Web-Based Support Systems

Web-based support systems (WBSS) are an emerging research multi-disciplinary domain aimed at studying the support of human activities with the Web as the common platform, medium and interface. The generalisation of the use of web services for any aspect of life has resulted in moving a wide range of support systems to extend the human physical limitation of information processing in the information age by creating a vast amount of data and process integration for different domains of application and groups of mobile users. Support systems are intelligent software-intensive systems that be must be flexible, fault-tolerant, robust, resilient, available, re-configurable, secure, and self-deploying. They are based on the use of advanced information and communication technologies (ICT) which include digital library services, computational and data grids, cloud computing (CC), service-oriented architecture (SOA) and provide organisations with a pervasive collaborative working environment enabling their members and entities to work together more efficiently in their real life activities in a collaborative virtual work environment (CVWE) composed of a network of several workplaces technologically connected [133-135] .

2.8.3.1 Web-Based Cloud Architectures

There is an increasing demand of high quality and productivity systems architectures integrating distributed and multi-agent systems in cloud computing integrated into service-oriented multi-agent architectures applicable to the development of intelligent highly dynamic environments. Such environments require to effectively supporting more individual complex tasks, to ensure full availability, accessibility and flexibility of tools to enhance the use of WBSS, and facilitate the distribution and management of functionalities through the distributed agent-based architecture. This management aimed at optimising usability and performance, consists of involving autonomous agents to cooperate in solving problems and generate knowledge and experience, and providing more flexible ways to move functions to where actions are needed [136] using reasoning mechanisms or learning techniques to handle these cloud services requirements. Such requirements include the access to services from a wide range of mobile devices such as tablets, smart phones and personal digital assistants (PDAs), the support of varied open complex context environments, high levels of human-system-environment interaction, ubiquitous communication, computing and adaptable

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interfaces, and advanced flexibility and customization to easily add, modify or remove services on request, with very limited impact from the programming environment.

Cloud computing architectures is the ultimate integration level providing simultaneously in one integrated novel design framework infrastructure (IaaS), platform (PaaS) and software (SaaS) as a service, adding composite services and applications as interaction blocks between users. All available services are stored in the Web Services Architecture Model (WSAM), a sort of model base supported by a Web Services Description Language (WSDL) establishing the logical link between applications and services.

Of great complexity in the implementation of these integrated service-oriented multi-agent architectures is the incompatibility between the agent's platforms. The advocated solution is either the distribution of services and applications in the agent infrastructure by modelling the functionalities of the agents and the systems as services and applications invoked by the agents, or the organisation of the communication between the different agent-based models of the platform [137] .

2.8.3.2 Web-Based Groupware Systems

The fast development of mobile technologies, such as Wi-Fi networks, PDA, and smart phones, has made it possible for users to instantaneously access any Web-based system from various kinds of devices, anytime and anywhere, extending further the scope of Ubiquitous Computing [138]. Extensive research and development have been carried out on applying context-based filtering technology for a Web-based group decision support system and its mobile users for the Context-Aware Adaptation in Web-based Groupware Systems [139] . Web-based groupware systems integrate both the user’s physical and collaborative context, and are built using object-oriented models. These models aim at personalising information content which consists of enabling the filtering of context-aware profiles to match the users’

context and the use of progressive access models to organize the selected information corresponding to the available content matching the profile. Wiki systems such as XWiki and MediaWiki, can be considered as a new generation of Web-based groupware systems enabling the combination of mobile technologies together with some of the Web principles that allow mobile devices to share data and contextualized information.

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2.8.3.3 Mobile Devices Adaptation

The use of mobile devices in Web-based groupware systems in the context of people access control system, poses the problem of the users’ specificity in terms of personal criteria such as user’s personal characteristics, background, culture, interests and preferences, and the context of their use that includes the location, specific situations and environmental conditions [140] . Of great significance in the research and development effort to enhance the access to Web-based collaborative systems, is the adaptation mechanisms and principles aimed at reducing the limitation of the mobile devices in terms of their battery lifetime, screen size, interoperability and intermittent network connections, to display or introduce the appropriate informational content. The improvement of the adaptation process consists of implementing a context-based filtering process that proposes to adapt the information delivered to mobile users by filtering it according to the current user’s context and to the user’s preferences for this context. Allowing a direct participation of the users into the adaptation process to express individual user profiles, a progressive refinement of the profiles description, and the simplification and reuse of profiles, results in additional requirements about the delivery of services, data and presentation [139]. Taking into account the interface requirements of mobile devices in use in the MAS, these additional requirements are translated into specifications incorporated in the design of interface agent's actions.

2.8.3.4 Dynamic Re-Configurable Web-Based Applications

The search for new ways to design and manage the deployment of systems and services has always been a constant engineering challenge for researchers and practitioners to deal with systems in a continuously changing environment and with emerging requirements that may be unknown at design-time. In recent years, web self-adaptation systems emerged, and considerable progress has been made in several software engineering domains to advance and improve the dynamic aspects of system reconfiguration aimed at providing web-based collaborative self-assembling and self-adaptive applications by proposing the feedback loops concept from the perspective of control engineering to control self-adaptation of systems [141]. These domains include requirements engineering, software architecture, middleware, and component-based development.

Self-adaptive systems are aimed to meet their higher-level objectives which are to be deployed on a large scale, able to function without any or very little human intervention, and regulating emerging requirements and orchestrating emergent properties.

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