Tutor

1. Johann Stan, Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs France / Laboratoire Hubert-Curien, CNRS UMR 5516 []
2. Julien Robinson, Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs France []

Social Platforms are a new generation of Web-based applications (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Delicious), characterized by their primarily user-driven content and the ability to mediate personal and social information across groups, such as teams, communities, and organizations. The most common forms of such systems are (i) Social Collaborative Environments (e.g. media sharing, micro-blogging, bookmarking), (ii) Social Networks and (iii) Social Web Mashups, which define the perimeter of the Social Web. Currently, from the metadata and content management perspectives, social platforms generally have proprietary models for the storage of information produced by users (e.g. profiles and shared content). This limits the reuse of the social content between the different platforms, a phenomenon usually conceptualized with the walled garden metaphor, meaning that such systems are separated and data is not easily exchangeable. The rationale behind the necessity of going beyond walled gardens in terms of social content management is the fact that users are often members of multiple social platforms or might have multiple profiles in the same platform. Therefore a flexible exchange of information between such systems would significantly facilitate the management of identities and shared content (e.g. seamless reuse of user profile information, of tags on photos or status updates etc.).

In this tutorial, we present a comprehensive survey of conceptual models (e.g. Foaf, Moat, Sioc, Upos, Scot, Skos, NiceTag, CommonTag, GroupMe etc.) proposed by the Semantic Web community for capturing social content in Social Platforms, such as user profile information or tags. We focus specifically on the comparison of such models so that different professionals can efficiently select the one that best fits the specific needs of their research or industrial project. We also show how we implemented several of these models in applications targeting e-education and collaborative learning.

Tutor

1. Levent Gürge, CEA-LETI Minatec Campus, Grenoble, France []
2. Cyril Labbé, University of Grenoble 1, Laboratory of Informatics of Grenoble (LIG), France []
3. Claudia Roncancio, Grenoble Institute of Technology, Laboratory of Informatics of Grenoble (LIG), France []

The advances in technology, in particular in miniaturization and wireless communication, have made sensor devices increasingly autonomous, small, cheap and powerful. The variety of available sensor devices is very rich and evolves daily. Sensor devices have become first class citizen data sources and have turned out to play a crucial role in the next generation of ubiquitous information systems. They concern an extremely rich variety of domains including industrial, medical and environmental applications having a high impact on the society. For example, building smart homes, transports and cities rely, among others, on mastering sensor data management together with other more classical data sources.

This tutorial provides a state of the art of sensor data management solutions based on different techniques such as in-network data processing, data stream management systems or higher level service-oriented solutions. In addition to specific scientific challenges such as energy efficiency, declarative querying of data streams, heterogeneity and scalability, research trends in ubiquitous information systems will also be presented.

Tutor

1. Prof. Brian Henderson-Sellers, UT Sydney

Metamodelling is an easy way to underpin the rules and usages of modelling languages like UML or full methodologies. Its use ensures a "common language" for all users of the technology, often enshrined in a formal standard from ISO or OMG, for example. In this tutorial we dispel the notion that metamodelling is only for the experts and demonstrate some advances in metamodelling techniques that make metamodelling affordable to developers and much more applicable and useful for their needs. The new techniques explained will include powertype-based metamodelling, the construction of methodologies using resources and templates from a method engineering perspective, the integration of process and modelling issues in the same metamodel and the incorporation of capability/maturity attributes at the methodological level. The International Standard ISO/IEC 24744 will be used as a reference framework throughout.

Tutor

1. Gianluigi Viscusi, Università degli Studi di Milano Bicocca, Italy []
2. Carlo Batini, Università degli Studi di Milano Bicocca, Italy []

The success of public sector investment in eGovernment initiatives strongly depends on effectively exploiting all aspects of ICT systems and infrastructures. The related objectives are hardly reachable without methodological frameworks that provide a holistic perspective and knowledge on the contexts of eGovernment initiatives. Yet public administrators usually have a mix of legal and administrative knowledge, while lacking an information systems background.

The tutorial aims to introduce to the complexity of strategic planning of information systems for provision of eGovernment services in countries characterized by different culture, technological readiness, and legal framework. Another goal is to raise awareness on the role of IS modelling in strategic planning in its interaction with socio-economic, organizational, and legal framework analyses. A major objective is to provide a comprehensive perspective on the challenges, opportunities, decisions involved in the effective strategic and operational planning of information systems in eGovernment. The tutorial aims to bridge this gap, providing the necessary (and sufficient) background to allow administrators to play an active role in eGovernment strategic and operational decisions. Due to these issues, the tutorial discusses a methodology called eG4M (eGovernment in Mediterranean Countries) in comparison with other approaches to information systems planning and engineering in eGovernment; eG4M has been experimented in three countries, namely Italy, Tunisia and Morocco. Comparison criteria with other approaches encompass the objectives considered, the problems addressed, the main concepts introduced, the phases and steps, the target applications.

Intended audience: The tutorial aims to be of interest for public administrators, decision makers, practitioners, professionals, and Ph.D. students.

Tutor

1. Jean-Luc Hainaut, PReCISE Research Center, University of Namur []
2. Anthony Cleve, PReCISE Research Center, University of Namur []

Transformation-based software engineering has long been considered a major approach to build reliable and efficient programs. According to this approach, abstract specifications (or models) can be converted into correct, compilable and efficient programs by applying selected, correctness-preserving operators called transformations.

In the database engineering realm, an increasing number of bodies (e.g., OMG through the MDE proposal) and of authors recognize the merits of transformational approaches, that can produce in a systematic way machine-processable database structures from abstract models, and conversely. Transformations that are proved to preserve the correctness of the source specifications have been proposed in virtually all the activities related to schema engineering: schema normalization, schema quality evaluation, logical design, schema integration, view derivation, schema equivalence, database migration, data conversion, database reverse engineering, schema optimization, ETL, wrapper generation and others.

This tutorial addresses both basic and practical aspects of database transformation techniques. It develops the concept of transformation, together with its properties of semantics-preservation. In addition, it analyzes the dependencies between several artefacts (e.g., database and programs) and introduces the concept of co-transformation. The tutorial shows how transformation plans can be built in a systematic way and applies this methodology to the elaboration of Entity-relationship to object-relational schema translation. It also elaborates on the design of reverse engineering methodologies for various data models. The impact of transformational techniques on CASE technology is discussed and illustrated through the use of DB-MAIN, a free transformation-based CASE environment.

The lecture is primarily aimed at practitioners in data-intensive application engineering. However, researchers can be considered as a target audience as well. Basic knowledge in database engineering is required.

Tutor

1. Giancarlo Guizzardi, (Ontology and Conceptual Modeling Research Group (NEMO) - Computer Science Department, Federal University of Espírito Santo, Vitória, Brazil)

The main objective of this tutorial is to introduce researchers to the theory and practice of advanced conceptual modeling through the application of a new emerging discipline named Ontology-Driven Conceptual Modeling. In this tutorial, we show how the area of Conceptual Modeling can directly benefit from the theories comprising a Foundational Ontology, i.e., an ontological system of general categories and their ties that can be used to formally characterize different domains in reality. The focuses in this tutorial is on structural modeling aspects (as opposed to dynamic ones) and, hence, we will discuss in details ontological theories of objects, their properties and relations, their parts, the roles they play, the types they instantiate, and the multiple classification structures that can be formed with these types. The foundational ontology which is adopted here has been developed by adapting and extending a number of theories coming, primarily, from formal ontology in philosophy, but also from cognitive science, philosophical logics and linguistics. Once developed, every sub-theory of the ontology is used for the creation of methodological tools (e.g., modeling profiles, guidelines and design patterns). The expressiveness and relevance of these tools are shown throughout the presentation to solve some classical and recurrent conceptual modeling problems that have been identified in industrial domains such as Petroleum and Gas, Bioinformatics, Telecommunications and News Information Management. Finally, the tutorial includes the presentation of a computational environment that automates the aforementioned methodological tools, thus, providing support for: (i) "ontological correctness by design" in conceptual modeling; (ii) model validation by simulation.

Tutor

1. Marco Brambilla, Politecnico di Milano, Italy []
2. Alessandro Bozzon, Politecnico di Milano, Italy []

With the advent of the Web, search has become the prominent paradigm for information seeking. However, no precise engineering methods and approaches have been devised for this class of applications.

This tutorial presents the peculiarities of modern search applications, by defining the requirements that must be fulfilled, the theoretical and technological constraints to be considered, and the available existing solutions (i.e., software frameworks) that can be exploited.

The tutorial describes a methodological approach to search application development that leads the development from the requirement collection to the implementation. When possible, the approach is presented at a high level of abstraction, based on the paradigm of Model Driven Development (MDD), where conceptual models are the core artifacts of the application life-cycle. Special emphasis will be devoted to the intrinsic data-intensive and process-intensive nature of the search systems. The discussion will be put in the context of current trends towards exploratory search and search-as-a-process.

Tutor

1. Graham McLeod, Chief Architect/Chairman, Promis Ltd Founder, Inspired []

Businesses need to innovate products, services and customer experience faster than ever. Concurrently, they must exhibit good governance, reduce risk and leverage existing assets. Changes including the Internet, mobile devices, telepresence, social media and semantic technologies create new opportunities and render old business and marketing models obsolete with breathtaking speed.

Business Architecture, properly scoped and conceived, provides a way to understand the current and future context, business and relationship to ICT (applications, communications, information and technology). Drawing upon twenty years of experience and thought leadership, this tutorial exposes delegates to a comprehensive meta model and a host of techniques for comprehensive and competent business architecture. Note: the scope goes well beyond that traditionally covered and includes elements such as products, business events, value networks, communication architecture, channels, culture etc.

For more information visit the Tutorial Overview page: