Sergio Firmenich

Universidad Nacional de La Plata | UNLP · Laboratorio de Investigación y Formación en Informática Avanzada LIFIA

This article addresses search tasks, which are the most frequent type of tasks users do nowadays on the Web. We suggest that the customization of search services would improve the user’s searching experience, and it also might make search tasks more effective and efficient. We analyze user tasks for performing searches and types of search services....

Nowadays, end-users are able to adapt Web applications when some of their requirements have not been taken into account by developers. One possible way to do adaptations is by using Web Augmentation techniques. Web Augmentation allows end-users to modify the Web sites’ user interfaces once these are loaded on the client-side, i.e., in the browser....

Web extensions are powerful software artifacts that allow end-users to adapt and enrich a website. These extensions run on the user's web browser as a single-user software that manipulates available third-party web contents. Many of them offer some collaborative features that depend on a web application. The need of two co-depending software artifa...

Nowadays, the accessibility of open data on the Web is problematic, in particular for those data enthusiasts (non-technical users really interested in data) with visual disabilities. They generally experience accessibility barriers when browsing open data portals. Therefore, in order to improve accessibility and facilitate visually impaired users t...

In the past decades recommender systems have become a powerful tool to improve personalization on the Web. Yet, many popular websites lack such functionality, its implementation usually requires certain technical skills, and, above all, its introduction is beyond the scope and control of end-users. To alleviate these problems, this paper presents a...

Decision making in agriculture increasingly relies on software, for example to gather important information or to weight alternatives. Information systems innovation in agriculture is a challenging and very active area. Existing software products, frequently implemented as web applications, are found to lack functionality, for example to support co...

Web augmentation is a set of techniques allowing users to define and execute software which is dependent on the presentation layer of a concrete Web page. Through the use of specialized Web augmentation artifacts, the end users may satisfy several kinds of requirements that were not considered by the analysts, developers and stakeholders that built...

Usability and user interaction improvement is a central task in web development to guarantee the success of a web application. However, designers are barely able to keep up with the current development cycle because their practices are too costly, while interaction issues accumulate in applications that end-users keep suffering. In this work, we pr...

Web extensions are currently the most frequently used mechanism for end-users to externally adapt and enrich the web. While most functionality offered by extensions runs on the browser, extensions that offer collaboration, complex computation, or massive storage rely on a centralized server. Relying on a server increases the cost of building, deplo...

Even nowadays, users with disabilities still experience barriers while accessing information on the Web. In order to facilitate visually-impaired users to access this information, we propose a Web Augmentation Framework for Accessibility (WAFRA). The main focus of our framework are information-rich websites, such as Wikipedia, but it is also applic...

Nowadays, the development of Web applications supporting distributed user interfaces (DUI) is straightforward. However, it is still hard to find Web sites supporting this kind of user interaction. Although studies on this field have demonstrated that DUI would improve the user experience, users are not massively empowered to manage these kinds of i...

The Web is a natural platform for end-user development given the amount of services and contents that users may require to adapt, automate, etc. Transcodings, mashups, Web augmentation, and other techniques have emerged to allow end users to improve their Web experiences. In this context, the use of Web browser extensions is a very common strategy...

Web Augmentation is usually applied to add, remove and change Web sites’ functionalities, content, and presentation. Content-based Web Augmentation is commonly performed by integrating content from an external Web site into the current one. In this article, we explore the use of the Semantic Web as a source of information to be incorporated to any...

Voice Assistants, and particularly the latest gadgets called smart speakers, allow end users to interact with applications by means of voice commands. As usual, end users are able to install applications (also called skills) that are available in repositories and fulfill multiple purposes. In this work we present an end-user environment to define s...

In this chapter, we discuss methods and tools for adapting user interfaces to make them more accessible. We introduce the problem of user interface adaptation and characterize different techniques to be adapted to the user interface. We show that there is a broad range of methods and tools to transform existing interfaces to make them accessible. W...

The trend towards mobile devices usage has put more than ever the Web as a ubiquitous platform where users perform all kind of tasks. In some cases, users access the Web with 'native' mobile applications developed for well-known sites, such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc. These native applications might offer further (e.g. location-based) func...

Nowadays, the development of Web applications supporting distributed user interfaces (DUI) is straightforward. However, it is still hard to find Web sites supporting this kind of user interaction. Although studies on this field have demonstrated that DUI would improve the user experience, users are not massively empowered to manage these kinds of i...

The World Wide Web is a vast and continuously changing source of information where searching is a frequent, and sometimes critical, user task. Searching is not always the user's primary goal but an ancillary task that is performed to find complementary information allowing to complete another task. In this paper, we explore primary and/or ancillary...

The Web is a vast source of semi-structured datasets that are made readily available to support the construction of new knowledge. Information visualization techniques have been demonstrated as a suitable alternative for allowing users to analyze and understand a large amount of data. However, the steps required for visualizing semi-structured data...

There are activities that on-line customers daily perform, which involve a multi-criteria decision challenge. Choosing a destination for traveling, buying a book to read, or buying a mobile phone are some examples. Customers analyze and compare alternatives considering a set of shared characteristics, and under certain criteria. E-commerce websites...

Usability evaluation is an essential task in web application development. There have been several attempts to integrate user-centered design with agile methods, but it is hard to synchronize their practices. User testing is very valuable to learn from feedback of actual use, but it remains expensive to find and solve usability problems. Furthermore...

Recommender systems are integrated with a significant number of Web applications helping users to find what may be of their interest. However, these systems do not always satisfy the users’ expectations regarding when and where recommendations are available, what is recommended, the source of the recommendations or how they are presented. Moreover,...

Web Applications are accessed by millions of users with different needs, goals, concerns, or preferences. Several well-known Web Applications provide personalized features, e.g., they recommend specific content to users by contemplating individual characteristics or requirements. However, since most Web Application cannot consider all users’ requir...

Usability has long been recognized as an important software quality attribute and it has become essential in web application development and maintenance. However, it is still hard to integrate usability evaluation and improvement practices in the software development process. Moreover, these practices are usually unaffordable for small to medium-si...

The importance of the Internet of Things (IoT) in our society is reflected by its exponential growth over recent and years to come. The Web of Things (WoT) emerged as a special case of IoT, allowing end-users to deal with their devices through Web applications, with which they are familiar. However, as more users are reached by this technology, it...

This article presents design decisions for an ontology-based framework supporting an expert-driven approach to the collaborative acquisition, integration and analysis of information. It describes a three-tier organization in which components facilitate establishing an information system to assist domain experts in addressing multi-causal dynamic si...

This article presents MoWA Authoring, an End User Development platform supporting the improvement of existing –usually third party– Web applications with mobile features. This enhancement is carried out by the addition of specific behaviours, mostly dependent on context values. The tool assists the user in the construction of applications by easily...

The World Wide Web is a vast and continuously changing source of information where searching is a frequent, and sometimes critical, user task. Searching is not always the user’s primary goal but an ancillary task that is performed to find complementary information allowing to complete another task. In this paper, we explore primary and/or ancillary...

With the current trend of digitalization within a multitude of different domains, the need raises for effective approaches to capture domain knowledge. Modeling languages, especially, domain-specific modeling languages (DSMLs), are considered as an important method to involve domain experts in the system development. However, current approaches for...

In this work we present an approach for creating Personal Web applications by reusing existing content that can be extracted even from third-party Web sites. Our approach starts with the harvesting of content from diverse Web sites, by DOM manipulation. Users without programming skills are empowered with tools for transforming DOM elements into mea...

Mobile Web Applications combine traditional navigation access enriched with location-based services, which results in a more complex development process since there are a myriad of issues to consider while integrating these kinds of behaviours. This complexity increases even more if the integration of another specific functionality is considered, a...

The trend towards mobile devices usage has made it possible for the Web to be conceived not only as an information space but also as a ubiquitous platform where users perform all kinds of tasks. In some cases, users access the Web with native mobile applications developed for well-known sites, such as, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. These native...

odel-Driven Web Engineering (MDWE) approaches aim to improve the Web applications development process by focusing on modeling instead of coding, and deriving the running application by transformations from conceptual models to code. The emergence of the Interaction Flow Modeling Language (IFML) has been an important milestone in the evolution of We...

Knowledge management is key for any organization. Huge amount of data is made available to organizations by pervasive technologies such as smart mobile devices. However, the knowledge to use such data is still missing, and organizations typically fail to exploit it. This paper proposes an architectural design that aims at addressing such problem. I...

The Personal Web arose to empower end users with the ability to drive and integrate the Web by themselves, according to their own interests. This is usually achieved through Web Augmentation, Mashups or Personal Information Managers (PIM), but despite the diversity of approaches, there are still scenarios that require to be solved through the combi...

This paper presents a novel approach for supporting abstraction and structuring mechanisms of Web contents. The goal of this approach is to enable users to create/extract Web contents in the form of objects that they can manipulate to create Personal Web experiences. We present an architecture that not only allows the user interaction with individu...

Immersed in social and mobile Web, users are expecting personalized browsing experiences, based on their needs, goals, and preferences. However, adding personalization to an existing Web site is not a simple task for Web owners who are not personalization experts. Most of the existing personalization approaches imply extending the backend applicati...

This paper presents a novel approach towards the opportunistic and lightweight distribution of existent Web User Interfaces. We describe an architecture that allows end-users to collect UI objects into a distributed UI-Component-oriented PIM, accessible from different user’s devices. Once in the PIM, the collected UI components are wrapped with dif...

Modding refers to the act of modifying hardware, software, or virtually anything else, to perform a function not originally conceived or intended by the designer. The rationales for modding should be sought in the aspiration of users to contextualize to their own situation the artefact at hand. Websites are not exception. WebMakeup targets mod scen...

The use of Web augmentation techniques has an impact on tasks of owners of Web sites, developers of scripts and end-users. Because the Web sites can be modified by external scripts, their owners might lose control about how Web site contents are delivered. To prevent this, they might be tempted to modify the structure of Web pages thus making harde...

Springer SharedIt Link to Full-text: http://rdcu.be/m1EA Universal access should be a target for all public Web sites. However, it is very hard to achieve, and even Web applications that comply with accessibility standards may still lack usability for disabled users. This paper proposes refactoring as an essencial technique to incrementally improve...

The increasing volume of content and actions available on the Web, combined with the growing number of mature digital natives, anticipate a growing desire of controlling the Web experience. Akin to the Web2.0 movement, webies’ desires do not stop at content authoring but look for controlling how content is arranged in websites. By content, we mainl...

Immersed in social and mobile Web, users are expecting personalized browsing experiences, based on their needs, goals, and preferences. This may be complex since the users’ Web navigations usually imply several (related) Web applications. A very popular technique to tackle this challenge is Web augmentation. Previously, we presented an approach to...

Web augmentation has emerged as a technique for customizing Web applications beyond the personalization mechanisms natively included in them. This technique usually manipulates existing Web sites on the client-side via scripts (commonly referred as userscripts) that can change its presentation and behavior. Large communities have surfaced around th...

Currently, a lot of the tasks engaged by users over the Web involve dealing with multiple Web sites. Moreover, whilst Web navigation was considered as a lonely activity in the past, a large proportion of users are nowadays engaged in collaborative activities over the Web. In this paper we argue that these two aspects of collaboration and tasks span...

In the last decade, several specialized tools have been created upon similarity functions that, given a keyword and a context, determine the degree of similarity (or probability) that information in a dataset corresponds to the user's query. Quite often such tools are meant for experts and require training and knowledge on the application domain to...

In this paper we claim that there are a lot of processes over Web applications that require a high level of coordination between individuals and tasks featuring procedures. We propose hereafter a Domain Specific Language (DSL) for describing the asynchronous orchestration users' tasks including manual users' tasks (i.e. simple instructions that tel...

In this paper we claim that there are a lot of processes over Web ap- plications that require a high level of coordination between individuals and tasks featuring procedures. We propose hereafter a Domain Specific Language (DSL) for describing the asynchronous orchestration users’ tasks including manual users’ tasks (i.e. simple instructions that t...

Building Mobile Web or Hypermedia Applications is usually difficult since there is a myriad of issues to take into account. Moreover adding support for personalized or context-aware behaviors goes far beyond the possibilities of many kinds of organizations that intend to build this kind of software (museums, city halls, etc). In this article we pre...

According to W3C accessibility standards, most Web applications are neither accessible nor usable for people with disabilities. Developers often solve this problem by building separate accessible applications, but these applications are seldom usable and typically offer less functionality than the original. Another common solution is to maintain a...

Currently, many tasks performed on the Web prompt users to provide personal information through forms. Despite the fact that most users are familiarized with this kind of interaction technique, the use of Web forms is not always straightforward. Indeed, some users might need assistance to understand labels and complex data format required to fill i...

Currently, users navigate across the Web in order to accomplish complex tasks. Frequently, these tasks involve working with many different Web applications. For this kind of tasks users have to move information manually among Web pages. While in the field of Adaptive Web there is important and meaningful research about adapting Web sites according...

Web forms are massively used as a very effective way for user interaction with information systems. Notwithstanding, filling in forms with personal data can be tedious and repetitive. Due to legal and technical constraints, full interoperability of information systems is not a straightforward solution. So that several client-side techniques have be...

Currently the Web is a platform for performing complex tasks which involve dealing with different Web applications. However users still have to face these tasks in a handcrafted way. In this paper we present a novel approach that combines concern-sensitive adaptation and navigation history to improve the user experience while performing a task. We...

Currently the Web is a platform for performing complex tasks which involve dealing with different Web applications. However, users still have to face these tasks in a handcrafted way. While building “opportunistic” service-based software, such as mashups, can be a solution for combining data and information from different providers, many times this...

Currently the Web allows users to perform complex tasks which involve different Web applications. Anyway they still have to face these tasks in a handcrafted way. Although it is possible to build service-based software, such as mashups, to combine data and information from different providers, many times this approach has limitations. In this paper...

Improving navigability in Web applications is essential for applications success. Our research aims to improve the user experience by applying novel techniques such as concern-sensitive navigation. Concern-sensitive navigation allows enriching Web pages with content related to the context in which they are accessed. In previous works, we showed how...

Improving navigability in Web applications is a serious challenge for developers as this quality feature is essential for applications success. In this paper we present the concept of concern-sensitive navigation, a useful conceptual tool to improve navigation by profiting from the nature of application's concerns. Concern sensitive navigation allo...