Information Systems

This paper focuses on the emerging problem of semantic interoperability between heterogeneous cooperating Cloud platforms. We try to pave the way towards a Reference Architecture for Semantically Interoperable Clouds (RASIC). To this end, three fundamental and complementary computing paradigms, namely Cloud computing, Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) and lightweight semantics are used as the main building blocks. The open, generic Reference Architecture for Semantically Interoperable Clouds introduces a scalable, reusable and transferable approach for facilitating the design, deployment and execution of resource intensive SOA services on top of semantically interlinked Clouds. In order to support the development of semantically interoperable Cloud systems based on RASIC, the model of a common Cloud API is also specified.

Cloud computing is a promising IT paradigm which enables the Internet's evolution into a global market of collaborating services. Cloud computing semantic interoperability plays a key role in making this a reality. Towards this direction, a comprehensive and systematic survey of Cloud computing interoperability efforts by standardization groups, industry and research community is carried out. The main objective of this survey is to derive an initial set of semantic interoperability core requirements that should be supported by any Cloud system in order to achieve Cloud computing semantic interoperability.Τhe survey motivates and encourages the Cloud community to adopt a common Cloud computing interoperability framework with core dimensions the creation of a common data model and a standardized Cloud interface (API), which will constitute the base for the development of a semantically interoperable Cloud environment.

Electronic Health Records (EHRs) contain an increasing wealth of medical information. They have the potential to help significantly in advancing medical research, as well as improve health policies, providing society with additional benefits. However, the European healthcare information space is fragmented due to the lack of legal and technical standards, cost effective platforms, and sustainable business models. The vision of Linked2Safety is to advance clinical practice and accelerate medical research, by providing pharmaceutical companies, healthcare professionals and patients with an innovative secure semantic interoperability framework facilitating the efficient and homogenized access to anonymised distributed EHRs in an aggregate form that enables merging multiple data sources into a single analyses. In this paper a first public introduction to the project is provided along with a clear definition of the problems, and proposed architecture. Three usage scenarios are used to demonstrate the potential impact of the outcomes of the project.

Given the rapid uptake and the great diversity of PaaS offerings, understanding semantic interoperability at the PaaS level is essential for supporting inter-Cloud cooperation, seamless information exchange and application and data portability. In this vein, this paper introduces a PaaS semantic interoperability framework (PSIF). PSIF studies, models and tries to resolve semantic interoperability conflicts raised during the deployment or the migration of an application by defining the following dimensions: Fundamental PaaS Entities, Types of Semantics, and Levels of Semantic Conflicts. In the context of this paper, the development of common PaaS models and standardized management interfaces are raised as primary requirements in this context. PaaS architectures can then be augmented with a semantic layer that would host the common models and would be the link between heterogeneous PaaS offerings.

A set of well-integrated clinical terminologies is at the core of delivering an efficient clinical trial system. The design and outcomes of a clinical trial can be improved significantly through an unambiguous and consistent set of clinical terminologies used in a participating clinical institute. However, due to lack of generalised legal and technical standards, heterogeneity exists between prominent clinical terminologies as well as within and between clinical systems at several levels, e.g., data, schema, and medical codes. This article specifically addresses the problem of integrating local or proprietary clinical terminologies with the globally defined universal concepts or terminologies. To deal with the problem of ambiguous, inconsistent, and overlapping clinical terminologies, domain and knowledge representation specialists have been repeatedly advocated the use of formal ontologies. We address two key challenges in developing an ontology-based clinical terminology (1) an ontology building methodology for clinical terminologies that are separated in global and local layers; and (2) aligning global and local clinical terminologies. We present Semantic Electronic Health Record (SEHR) ontology that covers multiple sub-domains of Healthcare and Life Sciences (HCLS) through specialisation of the upper-level Basic Formal Ontology (BFO). One of the main features of SEHR is layering and adaptation of local clinical terminologies with the upper-level BFO. Our empirical evaluation shows an agreement of clinical experts confirming SEHR's usability in clinical trials.

Cloud Platform as a Service (PaaS) is a novel, rapidly growing segment in the Cloud computing market. However, the diversity and heterogeneity of today's existing PaaS offerings raises several interoperability challenges. This introduces adoption barriers due to the lock-in issues that prevent the portability of data and applications from one PaaS to another, "locking" software developers to the first provider they use. This paper introduces the Cloud4SOA solution, a scalable approach to semantically interconnect heterogeneous PaaS offerings across different Cloud providers that share the same technology. The design of the Cloud4SOA solution, extensively presented in this work, comprises of a set of interlinked collaborating software components and models to provide developers and platform providers with a number of core capabilities: matchmaking, management, monitoring and migration of applications. The paper concludes with the presentation of a proof-of-concept implementation of the Cloud4SOA system based on real-life business scenarios.

Recently, there is an increased interest on approaches, methodologies and tools converting natural language into machine readable representations, such as RDF format. Although several steps have been made towards Natural Language Processing (NLP) domain, the machine intelligence for understanding natural language is still a topic of high research interest and its further exploration is going to bring significant benefits to several sub-tasks such as machine translation and questions answering. Natural language processing and natural language understanding are the usual approaches to transform the textual content from being unstructured and ambiguous, into structured and unambiguous. The current article presents the pipeline of linguistic processing and knowledge extraction techniques that are combined together in order to extract structured knowledge from natural language textual content and populate a knowledge base with quality triples. Moreover, it gives an overview of existing knowledge extraction tools found in the literature. Last, a short discussion and comparison of these tools is provided, and the article concludes with a brief summary.

Big part of Enterprise and Marketing Information Systems, such as customer relationship management (CRM), tend to be customised and even developed from scratch by the end-users working in the enterprises. However, user modelling and personalisation approaches have not been widely adopted in the end-user development (EUD) environments of information systems (IS). This results in the EUD of CRM software of low performance and reusability. Attempting to figure out how end-users can efficiently participate in the design and development of CRM systems, research suggests the 'construction' of end-users behavioural profiles to enhance their developing activity performance. This paper presents a methodological approach in which we construct different behavioural user-profiles based on end-user-related behavioural attributes. The suggested user-profiling approach can be applied to produce self-adaptive EUD environments to implicitly assist the end-users in the enhancement of their performance while developing web-based CRM software.

Mouse tracking allows web developers to view the behaviour of actual users in their natural browsing environment. By tracking the mouse movements and clicks, designers can evaluate the usefulness and ease of use of their web applications in order to enhance user experience. In today's highly competitive web marketplace, mouse tracking can reveal significant benefits for web marketing issues, since it can be used to analyze user behavior, so as we developers can design web environments to attract and win over the user (web consumer). However, simple mouse tracking is not enough since user behavior in web is multifold and e influenced by human factors such as gender, age, expectations, experience etc. Hence, mouse tracking should be used in compliance to human factor analysis and user behavioral (e.g. motivation, perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness, playfulness, etc) research. In this paper we address the role of two key human factors' derived behavioral attributes: self-efficacy and risk perception, and we analyze their influence on the user experience and user performance (i.e. the achievement of the desired task) while interacting with web software applications. We present the mouse tracking patterns that have been realized so far to measure these two attributes, and we conduct our own experiment by designing a prototype mouse tracking tool to measure user hesitation. Finally we discuss the contribution of this approach in the enhancement of user experience and in the broader web marketing area.

Since every-day users are not aware of database concepts, it is almost impossible for them to design even the basic structure of their self-developed applications with existing low level database-developing prototype applications. Most of the existing prototype applications demand at least some basic knowledge of SQL syntax and/or database logic. Hence, the end-users have either to be trained to use such prototype applications or the prototype applications have to be designed in such a way as to support untrained end-users. In this paper we present an approach based on 'simple-talking' to abstract database terminology and logic from the application development process. In this approach we assist untrained users to progressively design the whole database structure of their applications. The idea behind 'simple-talking' approach is to let the user choose a verb that describes the relationship between entities, and use this verb to form questions for the various database items. Our approach follows the relational paradigm since it is the dominant database type and the most complicated for the end-user to understand. Based on a prototype application we have conducted experiments to evaluate the effectiveness of 'simple-talking' approach and reveal its usefulness for end-user development.

Ubiquitous and cloud manufacturing systems have paved the way for the development of smart systems that can provide self-adaptive services to enhance quality of service and user experience, based on user and context awareness. However, current approaches to software adaptation have critical limitations when applied on software in a cloud environment, since cloud service engineers cannot be certain of the 'nature' of their users, regarding their needs and their evolution over time. This article proposes a user-centred framework that addresses self-adaptation of cloud services based on users' distinct needs and requirements. It aims at leveraging existing human computer interaction approaches to explicitly and implicitly collect user-related data into the cloud. This collection later supports the delivery of adaptive cloud services, contextually relevant to users' tasks and to their behavioural profiles. Such approaches have the potential to enhance the quality of cloud applications' service and user experience in cloud-based manufacturing systems. A first prototype demonstration is also presented as a future platform composed of the first basic models (of the ones mentioned in this article) .Then, the platform will be further expanded for instantiation and evaluation in the context of cloud and ubiquitous computing environments.

Marketing-IS research has recently focused on the development of personalization systems that are based on the modeling of consumer behavior and consumer heterogeneity regarding their distinct needs and preferences. However, personalization approaches in the design and development stage of Marketing-IS have not been widely studied in the End-User Development (EUD) research area. The lack of such research studies results in the development of Marketing-IS tools that neglect the differences in the end-user behavior, and artifacts of low performance and reusability. Attempting to figure out how end-users can participate in the design and construction of Marketing-IS in an efficient way, research suggests the 'construction' of endusers behavioral profiles based on human factors. Recent evidence reveal that human factors such as gender and expertise level can influence and even determine the end-users', behavior, and consequently performance, while end-users interact with EUD environments. This paper presents a methodological approach in which we identify different behavioral user-profiles, named 'user-categories' based on behavioural attributes derived by the human factors of gender and expertise level. The resulting usercategories can be applied in the modeling mechanism of adaptive EUD system environments. Such an approach is projected to implicitly assist the end-users in the enhancement of their performance during the development task of Marketing-IS

This paper addresses the role of gender in End-User Development (EUD) environments and examines whether there are gender differences in performance and in correlations between performance and a set of behavioral attributes. Based on a review of the most prominent EUD-related behavioral Human Computer Interaction (HCI) theories, and the influence of gender on them, it attempts to classify all the gender related behavioral attributes influencing the end-users' performance. Then, it theoretically selects a subset of these attributes,Use-Perception, and Self-Efficacy, presents an example application and conducts a basic evaluation testing. The proposed attributes (their initials form the word RULES) can form the basis for the design of EUD-oriented user modeling techniques for gender-neutral self-adaptive software EUD environments. Keywords Gender HCI. End-user development (EUD). Human factors in EUD. Behavioral user modeling, behavioral user profiles

In the recent years in the End-User Development (EUD) research there is a shift from the study of tools that focus on desktop graphical applications, to the development of EUD for web environments. To this end mouse and eye tracking methodologies are used to implicitly monitor the end-user behavior in real time. In this paper we explore the potential correlation between eye movements and end-user perception and acceptance in modern web-based EUD environments. The aim is to find out whether end-users' perception and acceptance attributes can be reflected on their eye behavior when interacting with a web-based, database-driven EUD system. To check out our research hypotheses we have conducted a field test using a prototype EUD tool based on a natural language approach (named 'simple talking'), to assist end-users in creating database-driven mobile applications. The results of the field test show significant correlations between eye behavior and acceptance and perception. Self-Efficacy is correlated to fixations of any kind. Risk-Perception is correlated to the increment of the pupil size. Perceived Ease-of-Use is correlated to fixations that turned into clicks and to the increment of the pupil size. And Perceived Usefulness is correlated to fixation duration.