2011 Journal article Open Access

Engineering the authoring of usable service front ends
Paternò Fabio, Santoro Carmen, Spano Lucio Davide
This paper presents a method and the associated authoring tool for supporting the development of interactive applications able to access multiple Web Services, even from different types of interactive devices. We show how model-based descriptions are useful for this purpose and describe the associated automatic support along with the underlying rules. The proposed environment is able to aid in the design of new interactive applications that access pre-existing Web Services, which may contain annotations supporting the user interface development. This is achieved through the use of task models as a starting point for the design and development of the corresponding implementations. We also provide an example to better illustrate the features of the approach, and report on two evaluations conducted to assess the support tool.Source: The Journal of systems and software 84 (2011): 1806–1822. doi:10.1016/j.jss.2011.05.025
DOI: 10.1016/j.jss.2011.05.025
Project(s): SERVFACE
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2011 Report Unknown

Measuring landscape heterogeneity by remotely-sensed spectral variability in an Open Source space
Rocchini Duccio, Delucchi Luca, Barcaro Giovanni, Cavallini Paolo, Feilhauer Hannes, Foody Giles M., He Kate S., Nagendra Harini, Porta Claudio, Ricotta Carlo, Schimidtlein Sebastian, Spano Lucio Davide, Wegmann Martin, Neteler Markus
The assessment of species diversity in relatively large areas has always been a challenging task for ecologists, mainly because of the intrinsic difficulty in judging the completeness of species lists and in undertaking sufficient appropriate sampling. Since the variability in the remotely sensed signal is expected to be related to landscape diversity, it could be used as a good proxy of diversity at species level. It has been demonstrated that the relation between species diversity and landscape heterogeneity measured from remotely sensed data or land use maps varies with scale. However, Free and Open Source tools (allowing an access to the source code) for assessing landscape heterogeneity at different spatial scales are still lacking today. In this paper, we aim at: i) providing a theoretical background of the mostly used diversity indices stemmed from information theory that are commonly applied to quantify landscape heterogeneity from remotely sensed data and ii) proposing a free and robust Open Source tool (r.diversity) with its source code for calculating diversity indices (and allowing an easy potential implementation of new metrics by multiple contributors globally) at different spatial scales from remotely-sensed imagery or land use maps, running under the widely used Open Source program GRASS GIS. r.diversity can be a valuable tool for calculating landscape heterogeneity in an Open Source space given the availability of multiple indices at multiple spatial scales with the possibility to create new indices directly reusing the code. We expect that the theme proposed in this paper will stimulate discussions on the opportunities offered by Free and Open Source Software to calculate landscape diversity indicesSource: ISTI Technical reports, 2011