This report was written as part of our thesis based on an assignment provided by Kantega. It deals with the use of mobile phones to access eGovernment services using the Liberty Identity Web Services Framework (ID-WSF). Additionally, it explores the use of strong authentication mechanisms on mobile phones while using the phone as the terminal to access such services. The first part of the report describes the project and its goals. In this process, it defines three research questions that will be answered in the course of the thesis. Furthermore, it outlines how these questions should be answered. This part also includes a presentation of the prototype that was developed later in the project. The second part of the report concentrates on the theoretical basis of the assignment. Existing standards and technologies for strong authentication and Liberty-enabled products are explored and evaluated. The focus of the evaluation is upon whether the technologies could be used in the prototype. The third part of the report contains the requirements specification, design, implementation and testing documentation for the prototype. This part aims to describe all aspects of the prototype development and enables us to show that it is a valid proof-of-concept. Requirements and design incorporating strong authentication into the prototype are also provided, although this functionality was not implemented as specified in the assignment. The last part of the report evaluates the results obtained in the course of the thesis and especially the resulting prototype. The prototype fulfills our requirements well, but there where some reservations on the security in the strong authentication design. This part also looks at what can be done in the future to further explore the topic and improve the results. Finally, it shows how the report has answered the research questions we defined in the beginning of the thesis by completing a prototype that accesses eGovernment services using Liberty ID-WSF.

Online financial news sources continuously publish information about actors involved in the Norwegian financial market. These are often short messages describing temporal relations. However, the amount of information is overwhelming and it requires a great effort to stay up to date on both the latest news and historical relations. Therefore it would have been advantageous to automatically analyse the information. In this report we present a framework for identifying actors and relations between them. Text mining techniques are employed to extract the relations and how they evolve over time. Techniques such as part of speech tagging, named entity identification, along with traditional information retrieval and information extraction methods are employed. Features extracted from the news articles are represented as vectors in a vector space. The framework employs the feature vectors to identify and describe relations between entities in the financial market. A qualitative evaluation of the framework shows that the approach has promising results. Our main finding is that vector representations of features have potential for detecting relations between actors, and how these relations evolve. We also found that the approach taken is dependent on an accurate identification of named entities.

Today more and more companies acquire enterprise-scale solutions for their organization. Enterprise-scale solutions connect departments and business functions in the organization in order to facilitate the coordination, communication, and work flow between them. However, when systems get more interconnected and complex, they are also more prone to faults. If business critical parts of the system are affected, this can be devastating for a company. When designing large enterprise scale systems, one uses a wide range of specialized models with different view points and applications. This fragmentation and specialization of the representation of the system decreases the clarity of the total enterprise model and implies that it is difficult to analyze the enterprise as a whole. To overcome this problem, specialized software tools that can integrate the sub models in a total model can be developed. This thesis will develop a tool assisted extended process to the development process Rational Unified Process that helps analyzing the design of enterprise solutions by integrating the behavioral and structural models of the system into a unified representation. The tools take basis in digitized models represented in UML, the industry standard language for modeling software systems. We will focus on the two quality attributes availability and criticality.

This project was started to develop a new improved version of the Peer2Me framework. After having evaluated the first version of the Peer2Me framework in our depth study project in the fall of 2005, quite a few possible improvements came up. This report starts with an introduction to Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), wireless networking, Peer-to-Peer (P2P) computing, and mobile ad hoc networking. It also introduces some central concepts concerning design of a software architecture, and technology relevant to the development of the Peer2Me framework. The redesign of the framework was started by eliciting a set of new requirements, constituting the basis for designing the new Peer2Me architecture. Through an iterative and incremental development process, Peer2Me framework v2.0 was developed with several new features. An instant messenger application has been developed using both versions of the framework, in order to compare them. A thorough comparison of Peer2Me v1.0 and Peer2Me v2.0 shows that the redesign has resulted in a reduced framework footprint and complexity, a simplified interface towards the MIDlets, and a considerably increase in transfer rate.

This thesis is a continuation of my previous work `Supporting Notetaking with Digital Writing System: the case of teacher education’. The main goal of this thesis is to design a customized digital pen and paper based note taking system for the practice based teacher education, PPE. This thesis work has further performed a literature review to state the pedagogical objectives of PPE. Literature review on state-of-the-art has also been carried out. Together, these researches have informed the development of deployment scenarios and requirements for the system design. The system design is based on the Logitech io2 system deployed in my previous work. The system design extends the original system with a specialized paper design and a functionality to invoke storing of notes to specified folders at note taking time. The system has been evaluated by both experts and users, and has received positive feedback from both groups. The feedback is presented in this thesis to inform possible further work with this system

Clustering in a data mining setting has been researched for decades. Lately, document clustering used to cluster web search engine results have recieved much attention. Large companies such as Google and Microsoft have shown their interest and we have seen the emergence of commercial clustering engines such as Vivisimo. This thesis shows how a search engine with clustering capabilities can be developed. The approach described has been implemented as a working prototype that allows searching and browsing clusters through a web interface. The prototype has been evaluated in a user survey and through informal testing.

Today, dogs and humans are used in rescueing victims from disasters involving collapsed buildings, trapped tunnels and so forth. However, in some cases, robots have been deployed to assist the rescue teams. The tragic events of the World Trade Center in 2001 involved Urban Search and Rescue (USAR) robots pioneering rescue search with the help of information technology and robotics engineering. This report describes the design and implementation of a safety-critical system of a USAR robot model which will serve as a basis for analysis and development of future USAR robots. The scenario used in the experiment is a USAR robot prototype searching for survivors in a building which has collapsed. We analyse the scenario on a real prototype made up of Lego Mindstorms parts and equipped with a camera relaying real-time images to a workstation. The paper is a continuation of the report I submitted in December 2005; "Identifying the risks involved in the design of a safety-critical system for an Urban Search and Rescue robot".

The KOPEK Payment System supports payment of online content or services as well as single sign in. Setting up the KOPEK Payment System is easy, the system consist of the KOPEK Payment Server as well as an end user client. The server is installed so that it will be exposed to the desired customers, usually directly on the Internet. It can be installed in front an existing web server that handles more advanced content or services than the KOPEK Payment Server itself supports. Access to the content or the service will then be controlled by the rules configured in the KOPEK Payment Server. The KOPEK client application will be used from any end user who will access that content in order to identify the end user and make sure the user has met the requirements defined in the KOPEK Payment Server. Simple license control over personal licenses can be achieved by creating a web page and make the KOPEK Payment Server control access to that web page. An application can then try to access that web page and will only proceed if the web page can be read. If the web page cannot be read, the end user hasn’t met the requirements defined in the KOPEK Payment Server and hence the end user doesn’t have a valid license. This results in support for quite advanced copy protection when using the KOPEK Payment System. The copy protection can be further enhanced by also using the KOPEK Payment Systems support for centralized electronic identification systems, like the Norwegian BankID or BuyPass. In the market there exists some solutions that have specialized in license control and copy protection. These solutions seem to cover most of the more advanced licensing models, but none of these solutions can supply both a complete solution for license control and copy protection as well as a solution for electronic distribution of the licenses. There would probably be a market for such complete solutions and since the KOPEK Payment System already support both electronic distribution of licenses and can be used for simple license control an expansion of the KOPEK Payment System to also support more advanced license control. However, the KOPEK Payment System has some obvious weaknesses when it comes to dependence on an Internet connection and that both the company responsible for the KOPEK Payment System central servers as well as the company responsible for the KOPEK Payment Server used for license control can continue to keep the servers operative.

This study continues the work from the specialization project, carrying out the empirical study of the educational platform It's Learning at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). The goal of this study was to measure the user acceptance of It's Learning at NTNU, performing more surveys with the students at NTNU, but also with other educational establishments for comparison. In addition to this, we wanted more focus on It's Learning as a multi-user system. To achieve the goal we did a study of technology acceptance in information systems. In addition to this, we have studied important challenges of developing, introducing and using groupware to get more focus on It's Learning as a multi-user system. In addition to the survey we performed during the specialization project, three new surveys have been performed in this study. Two surveys were performed with student groups at NTNU, while one survey was performed with a student group at Sør-Trøndelag University College (HiST). In addition to this, we have performed interviews with some of the teachers at NTNU to get an indication of their usage and opinion of It's Learning. Instead of using one of the existing technology acceptance models as a framework for the survey, we created a new research model. The new model combines elements from two existing technology acceptance models, and was created to better adapt to It's Learning. The survey, together with the interviews with the teachers, and the groupware challenge study, created a basis for an evaluation of It's Learning. The results from the survey in this study clearly contradicted the results from the survey in the specialization project, but even though the results differed, all the student groups identified many of the same topics when it comes to problems with It's Learning and how to improve the system The results from the study indicates that two of the main problems with It's Learning at NTNU is that too few subjects use It's Learning, and that It's Learning is not utilized in a good way by the teachers. These two problems represent two important challenges with multi-user systems, the "critical mass" challenge and the "non-standard use" challenge. As opposed to NTNU, HiST has mandatory use of It's Learning, meaning that they avoid the "critical mass" challenge. We also found that It's Learning has an inflexible and cumbersome user interface, and the lack of possibilities for integrating the calendar and message system in It's Learning with other existing applications affect the utility value of these features. That It's Learning is a closed system is one of the largest problems for the teachers, in addition to some missing features for administrating exercises in their subjects. From this study we found that general user acceptance models give a good indication on the user's perception of an information system, but that there is also important to focus on the challenges related to specific types of systems, like the multi-user environment in the case of our study.

En av de dominerende IT-avgjørelsene tatt av organisasjoner gjennom det siste tiåret, har vært valgene i retning av delte informasjonssystemer og databaser. Integrasjon av separate og isolerte egenutviklede systemer, som begynte som prosjekter rundt noen få applikasjoner, har i dag fortsatt i en mye større skala gjennom initiativ som standardiserte virksomhetssystemer og datavarehus. Selv om nåtidens perspektiv er preget av antagelsene om avansert teknologi som enten determinanter eller muliggjører for radikale organisatoriske endringer, viser empiriske studier en rekke uoverensstemmelser i tilfeller som støtter en slik deterministisk tankegang. Samtidig erfarer verden i disse dager en ny periode som har fått betegnelsen kunnskapsalderen. I denne nye sammenhengen er kunnskap en primær råvare og kunnskapsflyt er ansett til å være den viktigste faktoren i økonomien. Siden hurtige teknologiske innovasjoner bygger broer mellom konkurrerende organisasjoner er det nå en trend i industrien å betrakte den felles kunnskapen til de ansatte som en nøkkelfaktor til å produsere innovative og konkurransedyktige produkter. Denne endringen i fokus medfører at organisasjoner må revurdere måten de utfører sin forretning på siden fokus ikke lenger er på materielle aktiva, men på mennesker sine evner og erfaringer. Denne rapporten ønsker å bedre forståelsen av virksomheter sine egentlige behov for kunnskap og kunnskapsoverføring, med utgangspunkt i at det som i mange tilfeller er antatt å være formell praksis ikke er den samme som faktisk er utført. Dette inviterer til diskusjon om hvorvidt standardiserte virksomhetssystemer basert på beste praksis i industrien vil kunne imøtekomme de lokale kravene som stilles i organisasjoner. I lys av teori om praksisfellesskap og vurderte kritiske suksessfaktorer basert på tidligere erfaringer med implementering av virksomhetssystemer søker vi en bedre forståelse for eksisterende praksis i organisasjoner for å bedre kunnskapsoverføringen. Det er i den anledning blitt foretatt en case-studie hos salgsrepresentantene i Felleskjøpet Trondheim. Nøkkelord: ERP, CRM, kunnskapsforvaltning, praksisfellesskap, teknologi i praksis