25,671 research outputs found
Stabilizing knowledge through standards - A perspective for the humanities
It is usual to consider that standards generate mixed feelings among
scientists. They are often seen as not really reflecting the state of the art
in a given domain and a hindrance to scientific creativity. Still, scientists
should theoretically be at the best place to bring their expertise into
standard developments, being even more neutral on issues that may typically be
related to competing industrial interests. Even if it could be thought of as
even more complex to think about developping standards in the humanities, we
will show how this can be made feasible through the experience gained both
within the Text Encoding Initiative consortium and the International
Organisation for Standardisation. By taking the specific case of lexical
resources, we will try to show how this brings about new ideas for designing
future research infrastructures in the human and social sciences
Security-oriented data grids for microarray expression profiles
Microarray experiments are one of the key ways in which gene activity can be identified and measured thereby shedding light and understanding for example on biological processes. The BBSRC funded Grid enabled Microarray Expression Profile Search (GEMEPS) project has developed an infrastructure which allows post-genomic life science researchers to ask and answer the following questions: who has undertaken microarray experiments that are in some way similar or relevant to mine; and how similar were these relevant experiments? Given that microarray experiments are expensive to undertake and may possess crucial information for future exploitation (both academically and commercially), scientists are wary of allowing unrestricted access to their data by the wider community until fully exploited locally. A key requirement is thus to have fine grained security that is easy to establish and simple (or ideally transparent) to use across inter-institutional virtual organisations. In this paper we present an enhanced security-oriented data Grid infrastructure that supports the definition of these kinds of queries and the analysis and comparison of microarray experiment results
Enhancing workflow-nets with data for trace completion
The growing adoption of IT-systems for modeling and executing (business)
processes or services has thrust the scientific investigation towards
techniques and tools which support more complex forms of process analysis. Many
of them, such as conformance checking, process alignment, mining and
enhancement, rely on complete observation of past (tracked and logged)
executions. In many real cases, however, the lack of human or IT-support on all
the steps of process execution, as well as information hiding and abstraction
of model and data, result in incomplete log information of both data and
activities. This paper tackles the issue of automatically repairing traces with
missing information by notably considering not only activities but also data
manipulated by them. Our technique recasts such a problem in a reachability
problem and provides an encoding in an action language which allows to
virtually use any state-of-the-art planning to return solutions
IVOA Recommendation: SAMP - Simple Application Messaging Protocol Version 1.3
SAMP is a messaging protocol that enables astronomy software tools to
interoperate and communicate.
IVOA members have recognised that building a monolithic tool that attempts to
fulfil all the requirements of all users is impractical, and it is a better use
of our limited resources to enable individual tools to work together better.
One element of this is defining common file formats for the exchange of data
between different applications. Another important component is a messaging
system that enables the applications to share data and take advantage of each
other's functionality. SAMP builds on the success of a prior messaging
protocol, PLASTIC, which has been in use since 2006 in over a dozen astronomy
applications and has proven popular with users and developers. It is also
intended to form a framework for more general messaging requirements
Distribution pattern-driven development of service architectures
Distributed systems are being constructed by composing a number of discrete components. This practice is particularly prevalent within the Web service domain in the form of service process orchestration and choreography. Often, enterprise systems are built from many existing discrete applications such as legacy applications exposed using Web service interfaces. There are a number of architectural configurations or distribution patterns, which express how a composed system is to be deployed in a distributed environment. However, the amount of code
required to realise these distribution patterns is considerable. In this paper, we propose a distribution
pattern-driven approach to service composition and architecting. We develop, based on a catalog of patterns, a UML-compliant framework, which takes existing Web service interfaces as its input and generates executable Web service compositions based on a distribution pattern chosen by the software architect
Evaluating Knowledge Representation and Reasoning Capabilites of Ontology Specification Languages
The interchange of ontologies across the World Wide Web (WWW) and the cooperation among heterogeneous agents placed on it is the main reason for the development of a new set of ontology specification languages, based on new web standards such as XML or RDF. These languages (SHOE, XOL, RDF, OIL, etc) aim to represent the knowledge contained in an ontology in a simple and human-readable way, as well as allow for the interchange of ontologies across the web. In this paper, we establish a common framework to compare the expressiveness of "traditional" ontology languages (Ontolingua, OKBC, OCML, FLogic, LOOM) and "web-based" ontology languages. As a result of this study, we conclude that different needs in KR and reasoning may exist in the building of an ontology-based application, and these needs must be evaluated in order to choose the most suitable ontology language(s)
Building Efficient Query Engines in a High-Level Language
Abstraction without regret refers to the vision of using high-level
programming languages for systems development without experiencing a negative
impact on performance. A database system designed according to this vision
offers both increased productivity and high performance, instead of sacrificing
the former for the latter as is the case with existing, monolithic
implementations that are hard to maintain and extend. In this article, we
realize this vision in the domain of analytical query processing. We present
LegoBase, a query engine written in the high-level language Scala. The key
technique to regain efficiency is to apply generative programming: LegoBase
performs source-to-source compilation and optimizes the entire query engine by
converting the high-level Scala code to specialized, low-level C code. We show
how generative programming allows to easily implement a wide spectrum of
optimizations, such as introducing data partitioning or switching from a row to
a column data layout, which are difficult to achieve with existing low-level
query compilers that handle only queries. We demonstrate that sufficiently
powerful abstractions are essential for dealing with the complexity of the
optimization effort, shielding developers from compiler internals and
decoupling individual optimizations from each other. We evaluate our approach
with the TPC-H benchmark and show that: (a) With all optimizations enabled,
LegoBase significantly outperforms a commercial database and an existing query
compiler. (b) Programmers need to provide just a few hundred lines of
high-level code for implementing the optimizations, instead of complicated
low-level code that is required by existing query compilation approaches. (c)
The compilation overhead is low compared to the overall execution time, thus
making our approach usable in practice for compiling query engines
OntoMaven: Maven-based Ontology Development and Management of Distributed Ontology Repositories
In collaborative agile ontology development projects support for modular
reuse of ontologies from large existing remote repositories, ontology project
life cycle management, and transitive dependency management are important
needs. The Apache Maven approach has proven its success in distributed
collaborative Software Engineering by its widespread adoption. The contribution
of this paper is a new design artifact called OntoMaven. OntoMaven adopts the
Maven-based development methodology and adapts its concepts to knowledge
engineering for Maven-based ontology development and management of ontology
artifacts in distributed ontology repositories.Comment: Pre-print submission to 9th International Workshop on Semantic Web
Enabled Software Engineering (SWESE2013). Berlin, Germany, December 2-5, 201
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