Kraft [1] defines the User Experience - UX - as the set of sensations that the end user feels using a product. These sensations dominate so much the UX curve, to generate spikes or dips depending on how positive or negative such feelings are. The UX, therefore, represents a likelihood index of the user willing to continue to use a product. Ansuini [2] defines a legacy application - LA - as an information system of value inherited from the past. Nowadays, most of the companies make use of LAs, which on one side are characterized by high reliability and specialization, but on the other have an equally high degree of obsolescence, also with regard to the user interface. This paper introduces a framework for the UX reengineering of a LA, using the methodology Interactive Dialogue Model MM. The framework enables the definition and the implementation of the UX reengineering operations through a specific process, characterized by a series of steps. The reengineering process can take place in an almost fully automatic way, even if, in some phases, is still guaranteed the possibility to the designer to intervene on the intermediate diagrams. Given the reiteration of the reengineering process, it is necessary to historicize the changes made by the designer, and automatically applies them, when necessary, without any manual intervention. At this purpose, the implemented editor generates some extra runtime ATL - ATLAS Transformation Language - rules, in order to keep track of the customizations made on the model by the designer.

The reference context in which companies operate is often characterized by a high level of complexity. Any attempt aimed to represent such complexity can be facilitated by referring to appropriate semantic knowledge bases, able to structure the domain concepts along with the relationships between them. Such consideration can be particularly applied to the Model-Driven designing phases of a software system, and especially within the User eXperience – UX – modelling process. In effect, the UX modelling is becoming more and more dominant, even with the advent of Rich Internet Applications - RIAs. They represent particular web applications that are capable to provide features and functionalities of traditional desktop applications. This paper introduces a Knowledge-Driven framework for the UX engineering process based on the interaction with a domain knowledge base, along with a prototype generator. Such framework is obtained by extending and by adapting an existing one, the IDM Editor, which performs the UX reengineering of a legacy application, using the methodology Interactive Dialogue Model - IDM.

Abstract In the plethora of workflow management systems, both open source and commercial, a detailed analysis of a set of this is very important. In this article we propose a survey of 5 open source workflow management systems based on the analysis of different key aspects. We propose a set of 8 key aspects useful to evaluate the analyzed workflow management systems. These aspects cover the most important aspects of a workflow management systems from the design to the implementation and monitoring of the business process. Keywords: Business process, Open source, Workflow Management System.

The growth of Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) calls for new conceptual tools that enable designers and web engineers to model and keep under control the design complexity unleashed by innovative interaction (with increasing communication potential) and carefully consider the impact of the design decisions on the optimal flow of the user experience. Based on the theory of Situational Awareness, in this paper we illustrate how 5 major interface demons are particularly relevant for RIA engineering and undermine an effective dialogue between users and RIA interfaces. From this analysis, we propose a set of conceptual design primitives (Rich-IDM) to enable designers and web engineers to characterize the complex components of RIA models and take design decisions which meet both usability and communication requirements.

Purpose – Rich Internet Application (RIA) technologies offer designers the opportunity to experiment with novel interaction grammars, whose implications for conceptual modeling still need to be fully understood. An open problem is the ability to characterize the fluid, smooth and organic nature of the user interaction and navigation in ways that allow web engineers to share through a common vocabulary, as well as sketch, explore and specify design decisions in the light of usability requirements and stakeholder’s goals. The purpose of this paper is to address this problem. Design/methodology/approach – To meet this challenge, the authors extend IDM (Interactive Dialogue Model), a dialogue-based approach focusing on the conceptual dialogue flow with the user, codifying a set of key modeling constructs in order to describe the new dialogue features of RIAs. Findings – The approach, called Rich-IDM demonstrated some relevant features: expressiveness to capture interactive features at a high level of abstraction, semi-formality to facilitate the establishment of a common ground between designers and web engineers, and traceability of the design to important usability requirements. Research limitations/implications – The paper proposes a simple way to fill the gap between hypermedia design and user experience design for RIAs, which is an open issue, both from the web engineering point of view and the human-computer interaction point of view. Practical implications – The authors have described how Rich-IDM can help designers to capture and cope with some RIA interface flaws. In this case, the benefits of the approach are directly related to the semantics of its primitives. Originality/value – The authors’ proposal is the first, consolidated step of a promising research avenue.

The communication between specialists who use different terminologies based on their expertise is a notable problem in all sectors. When legal professional and business process analyst have to exchange know-how, it is very difficult to find a common vocabulary because the cultural background of the actors is completely different. Moreover, some experts take for granted basic concepts that are not known by other experts or are known with a different semantic meaning, thus creating significant information gaps that affect all analysis tasks. The problem described above is presented in the HSEPGEST project. The project aims to create a coherent information system able to harmonize the many European, national, and local laws and regulations on health, safety, and the environmental protection. The resulting information system implements the concepts present in these laws and regulations and could be easily adapted to the frequent changes of the concepts. This paper proposes some helpful guidelines that will be used by legal professionals. The guidelines can be used as a tool to schematically describe existing laws and regulations in order to make them simpler to understand for business process analysts who will take care of the design of the information system. The guidelines seek, in short, to bridge the skill gap between legal professionals and business process analysts

Nowadays many small and medium companies are interested in entering into foreign markets to establish a brand presence, sell their products and beat the competitors. Before making such a marketing decision, marketing experts can be guided by the traditional analysis of reports but also by the Web, through the analysis of social networks, blogs, forums, etc. These sources can provide real-time information about the perception that users have of specific brands and products. As a result, there are several tools that can extract interesting information from these unstructured data. In this paper, we propose an innovative knowledge extraction architecture realized through the integration of some existing tools. The aim is to retrieve the more frequent concepts from unstructured sources, suggest other links of articles and images, with multi-language feature so that the research is language independent. The architecture provides a knowledge base of a specific domain, which is used to suggest concepts related to the research, and to filter the results obtained from the elaboration of the unstructured sources. We present a case of study related to marketing in agri-food sector, in order to illustrate how the software works, the results obtained, their interpretation and the managerial implications.

L’obiettivo del lavoro consiste nel valutare, in chiave di strategie di marketing, le potenzialità derivanti dall’estrapolazione di informazioni dalle fonti web non strutturate. A tal fine, è stato appositamente progettato e realizzato un software di marketing intelligence finalizzato ad agevolare l’operatività sui mercati internazionali delle piccole e medie imprese agroalimentari. Alla descrizione dell’architettura e della funzionalità del software segue la presentazione dei risultati ottenuti da una sua sperimentazione sul mercato dell’oliod’oliva australiano.

Model-driven engineering is a promising approach for the modernization of legacy applications, but there are still many issues to address, especially to obtain automatic refactoring of the User Experience (UX) of existing applications applying modern interaction paradigms as Rich Internet Applica-tion (RIA). The MIGROS tool tries to solve the hurdles for the model-driven modernization of the UX of legacy application (as implemented in Cobol CICS, Visual Basic, Power Builder, etc.). It is designed upon a set of well-known methods in the web engineering field. It is implemented as a set of Eclipse plug-ins that support reverse engineering and model transformation exploiting the OMG Architecture-Driven Modernization (ADM) technology.

Web applications (mashups, mobile apps, context-rich web services) offer designers the opportunity to experiment with novel interaction grammars, whose implications for conceptual modeling still need to be fully understood. An open problem is the ability to model the usability keeping under control the design complexity unleashed by innovative interface and carefully considering the impact of the design decisions on the optimal flow of the user experience. To meet this challenge, we propose a set of key modeling constructs in order to describe the new dialogue features of Rich Internet Applications (RIAs), and we provide designers with a collection of conceptual model metrics to evaluate alternatives at early stages of the web app lifecycle. We demonstrate through a case study our novel ideas about model metrics and preliminary research results.

This paper discusses an evolution of exploratory portal for an ad- vanced and easy construction of an exploratory portal, through a simplification of the data loading process by a modeling of complex taxonomies. The main re- quirement for achieving this goal has been to make the schema-driven portal through a modeling of taxonomy, the data and the portal layout on Excel. A framework is proposed in which we implement an application that can build the exploratory portal from this Excel model. We have validated the portal popula- tion process, first “in vitro”, then “in vivo”.

Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) can be used as a way to modernize Legacy Applications (LAs), in particular to provide users with an innovative, state-of-the-art interactive experience. RIAs have the same richness in term of interaction grammar as Client-Server Applications (CSAs) and Desktop Applications (DAs), giving designers the opportunity to exploit the Web infrastructure also in domains where the communication between the user and the application is more complex of a sequence of page requests. In the transition from LAs to RIAs, however, several challenges need to be faced, including fundamental issues affecting user requirements and usability. In this paper we present the preliminary results of a large-scale industrial project, which focused on migrating a complex LA (VB6 + Cobol) to a RIA (JSF + SOA). In this context, we introduce a novel method (Rich-IDM) to transform the design of the User Experience (UX) and the strategy for interactive communication from LAs to RIAs in a graceful and disciplined manner, thus preventing the many flaws that typically are manifested in similar projects. We also show how Rich-IDM originally extends and well integrates into other well-known conceptual tools - the Conallen's UX model and the RUX model - within the OMG's ADM framework.

Rich Internet Applications (RIA) technologies offer designers the opportunity to experiment with novel interaction grammars, whose implications for conceptual modeling still need to be fully understood. An open problem is the ability to characterize the fluid, smooth and organic nature of the user interaction and navigation in ways that allow web engineers to share through a common vocabulary, as well as sketch, to explore and specify design decisions at the light of usability requirements and stakeholder’s goals. To meet this challenge, we codify a set of key modeling constructs in order to describe the new dialogue features of RIA. We demonstrate through a case study the promising advantages of our approach: expressiveness to capture interactive features at a high level of abstraction, semi-formality to facilitate the establishment of a common ground between designers and web engineers, and traceability of the design to important usability requirements.

In the previous years Information System manage only information inside the company, today a company may search and manage information of the other companies. In this scenario the problem of communication between Information Systems is of the highest importance. Up to the present moment, several types of integration have been used but all were founded on the agreement (about data to share and the exchange format) between the interested Information Systems. Today, thanks to the new technologies, it is possible that an Information System uses data of another Information System without a previous agreement. The problem is that, often, the Information System may refer to the same data but with different names. In this paper we present a methodology that, using ontology, and thus the intrinsic semantic of each data of the Information System, allow to create a global ontology useful to enable a semantic communication between Information Systems.

The growth of Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) calls for new conceptual tools that enable web engineers to model the design complexity unleashed by innovative interaction (with increasing communication potential) and to carefully consider the impact of the design decisions on the optimal flow of the User Experience (UX). In this paper we illustrate how is particularly relevant for RIA engineering not only to capture existing RIA technologies with suitable design artifacts but also to model an effective dialogue between users and RIA interfaces. Through a case study, we propose a set of conceptual design primitives (Rich-IDM) to enable web engineers to characterize the fluid, smooth and organic nature of the user interaction, and to take design decisions which meet both usability and communication requirements.

With the advent of Internet and Social networks, the process of knowledge extraction and search has became of great importance, especially for companies that are interested in collecting customer feedback, establishing a brand presence, observing the way their brands are discussed and perceived. Several tools for the extraction of semantically related concepts from unstructured sources are available on the web. These sources such as forums, blogs, etc. can provide real-time information about how users perceive certain brands and can guide companies in making market decisions. In this paper, we propose an innovative knowledge extraction architecture realized through the integration of some existing java based tools that aims to retrieve more frequent concepts from unstructured sources, suggest other links of articles and images, and detect the language used in the sources. The architecture provides a knowledge base of a specific domain, which is used to suggest other concepts related to the research and to filter the results obtained from the elaboration of the unstructured sources. This software, integrated with traditional marketing channels (analysis of reports) makes possible the extraction of useful information for companies. In order to show, interpret and benefit from the software output we present a case of study related to marketing in agri-food sector.

Nowadays there are an increasing evolution of technological solutions providing the virtual collaboration among people geographically distributed to obtain some common goals. At the same time virtual collaborative environments are often used for learning purposes because increase the interaction among users. These systems are usually developed in a custom way according to the speci¯c requirements without any kind of standardization in terms of de¯nition of collaboration among involved users. Although the literature shows attempts to formally express learning processes through a standard language, there are not proposals that combine e-learning languages with typical concepts of 3D collaborative experiences. This paper propose a notation model able to design collaboration for e-learning virtual environments. In this paper we present also the architecture of a tool that helps the designer in the use of the notation model here proposed.

The web revolution makes outdated preexisting Information Systems (legacy systems). Companies need to update their Information Systems without lose neither investments on design and implementation made in the past nor the know-how acquired during years. The modern trend is to activate a reengineering process for the legacy systems. It is important that the reengineering process consider both technological aspect and definition of the Human Computer Interaction as important quality factors for the Information System transformation into a web Information System. The process requires a methodological approach oriented to the application of a specific methodology for each reengineering phase. In this paper, we present a reengineering path that involves both technological and methodological aspects. The idea was born during the MIGR.O.S (MIGRation Open Source) project that aims to transform legacy systems into modern web Information Systems.