Smart environments can engage a wide range of end users with different interests and priorities, from corporate managers looking to improve the performance of their business to school children who want to explore and learn more about the world around them. Creating an effective user experience within a smart environment (from smart buildings to smart cities) is an important factor to success. In this article, we reflect on our experience of developing Internet-of-Things-enabled applications within a smart home, school, office building, university, and airport, where the goal has been to engage a wide range of users (from building managers to business travellers) to increase water and energy awareness, management, and conservation.Driven by the idea of using ICT to more effectively and efficiently manage resources, smart environments have emerged in the form of smart cities, smart buildings, smart grids, smart water, and smart mobility. 1 Mark Weiser and colleagues define a smart environment as "a physical world that is richly and invisibly interwoven with sensors, actuators, displays, and computational elements, embedded seamlessly in the everyday objects of our lives, and connected through a continuous network." 2 A key driver in the development of smart environments is the convergence of technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and big data, which are driving the
One of the biggest issues the World Wide Web (WWW) community has to overcome is accessibility for all. The rapid expansion of the WWW using problematic web authoring practices, together with the dominance of the desktop metaphor in web page design has raised many WWW accessibility problems for people with disabilities. In this paper we present a what may be termed as a "Semantic Web application framework" which allows different applications to be designed and developed for improving accessibility of the WWW. Apart from the architecture, the tools and the technologies that compose the framework, the key idea of the framework is that it aims at promoting the idea of creating a community of people federating into groups each playing a specific role: ontology creators creating concepts using an ontological approach to describe various elements of the WWW, annotators using concepts to annotate specific pages, user-agent developers creating tools based on the framework, and finally end-users (people with disabilities) that use these tools for their benefit. Within the proposed framework, these groups cooperate and interact with each other, having as their ultimate goal the improvement of WWW accessibility.
This paper presents a ''Semantic Web application framework'' which allows different applications to be designed and developed for improving the accessibility of the World Wide Web (WWW). The framework promotes the idea of creating a community of people federating into groups (ontology creators, annotators, user-agent developers, end-users) each playing a specific role, without the coordination of any central authority. The use of a specialised voice web browser for blind people, called SeEBrowser, is presented and discussed as an example of an accessibility tool developed based on the framework. SeEBrowser utilises annotations of web pages and provides browsing shortcuts. Browsing shortcuts are mechanisms, which facilitate blind people in moving efficiently through various elements of a web page (e.g. functional elements such as forms, navigational aids etc.) during the information-seeking process, hence operating effectively as a vital counterbalance to low accessibility. Finally, an experimental user study is presented and discussed which evaluates SeEBrowser with and without the use of browsing shortcuts.
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