Collaborative Computing and Applications
J.UCS Special Issue
Weiming Shen
(Tongji University, Shanghai, P.R. China
wshen@ieee.org)
Weidong Li
(Coventry University, Coventry, UK
aa3719@coventry.ac.uk)
Jose Alberto Pino
(University of Chile, DCC, Santiago, Chile
pinoemh@gmail.com)
Junzhou Luo
(Southeast University, Nanjing, P.R. China
jluo@seu.edu.cn)
1 Introduction
Evolving from parallel computing, cluster computing, grid computing,
to nowadays cloud computing, the distributed computing paradigm has
been shifting from parallelization, distribution, sharing, to be able
to support full-scale collaboration between systems and people. This
new computing paradigm can be called collaborative computing,
composing of technologies and techniques to facilitate people,
software, and hardware working together via computer-assisted means. A
number of well-known technologies are contributing to the emergence of
this new computing paradigm, including computer supported cooperative
work (CSCW) and groupware, software agents and multi-agent systems,
web services and semantic web, social networks and ad-hoc
networks. This collaborative computing paradigm and related
technologies have seen wide applications in many areas. At the same
time, it also offers a lot of research and development opportunities
across a number of disciplines and has attracted a lot of attention of
many researchers around the world. This Special Issue includes
original research papers that report recent advances in collaborative
computing technologies and applications.
2 Contributions of the Special Issue
We invited the authors of 11 high quality papers presented at the 2013
17th IEEE International Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative
Work in Design (CSCWD 2013), to submit extended versions of their
contributions to this Special Issue. In addition, an open call for
submissions was issued. A total of 16 submissions were received for
this Special Issue. Each submission was reviewed by three
international experts, and a second round of reviews was followed to
ensure that the papers were thoroughly improved with the reviewer
comments.
Finally seven papers were accepted for publication in this
Special Issue. These papers cover a wide range of topics in
collaborative computing research and development, including
synchronization, volunteer computing, collaborative planning
information delivery, service discovery and integration, ontology
based emotion description, opportunistic networks, and wireless mesh
networks.
Synchronization is essential in all collaborative computing
systems. Baloian et al. proposed an architecture to support the design
and development of distributed collaborative applications using
HTML5. A middleware called Coupled Objects was used to support the
synchronization by dynamically coupling arbitrary user interface
objects between heterogeneous applications. The proposed approach was
demonstrated through the design and implementation of four different
collaborative systems.
Volunteer computing is a paradigm in which devices participating in a
distributed environment share part of their resources to help others
to better perform their activities. The effectiveness of this
computing paradigm depends on the collaboration attitude adopted by
the participating devices. Vega et al. presented a study that helps
designers understand the impact of adopting a particular collaboration
attitude to contribute with local resources to the distributed shared
environment. The study considers five collaboration strategies which
are analyzed in computing environments with both abundance and
scarcity of resources. The analysis results indicate that
collaboration strategies based on effort-based incentives work better
than those using contribution-based incentives. The results also show
that the use of effort-based incentives does not jeopardize the
availability of local resources for the local needs.
Collaborative planning information delivery is an important issue in
collaborative systems, but has not been well addressed in the research
literature. Lino et al. proposed to integrate ontologies and reasoning
mechanisms for multi-modality visualisation in collaborative planning
environments. Ontologies and their integration support the
expressiveness of several aspects related to real world applications
in environments of mixed initiative planning from a visualisation
perspective, while the reasoning mechanism allows a tailored delivery
and visualisation of planning information. Since the proposed
framework is based on the W3C standards, it facilitates communication
and interoperability with other services and systems, and also
supports extensions for its use on Semantic Web applications.
Service discovery and integration is an important research area with
efforts invested to explore the potential advantages of collaborative
computing. Zheng et al. proposed an Intents-based approach for service
discovery and integration. Particularly, this paper proposed to use
information retrieval techniques and applied them to intent
resolving. An empirical approach was used through extensive
experiments and analyses on a real dataset to obtain guiding
principles based on which an adaptive intent resolving scheme was
designed.
López-Gil et al. presented a generic ontology called EmotionsOnto for
describing emotions, which allows applications to identify and express
them in applications. The ontology is proposed as a way to develop an
easily computerizable and flexible formal model. Since it is based on
the Web Ontology Language (OWL) standard, it is also easily shareable
and extensible. The ontology has been validated through an application
based on an emotions-aware Tangible User Interface (TUI).
Evolved from social networks and ad-hoc networks, opportunistic
networks have been evolving quickly in recent years. The concept of
"community", as one of the most inherent attributes of
opportunistic networks, has been proved to be very helpful in
simulating mobility traces of human society and selecting suitable
message forwarders. Fu et al. developed an interest-driven
community-based mobility model by considering location preference and
time variance in human behaviour patterns. Based on this enhanced
mobility model, a two-layer routing algorithm is proposed by jointly
considering utilities generated by users' active degree and social
relationships. Simulation results shown that the proposed routing
scheme is able to improve delivery ratio while keeping the routing
overhead and transmission delay within a reasonable range with respect
to well-known routing schemes for opportunistic networks.
Yang et al. proposed a model for measuring achieved network capacity
in multi-radio wireless mesh network (MR-WMNs) and proved that finding
an optimal overlapping channel assignment in a given MR-WMN with an
odd number of channels is equivalent to finding an optimal assignment
by only using its orthogonal channels. This facilitates the use of
fewer channels to solve complicated channel assignment problems. The
effectiveness of the proposed approach has been validated through
extensive simulations.
3 Review Committee
We would like to express our gratitude to the review committee members
involved in this special issue for their valuable work on reviewing
all the contributions.
Rachid Anane, Coventry University, UK
Pedro Antunes, Escola Superior de Tecnologia de Setúbal, Portugal
Nelson Baloian, University of Chile, Chile
Marcos Borges, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Ruth Cobos, University of Madrid, Spain
Giancarlo Fortino, University of Calabria, Italy
Ning Gu, Fudan University, China
Tomoo Inoue, University of Tsukuba, Japan
Rahat Iqbal, Coventry University, UK
Yinsheng Li, Fudan University, China
Min Liu, Tongji University, China
Ta-Ping Lu. National Taipei University of Technology
Vincent Ng, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, China
Sergio F. Ochoa, University of Chile, Chile
Jonice Oliveira, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Hwa Gyoo Park, SCH University, Korea
Milton Pires Ramos, TECPAR, Brazil, China
Flavia Santoro, Rio de Janeiro State Federal University, Brazil
Jun Shen, University of Wollongong, Australia
Yuqing Sun, Shandong University, China
Cesar Tacla, SULBBS, Brazil
WenAn Tan, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, China
Adriana Vivacqua, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Jun Yan, University of Wollongong, Australia
Jianming Yong, University of Southern Queensland, Australia
Haibin Zhu, Nipissing University, Canada
Weiming Shen
Weidong Li
Jose Alberto Pino
Junzhou Luo
Guest Editors
November 2014
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