38,914 research outputs found
Online participation: the Woodberry Down experiment
The internet and world wide web are generating radical changes in the way we are able tocommunicate. Our ability to engage communities and individuals in designing theirenvironment is also beginning to change as new digital media provide ways in whichindividuals and groups can interact with planners and politicians in exploring their future.This paper tells the story of how the residents of one of the most disadvantagedcommunities in Britain ? the Woodberry Down Estate in the London borough ofHackney ? have begun to use an online system which delivers everything from routineservices about their housing to ideas about options for their future. Woodberry Down isone of the biggest regeneration projects in Western Europe. It will take at least 10 years,probably much longer, to complete, at a cost of over £150 million. Online participation isone of the many ways in which this community is being engaged but as we will show, itis beginning to act as a catalyst. The kinds of networks which are evolving aroundsystems like these will change the nature of participation itself, the ways we need to thinkabout it, and the ways we need to respond. Before the experiment is described, we set thecontext by describing the wide range of digital media for communicating plans andplanning which suggests a new typology for web participation consistent with this fastemerging network culture
Usability dimensions in collaborative GIS
Collaborative GIS requires careful consideration of the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Usability aspects, given the variety of users that are expected to use these systems, and the need to ensure that users will find the system effective, efficient, and enjoyable. The chapter explains the link between collaborative GIS and usability engineering/HCI studies. The integration of usability considerations into collaborative GIS is demonstrated in two case studies of Web-based GIS implementation. In the first, the process of digitising an area on Web-based GIS is improved to enhance the user's experience, and to allow interaction over narrowband Internet connections. In the second, server-side rendering of 3D scenes allows users who are not equipped with powerful computers to request sophisticated visualisation without the need to download complex software. The chapter concludes by emphasising the need to understand the users' context and conditions within any collaborative GIS project. © 2006, Idea Group Inc
Characterizing a Meta-CDN
CDNs have reshaped the Internet architecture at large. They operate
(globally) distributed networks of servers to reduce latencies as well as to
increase availability for content and to handle large traffic bursts.
Traditionally, content providers were mostly limited to a single CDN operator.
However, in recent years, more and more content providers employ multiple CDNs
to serve the same content and provide the same services. Thus, switching
between CDNs, which can be beneficial to reduce costs or to select CDNs by
optimal performance in different geographic regions or to overcome CDN-specific
outages, becomes an important task. Services that tackle this task emerged,
also known as CDN broker, Multi-CDN selectors, or Meta-CDNs. Despite their
existence, little is known about Meta-CDN operation in the wild. In this paper,
we thus shed light on this topic by dissecting a major Meta-CDN. Our analysis
provides insights into its infrastructure, its operation in practice, and its
usage by Internet sites. We leverage PlanetLab and Ripe Atlas as distributed
infrastructures to study how a Meta-CDN impacts the web latency
Knowledge Organization Systems (KOS) in the Semantic Web: A Multi-Dimensional Review
Since the Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) specification and its
SKOS eXtension for Labels (SKOS-XL) became formal W3C recommendations in 2009 a
significant number of conventional knowledge organization systems (KOS)
(including thesauri, classification schemes, name authorities, and lists of
codes and terms, produced before the arrival of the ontology-wave) have made
their journeys to join the Semantic Web mainstream. This paper uses "LOD KOS"
as an umbrella term to refer to all of the value vocabularies and lightweight
ontologies within the Semantic Web framework. The paper provides an overview of
what the LOD KOS movement has brought to various communities and users. These
are not limited to the colonies of the value vocabulary constructors and
providers, nor the catalogers and indexers who have a long history of applying
the vocabularies to their products. The LOD dataset producers and LOD service
providers, the information architects and interface designers, and researchers
in sciences and humanities, are also direct beneficiaries of LOD KOS. The paper
examines a set of the collected cases (experimental or in real applications)
and aims to find the usages of LOD KOS in order to share the practices and
ideas among communities and users. Through the viewpoints of a number of
different user groups, the functions of LOD KOS are examined from multiple
dimensions. This paper focuses on the LOD dataset producers, vocabulary
producers, and researchers (as end-users of KOS).Comment: 31 pages, 12 figures, accepted paper in International Journal on
Digital Librarie
Sustaining the Internet with Hyperbolic Mapping
The Internet infrastructure is severely stressed. Rapidly growing overheads
associated with the primary function of the Internet---routing information
packets between any two computers in the world---cause concerns among Internet
experts that the existing Internet routing architecture may not sustain even
another decade. Here we present a method to map the Internet to a hyperbolic
space. Guided with the constructed map, which we release with this paper,
Internet routing exhibits scaling properties close to theoretically best
possible, thus resolving serious scaling limitations that the Internet faces
today. Besides this immediate practical viability, our network mapping method
can provide a different perspective on the community structure in complex
networks
Scalable Routing Easy as PIE: a Practical Isometric Embedding Protocol (Technical Report)
We present PIE, a scalable routing scheme that achieves 100% packet delivery
and low path stretch. It is easy to implement in a distributed fashion and
works well when costs are associated to links. Scalability is achieved by using
virtual coordinates in a space of concise dimensionality, which enables greedy
routing based only on local knowledge. PIE is a general routing scheme, meaning
that it works on any graph. We focus however on the Internet, where routing
scalability is an urgent concern. We show analytically and by using simulation
that the scheme scales extremely well on Internet-like graphs. In addition, its
geometric nature allows it to react efficiently to topological changes or
failures by finding new paths in the network at no cost, yielding better
delivery ratios than standard algorithms. The proposed routing scheme needs an
amount of memory polylogarithmic in the size of the network and requires only
local communication between the nodes. Although each node constructs its
coordinates and routes packets locally, the path stretch remains extremely low,
even lower than for centralized or less scalable state-of-the-art algorithms:
PIE always finds short paths and often enough finds the shortest paths.Comment: This work has been previously published in IEEE ICNP'11. The present
document contains an additional optional mechanism, presented in Section
III-D, to further improve performance by using route asymmetry. It also
contains new simulation result
Modernizing National Numbering Plan on NGN Platform - Hungarian Case Study
The intensive technological development of the last years brought the overall acceptance of an IP based network and services vision based on the NGN. The realization of the NGN vision, the decision on the migration to NGN sets regulatory tasks, especially in the area of numbering and addressing. The utilization of the opportunities provided by the NGN platform requires the use of IP addresses and names in the core network, the role of the E.164 numbers is taken over by IP addresses. However in case of voice services the identification of end-user access points will remain by the use of E.164 numbers. Migration to NGN doesn't require directly the change of the subscribers' phone number; however the NGN enables among others the implementation of national number portability for fixed telephone service. The opportunities can be realized by using uniform domestic number length and dialling method, practically closed numbering. The introduction of a 9-digit uniform, closed domestic numbering provides a consistent solution for the deficiencies of the present Hungarian numbering plan, too. Recently it can be reached in single step so that the present 9-digit domestic numbers and the short codes remain unchanged, the 8-digit domestic numbers are completed to 9-digit by the insertion of an appropriate digit, as well as the present and new numbering schemes can be in operation simultaneously. --
- …