Stefano Levialdi Ghiron’s research while affiliated with Sapienza University of Rome and other places

Tag-based indexing systems allow users to name web resources freely choosing keywords, called tags. Users (observers) may browse resources using a tag-cloud, a screen presentation that looks like an alphabetically ordered list of the most popular tags, visually weighted by font size. This project called Artsonomy, enables users to associate keywords (tags) to real artworks (for ex. in a museum) labeled with a QR Code by means of an application on a mobile device. The user’s tags are collected in a tag-cloud on the Artsonomy website so enabling other obesrvers to share their experience after viewing an artwork.

In this paper, we describe the prototype and usability test of a Near Field Communication (NFC)-based Virtual Ticketing application, developed via the collaboration between two research labs of Sapienza University of Rome: RFID Lab and LUA (Accessibility and Usability Lab). We conceived a usable application to allow the user to buy tickets for public transportation with a mobile phone, considering its increasing importance in the user life. The application, named NFCTicketing, was developed following a user-centered approach, so obtaining a balance between the information reduction required by the user and the increase of application flexibility. In this way, the NFCTicketing service will not only be less complex and therefore less expensive (keeping low both the cost of development and implementation) but will also be more usable for a broad community of users. The NFCTicketing application combines latest-generation technologies (such as NFC) with well-known technologies such as Short Message Service (SMS). All the architectural components of the application are fully described, detailing both software and hardware features and also the relative communication scheme. Finally, we focus the attention on usability studies on the application, fully reporting the users’ responses to the usability test. On the basis of the users’ responses, opinion and expectations, we detected the application’s weak spots and outlined possible modifications for a final release.

In this work we present a system to encode location based information extracted from a media collection (the Flickr tagging system) into a single 2D physical label. This information is clustered by using locations metadata (geotags) and key-words (tags) associated to pictures. Our system helps two types of users: the user authoring the physical label and the final user who retrieves up-to-date information scanning the label with his/her camera phone. Preliminary results for a given seed word (the tag Napoli) on 3000 photographs are presented, together with some ad-hoc weighting factors that help in finding significant pictures (representing places) that can be associated to a specific area.