A perspective on the Healthgrid initiative

This paper presents a perspective on the Healthgrid initiative which involves European projects deploying pioneering applications of grid technology in the health sector. In the last couple of years, several grid projects have been funded on health related issues at national and European levels. A crucial issue is to maximize their cross fertilization in the context of an environment where data of medical interest can be stored and made easily available to the different actors in healthcare, physicians, healthcare centres and administrations, and of course the citizens. The Healthgrid initiative, represented by the Healthgrid association (http://www.healthgrid.org), was initiated to bring the necessary long term continuity, to reinforce and promote awareness of the possibilities and advantages linked to the deployment of GRID technologies in health. Technologies to address the specific requirements for medical applications are under development. Results from the DataGrid and other projects are given as examples of early applications.Comment: 6 pages, 1 figure. Accepted by the Second International Workshop on Biomedical Computations on the Grid, at the 4th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Cluster Computing and the Grid (CCGrid 2004). Chicago USA, April 200

Towards an unified information systems reference model for higher education institutions

Higher education institutions are currently facing many challenges that are making them to start compete strategically, like other not-for-profit firm. To adequately support such new approach, their information systems and business strategies should be totally aligned. However, the current existing landscape of heterogeneous information systems and applications deployed in many institutions can compromise such aim. Recently, reference architectures and models have emerged as instruments suitable to help company’s decision-makers to cope with such tensions. However, whilst many of such architectural models already exist for several industries, little has been done so far in higher education. In this paper, we briefly review major existing developments in such way before to inductively derive a unified information systems reference model tailored for higher education institutions.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Deliverable JRA1.1: Evaluation of current network control and management planes for multi-domain network infrastructure

This deliverable includes a compilation and evaluation of available control and management architectures and protocols applicable to a multilayer infrastructure in a multi-domain Virtual Network environment.The scope of this deliverable is mainly focused on the virtualisation of the resources within a network and at processing nodes. The virtualization of the FEDERICA infrastructure allows the provisioning of its available resources to users by means of FEDERICA slices. A slice is seen by the user as a real physical network under his/her domain, however it maps to a logical partition (a virtual instance) of the physical FEDERICA resources. A slice is built to exhibit to the highest degree all the principles applicable to a physical network (isolation, reproducibility, manageability, ...). Currently, there are no standard definitions available for network virtualization or its associated architectures. Therefore, this deliverable proposes the Virtual Network layer architecture and evaluates a set of Management- and Control Planes that can be used for the partitioning and virtualization of the FEDERICA network resources. This evaluation has been performed taking into account an initial set of FEDERICA requirements; a possible extension of the selected tools will be evaluated in future deliverables. The studies described in this deliverable define the virtual architecture of the FEDERICA infrastructure. During this activity, the need has been recognised to establish a new set of basic definitions (taxonomy) for the building blocks that compose the so-called slice, i.e. the virtual network instantiation (which is virtual with regard to the abstracted view made of the building blocks of the FEDERICA infrastructure) and its architectural plane representation. These definitions will be established as a common nomenclature for the FEDERICA project. Other important aspects when defining a new architecture are the user requirements. It is crucial that the resulting architecture fits the demands that users may have. Since this deliverable has been produced at the same time as the contact process with users, made by the project activities related to the Use Case definitions, JRA1 has proposed a set of basic Use Cases to be considered as starting point for its internal studies. When researchers want to experiment with their developments, they need not only network resources on their slices, but also a slice of the processing resources. These processing slice resources are understood as virtual machine instances that users can use to make them behave as software routers or end nodes, on which to download the software protocols or applications they have produced and want to assess in a realistic environment. Hence, this deliverable also studies the APIs of several virtual machine management software products in order to identify which best suits FEDERICA’s needs.Postprint (published version

Global-Scale Resource Survey and Performance Monitoring of Public OGC Web Map Services

One of the most widely-implemented service standards provided by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) to the user community is the Web Map Service (WMS). WMS is widely employed globally, but there is limited knowledge of the global distribution, adoption status or the service quality of these online WMS resources. To fill this void, we investigated global WMSs resources and performed distributed performance monitoring of these services. This paper explicates a distributed monitoring framework that was used to monitor 46,296 WMSs continuously for over one year and a crawling method to discover these WMSs. We analyzed server locations, provider types, themes, the spatiotemporal coverage of map layers and the service versions for 41,703 valid WMSs. Furthermore, we appraised the stability and performance of basic operations for 1210 selected WMSs (i.e., GetCapabilities and GetMap). We discuss the major reasons for request errors and performance issues, as well as the relationship between service response times and the spatiotemporal distribution of client monitoring sites. This paper will help service providers, end users and developers of standards to grasp the status of global WMS resources, as well as to understand the adoption status of OGC standards. The conclusions drawn in this paper can benefit geospatial resource discovery, service performance evaluation and guide service performance improvements.Comment: 24 pages; 15 figure

A Business Ontology for supporting cross border cooperation between European Chambers of Commerce

The recent EU enlargement opens up new opportunities, but poses new issues to be addressed. In particular, in order to enable and support cooperation between firms from different countries, it is necessary to address interoperability issues. The LD-CAST project aims at enabling cross border cooperation between European chambers of commerce (CCs) for supporting the development of private company initiatives. The project objective is to build a European network of portals that will enable end users (mainly private companies) to access in a seamless mode services provided by public organizations registered in each portal. This paper briefly presents a cooperation framework for semantic interoperability mainly based on the following semantic technologies: ontology management, semantic annotation, and semantic search and discovery. Finally the business ontology produced in the course of the project is presented.The recent EU enlargement opens up new opportunities, but poses new issues to be addressed. In particular, in order to enable and support cooperation between firms from different countries, it is necessary to address interoperability issues. The LD-CAST project aims at enabling cross border cooperation between European chambers of commerce (CCs) for supporting the development of private company initiatives. The project objective is to build a European network of portals that will enable end users (mainly private companies) to access in a seamless mode services provided by public organizations registered in each portal. This paper briefly presents a cooperation framework for semantic interoperability mainly based on the following semantic technologies: ontology management, semantic annotation, and semantic search and discovery. Finally the business ontology produced in the course of the project is presented.Uninvited Submission

The Neuroscience Information Framework: A Data and Knowledge Environment for Neuroscience

With support from the Institutes and Centers forming the NIH Blueprint for Neuroscience Research, we have designed and implemented a new initiative for integrating access to and use of Web-based neuroscience resources: the Neuroscience Information Framework. The Framework arises from the expressed need of the neuroscience community for neuroinformatic tools and resources to aid scientific inquiry, builds upon prior development of neuroinformatics by the Human Brain Project and others, and directly derives from the Society for Neuroscience’s Neuroscience Database Gateway. Partnered with the Society, its Neuroinformatics Committee, and volunteer consultant-collaborators, our multi-site consortium has developed: (1) a comprehensive, dynamic, inventory of Web-accessible neuroscience resources, (2) an extended and integrated terminology describing resources and contents, and (3) a framework accepting and aiding concept-based queries. Evolving instantiations of the Framework may be viewed at http://nif.nih.gov, http://neurogateway.org, and other sites as they come on line

TERMS: Techniques for electronic resources management

Librarians and information specialists have been finding ways to manage electronic resources for over a decade now. However, much of this work has been an ad hoc and learn-as-you-go process. The literature on electronic resource management shows this work as being segmented into many different areas of traditional librarian roles within the library. In addition, the literature show how management of these resources has driven the development of various management tools in the market as well as serve as the greatest need in the development of next generation library systems. TERMS is an attempt to create a series of on-going and continually developing set of management best practices for electronic resource management in libraries

Offshoring of Application Services in the Banking Industry – A Transaction Cost Analysis

Gaining economic benefits from substantially lower labor costs has been reported as a major reason for information systems (IS) offshoring. However, many offshoring projects have failed to achieve expected cost savings, indicating that labor cost savings are offset by additional costs that arise in offshoring projects in certain situations. While previous research on IS offshoring has mostly focused on management issues in offshoring, the focus of this paper is to improve our understanding why the realization of economic benefits varies substantially between offshored software projects. Based on a conceptual framework from transaction cost economics and empirical data from an in-depth case study involving six software development and maintenance projects that were offshored to software vendors in India by a major German financial services organization, two research questions are studied. First, what types of additional costs may arise in offshored software projects? Second, how and why do additional costs vary between projects, considering both task and offshore characteristics? The findings from our analysis indicate that offshoring can lead to increased effort on the client side, both in terms of production costs (requirements specification, knowledge transfer, conceptual development) and transaction costs (vendor coordination, and control). These additional costs are particularly high when the outsourced function is highly asset specific. Moreover, offshore country characteristics such as cultural differences, geographic distance as well as vendor characteristics such as the degree of personnel fluctuation and lack of absorptive capacity can lead to cost add-ons at the client side – in particular when a high degree of human asset specificity is involved in the offshored software projects

Studies in Trade and Investment: The Development Impact of Information Technology in Trade Facilitation

It is important to lay out a framework for understanding how trade facilitation (TF) affects the movement of goods, and where information (IT) fits in. This relationship, in turn, sets the stage for locating small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in international transactions. There is an increasing amount of substantial literature on TF and equally wide knowledge of IT. While it is not the intent of this chapter to survey these materials, to the extent that they are relevant to the following discussion, they will be referred to appropriately. Section A of this chapter elaborates on TF and the wide range of instruments that have been used and analyzed while section B details some actual experiences in the use of IT in TF. Section C examines small and medium-sized enterprises and IT in TF. Section D summarizes this chapter and considers the implications for inclusive growth.Trade facilitation, ICT, IT, SMEs,

An IoT-based solution for monitoring a fleet of educational buildings focusing on energy efficiency

Raising awareness among young people and changing their behaviour and habits concerning energy usage iskey to achieving sustained energy saving. Additionally, young people are very sensitive to environmental protection so raising awareness among children is much easier than with any other group of citizens. This work examinesways to create an innovative Information & Communication Technologies (ICT) ecosystem (including web-based, mobile, social and sensing elements) tailored specifically for school environments, taking into account both theusers (faculty, staff, students, parents) and school buildings, thus motivating and supporting young citizenś behavioural change to achieve greater energy efficiency. A mixture of open-source IoT hardware and proprietary platforms on the infrastructure level, are currently being utilized for monitoring a fleet of 18 educational buildings across 3 countries, comprising over 700 IoT monitoring points. Hereon presented is the system's high-level architecture, as well as several aspects of its implementation, related to the application domain of educational building monitoring and energy efficiency. The system is developed based on open-source technologies andservices in order to make it capable of providing open IT-infrastructure and support from different commercial hardware/sensor vendors as well as open-source solutions. The system presented can be used to develop and offer newapp-based solutions that can be used either for educational purposes or for managing the energy efficiency ofthebuilding. The system is replicable and adaptable to settings that may be different than the scenarios envisionedhere (e.g., targeting different climate zones), different IT infrastructures and can be easily extended to accommodate integration with other systems. The overall performance of the system is evaluated in real-world environment in terms of scalability, responsiveness and simplicity