1,721,031 research outputs found
Supply Chain Management meets Auto-ID Management: A Structured Approach
No full textNowadays, firms need to support e-business through solutions that guarantee, on the one hand, the supply chain management (SCM) and, on the other, products’ identification and traceability (ID automation). These two
aspects have been faced, up until now, in a separate manner and adhered to the definition of established standards. Thus, we propose an approach that allows the integration of SCM and ID-automation software architectures and, at the same time, guarantees the separation of concerns. In this paper, we also present an implementation that uses two systems: the data interchange system based on the ebXML standard and the traceability system based on the EPCglobal standard. According to this approach, we propose a preliminary implementation experience for the pharmaceutical sector
Fast Prototyping of Learning Experiences: An Attempt of Modelling
No full textThere are already several examples of Enhanced Learning Management System (ELMS) that use 3D Virtual Worlds as a novel visual metaphor to catch the young student’s attention, to convey concepts and to develop their competences in a learning-by-doing and collaborative fashion. However, their main weak point is the lack of flexibility in the design of the virtual environment and in the customization of the learning experience. Moreover, the number of users potentially involved in each learning session, the variety of learning strategies and the amount of learning objects already available, require the ability of fast prototyping each virtual learning experience, generating, sometimes hundreds, of customized sessions starting from the same “general format”. The need to simplify the customization, open also to non-technical skilled people like teachers, have led us to focus the attention on the simplification of the authoring process of the learning experience and to develop OpenWebTalk, a general-purpose, flexible framework for the fast prototyping of collaborative 3D learning experiences that represents also a first approach to the structured modelling a learning session
Flexible 3D Collaborative Virtual Environment: WebTalk04
No full textA Collaborative Virtual Environment, CVE, is a computer-based virtual space that supports collaborative work and social interplay. In a 3D CVE, a “hosting” 3D world is the necessary ingredient: within it, users, provided with graphical embodiments, called avatars, that convey their identity (presence, location, movement, ..) can meet and interact with other users, with agents, or with virtual objects.
As we move increasingly to a networked world, and with the promise of increased and improved data-flow through broadband networks, we believe that collaborative virtual environments will be of increasing importance. Distributed teams engaged in collaborative task using CVEs are getting rather common in fields such as gaming, military, training, and engineering.
In this paper we present WebTalk04, a general purpose, flexible, framework for building 3D CVEs: the need of generating a variety of applications has led to high degree of flexibility and configurability. An XML configuration, in fact, allows to easily control most of its advanced features (including collaborative functions). WebTalk04 is a framework (rather than a specific application), developed by a joint team (University of Lecce and Politecnico di Milano). It supports complex cooperation features that have been tested with hundreds of “direct users” and thousands of “indirect users” as it will be explained in the paper.
The paper will describe the framework architecture, and will also describe how we use 3D networking technologies, to leverage collaboration between users (at different locations) that are working on the same learning task: thus creating blended, distributed e-Learning activities, and extending the current concept of e-Learning (today mainly perceived as “remote learning”)
Collaborative Learning through Flexible Web CVE: The Experience of WebTalk
No full textThis chapter describes the technological platform of the authors’ learning experiences and its evolution through the years, providing insights into the reasons that led to significant design choices and offering guidelines on how to deal with technological issues
WebTalkCube: a Framework to Add One Dimension to eLearning
No full textE-Learning is gaining increasing momentum as a teaching approach, both within universities and in general within funded courses, in Italy and abroad. It is in these specific learning environments, that vast numbers of students encounter eLearning as a mean to cut times and costs of lesson-going, capitalizing their time and their efforts for a better preparation. Enterprise-wide eLearning, used in companies and associations, is also perceived as a key instrument to train human resources reducing costs. However, especially in the range of funded courses directed to a lesser educated audience in respect to undergraduates, post-docs, or highly-motivated employees within an enterprise, sustaining the trainee’s attention for eLearning courses of long duration (e.g. entire ECDL preparation courses given in eLearning format, or history courses in intermediate schools) may be a problem, reducing the effectiveness and the benefits of the eLearning approach. Starting from these issues, the problem of which teaching methodologies are to be applied to eLearning is currently one the most debated at the moment. In this paper, we advocate the necessity to intermingle the present eLearning approach, mainly based on bi-dimensional multimedia presentation of the contents (with varying degrees of exploitation of sound, graphics and interactivity), with new types of eLearning, based on the exploitation of 3D representation, thus adding one dimension to the current way of thinking eLearning. The paper will show our early experiments on the subject, and how we used 3D and networking technologies to leverage collaboration between students that are working on the same eLearning modules in different places, thus creating blended, distributed eLearning activities, and extending the current concept of eLearning (today mainly perceived as “remote learning”). After having commented the results we obtained within two of our main experiments, we elaborate on a new framework which would support better this new eLearning paradigm, we describe its architectural structure, and the directions of our future work
3DC PLUS: An Authoring Toolkit for Collaborative Virtual Environments
No full textIn recent years, the hardware technology, high bandwidth network and 3D graphics systems have brought the Virtual Reality (VR) technology into a new field: Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVE) This field’s goal consists of using computers as tools for communication and information share through the use of 3D shared spaces to provide collaboration facilities . Even if, in the same time, also 3D design and virtual environments au-thoring tools has been developed, their main goal is mainly directed to support professional designers in the modeling of 3D words through advanced techniques for shapes and surfaces manipulation allowing multiple ef-fects to improve the rendering of the scene without offer any specific support to more closely related interaction control issues. When creating a virtual reality environments, in fact, a large amount of interactions have to be programmed. The main problem as for this is that non-computer expert users lack the programming skills neces-sary to create useful applications. Specifying interactions and behaviors remains in the domain of the program-mers. This paper examines the problem of creating authoring tools for VE that allow non-expert users to produce effective CVE applications without the direct programmers assistance. Then we propose a toolkit to support the entire process of designing, composing and deploying a Collaborative Virtual Environment in a visual mode based on the WYSIWYG paradigm that WT04 engine can process and evolve. WT04 is a research project to achieve a framework for generating and enjoining 3D collaborative virtual experiences. WT04 framework sup-ports collaborative rules definitions suitable to fully govern virtual experiences: virtual meeting during which users join to virtual session in the same time and in the same virtual environments with the help of a guide ex-plaining the contents and aiding the collaboration between users to achieve same particular goals according to well defined collaboration rules. Hence, main dynamic aspects that govern experiences are environment and ob-jects configuration, content definition and collaboration rules specification applying to each particular session
A Framework to Support Interoperability and Multi-channel Delivery Among Heterogeneous Systems: TRAME Project
No full textThe e-commerce has become a point of strength for the companies that desire to increase their billing enlarging their clients park and reducing the management costs. Therefore the demand has been born to use platforms able to support the interoperability between heterogeneous systems and the multi-channelling with variegated devices to access different services in reliable manner and to allow, so, a spread of the market toward partner with particular needs. Furthermore, many available services have been typically designed for a single channel the web one. In a real world scenario, an ever-growing number of users take advantage of different kind of communication channel and devices. In this paper we propose a B2B oriented framework able to support the interoperability among heterogeneous systems developed according to the ebXML reference model for the business messages interchange suitable to any B2B marketplace that foresees the commercial interaction among partners with different roles and profiles (including channel and device). Such framework has been developed and experimented for the TRAME research project that has as objective to create a room of district compensation of the peaks of productive ability demands within the Textile/Clothing sector and to give the needed infrastructure for the business messages exchange among the partners of the productive spinneret
Mobile WebTalk: a framework to support ubiquitous collaboration
No full textMobile technologies offer the opportunity to embed learning in a natural environment. This paper describes the design of the UbiCrossWords prototype, a project built to explore the opportunities to support learning through an orientation game in a mixed reality environment. The paper first introduces the scenario and then describes the general architecture of the prototype. Then the paper explores how using mobile technologies in direct physical interaction with space and with other players can be combined with principles of engagement and self-motivation to create a powerful learning experience. Finally it presents the underlying architecture, Mobile WebTalk, a mixed CVE framework mainly used for collaborative educational aims, to support in a flexible way both stationary and mobile players. We explore the use of heterogeneous collaboration thought a software architecture, running on mobile devices, able to configure itself on the basis of a XML declaration representing workspace and interaction rules shared with the 3D stationary users
WebTalk04: a Declarative Approach to Generate 3D Collaborative Environments
No full textEven if graphics hardware and 3D technologies are rapidly evolving and the increased internet connection speed allows to share amount of data and information between user geographically distributed, the development of networked three-dimensional applications is still complicated and demands expert knowledge. Though some collaborative Web 3D technologies and applications had already been developed, most of them are concerned especially to offer an high level realistic representation of the virtual world as increasing the level of detail would mean to increase the “virtual presence” sense in the 3D world; at the same time they don’t support from one hand an high level, non-expert authoring process, from the other the concept of programming flexibility and of component reuse is rarely taken into account.
We advocate the need of drastically simplify authoring and personalization phases through formal description of the interaction’s sets as well as of the behavioural features and rules, that we call “collaborative metaphors”, in a component oriented fashion to drive collaboration among users in the specific way a designer is intended to do. As result of previous considerations we present WebTalk04, a declarative 3D component system based on XML documents describing not only the environment formal structure of the virtual world were the action take place but also the complex interaction set of rules that control interactions between users and world objects used to stimulate certain kind of collaboration, thus effectively help fast prototyping and an easy building up of such collaborative applications. The WebTalk04 system also provide a runtime 3D rendering engine fully configurable through XML in order to easily modify virtual world settings as well as collaborative interaction rules thus allowing to control independently geometries, behaviors and contents, assigning to different developer (i.e software developer , content developer , graphics developer , session designers) different task
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