessen environmental issues by providing a collaborative transport sharing infrastructure that is based on electric vehicles (EVs) such as electric cars, electric bicycles and so on. Accordingly, this study aims to propose a multi-tier architecture to support the collection, processing, analytics and usage of mobility data in providing eMaaS within smart cities. The architecture uses application programming interfaces to enable interoperability between different infrastructures required for eMaaS and allow multiple partners to exchange and share data for making decision regarding electric mobility services.

Design science methodology based on a case study by interview was used to collect data from an infrastructure company in Norway to verify the applicability of the proposed multi-tier architecture.

Findings suggest that the architecture offers an approach for collecting, aggregating, processing and provisioning of data originating from sources to improve electric mobility in smart cities. More importantly, findings from this study provide guidance for municipalities and policymakers in improving electric mobility services. Moreover, the author’s findings provide a practical data-driven mobility use case that can be used by transport companies in deploying eMaaS in smart cities.

Data was collected from a single company in Norway, hence, it is required to further verify the architecture with data collected from other companies.

eMaaS operates on heterogeneous data, which are generated from EVs and used by citizens and stakeholders such as city administration, municipality transport providers, charging station providers and so on. Therefore, the proposed architecture enables the sharing and usage of generated data as openly available data to be used in creating value-added services to improve citizen’s quality of life and viability of businesses.

This study proposes the deployment of electric mobility to address increased usage of vehicles, which contributes to pollution of the environment that has a serious effect on citizen’s quality of life.

This study proposes a multi-tier architecture that stores, processes, analyze and provides data and related services to improve electric mobility within smart cities. The multi-tier architecture aims to support and increase eMaaS operation of EVs toward improving transportation services for city transport operators and citizens for sustainable transport and mobility system.

This paper aims to elucidate the value of opening up digital collections for end‐user development of mash‐ups and to evaluate the suitability of libraries' infrastructure for this purpose.

The author surveyed ARL members' digital collection platforms to assess the terms of use statements and options for programmatic access.

The findings show that 17 per cent of the institutions surveyed offer some means for mashing up digital collections, and that, while more than half the collections surveyed have some form of terms of use or rights statements, they were not written to support this type of use case.

Results of the research suggest that a mashable digital collection service is feasible for most libraries.

This paper will be of interest to librarians who are considering providing application programming interface (API) access to their digital collections.

Software developers extensively use stack overflow (SO) for knowledge sharing on software development. Thus, software engineering researchers have started mining the structured/unstructured data present in certain software repositories including the Q&A software developer community SO, with the aim to improve software development. The purpose of this paper is show that how academics/practitioners can get benefit from the valuable user-generated content shared on various online social networks, specifically from Q&A community SO for software development.

A comprehensive literature review was conducted and 166 research papers on SO were categorized about software development from the inception of SO till June 2016.

Most of the studies revolve around a limited number of software development tasks; approximately 70 percent of the papers used millions of posts data, applied basic machine learning methods, and conducted investigations semi-automatically and quantitative studies. Thus, future research should focus on the overcoming existing identified challenges and gaps.

The work on SO is classified into two main categories; “SO design and usage” and “SO content applications.” These categories not only give insights to Q&A forum providers about the shortcomings in design and usage of such forums but also provide ways to overcome them in future. It also enables software developers to exploit such forums for the identified under-utilized tasks of software development.

The study is the first of its kind to explore the work on SO about software development and makes an original contribution by presenting a comprehensive review, design/usage shortcomings of Q&A sites, and future research challenges.

The purpose of this paper is to present a method to realize the flexible and lightweight integration of general web applications.

The information extraction and functionality emulation method are proposed to realize the web information integration for the general web applications. All the processes of web information searching, submitting and extraction are run at client‐side by end‐user programming like a real web service.

The implementation shows that the required programming techniques are within the abilities of general web users, and without needing to write too many programs.

A Java‐based class package was developed for web information searching/submitting/extraction, which users can integrate easily with the general web applications.

This paper aims to outline the concepts of web services architectures and to begin an exploration of the uses that recordkeeping professionals may define for such a potentially radical change to the way recordkeeping functionality is delivered.

The paper combines narrative with argument and analysis of the issues surrounding records management.

The paper shows that the digital world has introduced new challenges to recordkeeping professionals. The initial response has been to transfer traditional recordkeeping systems to automated solutions. Increasingly these are being challenged for fit in dynamic organizational environments. Web services as a building block for next generation software applications are growing in acceptance both in governments and innovative product offerings.

Recordkeeping professionals should ensure that they are very firmly grounded in best professional practice in recordkeeping to grasp such a technology opportunity.

The purpose of this paper is to show that the digital world has introduced new challenges to recordkeeping professionals.

The initial response has been to transfer traditional recordkeeping systems to automated solutions. Increasingly these are being challenged for fit in dynamic organizational environments. Web services as a building‐block for next generation software applications are growing in acceptance both in governments and innovative product offerings.

The paper outlines the concepts of web services architectures and begins an exploration of the uses that recordkeeping professionals may define for such a potentially radical change to the way recordkeeping functionality is delivered.

The paper challenges recordkeeping professionals to ensure that they are very firmly grounded in best professional practice in recordkeeping to grasp such a technology opportunity.

Cloud computing becomes mobile when a mobile device tries to access the shared pool of computing resources provided by the cloud, on demand. Mobile applications may enrich their functionality by delegating heavy tasks to the clouds as the remote processing and storage have become possible by adding asynchronous behavior in the communication. However, developing mobile cloud applications involves working with services and APIs from different cloud vendors, which mostly are not interoperable across clouds. Moreover, by adding asynchronicity, mobile applications must rely on push mechanisms which are considered to be moderately reliable, and thus not recommended in scenarios that require high scalability and quality of service (QoS). To counter these problems, and the purpose of this paper, is to design a middleware framework, Mobile Cloud Middleware (MCM), which handles the interoperability issues and eases the use of process‐intensive services from smartphones by extending the concept of mobile host.

MCM is developed as an intermediary between the mobile and the cloud, which hides the complexity of dealing with multiple cloud services from mobiles. Several applications are presented to show the benefits of mobiles going cloud‐aware. Moreover, to verify the scalability of MCM, load tests are performed on the hybrid cloud resources using well known load balancing mechanisms like HAProxy and Tsung.

From the study it was found that it is possible to handle hybrid cloud services from mobiles by using MCM. The analysis demonstrated that the MCM shows reasonable performance levels of interaction with the user, thus validating the proof of concept. Moreover, MCM decreases the effort in developing mobile cloud applications and helps in keeping soft‐real time responses by using its asynchronous approach.

MCM fosters the utilization of different types of cloud services rather than the traditional mobile cloud services based on data synchronization. By offloading heavy tasks to the clouds, the framework extends the processing power and storage space capabilities of the constrained smart phones. The applications mentioned in the paper bring an added value by being success stories for mobile cloud computing domain in general.

Massive amounts of data, manifesting in various forms, are being produced on the Web every minute and becoming the new standard. Exploring these information sources distributed in different Web segments in a unified way is becoming a core task for a variety of users’ and companies’ scenarios. However, knowledge creation and exploration from distributed Web data sources is a challenging task. Several data integration conflicts need to be resolved and the knowledge needs to be visualized in an intuitive manner. The purpose of this paper is to extend the authors’ previous integration works to address semantic knowledge exploration of enterprise data combined with heterogeneous social and linked Web data sources.

The authors synthesize information in the form of a knowledge graph to resolve interoperability conflicts at integration time. They begin by describing KGMap, a mapping model for leveraging knowledge graphs to bridge heterogeneous relational, social and linked web data sources. The mapping model relies on semantic similarity measures to connect the knowledge graph schema with the sources' metadata elements. Then, based on KGMap, this paper proposes KeyFSI, a keyword-based semantic search engine. KeyFSI provides a responsive faceted navigating Web user interface designed to facilitate the exploration and visualization of embedded data behind the knowledge graph. The authors implemented their approach for a business enterprise data exploration scenario where inputs are retrieved on the fly from a local customer relationship management database combined with the DBpedia endpoint and the Facebook Web application programming interface (API).

The authors conducted an empirical study to test the effectiveness of their approach using different similarity measures. The observed results showed better efficiency when using a semantic similarity measure. In addition, a usability evaluation was conducted to compare KeyFSI features with recent knowledge exploration systems. The obtained results demonstrate the added value and usability of the contributed approach.

Most state-of-the-art interfaces allow users to browse one Web segment at a time. The originality of this paper lies in proposing a cost-effective virtual on-demand knowledge creation approach, a method that enables organizations to explore valuable knowledge across multiple Web segments simultaneously. In addition, the responsive components implemented in KeyFSI allow the interface to adequately handle the uncertainty imposed by the nature of Web information, thereby providing a better user experience.

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.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate new undergraduate student library engagement in the Minrva mobile app during the months of May 2015 through December 2015.

This research investigated what parts of a mobile app new students were using in their first semester after downloading the app. The quantitative study used application programming interface log analysis to better understand what parts of the app new students use in the mobile app.

By undertaking this study, the author has a better understanding about what students are finding useful within the app and what tools are not being used by this cohort in their first semester.

The value of this research is in helping system designers and first-year experience planners know what mobile support tools students are finding useful in their first semester. Implication for mobile interface design based on module popularity are discussed.