Research

Distributed systems and services engineering

The research activity is carried on mainly in two areas: cooperative distributed systems with the development of systems and tools to support communities of users that need to collaborate and share knowledge; and Service Oriented Computing (SOC) with the development of techniques and tools to support description, selection, composition and execution of Web services with focus on non-functional properties.
In the former the objective is to create and share reach descriptions of involved entities (communities, people, devices, projects, artifacts, documents, emails, …) based on ontologies that allow for identifying relations among entities to promote and support cooperation through awareness.
The objective of the latter is to support business process execution with a comprehensive approach that goes beyond the technical aspects to deals with business requirements that are represented by non-functional properties associated with offered Web services and with user requests.

Information systems

A research activity in the area of information systems concerns with the analysis and development of methodologies for planning and design of information systems, in particular in eGovernment and public-administration domains. Furthermore, the research activity is placed in the area of Service Science, aiming to integrate ICT paradigms with the traditional approaches to management of services. A theoretical investigation deals with the definition of the concept of service and its relationships with service provisioning at technological level, namely the concepts of eServices and Web Services.  The research activity aims to integrate the knowledge about services that have been developed in different disciplines (sociology, economics, organizational studies, computer science) in a methodological framework to capture the several facets of ICT supported service provisioning.
Another research topic is Data Quality Management, with a focus on the study of the assessment activity of heterogeneous data in a privacy context supporting the quality driven query answering processing. The main goals are:

1. the definition of a framework to asses quality of data without disclosing their privacy;
2. the support of information retrieval by metrics for quality evaluation of heterogeneous data (i.e. structured, semi-structured and unstructured data);
3. the analysis of dependencies among data quality dimensions with data-driven approaches.

Interaction technologies and ubiquitous computing

The staff of the ITIS lab has experience with the design and prototyping of complex interactive systems. Particular attention has been devoted to context-aware and ubiquitous-computing systems. The issues related to these kinds of systems have been tackled from various perspective:

• at interaction-design level, by studying how current and next-generation technologies affect human-human and human-computer interaction, and by developing novel scenarios and interaction paradigms;
• at model and architecture level, by defining new ways to design systems employing well known paradigms from computer science (e.g., multi-agent systems) as well as theories from communication and social sciences (e.g., linguistics);
• at knowledge level, by investigating how ontologies and similar knowledge representation instruments can be successfully employed to achieve context-awareness (e.g., with dynamic, distributed, and fuzzy ontologies);
• at technology level, by testing innovative devices (fixed and mobile) within complex setups.

Cooperation technologies

The cooperation technology area is about the definition of models and architectures to design technologies supporting collaboration, communication, coordination, and knowledge sharing in complex work settings. In particular the latter are characterized by heterogeneity, distributedness, and high dynamicity, like the healthcare and archeological domains. A specific interest is also about adaptive and context-aware systems in a ubiquitous computing perspective. Some of the projects:

• SWIRLS: the project aims at providing a contextual flexible and adaptive support to clinical care;
• MOSAICO: the project is about distributed care and it aims at providing a technological support to facilitate continuity of care;
• ARCHEO: the project aims at investigating how to design innovative applications to support archeological work.

The ITIS group is also interested in the study, design, and development of novel systems devoted to support the practices of real communities both at work and in everyday life (e.g., Communityware, Community Informatics, CoP). The group experiments the use of ICT and novel interaction paradigms for supporting local communities with the aims of providing new opportunities for social integration of penalized subjects (e.g., elderly, children) as well as new impulse to the “battle” against the losing of identities suffered by local communities under the pressure of globalization. E.g., in the EU funded Campiello the adoption of paper based and large screen interfaces have been experimented in supporting the cultural exchange among the community of people living in art cities and foreign visitors. In this case, the provision of different and multiple interfaces and interaction mechanisms, instead of a broad range of services via a single interface, granted accessibility and usability for all potential users.