No abstract

With the advent of mobile smart phones, new types of virtual communities arrived, i.e. mobile communities. Mobile communities, with respect to their IT needs, introduce new requirements compared to traditional online web communities. On the other hand, cloud computing is emerging as computing concept that promises provision of computational resources on demand and abstraction of technical details from the clients. We propose Mobile Community Cloud Platform (MCCP) as a cloud computing system that can leverage the full potential of mobile community growth. An analysis of the core requirements of common mobile communities is provided before we present the design of our cloud computing architecture that supports building and evolving of mobile communities.

In recent years, research on mash-up technologies for learning environments has gained interest. The overall goal is to enrich or replace traditional learning management systems (LMS) with mash-ups of widgets and services that can be easily combined and configured to fit the learner needs. This paper presents the implemented prototype of the ROLE interoperability framework and a business and an educational case study. The framework provides a common technical infrastructure to assemble widgets and services in Personal Learning Environments (PLEs). Evaluation results indicate that the perceived usefulness and usability is high for one case study in which a mature LMS was enriched with ROLE technology. In the second case study, an early mash-up prototype was deployed. The usefulness and usability of this early prototype were rated low, but the case study provides interesting insights for further research and development.

Abstract. Web applications have overcome traditional desktop applications especially in collaborative settings. However, the bulk of Web applications still follow the "single user on a single device" computing model. Therefore, we created the DireWolf framework for rich Web applications with distributed user interfaces (DUIs) over a federation of heterogeneous commodity devices supporting modern Web browsers such as laptops, smart phones and tablet computers. The DUIs are based on widget technology coupled with cross-platform inter-widget communication and seamless session mobility. Inter-widget communication technologies connect the widgets and enable real-time collaborative applications as well as runtime migration in our framework. We show that the DireWolf framework facilitates the use case of collaborative semantic video annotation. For a single user it provides more flexible control over different parts of an application by enabling the simultaneous use of smart phones, tablets and computers. The work presented opens the way for creating distributed Web applications which can access device specific functionalities such as multi-touch, text input, etc. in a federated and usable manner.