Acesso remoto dinâmico e seguro a bases de dados com integração de políticas de acesso suave

The amount of data being created and shared has grown greatly in recent years, thanks in part to social media and the growth of smart devices. Managing the storage and processing of this data can give a competitive edge when used to create new services, to enhance targeted advertising, etc. To achieve this, the data must be accessed and processed. When applications that access this data are developed, tools such as Java Database Connectivity, ADO.NET and Hibernate are typically used. However, while these tools aim to bridge the gap between databases and the object-oriented programming paradigm, they focus only on the connectivity issue. This leads to increased development time as developers need to master the access policies to write correct queries. Moreover, when used in database applications within noncontrolled environments, other issues emerge such as database credentials theft; application authentication; authorization and auditing of large groups of new users seeking access to data, potentially with vague requirements; network eavesdropping for data and credential disclosure; impersonating database servers for data modification; application tampering for unrestricted database access and data disclosure; etc. Therefore, an architecture capable of addressing these issues is necessary to build a reliable set of access control solutions to expand and simplify the application scenarios of access control systems. The objective, then, is to secure the remote access to databases, since database applications may be used in hard-to-control environments and physical access to the host machines/network may not be always protected. Furthermore, the authorization process should dynamically grant the appropriate permissions to users that have not been explicitly authorized to handle large groups seeking access to data. This includes scenarios where the definition of the access requirements is difficult due to their vagueness, usually requiring a security expert to authorize each user individually. This is achieved by integrating and auditing soft access policies based on fuzzy set theory in the access control decision-making process. A proof-of-concept of this architecture is provided alongside a functional and performance assessment.A quantidade de dados criados e partilhados tem crescido nos últimos anos, em parte graças às redes sociais e à proliferação dos dispositivos inteligentes. A gestão do armazenamento e processamento destes dados pode fornecer uma vantagem competitiva quando usados para criar novos serviços, para melhorar a publicidade direcionada, etc. Para atingir este objetivo, os dados devem ser acedidos e processados. Quando as aplicações que acedem a estes dados são desenvolvidos, ferramentas como Java Database Connectivity, ADO.NET e Hibernate são normalmente utilizados. No entanto, embora estas ferramentas tenham como objetivo preencher a lacuna entre as bases de dados e o paradigma da programação orientada por objetos, elas concentram-se apenas na questão da conectividade. Isto aumenta o tempo de desenvolvimento, pois os programadores precisam dominar as políticas de acesso para escrever consultas corretas. Além disso, quando usado em aplicações de bases de dados em ambientes não controlados, surgem outros problemas, como roubo de credenciais da base de dados; autenticação de aplicações; autorização e auditoria de grandes grupos de novos utilizadores que procuram acesso aos dados, potencialmente com requisitos vagos; escuta da rede para obtenção de dados e credenciais; personificação de servidores de bases de dados para modificação de dados; manipulação de aplicações para acesso ilimitado à base de dados e divulgação de dados; etc. Uma arquitetura capaz de resolver esses problemas é necessária para construir um conjunto confiável de soluções de controlo de acesso, para expandir e simplificar os cenários de aplicação destes sistemas. O objetivo, então, é proteger o acesso remoto a bases de dados, uma vez que as aplicações de bases de dados podem ser usados em ambientes de difícil controlo e o acesso físico às máquinas/rede nem sempre está protegido. Adicionalmente, o processo de autorização deve conceder dinamicamente as permissões adequadas aos utilizadores que não foram explicitamente autorizados para suportar grupos grandes de utilizadores que procuram aceder aos dados. Isto inclui cenários em que a definição dos requisitos de acesso é difícil devido à sua imprecisão, geralmente exigindo um especialista em segurança para autorizar cada utilizador individualmente. Este objetivo é atingido no processo de decisão de controlo de acesso com a integração e auditaria das políticas de acesso suaves baseadas na teoria de conjuntos difusos. Uma prova de conceito desta arquitetura é fornecida em conjunto com uma avaliação funcional e de desempenho.Programa Doutoral em Informátic

Disaster Response System

With integration of geospatial information system into a conventional information system a basic disaster response information system is implemented. The result is a report on various useful technologies and software engineering methodologies that could be utilized to implement a preliminary system, which in turn clarifies many uncertainties and surprises that are typical of many such systems. The foundations of my project include the Unified Process of software development, the relational data models, the decision tree technique, class design principles such as the MVC pattern

Extracting a Relational Database Schema from a Document Database

As NoSQL databases become increasingly used, more methodologies emerge for migrating from relational databases to NoSQL databases. Meanwhile, there is a lack of methodologies that assist in migration in the opposite direction, from NoSQL to relational. As software is being iterated upon, use cases may change. A system which was originally developed with a NoSQL database may accrue needs which require Atomic, Consistency, Isolation, and Durability (ACID) features that NoSQL systems lack, such as consistency across nodes or consistency across re-used domain objects. Shifting requirements could result in the system being changed to utilize a relational database. While there are some tools available to transfer data between an existing document database and existing relational database, there has been no work for automatically generating the relational database based upon the data already in the NoSQL system. Not taking the existing data into account can lead to inconsistencies during data migration. This thesis describes a methodology to automatically generate a relational database schema from the implicit schema of a document database. This thesis also includes details of how the methodology is implemented, and what could be enhanced in future works

THE USE OF RECOMMENDER SYSTEMS IN WEB APPLICATIONS – THE TROI CASE

Avoiding digital marketing, surveys, reviews and online users behavior approaches on digital age are the key elements for a powerful businesses to fail, there are some systems that should preceded some artificial intelligence techniques. In this direction, the use of data mining for recommending relevant items as a new state of the art technique is increasing user satisfaction as well as the business revenues. And other related information gathering approaches in order to our systems thing and acts like humans. To do so there is a Recommender System that will be elaborated in this thesis. How people interact, how to calculate accurately and identify what people like or dislike based on their online previous behaviors. The thesis includes also the methodologies recommender system uses, how math equations helps Recommender Systems to calculate user’s behavior and similarities. The filters are important on Recommender System, explaining if similar users like the same product or item, which is the probability of neighbor user to like also. Here comes collaborative filters, neighborhood filters, hybrid recommender system with the use of various algorithms the Recommender Systems has the ability to predict whether a particular user would prefer an item or not, based on the user’s profile and their activities. The use of Recommender Systems are beneficial to both service providers and users. Thesis cover also the strength and weaknesses of Recommender Systems and how involving Ontology can improve it. Ontology-based methods can be used to reduce problems that content-based recommender systems are known to suffer from. Based on Kosovar’s GDP and youngsters job perspectives are desirable for improvements, the demand is greater than the offer. I thought of building an intelligence system that will be making easier for Kosovars to find the appropriate job that suits their profile, skills, knowledge, character and locations. And that system is called TROI Search engine that indexes and merge all local operating job seeking websites in one platform with intelligence features. Thesis will present the design, implementation, testing and evaluation of a TROI search engine. Testing is done by getting user experiments while using running environment of TROI search engine. Results show that the functionality of the recommender system is satisfactory and helpful

Disaster Response System

With integration of geospatial information system into a conventional information system a basic disaster response information system is implemented. The result is a report on various useful technologies and software engineering methodologies that could be utilized to implement a preliminary system, which in turn clarifies many uncertainties and surprises that are typical of many such systems. The foundations of my project include the Unified Process of software development, the relational data models, the decision tree technique, class design principles such as the MVC pattern

DACTyL:towards providing the missing link between clinical and telehealth data

This document conveys the findings of the Data Analytics, Clinical, Telehealth, Link (DACTyL) project. This nine-month project started at January 2013 and was conducted at Philips Research in the Care Management Solution group and as part of the Data Analysis for Home Healthcare (DA4HH) project. The DA4HH charter is to perform and support retrospective analyses of data from Home Healthcare products, such as Motiva telehealth. These studies will provide valid insights in actual clinical aspects, usage and behavior of installed products and services. The insights will help to improve service offerings, create clinical algorithms for better outcome, and validate and substantiate claims on efficacy and cost-effectiveness. The current DACTyL project aims at developing and implementing an architecture and infrastructure to meet the most demanding need from Motiva telehealth customers on return on investment (ROI). These customers are hospitals that offer Motiva telehealth to their patients. In order to provide the Motiva service cost-effectively, they need to have insight into the actual cost, benefit and resource utilization when it comes to Motiva deployment compared to their usual routine care. Additional stakeholders for these ROI-related data are Motiva customer consultants and research scientists from Philips for strengthening their messaging and service deliveries to arrive at better patient care

DACTyL:towards providing the missing link between clinical and telehealth data

This document conveys the findings of the Data Analytics, Clinical, Telehealth, Link (DACTyL) project. This nine-month project started at January 2013 and was conducted at Philips Research in the Care Management Solution group and as part of the Data Analysis for Home Healthcare (DA4HH) project. The DA4HH charter is to perform and support retrospective analyses of data from Home Healthcare products, such as Motiva telehealth. These studies will provide valid insights in actual clinical aspects, usage and behavior of installed products and services. The insights will help to improve service offerings, create clinical algorithms for better outcome, and validate and substantiate claims on efficacy and cost-effectiveness. The current DACTyL project aims at developing and implementing an architecture and infrastructure to meet the most demanding need from Motiva telehealth customers on return on investment (ROI). These customers are hospitals that offer Motiva telehealth to their patients. In order to provide the Motiva service cost-effectively, they need to have insight into the actual cost, benefit and resource utilization when it comes to Motiva deployment compared to their usual routine care. Additional stakeholders for these ROI-related data are Motiva customer consultants and research scientists from Philips for strengthening their messaging and service deliveries to arrive at better patient care

Análise colaborativa de grandes conjuntos de séries temporais

The recent expansion of metrification on a daily basis has led to the production of massive quantities of data, and in many cases, these collected metrics are only useful for knowledge building when seen as a full sequence of data ordered by time, which constitutes a time series. To find and interpret meaningful behavioral patterns in time series, a multitude of analysis software tools have been developed. Many of the existing solutions use annotations to enable the curation of a knowledge base that is shared between a group of researchers over a network. However, these tools also lack appropriate mechanisms to handle a high number of concurrent requests and to properly store massive data sets and ontologies, as well as suitable representations for annotated data that are visually interpretable by humans and explorable by automated systems. The goal of the work presented in this dissertation is to iterate on existing time series analysis software and build a platform for the collaborative analysis of massive time series data sets, leveraging state-of-the-art technologies for querying, storing and displaying time series and annotations. A theoretical and domain-agnostic model was proposed to enable the implementation of a distributed, extensible, secure and high-performant architecture that handles various annotation proposals in simultaneous and avoids any data loss from overlapping contributions or unsanctioned changes. Analysts can share annotation projects with peers, restricting a set of collaborators to a smaller scope of analysis and to a limited catalog of annotation semantics. Annotations can express meaning not only over a segment of time, but also over a subset of the series that coexist in the same segment. A novel visual encoding for annotations is proposed, where annotations are rendered as arcs traced only over the affected series’ curves in order to reduce visual clutter. Moreover, the implementation of a full-stack prototype with a reactive web interface was described, directly following the proposed architectural and visualization model while applied to the HVAC domain. The performance of the prototype under different architectural approaches was benchmarked, and the interface was tested in its usability. Overall, the work described in this dissertation contributes with a more versatile, intuitive and scalable time series annotation platform that streamlines the knowledge-discovery workflow.A recente expansão de metrificação diária levou à produção de quantidades massivas de dados, e em muitos casos, estas métricas são úteis para a construção de conhecimento apenas quando vistas como uma sequência de dados ordenada por tempo, o que constitui uma série temporal. Para se encontrar padrões comportamentais significativos em séries temporais, uma grande variedade de software de análise foi desenvolvida. Muitas das soluções existentes utilizam anotações para permitir a curadoria de uma base de conhecimento que é compartilhada entre investigadores em rede. No entanto, estas ferramentas carecem de mecanismos apropriados para lidar com um elevado número de pedidos concorrentes e para armazenar conjuntos massivos de dados e ontologias, assim como também representações apropriadas para dados anotados que são visualmente interpretáveis por seres humanos e exploráveis por sistemas automatizados. O objetivo do trabalho apresentado nesta dissertação é iterar sobre o software de análise de séries temporais existente e construir uma plataforma para a análise colaborativa de grandes conjuntos de séries temporais, utilizando tecnologias estado-de-arte para pesquisar, armazenar e exibir séries temporais e anotações. Um modelo teórico e agnóstico quanto ao domínio foi proposto para permitir a implementação de uma arquitetura distribuída, extensível, segura e de alto desempenho que lida com várias propostas de anotação em simultâneo e evita quaisquer perdas de dados provenientes de contribuições sobrepostas ou alterações não-sancionadas. Os analistas podem compartilhar projetos de anotação com colegas, restringindo um conjunto de colaboradores a uma janela de análise mais pequena e a um catálogo limitado de semântica de anotação. As anotações podem exprimir significado não apenas sobre um intervalo de tempo, mas também sobre um subconjunto das séries que coexistem no mesmo intervalo. Uma nova codificação visual para anotações é proposta, onde as anotações são desenhadas como arcos traçados apenas sobre as curvas de séries afetadas de modo a reduzir o ruído visual. Para além disso, a implementação de um protótipo full-stack com uma interface reativa web foi descrita, seguindo diretamente o modelo de arquitetura e visualização proposto enquanto aplicado ao domínio AVAC. O desempenho do protótipo com diferentes decisões arquiteturais foi avaliado, e a interface foi testada quanto à sua usabilidade. Em geral, o trabalho descrito nesta dissertação contribui com uma abordagem mais versátil, intuitiva e escalável para uma plataforma de anotação sobre séries temporais que simplifica o fluxo de trabalho para a descoberta de conhecimento.Mestrado em Engenharia Informátic

Automatic information retrieval through text-mining

The dissertation presented for obtaining the Master’s Degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, at Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Faculdade de Ciências e TecnologiaNowadays, around a huge amount of firms in the European Union catalogued as Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs), employ almost a great portion of the active workforce in Europe. Nonetheless, SMEs cannot afford implementing neither methods nor tools to systematically adapt innovation as a part of their business process. Innovation is the engine to be competitive in the globalized environment, especially in the current socio-economic situation. This thesis provides a platform that when integrated with ExtremeFactories(EF) project, aids SMEs to become more competitive by means of monitoring schedule functionality. In this thesis a text-mining platform that possesses the ability to schedule a gathering information through keywords is presented. In order to develop the platform, several choices concerning the implementation have been made, in the sense that one of them requires particular emphasis is the framework, Apache Lucene Core 2 by supplying an efficient text-mining tool and it is highly used for the purpose of the thesis

Improving an Open Source Geocoding Server

A common problem in geocoding is that the postal addresses as requested by the user differ from the addresses as described in the database. The online, open source geocoder called Nominatim is one of the most used geocoders nowadays. However, this geocoder lacks the interactivity that most of the online geocoders already offer. The Nominatim geocoder provides no feedback to the user while typing addresses. Also, the geocoder cannot deal with any misspelling errors introduced by the user in the requested address. This thesis is about extending the functionality of the Nominatim geocoder to provide fuzzy search and autocomplete features. In this work I propose a new index and search strategy for the OpenStreetMap reference dataset. Also, I extend the search algorithm to geocode new address types such as street intersections. Both the original Nominatim geocoder and the proposed solution are compared using metrics such as the precision of the results, match rate and keystrokes saved by the autocomplete feature. The test addresses used in this work are a subset selected among the Swedish addresses available in the OpenStreetMap data set. The results show that the proposed geocoder performs better when compared to the original Nominatim geocoder. In the proposed geocoder, the users get address suggestions as they type, adding interactivity to the original geocoder. Also, the proposed geocoder is able to find the right address in the presence of errors in the user query with a match rate of 98%.The demand of geospatial information is increasing during the last years. There are more and more mobile applications and services that require from the users to enter some information about where they are, or the address of the place they want to find for example. The systems that convert postal addresses or place descriptions into coordinates are called geocoders. How good or bad a geocoder is not only depends on the information the geocoder contains, but also on how easy is for the users to find the desired addresses. There are many well-known web sites that we use in our everyday life to find the location of an address. For example sites like Google Maps, Bing Maps or Yahoo Maps are accessed by millions of users every day to use such services. Among the main features of the mentioned geocoders are the ability to predict the address the user is writing in the search box, and sometimes even to correct any misspellings introduced by the user. To make it more complicated, the predictions and error corrections these systems perform are done in real time. The owners of these address search engines usually impose some restrictions on the number of addresses a user is allowed to search monthly, above which the user needs to pay a fee in order to keep using the system. This limit is usually high enough for the end user, but it might not be enough for the software developers that want to use geospatial data in their products. There is a free alternative to the address search engines mentioned above called Nominatim. Nominatim is an open source project whose purpose is to search addresses among the OpenStreetMap dataset. OpenStreetMap is a collaborative project that tries to map places in the real world into coordinates. The main drawback of Nominatim is that the usability is not as good as the competitors. Nominatim is unable to find addresses that are not correctly spelled, neither predicts the user needs. In order for this address search engine to be among the most used the prediction and error correction features need to be added. In this thesis work I extend the search algorithms of Nominatim to add the functionality mentioned above. The address search engine proposed in this thesis offers a free and open source alternative to users and systems that require access to geospatial data without restrictions