Digital Preservation Services : State of the Art Analysis

Research report funded by the DC-NET project.An overview of the state of the art in service provision for digital preservation and curation. Its focus is on the areas where bridging the gaps is needed between e-Infrastructures and efficient and forward-looking digital preservation services. Based on a desktop study and a rapid analysis of some 190 currently available tools and services for digital preservation, the deliverable provides a high-level view on the range of instruments currently on offer to support various functions within a preservation system.European Commission, FP7peer-reviewe

A System for Deduction-based Formal Verification of Workflow-oriented Software Models

The work concerns formal verification of workflow-oriented software models using deductive approach. The formal correctness of a model's behaviour is considered. Manually building logical specifications, which are considered as a set of temporal logic formulas, seems to be the significant obstacle for an inexperienced user when applying the deductive approach. A system, and its architecture, for the deduction-based verification of workflow-oriented models is proposed. The process of inference is based on the semantic tableaux method which has some advantages when compared to traditional deduction strategies. The algorithm for an automatic generation of logical specifications is proposed. The generation procedure is based on the predefined workflow patterns for BPMN, which is a standard and dominant notation for the modeling of business processes. The main idea for the approach is to consider patterns, defined in terms of temporal logic,as a kind of (logical) primitives which enable the transformation of models to temporal logic formulas constituting a logical specification. Automation of the generation process is crucial for bridging the gap between intuitiveness of the deductive reasoning and the difficulty of its practical application in the case when logical specifications are built manually. This approach has gone some way towards supporting, hopefully enhancing our understanding of, the deduction-based formal verification of workflow-oriented models.Comment: International Journal of Applied Mathematics and Computer Scienc

Status and Future Perspectives for Lattice Gauge Theory Calculations to the Exascale and Beyond

In this and a set of companion whitepapers, the USQCD Collaboration lays out a program of science and computing for lattice gauge theory. These whitepapers describe how calculation using lattice QCD (and other gauge theories) can aid the interpretation of ongoing and upcoming experiments in particle and nuclear physics, as well as inspire new ones.Comment: 44 pages. 1 of USQCD whitepapers

Enriched biodiversity data as a resource and service

Background: Recent years have seen a surge in projects that produce large volumes of structured, machine-readable biodiversity data. To make these data amenable to processing by generic, open source “data enrichment” workflows, they are increasingly being represented in a variety of standards-compliant interchange formats. Here, we report on an initiative in which software developers and taxonomists came together to address the challenges and highlight the opportunities in the enrichment of such biodiversity data by engaging in intensive, collaborative software development: The Biodiversity Data Enrichment Hackathon. Results: The hackathon brought together 37 participants (including developers and taxonomists, i.e. scientific professionals that gather, identify, name and classify species) from 10 countries: Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, Finland, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, New Zealand, the UK, and the US. The participants brought expertise in processing structured data, text mining, development of ontologies, digital identification keys, geographic information systems, niche modeling, natural language processing, provenance annotation, semantic integration, taxonomic name resolution, web service interfaces, workflow tools and visualisation. Most use cases and exemplar data were provided by taxonomists. One goal of the meeting was to facilitate re-use and enhancement of biodiversity knowledge by a broad range of stakeholders, such as taxonomists, systematists, ecologists, niche modelers, informaticians and ontologists. The suggested use cases resulted in nine breakout groups addressing three main themes: i) mobilising heritage biodiversity knowledge; ii) formalising and linking concepts; and iii) addressing interoperability between service platforms. Another goal was to further foster a community of experts in biodiversity informatics and to build human links between research projects and institutions, in response to recent calls to further such integration in this research domain. Conclusions: Beyond deriving prototype solutions for each use case, areas of inadequacy were discussed and are being pursued further. It was striking how many possible applications for biodiversity data there were and how quickly solutions could be put together when the normal constraints to collaboration were broken down for a week. Conversely, mobilising biodiversity knowledge from their silos in heritage literature and natural history collections will continue to require formalisation of the concepts (and the links between them) that define the research domain, as well as increased interoperability between the software platforms that operate on these concepts

A Classification of BPEL Extensions

The Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) has emerged as de-facto standard for business processes implementation. This language is designed to be extensible for including additional valuable features in a standardized manner. There are a number of BPEL extensions available. They are, however, neither classified nor evaluated with respect to their compliance to the BPEL standard. This article fills this gap by providing a framework for classifying BPEL extensions, a classification of existing extensions, and a guideline for designing BPEL extensions

Understanding the Success or Failure of Organizational ICT Integration: The Criticality of Managerial Involvement

Translator disclaimer Full Article Figures & data References Citations Metrics Reprints & Permissions Get access ABSTRACT This study explores how managerial involvement affects the success or failure of ICT-based change. Employees’ use and non-use of new ICT were indicators for change success and failure, respectively. Based on the thematic analysis, the findings accentuate the criticality of adequate managerial involvement with affected employees during ICT-based organizational change. This proved vital for the successful integration of new ICT and the development of new work processes and practices. The combination of absence of managerial involvement and expert control prevented employees who did not have previous ICT experience from developing new work practices that integrated tasks, work processes and the new technology. ICT experts were authorized to control the change process by a combination of managerial involvement and delegated managerial authority. Closeness to the technology and to managers/decision-makers combined with high levels of mutual involvement and ICT experience seem to be important factors for the success of ICT-based organizational changeUnderstanding the Success or Failure of Organizational ICT Integration: The Criticality of Managerial InvolvementacceptedVersio

Comparison on OpenStack and OpenNebula performance to improve multi-Cloud architecture on cosmological simulation use case

With the increasing numbers of Cloud Service Providers and the migration of the Grids to the Cloud paradigm, it is necessary to be able to leverage these new resources. Moreover, a large class of High Performance Computing (HPC) applications can run these resources without (or with minor) modifications. But using these resources come with the cost of being able to interact with these new resource providers. In this paper we introduce the design of a HPC middleware that is able to use resources coming from an environment that compose of multiple Clouds as well as classical \hpc resources. Using the \diet middleware, we are able to deploy a large-scale, distributed HPC platform that spans across a large pool of resources aggregated from different providers. Furthermore, we hide to the end users the difficulty and complexity of selecting and using these new resources even when new Cloud Service Providers are added to the pool. Finally, we validate the architecture concept through cosmological simulation RAMSES. Thus we give a comparison of 2 well-known Cloud Computing Software: OpenStack and OpenNebula.Avec l'augmentation du nombre de fournisseurs de service Cloud et la migration des applications depuis les grilles de calcul vers le Cloud, il est nécessaire de pouvoir tirer parti de ces nouvelles ressources. De plus, une large classe des applications de calcul haute performance peuvent s'exécuter sur ces ressources sans modifications (ou avec des modifications mineures). Mais utiliser ces ressources vient avec le coût d'être capable d'intéragir avec des nouveaux fournisseurs de ressources. Dans ce papier, nous introduisons la conception d'un nouveau intergiciel HPC qui permet d'utiliser les ressources qui proviennent d'un environement composé de plusieurs Clouds comme des ressources classiques. En utilisant l'intergiciel \diet, nous sommes capable de déployer une plateforme HPC distribuée et large échelle qui s'étend sur un large ensemble de ressources aggrégées entre plusieurs fournisseurs Cloud. De plus, nous cachons à l'utilisateur final la difficulté et la complexité de sélectionner et d'utiliser ces nouvelles ressources quand un nouveau fournisseur de service Cloud est ajouté dans l'ensemble. Finalement, nous validons notre concept d'architecture via une application de simulation cosmologique RAMSES. Et nous fournissons une comparaison entre 2 intergiciels de Cloud: OpenStack et OpenNebula