We are happy to announce the following three half-day (3h) tutorials at ICWE which will take place on 1 of July 2014:

 


Web of Things: Concepts, technologies and applications for connecting physical objects to the Web

Download the slides here!

Inter-communicating devices and integrated Web-based services will open exciting opportunities. The idea of a world where everything is connected is becoming a reality, as hardware and software evolves to provide the necessary infrastructure to connect any physical device and objects to the Web. The goal of this tutorial is to present an overview on the advances in the Web of Things initiative. It will cover the key ideas behind the concept, how it works, infrastructure, as well as present the attendees with ideas and frameworks on how to build applications on top of it. We’ll review a number of embedded devices and their integration to the Web, reviewing the Web of Things best practices on the way. We’ll then dig into Web of Things platforms both on the commercial side, where we will present the EVRYTHNG platform and on the research side, where latest advances in object inte-gration carried out in the COMPOSE platform will be presented. Based on these two platforms, use cases and applications will be showcased to demonstrate how to inte-grate objects, devices and applications following the Web of Things concepts.

The tutorial will have a practical approach and is open to both academia and industry attendees with interest in technologies and applications to interconnect physical objects to the Web. Knowledge of the architecture of the Web (e.g SOA, REST) and basic understanding of Web technologies (e.g. URIs, HTML, Javascript) are encouraged but not necessary to attend this tutorial.

Short bio of the presenters:
Dominique Guinard, the chief technical officer at EVRYTHNG, got his Ph.D. from ETH Zurich, where he worked on laying down the foundations of the Web of Things™: a world-wide network of interconnected objects (sensors, appliances, machines and tagged objects) and co-founded the WebofThings.org. Before this, he worked on bringing industrial networks of RFID-tagged objects to the Web at the MIT Auto-ID Labs in USA. He also worked 4 years for SAP on the software aspects of the next generation platform for integrating real-world services with business systems. Dominique was a researcher at the Auto-ID Labs Zurich, working on mobile interactions with the Internet of Things (IoT) for Nokia. Before this, he worked on scalable IoT enterprise software architectures for Sun Microsystems. He holds an MSc in Computer Science and a BSc in Computer Science and Management from the Universities of Fribourg and Bern with a specialization in mobile and ubiquitous computing at Lancaster University, UK. In 2011, Dominique was listed 5th amongst the top 100 IoT thinkers by Postscapes. Early in 2012, his Ph.D. research was granted the ETH Medal.

Iker Larizgoitia, Research Developer at EVRYTHNG, holds a BSc. in Computer Engineering and later he obtained a MSc. in Mathematical Modelling, Statistics and Computation by the University of the Basque Country. He has an extensive experience in European research projects, during his time working as a Researcher at the University of Deusto (2004-2010) and at the Semantic Technology Institute Innsbruck (STI) where he participated in several European research projects focusing his research on Ambient Intelligence, Internet of Things and Service Oriented architectures.


 


IFML: Building the front end of Web and Mobile applications with OMG’s Interaction Flow Modeling Language

View the slides here!

This tutorial focuses on the Domain-specific Language (DSL) called IFML, which has been adopted as a standard by OMG in March 2013. The Interaction Flow Modeling Language (IFML) is designed for expressing content, user interaction and control behaviour of the front-end of software applications, as well as the binding to the persistence and business logic layers. IFML is the missing piece for modeling the front end of software applications and perfectly complements other modeling dimensions in broad system modeling projects. Therefore, IFML works best when integrated with other modeling languages in the MDA suite, such as UML and BPMN. This tutorial illustrates the basic concepts of IFML, presents the design best practices and integration with other modelling languages, and discusses some industrial experiences (also featuring quantitative measures of productivity) achieved by the companion tool WebRatio. At the end of the tutorial, attendees will get a general knowledge about IFML (they will be able to design simple models and to derive models from existing interfaces), will be able to associate front-end design with system modelling at large, will see the associated MDE tool WebRatio at work, and will get a glimpse of real-life industrial applications developed for large enterprises. This will let them appreciate the advantages of a model-driven development approach at work within large-scale industrial project.

The tutorial will be aimed at both industrial and academic attendees, including Ph.D. students. Prerequisite for attending the tutorial is a general knowledge about the bases of model-driven development, software engineering, and some general purpose modelling languages like UML.

Short bio of the presenter:
Marco Brambilla is assistant professor at Politecnico di Milano since February 2004. He graduated cum laude in 2001 and got his Ph.D. in Information Engineering in 2004. He collaborated as application analyst in several industrial projects; among others, he worked with Acer Europe, Cisco System (San José, CA, USA), and WebRatio. He has been visiting researcher at UCSD (University of California, San Diego, prof. Papakonstantinou and Vianu), working on verification of workflow-based Web applications through lineartime temporal logics. He participated in several European and national research projects: Pharos 7FP EU Project, Cooper EU Project, ESA MyHMI Project (technical director), WebSI EU Project, MetalC Project, W3I3 EU Project, and others. He serves in the PC of several international conferences, workshops, and journals. He has been PC chair of ICWE 2012 in Berlin. His research interests include theoretical, experimental, and methodological aspects related to Web modeling methodologies, Web design patterns, conceptual design of data-intensive Web applications, workflow-based Web applications, service-oriented applications, Semantic Web application modeling, MDE/MDD, Web architectures for embedded and HMI systems interfaced with home automation and industrial automation, and simplified interfaces for disabled people. He is shareholder and scientific advisor of WebRatio. He is also involved in 2 other startups related to Web and social networking technologies. He is the leader of the standardization initiative of IFML within OMG. He is coauthor of the books: “Designing Data-Intensive Web Applications” (MK, 2002), “Model-driven Software Engineering in Practices” (M&C, 2012), “Web Information Retrieval” (Springer 2013), and of the upcoming book on IFML, which will be published by Morgan-Kaufmann and the OMG Press in Q3 2014.


 


Mashups: A Journey from Concepts and Models to the Quality of Applications

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Mashing up data and functionalities sourced from the Web has inexorably percolated into Web Engineering as a commonly accepted development practice. Today, it is unimaginable to develop modern Web applications without some form of reuse and integration of value-adding, third-party content or services, a task that is greatly facilitated by technologies like Web services, Open Data, XML, JSON, the RESTful architectural style, and many more. But which are the conceptual underpinnings of this practice? What are mashups? What does it mean to “mashup up” resources that can be accessed via the Web? Which are the paradigms adopted for the composition of mashups? What kinds of tools exist that aid this activity? And, eventually, what does it mean to develop “good” mashups? This tutorial aims to clarify these aspects and to provide insight into the constantly evolving mashup ecosystem. It discusses core definitions, overviews a representative set of mashup components (the resources to be integrated) and mashup models (how resources are integrated), illustrates composition paradigms supported by state-of-the-art mashup tools, and studies the quality of the resulting mashups from a user perspective. The goal of the tutorial is to introduce the audience to the topic and to show is applicability, benefits and limitations.

This tutorial is open to researchers, practitioners, advanced students who want to learn more about mashup development from a perspective which especially privileges modeling abstractions, not only development practices.

Short bio of presenters:
Cinzia Cappiello is assistant professor at the Politecnico di Milano, where she teaches Information Systems courses. Her research interests regard Data and Information quality aspects in service based and Web applications, Web services, and sensor data management. She received a PhD in Computer Science Engineering from Politecnico di Milano in 2005. She regularly serves in the PC of several international conferences and workshops related to the information quality fields. Homepage: http://dei.elet.polimi.it/cappiell

Florian Daniel is a senior research fellow at the University of Trento, Italy. He has been visiting researcher at UNSW, Sydney, Australia, and HP Labs, Palo Alto, USA, and post-doc researcher at Politecnico di Milano, Italy. Florian has been working on mashups and lightweight integration on the Web for more than seven years in the context of own research, EU-FP7 projects, and industryfunded projects in Europe, the United States, and China. He is co-author of the books Mashups: Concepts, Models and Architectures (Springer, 2014) and Engineering Web Applications (Springer, 2009). His research interests also include conceptual modeling of Web applications, business process management and service-oriented computing. Florian has served as PC Chair of the international conferences BPM, ICWE and MobiWIS. Homepage: http://www.floriandaniel.it

Maristella Matera is Associate Professor at the Politecnico di Milano, Italy. Her research focuses on Web Engineering, with particular emphasis on model- based methods and tools for Web application development. She dedicated the last years to investigating mashup languages and tools, with particular focus on the definition of composition paradigms for the end-user development. She worked on these (and other) research topics in the context of several national and international research projects. She published the achieved results in more than one hundred papers, and in the books Mashups: Concepts, Models and Architectures (Springer, 2014), Engineering Web Applications (Springer, 2009) and Designing Data-Intensive Web Applications (Morgan Kaufmann publisher, 2002). Homepage: http://home.deib.polimi.it/matera