This paper reports findings from a phenomenographic investigation into blended university teaching using virtual learning environments (VLEs). Interviews with 25 Computer Science teachers in Greek universities illuminated a spectrum of teachers' conceptions and approaches from 'teacher-focused and content-oriented', through 'studentfocused and content-oriented', to 'student-focused and process-oriented'. Using VLEs was described as a means of supporting: A-information transfer; B-application and clarification of concepts; C-exchange and development of ideas, and resource exploration and sharing; D-collaborative knowledge-creation, and development of process awareness and skills. The study suggests that pedagogical beliefs and circumstances underpinning face-toface teaching are more influential in shaping approaches to blended VLE use than VLE system features. The authors propose that the findings could be used to inform educational enhancement initiatives and that there is a need for further discipline-focused research on blended teaching.

Abstract. UDDI registries are included as a standard offering within the product suite of any major SOA vendor, serving as the foundation for establishing design-time and run-time SOA governance. Despite the success of the UDDI specification and its rapid uptake by the industry, the capabilities of its offered service discovery facilities are rather limited. The lack of machineunderstandable semantics in the technical specifications and classification schemes used for retrieving services, prevent UDDI registries from supporting fully automated and thus truly effective service discovery. This paper presents the implementation of a semantically-enhanced registry that builds on the UDDI specification and augments its service publication and discovery facilities to overcome the aforementioned limitations. The proposed solution combines the use of SAWSDL for creating semantically annotated descriptions of service interfaces and the use of OWL-DL for modelling service capabilities and for performing matchmaking via DL reasoning.

Growing interest towards cloud application platforms has resulted in a large number of platform offerings to be already available on the market and new related products to be continuously launched. However, there are a number of challenges that prevent cloud application platforms from becoming widely adopted. One such challenge is application portability. This paper reports on an ongoing effort to explore the area of cloud application portability. We briefly examine the issue of heterogeneity in cloud platforms and highlight specific platform characteristics that may hinder the portability of cloud applications. We present some high level approaches and existing work that attempts to address this challenge. In order to narrow down the area of our exploration we have been carrying out an experiment in cross-platform application development and deployment with four prominent cloud platforms: OpenShift, Google App Engine, Heroku, and Amazon Elastic Beanstalk. We briefly discuss our initial conclusions from this ongoing experimentation.

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Part 18: Optimization in Collaborative NetworksInternational audienceWith the rise of cloud computing, enterprises increasingly rely for their daily operations on heterogeneous externally-sourced cloud services that span different levels of capability. Their IT environment is thus progressively transformed into an ecosystem of intertwined infrastructure, platform, and application services. To effectively manage the ensuing complexity, enterprises are anticipated to increasingly rely on cloud service brokerage (CSB). This work presents a conceptual architecture for a framework which provides solutions with respect to the quality assurance and optimisation dimensions of CSB in the context of virtual enterprises. The framework revolves around three general themes, namely governance and quality control, failure prevention and recovery, and optimisation