The demand for higher education has increased dramatically in the last decade. At the same time, institutions have faced continual pressure to reduce costs and increase quality of education, while delivering that education to greater numbers of students. The introduction of software systems such as virtual learning environments, online learning resources and centralised student record systems has become routine in attempts to address these demands. However, these approaches suffer from a variety of limitations: They do not take all stakeholders' needs into account. They do not seek to reduce administrative overheads in academic processes. They do not reflect institution-specific academic policies. They do not integrate readily with other information systems. They are not capable of adequately modelling the complex authorisation roles and organisational structure of a real institution. They are not well suited to rapidly changing policies and requirements. Their implementation is not informed by sound software engineering practises or data architecture design. Crucially, as a consequence of these drawbacks such systems can increase administrative workload for academic staff. This thesis describes the research, development and deployment of a system which seeks to address these limitations, the Module Management System (MMS). MMS is a collaborative web application targeted at streamlining and minimising administrative tasks. MMS encapsulates a number of user-facing tools for tasks including coursework submission and marking, tutorial attendance tracking, exam mark recording and final grade calculation. These tools are supported by a framework which acts as a form of “university operating system”. This framework provides a number of different services including an institution abstraction layer, role-based views and privileges, security policy support integration with external systems.

Τα τελευταία χρόνια υπάρχει εκθετική αύξηση του όγκου της πληροφορίας που δημοσιεύεται στο Διαδίκτυο. Καθώς όμως η πληροφορία αυτή δε συνδέεται με τη σημασιολογία της παρατηρείται δυσκολία στη διαχείρισή της και στην πρόσβαση σε αυτήν. Ο Σημασιολογικός Ιστός, λοιπόν, είναι μια ομάδα μεθόδων και τεχνολογιών που σκοπεύουν να δώσουν τη δυνατότητα στις μηχανές να κατανοήσουν τη “σημασιολογία” των πληροφοριών σχετικά με τον Παγκόσμιο Ιστό. Ο Σημασιολογικός Ιστός (Semantic Web) αποτελεί επέκταση του Παγκοσμίου Ιστού. Στο Σημασιολογικό Ιστό οι πληροφορίες εμπλουτίζονται με μεταδεδομένα, τα οποία υπακουούν σε κοινά πρότυπα και επιτρέπουν την εξαγωγή γνώσεως από την ήδη υπάρχουσα, καθώς επίσης και το συνδυασμό της υπάρχουσας πληροφορίας με στόχο την εξαγωγή συμπερασμάτων. Απώτερος στόχος του Σημασιολογικού Ιστού είναι η βελτιωμένη αναζήτηση, η εκτέλεση σύνθετων διεργασιών και η εξατομίκευση της πληροφορίας σύμφωνα με τις ανάγκες του κάθε χρήστη. Στην παρούσα διπλωματική εργασία μελετήθηκε η χρήση των τεχνολογιών του Σημασιολογικού Ιστού για τη βελτίωση της πρόσβασης σε πολιτισμικά δεδομένα. Συγκεκριμένα αρχικά έγινε εμβάθυνση στις τεχνολογίες και στις θεμελιώδεις έννοιες του Σημασιολογικού Ιστού. Παρουσιάστηκαν αναλυτικά οι βασικές γλώσσες σήμανσης: XML που επιτρέπει τη δημιουργία δομημένων εγγράφων με λεξιλόγιο καθορισμένο από το χρήστη, RDF που προσφέρει ένα μοντέλο δεδομένων για την περιγραφή πληροφοριών με τέτοιο τρόπο ώστε να είναι δυνατή η ανάγνωση και η κατανόησή τους από μηχανές. Αναφέρθηκαν, ακόμη, οι διάφοροι τρόποι σύνταξης της γλώσσας RDF καθώς και πως γίνεται αναζήτηση σε γράφους RDF με το πρωτόκολλο SPARQL. Στη συνέχεια ακολουθεί η περιγραφή της RDFS, που πρόκειται για γλώσσα περιγραφής του RDF λεξιλογίου. Έχοντας παρουσιαστεί σε προηγούμενο κεφάλαιο η έννοια της οντολογίας, γίνεται αναφορά στη σημασιολογική γλώσσα σήμανσης OWL, που χρησιμοποιείται για την έκδοση και διανομή οντολογιών στο Διαδίκτυο. Έπειτα ακολουθεί μια ανασκόπηση από επιλεγμένα έργα, ελληνικά, ευρωπαϊκά και διεθνή, των τελευταίων ετών που χρησιμοποιούν τις τεχνολογίες του Σημασιολογικού Ιστού στο τομέα του πολιτισμού και της πολιτισμικής κληρονομιάς. Τέλος στο έβδομο κεφάλαιο παρουσιάζεται μία εφαρμογή διαχείρισης αρχαιολογικών χώρων-μνημείων και μελετώνται σε βάθος οι τεχνολογίες και τα εργαλεία που χρησιμοποιήθηκαν για την υλοποίησή της. / Over the past few years there has been exponential increase of the volume of information published on the Internet. Since information is not connected to its semantics, it is difficult to manipulate and access it. Therefore, the Semantic Web consists of methods and technologies that aim to enable machines to understand information’s semantics. The Semantic Web is an extension of the World Wide Web (WWW). Specifically, information is enriched with metadata, which are subject to common standards and permit knowledge extraction from the existing one and the combination of existing information in order to infer implicit knowledge, as well. Future goals of the Semantic Web are enhanced searching, complicated processes’ execution and information personalization according to each user’s needs. This post-graduate diploma thesis researches the usage of Semantic Web technologies for the enhancement of the access to cultural data. More specifically, Semantic Web technologies and essential concepts were studied. Basic markup languages were presented analytically: XML that allows structured documents’ creation with user defined vocabulary, RDF that offers a data model for such information description that it is readable and understandable by machines. Also, various RDF syntaxes and how to search RDF graphs using SPARQL protocol were referred. Below RDFS description follows, that is a description language of RDF vocabulary. After having introduced the concept of ontology in previous chapter, the semantic markup language OWL is presented, that is used for ontology publishing and distribution on the Internet. A review of selected projects of the last years, Greek, European and international, which are characterized by the application of technologies of the Semantic Web in the sector of Culture and Cultural heritage, is presented. In the last chapter, an application that manages archaeological places- sites is presented and it is studied technologies and tools that were used for it.

Made available in DSpace on 2014-12-17T15:47:46Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 AndreMD.pdf: 5208404 bytes, checksum: 35b3883a3ba487ddd5f5627c46d41e2c (MD5) Previous issue date: 2008-01-08 / ?Over the years the use of application frameworks designed for the View and Controller layers of MVC architectural pattern adapted to web applications has become very popular. These frameworks are classified into Actions Oriented and Components Oriented , according to the solution strategy adopted by the tools. The choice of such strategy leads the system architecture design to acquire non-functional characteristics caused by the way the framework influences the developer to implement the system. The components reusability is one of those characteristics and plays a very important role for development activities such as system evolution and maintenance. The work of this dissertation consists to analyze of how the reusability could be influenced by the Web frameworks usage. To accomplish this, small academic management applications were developed using the latest versions of Apache Struts and JavaServer Faces frameworks, the main representatives of Java plataform Web frameworks of. For this assessment was used a software quality model that associates internal attributes, which can be measured objectively, to the characteristics in question. These attributes and metrics defined for the model were based on some work related discussed in the document / ?O uso de frameworks para as camadas do Controlador e Vis?o do padr?o arquitetural MVC adaptado para aplica??es Web se tornou bastante popular ao longo dos anos. Eles s?o classificados em Orientados a A??es ou Orientados a Componentes , de acordo com a estrat?gia de solu??o adotada pelas ferramentas. A escolha por uma dessas estrat?gias faz com que o design da arquitetura do sistema adquira caracter?sticas n?o-funcionais ocasionadas pela forma com que o framework leva o desenvolvedor a implementar o sistema. A reusabilidade dos componentes ? uma dessas caracter?sticas. Ela possui um papel muito importante para atividades como evolu??o e manuten??o do sistema. O trabalho desta disserta??o consiste em analisar o quanto a reusabilidade pode ser impactada de acordo com a utiliza??o de um tipo de framework Web. Com esse intuito, foram realizados estudos de caso atrav?s da implementa??o de pequenas aplica??es de controle acad?mico se utilizando das mais recentes vers?es dos frameworks Apache Struts e JavaServer Faces, os principais representantes de frameworks Web da plataforma Java. Para essa avalia??o, foi utilizado um modelo de qualidade de software respons?vel por associar atributos internos, que podem ser medidos objetivamente, ? caracter?stica em quest?o. Esses atributos e m?tricas definidos para o modelo foram baseados em alguns trabalhos relacionados discutidos no documento

Nos últimos anos, a demanda por aplicações Web vem crescendo rapidamente para atender às necessidades das pessoas e empresas. Essas aplicações têm proporcionado benefícios que vão desde melhorias no processo de comunicação e maior velocidade ao realizar tarefas até a redução de custos. No entanto, inúmeros problemas relacionados à usabilidade de interfaces, a exemplo da alta complexidade e baixa eficácia de uso têm dificultado e, em muitos casos, inviabilizado a utilização de aplicações Web. Esse fato é preocupante, pois a usabilidade é apontada pelos usuários como o atributo de qualidade de software mais importante e por constatar que muitas organizações ainda não empregam os recursos de suporte à usabilidade sob vários motivos, tais como: desconhecimento de técnicas, métodos e ferramentas; restrição de orçamento; e dificuldade de seleção e uso sistemático desses recursos. Desenvolver interfaces com maior qualidade de uso é um desafio que tem se tornado crítico para o sucesso das aplicações Web junto às empresas e aos usuários. Pesquisas foram realizadas, mas há lacunas quanto ao fornecimento de soluções integradas de suporte à usabilidade nas diversas fases de um projeto de aplicação Web. Diante dessa necessidade, este trabalho propõe o Framework UEF-WEB de apoio à Engenharia de Usabilidade. Este framework, composto por fases, atividades, recursos e artefatos, tem por objetivo principal auxiliar as organizações a introduzir, de maneira sistematizada, recursos de usabilidade no processo de planejamento, desenvolvimento e avaliação de interfaces de aplicações Web, com vistas à ampliação da qualidade de uso das interfaces construídas.

This thesis describes a development of a modern client-server application for text recognition on iOS platform. The reader is acquainted with common principles of a client-server model, including its known architecture styles, and with a distribution of logical layers between both sides of the model. After that the thesis depicts current trends and examples of suitable technologies for creating an application programming interface of a web server. Possible ways of text recognition on the server side are discussed as well. In context of a client side, the thesis provides an insight into iOS platform and a few important concepts in iOS application development. Following implementation of the server side is stressed to be reusable as much as possible for different kinds of use cases. Last but not least, the thesis provides a simple iOS framework for a direct communication with the recognition server. Finally, an application for evaluation of food ingredients from a packaging material is implemented as an example of usage.