No abstract

Representing information evolving in time in ontologies is a difficult problem to deal with. Temporal relations are in fact ternary (i.e., properties of objects that change in time involve also a temporal value in addition to the object and the subject) and cannot be handled directly by OWL. The standard solution to this problem is to map all temporal relations to a set of binary ones with new (intermediate) classes introduced by the temporal model applied. Nevertheless, ontologies then become complicated and difficult to handle by standard editors such as Protégé (e.g., property restrictions of temporal classes might refer to the new classes rather than to the classes on which they were meant to be defined). It also requires that the user be familiar with the peculiarities of the temporal representation. This is exactly the problem this work is dealing with. We introduce CHRONOS Ed, a plug-in for Protégé that enables handling of temporal ontologies in Protégé the same way static ontologies are handled. It is implemented as a Tab plug-in for Protégé and can be downloaded from the Web.

Interact is a cloud based gesture recognition solution based on the FI-WARE cloud platform, realized by means of cloud services communicating with each other through REST APIs. To promote the development of Future Internet (FI) applications, all functionalities of Interact are offered as cloud services. The system is sensor independent and is designed to work with the most popular motion sensors. To show proof of concept, a system prototype has been developed utilizing the LEAP Motion sensor.

Gesture recognition technology enables new means of user communication and interaction with machines. This work focuses on gesture recognition by analyzing data, obtained by motion sensors, in the cloud. We present Interact, a cloud based gesture recognition system that uses FIWARE. To promote the development of Future Internet (FI) applications, all functionalities of Interact are offered as cloud services, enabling elasticity, lower cost of maintenance and off-site efficient data storage. To promote productivity, Interact offers a REST API for recognizing, storing and managing customized gesture collections in the cloud as well as for subscribing to sensors. The system is sensor independent and is designed to be compliant with the most popular motion sensors (i.e., Leap Motion or Kinect). To demonstrate the functionalities of Interact, a system prototype has been developed utilizing the LEAP Motion sensor, offering all the previously described functionalities. The prototype is hosted on FIWARE Lab and is available for testing.

Over the recent years, the rapid development of Cloud Computing has driven to a large market of cloud services that offer infrastructure, platforms and software to everyday users. Yet, due to the lack of common accepted standards, cloud service providers use different technologies and offer their clients services that are operated by a variety of proprietary APIs. The lack of standardization results in numerous heterogeneities (e.g., heterogeneous service descriptions, message level naming conflicts, data representation conflicts etc.) making the interoperation, collaboration and portability of services a very complex task. In this work we focus on the problems of interoperability and portability in Cloud Computing, we address their differences and we discuss some of the latest research work in this area. Finally we evaluate and point out relationships between the identified solutions.