1522 research outputs found
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On the use of Policy Based Management for Pervasive m-Government Services
Get PDFThis paper discusses service discovery, composition and adaptation, illustrating their usefulness in pervasive mobile environments in which a multitude of services are available to users. It addresses how service discovery and composition, incorporating personalisation and context awareness, can provide focused sets of services tailored to a user's individual needs, shielding users from the potentially bewildering range of offered services. It is argued that because users' needs will be constantly evolving, these service sets must also continually adapt to changing requirements. The Pervasive Services Platform developed by the EU FP6 integrated project Daidalos is described and a usage scenario for it that demonstrates how service discovery, composition and adaptation can be successfully integrated is outline
An architecture for User-centric Management of Intelligent Environments
Get PDFUbiquitous computing environments are intelligent environments that have a wide array of embedded sensors and other artefacts that provide information regarding the current state of the physical environment. Utilisation of such information, known as context information has the potential to alter the natural surroundings of users in order to adapt the environment to suit the user's needs and assist in their tasks. These alterations in the environment should occur both transparently and seamlessly in order to minimise the impact on user's attention in such a way that the user's focus is not shifted from the task at hand. Satisfying user requirements in this manner, particularly in an environment that is so complex and dynamic raises a multitude of challenges. It is our belief that these challenges can be attributed to three distinct domains, namely management of personal information and management of context information combined with policy based management system. In the proposed paper we describe a management architecture for these intelligent environments that, through coordinated invocation of system and user policies triggered through the analysis of context information, taking into account business goals, can achieve a balance between user's desires and intentions while upholding system constraints
AUTONOMIC MANAGEMENT OF UBIQUITOUS COMPUTING ENVIRONMENTS
No full textThis technical paper provides an overview of IBM’s Autonomic Toolkit components and an introduction to my research into the development of autonomic services. The program should assess the effort and complexity involved in developing a simplified autonomic architecture on which a set of disparate services can be deployed and maintained autonomically. The advantages of such an architecture will then be compared against the ease of creating such autonomic environments. My research will show that autonomic computing does result in reduced complexity, increased productivity, graceful deployment and ease of management. However in researching the current state of the art in autonomic computing, I will explore some areas which require extensive further work in order to achieve the goals autonomic computing promises. The two main technologies that will be used to develop this architecture are IBM’s autonomic toolkit and Knopflerfish’s Open Service Gateway initiative (OSGi) framework. In this paper I will discuss these technologies and how they can be combined to produce an autonomic architecture
Developing a Cohesive Position for Rural Tourism - The Role of Image Congruence
Get PDFImage congruity theory has received great interest by marketing academics over the decades. However, to date most of the research concerning image congruity is centred around consumer goods and based on the assumption that the greater the image similarity between consumer and brand, the more favourable the relationship between the two. This paper aims to investigate this issue and apply the long-standing theoretical concept of image congruence to tourism, and more specifically the Irish rural tourism product, through the development and testing of a conceptual model.
The author uses the metaphor of ‘brand as person’ to present a conceptual framework that illustrates the interrelationship between consumer (visitor), rural destination, and tourism service provider. This paper aims to illustrate how important the management of this interrelationship is in order to effectively market a destination to a target audience. The paper concludes with a discussion of research directions and implications for theory and managerial practice. A joint Irish / Welsh rural tourism marketing initiative based in the South East of Ireland will provide a context for the empirical work
When Brands Become Real-Lived Experiences: Consumer Motivations to Participate in Event-Marketing Strategies (Final Draft of the Manuscript)
No full textDue to significant changes in their marketing environments and in consumer behaviour, marketers are confronted with the decreasing effectiveness of their classic marketing communications and in need of new ways to position their brands in consumers' minds. As a consequence, event-marketing is becoming increasingly popular alternative for marketers to communicate with their target audiences on a behavioural level. Event-marketing is defined as the staging of interactive marketing-events as 3-dimensional hyperreal brand experiences for consumers, which would result in their emotional attachment to the brand. Indeed, the major pecularity of event-marketing in comparison to classic marketing communications is that consumers are encouraged to experience the brand by becoming an active part of its hyperreality, because nothing is more convincing than personal experiences. However, as a pull strategy within marketing communications, the effectiveness of event-marketing strategies is highly dependent on consumers' voluntary participation. This means that an in-depth understanding of consumers' experiential needs and their intrinsic motivations is essential for the design of successful event-marketing strategies. Therefore, the objective of this research is to investigate why consumers participate voluntarily in marketing-events that are specifically designed to communicate the same commercial messages these consumers would usually avoid. In doing so, this study expands the previous research by identifying and investigating the motivational drivers in the pre-event stage that determine the voluntary participation of consumers in marketing-events. A total framework of how event-marketing works is developed in this study. Particular emphasis is placed on presenting a model of how consumers' predispositional involvement in the event-object, event-content, event-marketing and the social interaction at events determine their involvement in the marketing-event and, subsequently, drive their motivation to participate. The proposed model is tested in a quasi-experimental survey of students at WIT in relation to two research objects (Adidas Predator Cup and Guinness Storehouse) by using Pearson Correlation, bivariate regression analysis and finally backward stepwise regression analysis as a powerful multivariate data analysis technique
Redundant Positioning Architecture
Get PDFPositioning has been a driving factor in the development of ubiquitous computing applications throughout the past two decades. Numerous devices and techniques have been developed-few of them are actually used commercially. The precision is limited to specific applications, the availability limited to the provider of specific services. Occasionally, few methods have been combined to recalibrate each other by means of data fusion. We present a novel architecture for processing the vast amount of data from pervasive devices penetrating everyday objects to the cheapest level. Location information can be inferred from infrastructure deployed for different purposes, only partly designed for positioning in the first place. The massive redundancy of such nodes and the synergetic heterogeneity of completely different recognition principles allows to tailor the perceived positioning probability to the specific requirements of the target application. A self-learning and self-healing approach to misleading, wrong and outdated pieces of information provides a new quality of interworking position and context aware systems. q 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved
Securing mobile services
Get PDFThis paper reports on some initial findings of the EU IST SEINIT project with respect to the security of end-to-end services over the wireless access and fixed network and captures the state of the art in secure mobile services infrastructures
Seasonal and management influences on bacterial community structure in an upland grassland soil
Get PDFFloristically diverse Nardo–Galion upland grasslands are common in Ireland and the UK and are valuable in agricultural, environmental
and ecological terms. Under improvement (inputs of lime, fertiliser and re-seeding), they convert to mesotrophic grassland
containing very few plant species. The effects of upland grassland improvement and seasonality on soil microbial communities
were investigated at an upland site. Samples were taken at five times in one year in order to observe seasonal trends, and bacterial
community structure was monitored using automated ribosomal intergenic spacer analysis (ARISA), a DNA-fingerprinting
approach. Differences in soil chemistry and bacterial community structure between unimproved and improved grassland soils were
noted. Season was also found to cause mild fluctuations in bacterial community structure, with soil samples from colder months
(October and December) more correlated with change in ribotype profiles than samples from warmer months. However, for the
majority of seasons clear differences in bacterial community structures from unimproved and improved soils could be seen, indicating
seasonal influences did not obscure effects associated with improvement
Morphology and mechanical properties of antimicrobial polyamide/silver composites
Get PDFSilver filled antimicrobial polymers were produced from composites comprising polyamide and elementary silver powder possessing various specific surface area (SSA) by melt compounding. Different concentrations (2%, 4% and 8%) of the silver powder were incorporated in the polyamide to investigate the effect of silver loading on the mechanical properties. As the water uptake imparts antimicrobial properties, the influence of the diffused water on the mechanical properties of the composites is discussed. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) is employed to investigate the morphology of the composites. The composite morphology found to be dependent on the SSA of the silver powder employed within the polyamide matrix. DMTA measurements were performed to follow the visco elastic behaviour of the composites. The crystallinities of the composites were evaluated using Differential Scanning Calorimetry (DSC). D 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved