One of the main tasks in robotics is to precisely connect the robot's coordinate system with the world's coordinate system. For parallel mechanisms, this is a challenging task due to the direct kinematics problem, which is usually solved by using iterative algorithms to search for the mobile platform's position and orientation or by adding auxiliary sensors. In this paper, a sensor concept for solving the direct kinematics problem of the Stewart-Gough platform is presented where only three inertial measurement units are used with the aim to renounce length sensors as well as initial and, in some cases, external pose measurements.

All software requires maintenance, either for error correction or for implementing updates.However, maintenance is often complex and expensive, and one of the main problems in the high cost of maintenance is the difficulty of understanding the source code of other authors.Thus, this research presents TaggingSense, a method based on sensemaking that aims to reduce object-oriented source code comprehension time on systems maintenance.Through experimentation, it was possible to observe knowledge extracted from the source code, processing, and sharing, to be positively assisted in the source code maintenance and comprehension process, thus bringing benefits such as reduction time spent, quality, and greater security in the changes made.

Smart objects can be smart because of the information and communication technology that is added to human-made artifacts. It is not, however, the technology itself that makes them smart but rather the way in which the technology is integrated, and their smartness surfaces through how people are able to interact with these objects. Hence, the key challenge for making smart objects successful is to design usable and useful interactions with them. We list five features that can contribute to the smartness of an object, and we discuss how smart objects can help resolve the simplicity-featurism paradox. We conclude by introducing the three articles in this special issue, which dive into various aspects of smart object interaction: augmenting objects with projection, service-oriented interaction with smart objects via a mobile portal, and an analysis of input-output relations in interaction with tangible smart objects.

Although smartphones and tablets become increasingly popular, pen and paper continues to play an important role in mobile practices, such as note taking or creative discussions. Applications designed to combine the benefits of both worlds in a mobile paper-digital ensemble require a theoretical understanding of interaction, to inform the design of adequate interaction techniques. To fill this void, we propose a theory based on the results of a stimulus driven exploratory study.

To be effective, the systematic reuse in software development process must be supported by an artifact database. Although many organizations do not have such database, generally the Service Repository is the catalog responsible for leveraging Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) reuse within the development lifecycle. This paper presents a SOA implementation experience, emphasizing the contributions of developing Service Repository extensions. The adoption of SOA occurred along with a new ERP deployment. One of the main goals was to enable the reuse of standard processes and services within a better integration between ERP system and legacy systems. The repository received additional capabilities to maximize searches and usability; to support configuration and release management; and also address performance issues within cache manageability. The benefits of this work are presented, as well as the results of the current situation in the organization considering SOA repository usage and the empirical evidence collected.

The Internet of Things connects digital information sources with physical objects - which transforms an artifact from being a passive object into a 'thing' that may link to data, store data and even offer data to users. Digital Object Memories (DOMe) comprise hardware and software components, which together provide an open and universal platform for capturing, associating, and interacting with the digital information of connected objects - including storage, documentation and provision of information concerning actions an object is or might be involved in. The goal of this continuation of an established workshop series (predecessor events include DIPSO 2007-09 in conjunction with Ubicomp 2007-09, DOMe in conjunction with Intelligent Environment 2009, DOMe-IoT 2010 in conjunction with Ubicomp 2010, and NOMe-IoT in conjunction with Ubicomp 2011) is to twofold: 1.) initiate a conversation concerning the potential for objects to develop agency; and 2.) explore how data that is associated with an object may leverage real-world actions. Here, DOMe 2012 provides a hybrid interdisciplinary workshop format that will combine traditional presentations and discussion with practice-based experimentation.

Digital Object Memories (DOMes) comprise hardware and software components, which together provide an open and universal platform for capturing and interacting with the digital information of connected objects - including storage, documentation and provision of information concerning actions an object is or might be involved in. We envisage that connected objects equipped with DOMes will be enabled to make suggestions and propositions to human users - which implies that an object may have a level of agency. The latter concept is a striking possibility that may change the way that we perceive, interact, and relate to objects. The goal of this established workshop series is to twofold: 1.) initiate a conversation concerning the potential for objects to develop agency; and 2.) explore how data that is associated with an object may leverage real-world actions. DOMe-IoT 2012 provides a hybrid interdisciplinary workshop format that will combine traditional presentations and discussion with practice-based experimentation.

Specifying interaction between users and smart environments is an important topic in pervasive computing. Both imperative and declarative languages have been investigated in this context. Declarative approaches require more abstract thinking and higher modeling effort but enable greater flexibility. A survey of related work suggests, however, that the high modeling effort of declarative approaches is prohibitive to their practical application. In contrast, imperative approaches lead to static control-flow and over-specification. Still, they are used, mainly due to their simplicity. Our approach supports a systematic transformation process from imperative models to declarative ones. Our method comprises an imperative, workflow-based language that we extended with novel declarative constructs and an algorithm for converting imperative models into declarative ones. Our approach requires only a modest level of declarative specification literacy for reaching a degree of flexibility that formerly only expert designers could achieve with hand-crafted declarative models.

Modern collaboration applications have a multitude of QoS requirements. Depending on the application module, such as messaging, collaborative modeling, or multimedia conferencing, the networking requirements are different. Such applications can greatly benefit from middleware which allows for configuring and using multiple communication stacks from within the same application. This enables applications to employ the best middleware configuration for each communication task. In this paper we demonstrate how to optimize for reliability, low latency, and throughput using configurable protocol stacks. We have implemented a prototype and evaluated the positive effects of customizing the protocol stack in three different use case scenarios.

The number of smart objects in our everyday life is steadily increasing. In this workshop we discuss how the interaction with these smart objects should be designed from various perspectives.

Shopping is one of the most frequently occuring tasks in our daily lives, and creation and management of shopping lists is an important aspect of this task. Given the recent adoption of mobile devices, the process of writing lists is not only limited to the use of pen and paper, as a good number of digital tools and applications are available. The goal of this paper is to study and understand the transition between paper-based and digital shopping lists. We analyze how people interact with paper-based shopping lists and derive design implications for our own hybrid shopping support application, which combines paper-based lists with a mobile application. We contribute the study and the design and implementation of a hybrid (pen-and-paper-based UI and mobile GUI) application for the creation of shopping lists.

Employees are increasingly participating in business processes using mobile devices. Often, this is supported by a mobile web application, which accesses various web services in the back-end. The high latency of the mobile network (e.g., EDGE) is perceived by the user each time a web service is called, in addition to the time needed to invoke the service itself. This high latency may lead to low usability, low acceptance rate, and finally compromises the overall process quality. To reduce the latency perceived by the user, we present a caching architecture for web services and an adaptive prefetching algorithm. The key characteristics of our approach are the compatibility with major mobile browsers and the independence of the caching proxy from the front-end application and the back-end services. We evaluate our approach on realistic traces of web service calls in an IT service management scenario. The traces were generated from handling real incidents according to the ITIL (ISO 20000) processes. The results confirm that using our approach, the latency perceived by the user is reduced by 24%.

Network latency is one of the most critical factors for the usability of mobile SOA applications. This paper introduces prefetching and caching enhancements for an existing SOA framework for mobile applications to reduce the user perceived latency. Latency reduction is achieved by proactively sending data to the mobile device that could most likely be requested at a later time. This additional data is piggybacked onto responses to actual requests and injected into a client side cache, so that it can be used without an additional connection. The prefetching is done automatically using a sequence prediction algorithm. The benefit of prefetching and caching enhancements were evaluated for different network settings and a reduction of user perceived latency of up to 31% was found in a typical scenario. In contrast to other prefetching solutions, our piggybacking approach also allows to significantly increase battery lifetime of the mobile device.

Since the introduction of object-oriented programming few programming languages have attempted to provide programmers with more than objects and classes, i.e., more than two levels. Those that did, almost exclusively aimed at describing language properties-i.e., their metaclasses exert linguistic control on language concepts and mechanisms-often in order to make the language extensible. In terms of supporting logical domain classification levels, however, they are still limited to two levels.