ALBERT

Description: The constantly growing amount ofWeb content and the success of the SocialWeb lead to increasing needs for Web archiving. These needs go beyond the pure preservationo of Web pages. Web archives are turning into “community memories” that aim at building a better understanding of the public view on, e.g., celebrities, court decisions and other events. Due to the size of the Web, the traditional “collect-all” strategy is in many cases not the best method to build Web archives. In this paper, we present the ARCOMEM (From Future Internet 2014, 6 689 Collect-All Archives to Community Memories) architecture and implementation that uses semantic information, such as entities, topics and events, complemented with information from the Social Web to guide a novel Web crawler. The resulting archives are automatically enriched with semantic meta-information to ease the access and allow retrieval based on conditions that involve high-level concepts..

Description: The next generation of the Internet Protocol (IPv6) is currently about to be introduced in many organizations. However, its security features are still a very novel area of expertise for many practitioners. This study evaluates guidelines for secure deployment of IPv6, published by the U.S. NIST and the German federal agency BSI, for topicality, completeness and depth. The later two are scores defined in this paper and are based on the Requests for Comments relevant for IPv6 that were categorized, weighted and ranked for importance using an expert survey. Both guides turn out to be of practical value, but have a specific focus and are directed towards different audiences. Moreover, recommendations for possible improvements are presented. Our results could also support strategic management decisions on security priorities as well as for the choice of security guidelines for IPv6 roll-outs.

Description: In this paper, we investigate our mobility-assisted and adaptive broadcast routing mechanism, called Mobility Tolerant Firework Routing (MTFR), which utilizes the concept of potentials for routing and improves node reachability, especially in situations with high mobility, by including a broadcast mechanism. We perform detailed evaluations by simulations in a mobile environment and demonstrate the advantages of MTFR over conventional potential-based routing. In particular, we show that MTFR produces better reachability in many aspects at the expense of a small additional transmission delay and intermediate traffic overhead, making MTFR a promising routing protocol and feasible for future mobile Internet infrastructures.

Description: A number of recent incidents, such as the Stanley Cup Riots, the uprisings in the Middle East and the London riots have demonstrated the value of crowd sourced audio-visual evidence wherein citizens submit audio-visual footage captured on mobile phones and other devices to aid governmental institutions, responder agencies and law enforcement authorities to confirm the authenticity of incidents and, in the case of criminal activity, to identify perpetrators. The use of such evidence can present a significant logistical challenge to investigators, particularly because of the potential size of data gathered through such mechanisms and the added problems of time-lining disparate sources of evidence and, subsequently, investigating the incident(s). In this paper we explore this problem and, in particular, outline the pressure points for an investigator. We identify and explore a number of particular problems related to the secure receipt of the evidence, imaging, tagging and then time-lining the evidence, and the problem of identifying duplicate and near duplicate items of audio-visual evidence.

Description: Digesting the data hose that cities are constantly producing is complex; data is usually structured with different criteria, which makes comparative analysis of multiple cities challenging. However, the publicly available data from the Spanish cadaster contains urban information in a documented format with common semantics for the whole territory, which makes these analyses possible. This paper uses the information about the 3D geometry of buildings, their use and their year of construction, stored in cadastral databases, to study the relation between the built environment (what the city is) and the urban plan (what the city wants to become), translating the concepts of the cadastral data into the semantics of the urban plan. Different representation techniques to better understand the city from the pedestrians’ point of view and to communicate this information more effectively are also discussed.

Description: As an emerging complex concept, GeoDesign requires an innovative theoretical basis, tools, supports and practices. For this reason, we propose a new concept, “WikiGIS”, designed to answer some dimensions of the GeoDesign process. WikiGIS focuses on the needs of GeoDesign, but we leave the door open for future improvement when tested in other areas that may have additional needs. WikiGIS is built on Web 2.0 technologies—and primarily on wiki—to manage the tracking of participants’ editing (i.e., managing the contributions history). It also offers GIS functions for geoprocessing and a design-based approach for sketching proposals. One of the main strengths of WikiGIS is its ability to manage the traceability of contributions with an easy and dynamical access, data quality and deltification. The core of this paper consists of presenting a conceptual framework for WikiGIS using UML diagrams. A user interface is presented later to show how our WikiGIS proposal works. This interface is simply a means to illustrate the concepts underlying WikiGIS.

Description: Empirical studies clearly show that women in the developing world have significantly lower technology participation rates than men; a result of entrenched socio-cultural attitudes about the role of women in society. However, as studies are beginning to show, when those women are able to engage with Internet technology, a wide range of personal, family and community benefits become possible. The key to these benefits is on-line education, the access to which sets up a positive feedback loop. This review gives an overview of the digital divide, before focusing specifically on the challenges women in developing countries face in accessing the Internet. Current gender disparities in Internet use will be outlined and the barriers that potentially hinder women’s access and participation in the online world will be considered. We will then look at the potential opportunities for women’s participation in a global digital society along with a consideration of current initiatives that have been developed to mitigate gender inequity in developing countries. We will also consider a promising avenue for future research.

Description: Societies have rapidly morphed into complex entities that are creating accessibility, yet, at the same time, they are developing new forms of neogeographic-poverty related to information uptake. Those that have managed to partake in the opportunities provided by the web have new vistas to survive in, in contrast to the new poor who have limited or no access to information. New forms of data in spatial format are accessible to all, however few realize the implications of such a transitional change in wellbeing: Whether entire societies or individuals. The different generations taking up the information access can face different levels of accessibility that may be limited by access to online data, knowledge of usage of tools and the understanding of the results, all within the limits on the spaces they are familiar with. This paper reviews a conceptual process underlining the initial steps of a long-term project in the Maltese Islands that seeks to create an online series of tools that bring the concept of “physical place” to the different generations through the management of a major project, the creation of a 3D virtuality, employing scanning processes, GIS, conversion aspects, and a small block-based Minecraft engine.

Description: Geo-Wiki is a crowdsourcing tool used to derive information, based on satellite imagery, to validate and enhance global land cover. Around 5000 users are registered, who contribute to different campaigns to collect data across various domains (e.g., agriculture, biomass, human impact, etc.). However, seeing the Earth’s surface from above does not provide all of the necessary information for understanding what is happening on the ground. Instead, we need to enhance this experience with local knowledge or with additional information, such as geo-located photographs of surface features with annotation. The latest development in enhancing Geo-Wiki in this context has been achieved through collaboration with the University of Waterloo to set up a separate branch called Geography Geo-Wiki for use in undergraduate teaching. We provide the pedagogical objectives for this branch and describe two modules that we have introduced in first and third year Physical Geography classes. The majority of the feedback was positive and in, many cases, was part of what the student liked best about the course. Future plans include the development of additional assignments for the study of environmental processes using Geo-Wiki that would engage students in a manner that is very different from that of conventional teaching.

Description: By the Aarhus Convention (1998) it is recognized the right of citizens to get access to and influence decision-making in respect to issues affecting the state of the environment. More specifically, in Article 8 it is stated that public authorities are forced to engage public participation when preparing regulations or legally binding rules that have a significant environmental impact. Towards this end, Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) and their applications have considerably expanded the potential of planners and decision makers to interact with stakeholders and the public and engage them in participatory processes through ICTs-enabled platforms. The focus of the present paper is on the context of public consultation in taking legislative action as to the spatial development of the tourist sector in Greece. It consists of three parts: the first part, where the context of engaging the public in governmental decision-making in Greece is discussed, following the Open Government Partnership (OGP) initiative; the second part, presenting the steps of the “OpenGov” online platform, designed for gathering public knowledge to further improve legislative efforts and policy; and the third part, elaborating on the experience gained by the use of the “OpenGov” platform for decision-making on the spatial development of the tourist sector in Greece.

Description: Despite the number of tools created to help end-users reduce risky security behaviours, users are still falling victim to online attacks. This paper proposes a browser extension utilising affective feedback to provide warnings on detection of risky behaviour. The paper provides an overview of behaviour considered to be risky, explaining potential threats users may face online. Existing tools developed to reduce risky security behaviours in end-users have been compared, discussing the success rates of various methodologies. Ongoing research is described which attempts to educate users regarding the risks and consequences of poor security behaviour by providing the appropriate feedback on the automatic recognition of risky behaviour. The paper concludes that a solution utilising a browser extension is a suitable method of monitoring potentially risky security behaviour. Ultimately, future work seeks to implement an affective feedback mechanism within the browser extension with the aim of improving security awareness.

Description: Based on existing literature, this article makes a case for open (government) data as supporting political efficiency, socio-economic innovation and administrative efficiency, but also finds a lack of measurable impact. It attributes the lack of impact to shortcomings regarding data access (must be efficient) and data usefulness (must be effective). To address these shortcomings, seven key activities that add value to data are identified and are combined into the 7R Data Value Framework, which is an applied methodology for linked data to systematically address both technical and social shortcomings. The 7R Data Value Framework is then applied to the international Fusepool project that develops a set of integrated software components to ease the publishing of open data based on linked data and associated best practices. Real-life applications for the Dutch Parliament and the Libraries of Free University of Berlin are presented, followed by a concluding discussion.

Description: In this paper we posit that current investigative techniques—particularly as deployed by law enforcement, are becoming unsuitable for most types of crime investigation. The growth in cybercrime and the complexities of the types of the cybercrime coupled with the limitations in time and resources, both computational and human, in addressing cybercrime put an increasing strain on the ability of digital investigators to apply the processes of digital forensics and digital investigations to obtain timely results. In order to combat the problems, there is a need to enhance the use of the resources available and move beyond the capabilities and constraints of the forensic tools that are in current use. We argue that more intelligent techniques are necessary and should be used proactively. The paper makes the case for the need for such tools and techniques, and investigates and discusses the opportunities afforded by applying principles and procedures of artificial intelligence to digital forensics intelligence and to intelligent forensics and suggests that by applying new techniques to digital investigations there is the opportunity to address the challenges of the larger and more complex domains in which cybercrimes are taking place.

Description: Given the existing divide related to Internet skills and types of Internet use, it is safe to assume that a large proportion of the population uses the Internet for health purposes in a partially productive fashion. We suggest that in addition to user characteristics, another factor that inhibits productive Internet use, and thus contributes to the existing gap, is related to the ways in which the technology is configured. The goal of this study was to explore the processes that webmasters and content managers use for constructing and producing, or selecting content, for health websites. Interviews conducted with 23 website builders and managers of websites that represent public and non-public health organizations revealed that they do not plan or conduct activities for content needs elicitation, either in the design stage or on an ongoing basis. Rather, these professionals rely on a “self-embodiment” standard, whereby their and their cohorts’ expectations determine the quality and functionality of the websites’ structure and content. Hence, target groups beyond their social sphere are disregarded, and instead of new opportunities, new cleavages are created. We recommended that government, public and non-public stakeholders work to establish construction standards, to ensure that health websites meet the needs of varied end-user populations.

Description: The public-oriented goals of the open government movement promise increased transparency and accountability of governments, enhanced citizen engagement and participation, improved service delivery, economic development and the stimulation of innovation. In part, these goals are to be achieved by making more and more government information public in reusable formats and under open licences. This paper identifies three broad privacy challenges raised by open government. The first is how to balance privacy with transparency and accountability in the context of “public” personal information. The second challenge flows from the disruption of traditional approaches to privacy based on a collapse of the distinctions between public and private sector actors. The third challenge is that of the potential for open government data—even if anonymized—to contribute to the big data environment in which citizens and their activities are increasingly monitored and profiled.

Description: The performance of traditional direction of arrival (DOA) estimation algorithm based on uniform circular array (UCA) is constrained by the array aperture. Furthermore, the array requires more antenna elements than targets, which will increase the size and weight of the device and cause higher energy loss. In order to solve these issues, a novel low energy algorithm utilizing array base-line rotation for multiple targets estimation is proposed. By rotating two elements and setting a fixed time delay, even the number of elements is selected to form a virtual UCA. Then, the received data of signals will be sampled at multiple positions, which improves the array elements utilization greatly. 2D-DOA estimation of the rotation array is accomplished via multiple signal classification (MUSIC) algorithms. Finally, the Cramer-Rao bound (CRB) is derived and simulation results verified the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm with high resolution and estimation accuracy performance. Besides, because of the significant reduction of array elements number, the array antennas system is much simpler and less complex than traditional array.

Description: Regarding mobility, health conditions and personal preferences, evacuees can be categorized into different classes in realistic environments. Previous emergency navigation algorithms that direct evacuees with a single decision rule cannot fulfil civilians’ distinct service requirements and increase the likelihood of inducing destructive crowd behaviours, such as clogging, pushing and trampling, due to diverse mobility. This paper explores a distributed emergency navigation algorithm that employs the cognitive packet network concept to tailor different quality of service needs to different categories of evacuees. In addition, a congestion-aware algorithm is presented to predict the future congestion degree of a path with respect to the observed population density, arrival rate and service rate of each route segment. Experiments are implemented in a simulated environment populated with autonomous agents. Results show that our algorithm can increase the number of survivors while providing improved quality of service.

Description: This paper discusses some key points related to the ontology of the “appropriate assessment” [1] procedure concerning plans significantly affecting Natura 2000 sites. We study this ontology by discussing its implementation into the adjustment process of the master plans of the regional municipalities of Sardinia (Italy) to the Regional Landscape Plan (RLP) and put as evidence some important general observations, coming from the case study, concerning the utility and effectiveness of the ontological conceptual framework in order to help planners and decision-makers understand and structure the assessment process of plans.

Description: The data contained on the web and the social web are inherently multimedia and consist of a mixture of textual, visual and audio modalities. Community memories embodied on the web and social web contain a rich mixture of data from these modalities. In many ways, the web is the greatest resource ever created by human-kind. However, due to the dynamic and distributed nature of the web, its content changes, appears and disappears on a daily basis. Web archiving provides a way of capturing snapshots of (parts of) the web for preservation and future analysis. This paper provides an overview of techniques we have developed within the context of the EU funded ARCOMEM (ARchiving COmmunity MEMories) project to allow multimedia web content to be leveraged during the archival process and for post-archival analysis. Through a set of use cases, we explore several practical applications of multimedia analytics within the realm of web archiving, web archive analysis and multimedia data on the web in general.

Description: Since 2009, most Norwegian students in upper secondary have had access to their own personal computer at school. Hence, with the increased access to technology, the importance of online connectedness has increased for adolescents’ social interaction and communication. It is, therefore, important to identify and understand the concept of Internet safety among upper secondary school students. A total of 4216 students from 238 classrooms in 23 upper secondary schools completed an Internet safety assessment. The aim of the study was to operationalize and measure Internet safety in a school context, and to further examine the factors predicting students’ Internet safety awareness and responsibility. Our analysis revealed substantial variation in Internet safety awareness between schools, classrooms and students. Overall, the findings indicate that students’ social backgrounds are determining for their development and understanding of Internet safety awareness.

Description: Open data initiatives are characterized, in several countries, by a great extension of the number of data sets made available for access by public administrations, constituencies, businesses and other actors, such as journalists, international institutions and academics, to mention a few. However, most of the open data sets rely on selection criteria, based on a technology-driven perspective, rather than a focus on the potential public and social value of data to be published. Several experiences and reports confirm this issue, such as those of the Open Data Census. However, there are also relevant best practices. The goal of this paper is to investigate the different dimensions of a framework suitable to support public administrations, as well as constituencies, in assessing and benchmarking the social value of open data initiatives. The framework is tested on three initiatives, referring to three different countries, Italy, the United Kingdom and Tunisia. The countries have been selected to provide a focus on European and Mediterranean countries, considering also the difference in legal frameworks (civic law vs. common law countries).

Description: The World Wide Web is the largest information repository available today. However, this information is very volatile and Web archiving is essential to preserve it for the future. Existing approaches to Web archiving are based on simple definitions of the scope of Web pages to crawl and are limited to basic interactions with Web servers. The aim of the ARCOMEM project is to overcome these limitations and to provide flexible, adaptive and intelligent content acquisition, relying on social media to create topical Web archives. In this article, we focus on ARCOMEM’s crawling architecture. We introduce the overall architecture and we describe its modules, such as the online analysis module, which computes a priority for the Web pages to be crawled, and the Application-Aware Helper which takes into account the type of Web sites and applications to extract structure from crawled content. We also describe a large-scale distributed crawler that has been developed, as well as the modifications we have implemented to adapt Heritrix, an open source crawler, to the needs of the project. Our experimental results from real crawls show that ARCOMEM’s crawling architecture is effective in acquiring focused information about a topic and leveraging the information from social media.

Description: In this paper, we describe a set of reusable text processing components for extracting opinionated information from social media, rating it for interestingness, and for detecting opinion events. We have developed applications in GATE to extract named entities, terms and events and to detect opinions about them, which are then used as the starting point for opinion event detection. The opinions are then aggregated over larger sections of text, to give some overall sentiment about topics and documents, and also some degree of information about interestingness based on opinion diversity. We go beyond traditional opinion mining techniques in a number of ways: by focusing on specific opinion-target extraction related to key terms and events, by examining and dealing with a number of specific linguistic phenomena, by analysing and visualising opinion dynamics over time, and by aggregating the opinions in different ways for a more flexible view of the information contained in the documents.

Description: The international Human Rights regime acknowledges a certain number of rights. That number, albeit increasing since its inception, does not seem able to keep up with the pace of modern technology. Human rights today are not only exercised in the tangible world; they are also exercised on a daily basis in a world of ubiquitous computing–as such they can be easily breached with a mere click of a button. To make matters worse, these rights are controlled largely by multinational corporations that have little regard for their value. In this paper we will attempt to explore the difficulties the global human rights regime faces today, the challenge that is its enforcement, and whether it has come to a standstill in an age where connections grow faster than the rule of law.

Description: As governments develop open data strategies, such efforts reflect the advent of the Internet, the digitization of government, and the emergence of meta-data as a wider socio-economic and societal transformational. Within this context the purpose of this article is twofold. First, we seek to both situate and examine the evolution and effectiveness of open data strategies in the Canadian public sector, with a particular focus on municipal governments that have led this movement. Secondly, we delve more deeply into—if and how, open data can facilitate more open and innovative forms of governance enjoining an outward-oriented public sector (across all government levels) with an empowered and participative society. This latter vantage point includes four main and inter-related dimensions: (i) conceptualizing public value and public engagement; (ii) media relations—across traditional intermediaries and channels and new social media; (iii) political culture and the politics of privacy in an increasingly data-centric world; and (iv) federated architectures and the alignment of localized, sub-national, and national strategies and governance mechanisms. This article demonstrates how each of these dimensions includes important determinants of not only open data’s immediate impacts but also its catalytic ability to forge wider and collective innovation and more holistic governance renewal.

Description: Today, increasing number of industrial application cases rely on the Machine to Machine (M2M) services exposed from physical devices. Such M2M services enable interaction of physical world with the core processes of company information systems. However, there are grand challenges related to complexity and “vertical silos” limiting the M2M market scale and interoperability. It is here expected that horizontal approach for the system architecture is required for solving these challenges. Therefore, a set of architectural principles and key enablers for the horizontal architecture have been specified in this work. A selected set of key enablers called as autonomic M2M manager, M2M service capabilities, M2M messaging system, M2M gateways towards energy constrained M2M asset devices and creation of trust to enable end-to-end security for M2M applications have been developed. The developed key enablers have been evaluated separately in different scenarios dealing with smart metering, car sharing and electric bike experiments. The evaluation results shows that the provided architectural principles, and developed key enablers establish a solid ground for future research and seem to enable communication between objects and applications, which are not initially been designed to communicate together. The aim as the next step in this research is to create a combined experimental system to evaluate the system interoperability and performance in a more detailed manner.

Description: The recent emergence of e-government and online social media offers opportunities for governments to meet the demands and expectations of citizens, to provide value-added services and overcome barriers of reduced public budgets. Twitter is the most popular microblogging platform that can facilitate interaction and engagement. It is widely used by government agencies, public affairs practitioners, non-government organizations, members of Parliament and politicians. The paper aims to explore the use of Twitter by government agencies in Greece and record Twitter followers’ preferences regarding which accounts they follow. The paper records 27 Greek e-government Twitter accounts and their 107,107 followers. It uses a data mining technique, association rules and two multivariate statistical methods, multidimensional scaling and cluster analysis and proposes the use of a similarity measure, suitable for describing Twitter account proximity. In this way, the paper locates accounts that share followers. Groups of Twitter accounts are located, and their common orientation is described. The analysis not only describes Twitter account similarities and group formation, but to some extent, the followers’ preferences and habits of obtaining information through Twitter, as well.

Description: We explain the notion of software-defined networking (SDN), whose southbound interface may be implemented by the OpenFlow protocol. We describe the operation of OpenFlow and summarize the features of specification versions 1.0–1.4. We give an overview of existing SDN-based applications grouped by topic areas. Finally, we point out architectural design choices for SDN using OpenFlow and discuss their performance implications.

Description: The term “crowdsourcing” was initially introduced by Howe in his article “The Rise of Crowdsourcing” [1]. During the last few years, crowdsourcing has become popular among companies, institutions and universities, as a crowd-centered modern “tool” for problem solving. Crowdsourcing is mainly based on the idea of an open-call publication of a problem, requesting the response of the crowd for reaching the most appropriate solution. The focus of this paper is on the role of crowdsourcing in knowledge acquisition for planning applications. The first part provides an introduction to the origins of crowdsourcing in knowledge generation. The second part elaborates on the concept of crowdsourcing, while some indicative platforms supporting the development of crowdsourcing applications are also described. The third part focuses on the integration of crowdsourcing with certain web technologies and GIS (Geographic Information Systems), for spatial planning applications, while in the fourth part, a general framework of the rationale behind crowdsourcing applications is presented. Finally, the fifth part focuses on a range of case studies that adopted several crowdsourcing techniques.

Description: Technology innovations have pushed today’s healthcare sector to an unprecedented new level. Various portable and wearable medical and fitness devices are being sold in the consumer market to provide the self-empowerment of a healthier lifestyle to society. Many vendors provide additional cloud-based services for devices they manufacture, enabling the users to visualize, store and share the gathered information through the Internet. However, most of these services are integrated with the devices in a closed “silo” manner, where the devices can only be used with the provided services. To tackle this issue, an information integration platform (IIP) has been developed to support communications between devices and Internet-based services in an event-driven fashion by adopting service-oriented architecture (SOA) principles and a publish/subscribe messaging pattern. It follows the “Internet of Things” (IoT) idea of connecting everyday objects to various networks and to enable the dissemination of the gathered information to the global information space through the Internet. A patient-centric healthcare service environment is chosen as the target scenario for the deployment of the platform, as this is a domain where IoT can have a direct positive impact on quality of life enhancement. This paper describes the developed platform, with emphasis on dependability aspects, including availability, scalability and security.

Description: Tweet My Street is a cross-disciplinary project exploring the extent to which data derived from Twitter can reveal more about spatial and temporal behaviours and the meanings attached to these locally. This is done with a longer-term view to supporting the coproduction and delivery of local services, complaint mechanisms and horizontal community support networks. The project has involved the development of a web-based software application capable of retrieving, storing and visualising geo-located “tweets” (and associated digital content) from Twitter’s Firehose. This has been piloted in Newcastle upon Tyne (UK) and has proven a scalable tool that can aid the analysis of social media data geographically. Beyond explaining efforts to analyse pilot data via this software, this paper elucidates three methodological challenges encountered during early collaboration. These include issues relating to “proximity” with subjects, ethics and critical questions about scholars’ digital responsibilities during the neogeographic turn.

Description: A considerable amount of information, particularly in image form, is shared on the web through social networking sites. If any of this content is worthy of preservation, who decides what is to be preserved and based on what criteria. This paper explores the potential for public libraries to assume this role of community digital repositories through the creation of digital collections. Thirty public library users and thirty librarians were solicited from the Indianapolis metropolitan area to evaluate five images selected from Flickr in terms of their value to public library digital collections and their worthiness of long-term preservation. Using a seven-point Likert scale, participants assigned a value to each image in terms of its importance to self, family and society. Participants were then asked to explain the reasoning behind their valuations. Public library users and librarians had similar value estimations of the images in the study. This is perhaps the most significant finding of the study, given the importance of collaboration and forming partnerships for building and sustaining community collections and archives.

Description: The web and the social web play an increasingly important role as an information source for Members of Parliament and their assistants, journalists, political analysts and researchers. It provides important and crucial background information, like reactions to political events and comments made by the general public. The case study presented in this paper is driven by two European parliaments (the Greek and the Austrian parliament) and targets an effective exploration of political web archives. In this paper, we describe semantic technologies deployed to ease the exploration of the archived web and social web content and present evaluation results.

Description: The current digital revolution has ignited the evolution of communications grids and the development of new schemes for productive systems. Traditional technologic scenarios have been challenged, and Smart Cities have become the basis for urban competitiveness. The citizen is the one who has the power to set new scenarios, and that is why a definition of the way people interact with their cities is needed, as is commented in the first part of the article. At the same time, a lack of clarity has been detected in the way of describing what Smart Cities are, and the second part will try to set the basis for that. For all before, the information and communication technologies that manage and transform 21st century cities must be reviewed, analyzing their impact on new social behaviors that shape the spaces and means of communication, as is posed in the experimental section, setting the basis for an analysis matrix to score the different elements that affect a Smart City environment. So, as the better way to evaluate what a Smart City is, there is a need for a tool to score the different technologies on the basis of their usefulness and consequences, considering the impact of each application. For all of that, the final section describes the main objective of this article in practical scenarios, considering how the technologies are used by citizens, who must be the main concern of all urban development.

Description: User-generated content (UGC) platforms on the Internet have experienced a steep increase in data contributions in recent years. The ubiquitous usage of location-enabled devices, such as smartphones, allows contributors to share their geographic information on a number of selected online portals. The collected information is oftentimes referred to as volunteered geographic information (VGI). One of the most utilized, analyzed and cited VGI-platforms, with an increasing popularity over the past few years, is OpenStreetMap (OSM), whose main goal it is to create a freely available geographic database of the world. This paper presents a comprehensive overview of the latest developments in VGI research, focusing on its collaboratively collected geodata and corresponding contributor patterns. Additionally, trends in the realm of OSM research are discussed, highlighting which aspects need to be investigated more closely in the near future.

Description: The editors of Future Internet would like to express their sincere gratitude to the following reviewers for assessing manuscripts in 2013.

Description: The deterministic and restricted nature of industrial control system networks sets them apart from more open networks, such as local area networks in office environments. This improves the usability of network security, monitoring approaches that would be less feasible in more open environments. One of such approaches is machine learning based anomaly detection. Without proper customization for the special requirements of the industrial control system network environment, many existing anomaly or misuse detection systems will perform sub-optimally. A machine learning based approach could reduce the amount of manual customization required for different industrial control system networks. In this paper we analyze a possible set of features to be used in a machine learning based anomaly detection system in the real world industrial control system network environment under investigation. The network under investigation is represented by architectural drawing and results derived from network trace analysis. The network trace is captured from a live running industrial process control network and includes both control data and the data flowing between the control network and the office network. We limit the investigation to the IP traffic in the traces.

Description: Due to widespread adoption of mobile communications devices and increasingly high throughput capacity of cellular networks, Third-Generation (3G) and Long Term Evolution (LTE) are becoming ever more popular. Millions of smart phones with 3G capabilities are sold every year and used for mostly browsing the Internet. Hence, mobile operators have been heavily investing in their packet switched networks to meet customer demand and stay ahead in the market. The widespread use of broadband mobile Internet bring along also some IP based threats such as the Denial of Service (DoS) attacks, botnets and malwares. In this paper, we performed DoS and flooding attacks on 3G mobile networks and measured their effect on the most critical elements of a network such as the Radio Network Controller (RNC) and the Serving GPRS Support Node (SGSN) devices. We carried out our experiments on a real mobile network, not just a simulation environment, and hence our findings depict a realistic picture of the vulnerabilities existent in 3G mobile networks. We propose alternative solutions to avoid these vulnerabilities and mitigate the issues raised.

Description: Cyber-Physical-Human Systems (CPHS) combine sensing, communication and control to obtain desirable outcomes in physical environments for human beings, such as buildings or vehicles. A particularly important application area is emergency management. While recent work on the design and optimisation of emergency management schemes has relied essentially on discrete event simulation, which is challenged by the substantial amount of programming or reprogramming of the simulation tools and by the scalability and the computing time needed to obtain useful performance estimates, this paper proposes an approach that offers fast estimates based on graph models and probability models. We show that graph models can offer insight into the critical areas in an emergency evacuation and that they can suggest locations where sensor systems are particularly important and may require hardening. On the other hand, we also show that analytical models based on queueing theory can provide useful estimates of evacuation times and for routing optimisation. The results are illustrated with regard to the evacuation of a real-life building.

Description: Emergency rescues require that first responders provide support to evacuate injured and other civilians who are obstructed by the hazards. In this case, the emergency personnel can take actions strategically in order to rescue people maximally, efficiently and quickly. The paper studies the effectiveness of a random neural network (RNN)-based task assignment algorithm involving optimally matching emergency personnel and injured civilians, so that the emergency personnel can aid trapped people to move towards evacuation exits in real-time. The evaluations are run on a decision support evacuation system using the Distributed Building Evacuation Simulator (DBES) multi-agent platform in various emergency scenarios. The simulation results indicate that the RNN-based task assignment algorithm provides a near-optimal solution to resource allocation problems, which avoids resource wastage and improves the efficiency of the emergency rescue process.

Description: Online collaboration and web-based knowledge sharing have gained momentum as major components of the Web 2.0 movement. Consequently, knowledge embedded in such platforms is no longer static and continuously evolves through experts’ micro-contributions. Traditional Information Retrieval and Social Network Analysis techniques take a document-centric approach to expertise modeling by creating a macro-perspective of knowledge embedded in large corpus of static documents. However, as knowledge in collaboration platforms changes dynamically, the traditional macro-perspective is insufficient for tracking the evolution of knowledge and expertise. Hence, Expertise Profiling is presented with major challenges in the context of dynamic and evolving knowledge. In our previous study, we proposed a comprehensive, domain-independent model for expertise profiling in the context of evolving knowledge. In this paper, we incorporate Language Modeling into our methodology to enhance the accuracy of resulting profiles. Evaluation results indicate a significant improvement in the accuracy of profiles generated by this approach. In addition, we present our profile visualization tool, Profile Explorer, which serves as a paradigm for exploring and analyzing time-dependent expertise profiles in knowledge-bases where content evolves overtime. Profile Explorer facilitates comparative analysis of evolving expertise, independent of the domain and the methodology used in creating profiles.

Description: The technology of Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) becomes one of the most important research applications in the area of computer network security. The overall functionality of SIEM systems depends largely on the quality of solutions implemented at the data storage level, which is purposed for the representation of heterogeneous security events, their storage in the data repository, and the extraction of relevant data for analytical modules of SIEM systems. The paper discusses the key issues of design and implementation of a hybrid SIEM data repository, which combines relational and ontological data representations. Based on the analysis of existing SIEM systems and standards, the ontological approach is chosen as a core component of the repository, and an example of the ontological data model for vulnerabilities representation is outlined. The hybrid architecture of the repository is proposed for implementation in SIEM systems. Since the most of works on the repositories of SIEM systems is based on the relational data model, the paper focuses mainly on the ontological part of the hybrid approach. To test the repository we used the data model intended for attack modeling and security evaluation, which includes both ontological and relational dimensions.

Description: This study examines the participation of African Americans on social networking sites (SNS), and evaluates the degree to which African Americans engage in activities in the online environment to mitigate social capital deficits. Prior literature suggests that compared with whites, African Americans have less social capital that can enhance their socio-economic mobility. As such, my research question is: do African Americans enhance their social capital through their participation on SNS? I use nationally representative data collected from the Pew Internet and American Life Project to explore the research question. The results suggest that the online environment is potentially a space in which African Americans can lessen social capital deficits.

Description: In this article, learning is studied in in situ applications that involve sensors. The main questions are how to conceptualize experiential learning involving sensors and what kinds of learning applications using sensors already exist or could be designed. It is claimed that experiential learning, context information and sensor data supports twenty first century learning. The concepts of context, technology-mediated experiences, shared felt experiences and experiential learning theory will be used to describe a framework for sensor-based mobile learning environments. Several scenarios and case examples using sensors and sensor data will be presented, and they will be analyzed using the framework. Finally, the article contributes to the discussion concerning the role of technology-mediated learning experiences and collective sensor data in developing twenty first century learning by characterizing what kinds of skills and competences are supported in learning situations that involve sensors.

Description: This article presents and explains a methodology based on cryptanalytic and reverse engineering techniques that can be employed to quickly recover information from encrypted files generated by malware. The objective of the methodology is to minimize the effort with static and dynamic analysis, by using cryptanalysis and related knowledge as much as possible. In order to illustrate how it works, we present three case studies, taken from a big Brazilian company that was victimized by directed attacks focused on stealing information from a special purpose hardware they use in their environment.

Description: A highly efficient self-provisioning interference management scheme is derived for 3G Home Node-Bs (HNB). The proposed scheme comprises self-adjustment of the HNB transmission parameters to meet the targeted QoS (quality of service) requirements in terms of downlink and uplink guaranteed minimum throughput and coverage. This objective is achieved by means of an autonomous HNB solution, where the transmit power of pilot and data are adjusted separately, while also controlling the uplink interference pollution towards the macro-layer. The proposed scheme is evaluated by means of extensive system level simulations and the results show significant performance improvements in terms of user throughput outage probability, power efficiency, femtocell coverage, and impact on macro-layer performance as compared to prior art baseline techniques. The paper is concluded by also showing corresponding measurements from live 3G high-speed packet access (HSPA) HNB field-trials, confirming the validity of major simulation results and assumptions.

Description: As the internet has become an integral part of everyday life, it is understood that patterns of racial stereotyping and discrimination found in the offline world are often reproduced online. In our paper, we examine two exclusionary practices in an online environment for adult toy collectors: First, the exclusion of non-white individuals who are expected to form immediate friendships with other non-white members; and second, the essentializing of racial issues when concerns over the lack of racial diversity in the toys are discussed. This dismissal is often directly connected to non-white members’ decisions to no longer participate, resulting in a new form of segregation within virtual space.

Description: Energy saving in networks has traditionally focussed on reducing battery consumption through smart wireless network design. Recently, researchers have turned their attention to the energy cost and carbon emissions of the backbone network that both fixed and mobile communications depend on, proposing primarily mechanisms that turn equipments OFF or put them into deep sleep. This is an effective way of saving energy, provided that the nodes can return to working condition quickly, but it introduces increased delays and packet losses that directly affect the quality of communication experienced by the users. Here we investigate the associated tradeoffs between power consumption and quality of service in backbone networks that employ deep sleep energy savings. We examine these tradeoffs by conducting experiments on a real PC-based network topology, where nodes are put into deep sleep at random times and intervals, resulting in a continuously changing network with reduced total power consumption. The average power consumption, the packet loss and the average delay of this network are examined with respect to the average value of the ON rate and the ON/OFF cycle of the nodes.

Description: Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) projects and their crowdsourced data have been the focus of a number of scientific analyses and investigations in recent years. Oftentimes the results show that the collaboratively collected geodata of one of the most popular VGI projects, OpenStreetMap (OSM), provides good coverage in urban areas when considering particular completeness factors. However, results can potentially vary significantly for different world regions. In this article, we conduct an analysis to determine similarities and differences in data contributions and community development in OSM between 12 selected urban areas of the world. Our findings showed significantly different results in data collection efforts and local OSM community sizes. European cities provide quantitatively larger amounts of geodata and number of contributors in OSM, resulting in a better representation of the real world in the dataset. Although the number of volunteers does not necessarily correlate with the general population density of the urban areas, similarities could be detected while comparing the percentage of different contributor groups and the number of changes they made to the OSM project. Further analyses show that socio-economic factors, such as income, can have an impact on the number of active contributors and the data provided in the analyzed areas. Furthermore, the results showed significant data contributions by members whose main territory of interest lies more than one thousand kilometers from the tested areas.

Description: The progressive consolidation of information technologies on a large scale has been facilitating and progressively increasing the production, collection, and diffusion of geographic data, as well as facilitating the integration of a large amount of external information into geographic information systems (GIS). Traditional GIS is transforming into a consolidated information infrastructure. This consolidated infrastructure is affecting more and more aspects of internet computing and services. Most popular systems (such as social networks, GPS, and decision support systems) involve complex GIS and significant amounts of information. As a web service, GIS is affected by exactly the same problems that affect the web as a whole. Therefore, next generation GIS solutions have to address further methodological and data engineering challenges in order to accommodate new applications’ extended requirements (in terms of scale, interoperability, and complexity). The conceptual and semantic modeling of GIS, as well as the integration of semantics into current GIS, provide highly expressive environments that are capable of meeting the needs and requirements of a wide range of applications.

Description: The term prosumer, first introduced by Toffler in the 1980s, has been developed by sociologists in response to Web 2.0 (the set of technologies that has transformed a predominantly static web into the collaborative medium initially envisaged by Tim Berners-Lee). The phenomena is now understood as a process involving the creation of meanings on the part of the consumer, who re-appropriates spaces that were dominated by institutionalized production, and this extends to the exploitation of consumer creativity on the production side. Recent consumption literature can be re-interpreted through the prosumer lens in order to understand whether prosumers are more creative or alienated in their activities. The peculiar typology of prosumption introduced by Web 2.0 leads us to analyze social capital as a key element in value creation, and to investigate its different online and offline forms. Our analysis then discusses the digital divide and critical consumerism as forms of empowerment impairment.

Description: This article speculates on the future of privacy and electronic identities on the Internet. Based on a short review of security models and the development of privacy-enhancing technology, privacy and electronic identities will be discussed as parts of a larger context—an ecosystem of personal information and electronic identities. The article argues for an ecosystem view of personal information and electronic identities, as both personal information and identity information are basic required input for many applications. Therefore, for both application owners and users, a functioning ecosystem of personal information and electronic identification is important. For the future of the Internet, high-quality information and controlled circulation of such information is therefore argued as decisive for the value of future Internet applications.

Description: In this paper, we address the implementation of physical layer network coding (PNC) based on compute and forward (CF) in relay networks. It is known that the maximum achievable rates in CF-based transmission is limited due to the channel approximations at the relay. In this work, we propose the integer forcing precoder (IFP), which bypasses this maximum rate achievability limitation. Our precoder requires channel state information (CSI) at the transmitter, but only that of the channel between the transmitter and the relay, which is a feasible assumption. The overall contributions of this paper are three-fold. Firstly, we propose an implementation of CF using IFP and prove that this implementation achieves higher rates as compared to traditional relaying schemes. Further, the probability of error from the proposed scheme is shown to have up to 2 dB of gain over the existent lattice network coding-based implementation of CF. Secondly, we analyze the two phases of transmission in the CF scheme, thereby characterizing the end-to-end behavior of the CF and not only one-phase behavior, as in previous proposals. Finally, we develop decoders for both the relay and the destination. We use a generalization of Bezout’s theorem to justify the construction of these decoders. Further, we make an analytical derivation of the end-to-end probability of error for cubic lattices using the proposed scheme.

Description: In an indoor firefighter mission, coordination and communication support are of the utmost importance. We present our experience from over five years of research with current firefighter support technology. In contrast to some large scale emergency response research, our work is focused on the frontline interaction between teams of firefighters and the incident commander on a single site. In this paper we investigate the flaws in firefighter communication systems. Frequent technical failures and the high cognitive costs incurred by communicating impede coordination. We then extract a list of requirements for an assistant emergency management technology from expert interviews. Thirdly, we provide a system concept and explore challenges for building a novel firefighter support system based on our previous work. The system has three key features: robust ad-hoc network, telemetry and text messaging, as well as implicit interaction. The result would provide a complementary mode of communication in addition to the current trunked radio.

Description: The locator/identifier split is an approach for a new addressing and routing architecture to make routing in the core of the Internet more scalable. Based on this principle, we developed the GLI-Split framework, which separates the functionality of current IP addresses into a stable identifier and two independent locators, one for routing in the Internet core and one for edge networks. This makes routing in the Internet more stable and provides more flexibility for edge networks. GLI-Split can be incrementally deployed and it is backward-compatible with the IPv6 Internet. We describe its architecture, compare it to other approaches, present its benefits, and finally present a proof-of-concept implementation of GLI-Split.

Description: The Bitcoin network of decentralized payment transactions has attracted a lot of attention from both Internet users and researchers in recent years. Bitcoin utilizes a peer-to-peer network to issue anonymous payment transactions between different users. In the currently used Bitcoin clients, the full transaction history is available at each node of the network to prevent double spending without the need for a central authority, forming a valuable source for empirical research on network structure, network dynamics, and the implied anonymity challenges, as well as guidance on the future evolution of complex payment systems. We found dynamical effects of which some increase anonymity while others decrease it. Most importantly, several parameters of the Bitcoin transaction graph seem to have become stationary over the last 12–18 months. We discuss the implications.

Description: Emergency planners, first responders and relief workers increasingly rely on computational and communication systems that support all aspects of emergency management, from mitigation and preparedness to response and recovery. Failure of these systems, whether accidental or because of malicious action, can have severe implications for emergency management. Accidental failures have been extensively documented in the past and significant effort has been put into the development and introduction of more resilient technologies. At the same time researchers have been raising concerns about the potential of cyber attacks to cause physical disasters or to maximise the impact of one by intentionally impeding the work of the emergency services. Here, we provide a review of current research on the cyber threats to communication, sensing, information management and vehicular technologies used in emergency management. We emphasise on open issues for research, which are the cyber threats that have the potential to affect emergency management severely and for which solutions have not yet been proposed in the literature.

Description: Norwegian authorities’ policy aims at securing an information society for all, emphasizing the importance of accessible and usable Information and Communication Technology (ICT) for everyone. While the body of research on young people’s use of ICT is quite comprehensive, research addressing digital differentiation in young people with disabilities’ use of ICT is still in its early days. This article investigates how young people with disabilities’ use, or non-use, of assistive ICT creates digital differentiations. The investigation elaborates on how the anticipations and stereotypes of disability establish an authoritative definition of assistive ICT, and the consequence this creates for the use of the Web by young people with disabilities. The object of the article is to provide enhanced insight into the field of technology and disability by illuminating how assistive ICT sometimes eliminates and sometimes reproduces stereotypes and digital differentiations. The investigation draws on a qualitative interview study with 23 young Norwegians with disabilities, aged 15–20 years. I draw on a theoretical perspective to analyze the findings of the study, which employs the concept of identity multiplicity. The article’s closing discussion expands on technology’s significance in young people’s negotiations of impairment and of perceptions of disability

Description: Given the increasingly popular use of socially interactive technology (SIT), it is believed that the way in which individuals communicate and experience relationships has drastically been changing. For those who partake in this electronic world, damaging behaviors akin to those found in the real world have emerged. Yet, we know little about the extent of these behaviors in the context of romantic relationships, especially from a gender or cultural standpoint. Research on dating violence generally indicates that women experience in-person victimization at higher rates than men, although some research has called this into question. It also suggests that some national groups experience higher rates of violence than others. However, research is almost non-existent when it comes to exploring violence in the digital world. This study investigated gender and nationality in (1) the nature and extent of socially interactive intimate violence, and (2) perceptions of the seriousness of virtual relationship violence. Using a sample of students from the United States and Poland, findings revealed that socially interactive technology may serve as a new avenue for aggressing against partners, as virtual relationship violence was not uncommon and reflected some patterns present in the real world. Some unexpected patterns also emerged. The results of this research signal a possible transferability of covert intimate violence and highlight ways in which inequalities may exist in our virtual worlds.

Description: Cyber-physical systems that include human beings and vehicles in a built environment, such as a building or a city, together with sensor networks and decision support systems have attracted much attention. In emergencies, which also include mobile searchers and rescuers, the interactions among civilians and the environment become much more diverse, and the complexity of the emergency response also becomes much greater. This paper surveys current research on sensor-assisted evacuation and rescue systems and discusses the related research issues concerning communication protocols for sensor networks, as well as several other important issues, such as the integrated asynchronous control of large-scale emergency response systems, knowledge discovery for rescue and prototyping platforms. Then, we suggest directions for further research.

Description: Recent vehicular networking activities include novel automotive applications, such as public vehicle to vehicle/infrastructure (V2X), large scale deployments, machine-to-machine (M2M) integration scenarios, and more. The platform described in this paper focuses on the integration of eHealth in a V2I setting. This is to allow the use of Internet from a vehicular setting to disseminate health-related information. From an eHealth viewpoint, the use of remote healthcare solutions to record and transmit a patient’s vital signs is a special telemedicine application that helps hospital resident health professionals to optimally prepare the patient’s admittance. From the automotive perspective, this is a typical vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication scenario. This proposal provides an IPv6 vehicular platform, which integrates eHealth devices and allows sending captured health-related data to a personal health record (PHR) application server in the IPv6 Internet. The collected data is viewed remotely by a doctor and supports his diagnostic decision. In particular, our work introduces the integration of vehicular and eHealth testbeds, describes related work and presents a lightweight auto-configuration method based on a DHCPv6 extension to provide IPv6 connectivity with a few numbers of messages.

Description: This paper reports on the design of an OPNET simulation platform to test the performance of sending real-time safety video over VANET (Vehicular Adhoc NETwork) using the WiMAX technology. To provide a more realistic environment for streaming real-time video, a video model was created based on the study of video traffic traces captured from a realistic vehicular camera, and different design considerations were taken into account. A practical controller over real-time streaming protocol is implemented to control data traffic congestion for future road safety development. Our driving video model was then integrated with the WiMAX OPNET model along with a mobility model based on real road maps. Using this simulation platform, different mobility cases have been studied and the performance evaluated in terms of end-to-end delay, jitter and visual experience.

Description: Although recent research suggests that the selective nature of new media helps foster issue specialists, little empirical evidence has been documented, mostly due to theoretical and methodological limitations. Extending the concept of issue publics, the present study proposes a method to estimate the degree to which an individual is a specialist- or a generalist-type citizen. Applying the method to the 2008 American National Election Studies data, the study reveals various characteristics of specialists and generalists. The results indicate that specialist-type citizens are positively associated with online news use, but negatively associated with conventional news media, such as television, newspaper, and radio. The implications of the growth of specialists as well as the validity of the proposed method are discussed.

Description: In this work, we present an innovative approach for effective cross-network information dissemination, with applications to vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs). The proposed approach, denoted as "Cross-Network Effective Traffic Alert Dissemination" (X-NETAD), leverages on the spontaneous formation of local WiFi (IEEE 802.11b) VANETs, with direct connections between neighboring vehicles, in order to disseminate, very quickly and inexpensively, traffic alerts received from the cellular network. The proposed communication architecture has been implemented on Android smartphones. The obtained experimental results show that an effective cross-network information dissemination service can entirely rely on smartphone-based communications. This paves the way to future Internet architectures, where vehicles will play a key role as information destinations and sources.