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A Lightweight Process Engine for Enabling Advanced Mobile Applications

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Book cover On the Move to Meaningful Internet Systems: OTM 2016 Conferences (OTM 2016)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 10033))

Abstract

The widespread dissemination of smart mobile devices offers new perspectives for timely data collection in large-scale scenarios. However, realizing sophisticated mobile data collection applications raises various technical issues like the support of different mobile operating systems and their platform-specific features. Often, specifically tailored mobile applications are implemented in order to meet particular requirements. In this context, changes of the data collection procedure become costly and profound programming skills are needed to adapt the respective mobile application accordingly. To remedy this drawback, we developed a model-driven approach, enabling end-users to create mobile data collection applications themselves. Basis to this approach are elements for flexibly defining sophisticated questionnaires, called instruments, which not only contain information about the data to be collected, but also on how the instrument shall be processed on different mobile operating systems. For the latter purpose, we provide an advanced mobile (kernel) service that is capable of processing the logic of sophisticated instruments on various platforms. The paper discusses fundamental requirements for such a kernel and introduces a generic architecture. The feasibility of this architecture is demonstrated through a prototypical implementation. Altogether, the mobile service allows for the effective use of smart mobile devices in a multitude of different data collection application scenarios (e.g., clinical and psychological trials).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://www.uni-ulm.de/en/in/dbis/research/projects/questionsys.html, accessed: July 13th, 2016.

  2. 2.

    Due to lack of space we only illustrate the algorithm for the Android platform.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Databases and Information Systems, Ulm University, Ulm, Germany

    Johannes Schobel, Rüdiger Pryss, Marc Schickler & Manfred Reichert

Authors
  1. Johannes Schobel
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  2. Rüdiger Pryss
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  3. Marc Schickler
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  4. Manfred Reichert
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Johannes Schobel .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. ADAPT Centre, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin 2, Ireland

    Christophe Debruyne

  2. University of Lorraine, Vandoeuvre-les-Nancy, France

    Hervé Panetto

  3. TU Graz, Graz, Austria

    Robert Meersman

  4. La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia

    Tharam Dillon

  5. Institute of Computer Languages, TU Wien, Vienna, Austria

    eva Kühn

  6. ADAPT Centre, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin 2, Ireland

    Declan O'Sullivan

  7. Università degli Studi di Milano Crema, Crema, Italy

    Claudio Agostino Ardagna

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Schobel, J., Pryss, R., Schickler, M., Reichert, M. (2016). A Lightweight Process Engine for Enabling Advanced Mobile Applications. In: Debruyne, C., et al. On the Move to Meaningful Internet Systems: OTM 2016 Conferences. OTM 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10033. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-48472-3_33

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-48472-3_33

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-48471-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-48472-3

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