Spark

Editorial

Stephen Lofthouse — 2010-08-05

Welcome to this first issue of Spark - The journal of postgraduate research. This journal has been established to showcase the best in post graduate research here at Sheffield Hallam University.

Here at SHU we understand the importance of purpose. We strive to stretch our students, encouraging and facilitating their growth and development. Our teaching is research lead and we have always encouraged our students to get involved with research. Unfortunately, in the past, the students had no means of showcasing their work and in terms of the research cycle the final step was always missing as they had no easily accessible means of publishing their work and gaining the credit and recognition that comes with being a published academic.

Spark has been developed to satisfy this need. It is a platform which will showcase the very best work from the postgraduates within the university. Whether working alone or in conjunction with their tutor's, postgraduate students now have a recognised way to get their work exposed to a wider audience and claim the credit that our students deserve.

In creating this journal we have embraced the rigor of the publication process. All of our articles are peer reviewed and the overall governance of the journal is guided by an editorial board made up of both students and academics. Our aim is to maintain a very high standard thereby reflecting the high quality work undertaken within the university and providing something for our postgraduates to aim for. The journal will comprise work taken from across the faculty of Arts, Computing, Engineering and Sciences and we hope that this wide variety of subjects will give rise to a publication full of diverse and interesting articles.

Steve Lofthouse

Incorporating Research Publication in Undergraduate & Postgraduate Learning

Stephen Lofthouse — 2010-09-13

Universities are under increasing pressure to provide innovative, cost effective, and high quality teaching in order to equip learners for the modern digital economy. Numerous studies have shown the need to incorporate research within the curriculum. Sadly whilst universities do successfully include research based modules and assessment within their teaching portfolio, studies have identified that a lack of publication prevents learners from realising the full benefits of research based practice. Using journal management software I have been able to implement a number of journals to facilitate the publication of student work as well as facilitating the inclusion of social constructivist teaching methodologies with our curricula.

Pattern Based Design Can Improve Usability of Sheffield Hallam University Student Timetable

Bhakti Nagavkar — 2010-08-05

We present a comparative study of the use of patterns to build a new and effective time tabling system with the help of user responses and liking. We used the students and the people related to the time tabling system to collect information regarding the system. The subjects were given a set of questionnaires and interviews. The answers collected from these questionnaires and interviews were used to construct the time tabling system.

Service-Orientation and Object-Orientation: Complementary Design Paradigms

Garry Stubbings — 2010-08-05

Modern software development techniques evolve around the use of object-orientation (OO). However, there is an increasing drive to develop applications using distinct services that facilitate the reuse of already developed business processes through functions rather than objects. This paper discusses the benefits and influence of these paradigms with respect to how consideration should be placed on both when carrying out software design.

Utilising the Universal Description, Discovery and Integration registry to provide business performance and quality of service data for web

Mark Fox — 2010-08-05

Web services can be defined as 'a family of interrelated standards that work together to provide a simple way to allow program functionality in different languages and on different platforms to interoperate' (Mattern and Woods, 2006, p. 13). Interoperability is therefore the key to the technology as it can provide an organisation with the ability to communicate and perform business tasks with other business partners regardless of language or platform.

Web Services : In support of Competitive Advantage

Gerald Philips — 2010-08-05

Opportunities for competitive advantage arising from the emergence of web services can be realised by any of the players from cloud computing providers to Software as a Service (Saas) providers and users (Armbrust, et al.). However, the focus here will be on web services providers and users.

A Practical Exploration of Ontology interoperability with Conceptual Graphs for added expressivity in the Semantic Web

Ashima Shah — 2010-08-05

In the pursuit of adding expressivity to ontologies by the use of ISO Common Logic, we explore how Conceptual Graphs (CG) can enhance ontologies modeled in the Semantic Web (SW). Various strengths and weaknesses of SW's RDF/OWL are identified and considered how they be addressed by CG. We put these strengths and weaknesses to the test through a rich and topical business example in the form of a financial trading case study. We continue this practical vein by generating its ontology using the Protégé OWL tool and then use the CG CoGui Tool to elicit the comparative expressiveness as realised by these contemporary, representative software tools. In particular, the case study's OWL ontology is subjected to its business rules by means of the CG operations in CoGui. The work demonstrates how an OWL ontology can interoperate and in turn be enriched by CG tools in a practical, implementable way and from this experience stimulate industry interest in adding meaningful semantics to the SW to make it a mainstream business proposition.

A Practical Exploration of Ontology Interoperability

Simon Polovina — 2010-08-05

ISO Common Logic (CL, ISO/IEC 24707:2007) offers the Semantic Web (SW) a new and powerful dimension in achieving the effective discovery, automation, integration, and reuse across applications, data and knowledge. The paper shows how it is possible to explore such interoperability through small scale exemplar projects. As Conceptual Graphs (CG) is a key technology in CL, we focused on the Amine CG software and for the SW we focused on the Prot´eg´e OWL software, exploring the possible mappings between ontologies captured in OWL and in Amine. Through this practical exercise the dimensions and extent of the desired interoperability could be demonstrated. This small but significant experiment provided a practical insight into how CG Tools can actually interoperate towards achieving the wider goal of Ontology interoperability between CL and the SW.