10,436 research outputs found
Towards Exascale Scientific Metadata Management
Advances in technology and computing hardware are enabling scientists from
all areas of science to produce massive amounts of data using large-scale
simulations or observational facilities. In this era of data deluge, effective
coordination between the data production and the analysis phases hinges on the
availability of metadata that describe the scientific datasets. Existing
workflow engines have been capturing a limited form of metadata to provide
provenance information about the identity and lineage of the data. However,
much of the data produced by simulations, experiments, and analyses still need
to be annotated manually in an ad hoc manner by domain scientists. Systematic
and transparent acquisition of rich metadata becomes a crucial prerequisite to
sustain and accelerate the pace of scientific innovation. Yet, ubiquitous and
domain-agnostic metadata management infrastructure that can meet the demands of
extreme-scale science is notable by its absence.
To address this gap in scientific data management research and practice, we
present our vision for an integrated approach that (1) automatically captures
and manipulates information-rich metadata while the data is being produced or
analyzed and (2) stores metadata within each dataset to permeate
metadata-oblivious processes and to query metadata through established and
standardized data access interfaces. We motivate the need for the proposed
integrated approach using applications from plasma physics, climate modeling
and neuroscience, and then discuss research challenges and possible solutions
Semantic Storage: Overview and Assessment
The Semantic Web has a great deal of momentum behind it. The promise of a ‘better web’, where information is given well defined meaning and computers are better able to work with it has captured the imagination of a significant number of people, particularly in academia. Language standards such as RDF and OWL have appeared with remarkable speed, and development continues apace. To back up this development, there is a requirement for ‘semantic databases’, where this data can be conveniently stored, operated upon, and retrieved. These already exist in the form of triple stores, but do not yet fulfil all the requirements that may be made of them, particularly in the area of performing inference using OWL. This paper analyses the current stores along with forthcoming technology, and finds that it is unlikely that a combination of speed, scalability, and complex inferencing will be practical in the immediate future. It concludes by suggesting alternative development routes
ARCHANGEL: Tamper-proofing Video Archives using Temporal Content Hashes on the Blockchain
We present ARCHANGEL; a novel distributed ledger based system for assuring
the long-term integrity of digital video archives. First, we describe a novel
deep network architecture for computing compact temporal content hashes (TCHs)
from audio-visual streams with durations of minutes or hours. Our TCHs are
sensitive to accidental or malicious content modification (tampering) but
invariant to the codec used to encode the video. This is necessary due to the
curatorial requirement for archives to format shift video over time to ensure
future accessibility. Second, we describe how the TCHs (and the models used to
derive them) are secured via a proof-of-authority blockchain distributed across
multiple independent archives. We report on the efficacy of ARCHANGEL within
the context of a trial deployment in which the national government archives of
the United Kingdom, Estonia and Norway participated.Comment: Accepted to CVPR Blockchain Workshop 201
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