56,060 research outputs found
A unified approach to the development and usage of mobile agents
Mobile agents are an interesting approach to the development of distributed systems. By moving freely accross the network, they allow for the distribution of computation as well as gathering and filtering of information in an autonomous way. Over the last decade, the agent research community has decidedly achieved tremendous results.
However, the community was not able to provide easy to use toolkits to make this paradigm available to a broader audience. By embracing simplicity during the creation of a formal model and a reference implementation to create and execute instances of that model, our aim is to enable a wide audience – even non-experts – to create, adapt and use mobile agents. The proposed model allows for the creation of agents by combining atomic, self-contained building blocks and we provide an approachable, easy to use graphical editor for the creation
of model instances. In two evaluations, we could reinforce our believes that, with the achieved results, we could reach our aims
A study of existing Ontologies in the IoT-domain
Several domains have adopted the increasing use of IoT-based devices to
collect sensor data for generating abstractions and perceptions of the real
world. This sensor data is multi-modal and heterogeneous in nature. This
heterogeneity induces interoperability issues while developing cross-domain
applications, thereby restricting the possibility of reusing sensor data to
develop new applications. As a solution to this, semantic approaches have been
proposed in the literature to tackle problems related to interoperability of
sensor data. Several ontologies have been proposed to handle different aspects
of IoT-based sensor data collection, ranging from discovering the IoT sensors
for data collection to applying reasoning on the collected sensor data for
drawing inferences. In this paper, we survey these existing semantic ontologies
to provide an overview of the recent developments in this field. We highlight
the fundamental ontological concepts (e.g., sensor-capabilities and
context-awareness) required for an IoT-based application, and survey the
existing ontologies which include these concepts. Based on our study, we also
identify the shortcomings of currently available ontologies, which serves as a
stepping stone to state the need for a common unified ontology for the IoT
domain.Comment: Submitted to Elsevier JWS SI on Web semantics for the Internet/Web of
Thing
Designing community care systems with AUML
This paper describes an approach to developing an appropriate agent environment appropriate for use in community care applications. Key to its success is that software designers collaborate with environment builders to provide the levels of cooperation and support required within an integrated agent–oriented community system. Agent-oriented Unified Modeling Language (AUML) is a practical approach to the analysis, design, implementation and management of such an agent-based system, whilst providing the power and expressiveness necessary to support the specification, design and organization of a health care service. The background of an agent-based community care application to support the elderly is described. Our approach to building agent–oriented software development solutions emphasizes the importance of AUML as a fundamental initial step in producing more general agent–based architectures. This approach aims to present an effective methodology for an agent software development process using a service oriented approach, by addressing the agent decomposition, abstraction, and organization characteristics, whilst reducing its complexity by exploiting AUML’s productivity potential. </p
Library Resources: Procurement, Innovation and Exploitation in a Digital World
The possibilities of the digital future require new models for procurement, innovation and exploitation. Emma Crowley and Chris Spencer describe the skills staff need to deliver resources in hybrid and digital environments. The chapter demonstrates the innovative ways that librarians use to procure and exploit the wealth of resources available in a digital world. They also describe the technological developments that can be adopted to improve workflow processes and they highlight the challenges faced on this fascinating journey
Re-thinking technology and its growing role in enabling patient empowerment
© The Author(s) 2018. The presence and increase of challenges to eHealth in today’s society have begun to generate doubts about the capability of technology in patient empowerment, especially within the frameworks supporting empowerment. Through the review of existing frameworks and articulation of patient demands, weaknesses in the current application of technology to support empowerment are explored, and key constituents of a technology-driven framework for patient empowerment are determined. This article argues that existing usage of technology in the design, development and implementation of patient empowerment in the healthcare system, although well intentioned, is insufficiently constituted, primarily as a result of fragmentation. Systems theory concepts such as holism and iteration are considered vital in improving the role of technology in enabling patient empowerment
The Ubiquitous Interactor - Device Independent Access to Mobile Services
The Ubiquitous Interactor (UBI) addresses the problems of design and
development that arise around services that need to be accessed from many
different devices. In UBI, the same service can present itself with different
user interfaces on different devices. This is done by separating interaction
between users and services from presentation. The interaction is kept the same
for all devices, and different presentation information is provided for
different devices. This way, tailored user interfaces for many different
devices can be created without multiplying development and maintenance work. In
this paper we describe the system design of UBI, the system implementation, and
two services implemented for the system: a calendar service and a stockbroker
service
Fog-enabled Edge Learning for Cognitive Content-Centric Networking in 5G
By caching content at network edges close to the users, the content-centric
networking (CCN) has been considered to enforce efficient content retrieval and
distribution in the fifth generation (5G) networks. Due to the volume,
velocity, and variety of data generated by various 5G users, an urgent and
strategic issue is how to elevate the cognitive ability of the CCN to realize
context-awareness, timely response, and traffic offloading for 5G applications.
In this article, we envision that the fundamental work of designing a cognitive
CCN (C-CCN) for the upcoming 5G is exploiting the fog computing to
associatively learn and control the states of edge devices (such as phones,
vehicles, and base stations) and in-network resources (computing, networking,
and caching). Moreover, we propose a fog-enabled edge learning (FEL) framework
for C-CCN in 5G, which can aggregate the idle computing resources of the
neighbouring edge devices into virtual fogs to afford the heavy delay-sensitive
learning tasks. By leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) to jointly
processing sensed environmental data, dealing with the massive content
statistics, and enforcing the mobility control at network edges, the FEL makes
it possible for mobile users to cognitively share their data over the C-CCN in
5G. To validate the feasibility of proposed framework, we design two
FEL-advanced cognitive services for C-CCN in 5G: 1) personalized network
acceleration, 2) enhanced mobility management. Simultaneously, we present the
simulations to show the FEL's efficiency on serving for the mobile users'
delay-sensitive content retrieval and distribution in 5G.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Communications Magzine, under review, Feb. 09, 201
Supporting service discovery, querying and interaction in ubiquitous computing environments.
In this paper, we contend that ubiquitous computing environments will be highly heterogeneous, service rich domains. Moreover, future applications will consequently be required to interact with multiple, specialised service location and interaction protocols simultaneously. We argue that existing service discovery techniques do not provide sufficient support to address the challenges of building applications targeted to these emerging environments. This paper makes a number of contributions. Firstly, using a set of short ubiquitous computing scenarios we identify several key limitations of existing service discovery approaches that reduce their ability to support ubiquitous computing applications. Secondly, we present a detailed analysis of requirements for providing effective support in this domain. Thirdly, we provide the design of a simple extensible meta-service discovery architecture that uses database techniques to unify service discovery protocols and addresses several of our key requirements. Lastly, we examine the lessons learnt through the development of a prototype implementation of our architecture
Digital Ecosystems: Ecosystem-Oriented Architectures
We view Digital Ecosystems to be the digital counterparts of biological
ecosystems. Here, we are concerned with the creation of these Digital
Ecosystems, exploiting the self-organising properties of biological ecosystems
to evolve high-level software applications. Therefore, we created the Digital
Ecosystem, a novel optimisation technique inspired by biological ecosystems,
where the optimisation works at two levels: a first optimisation, migration of
agents which are distributed in a decentralised peer-to-peer network, operating
continuously in time; this process feeds a second optimisation based on
evolutionary computing that operates locally on single peers and is aimed at
finding solutions to satisfy locally relevant constraints. The Digital
Ecosystem was then measured experimentally through simulations, with measures
originating from theoretical ecology, evaluating its likeness to biological
ecosystems. This included its responsiveness to requests for applications from
the user base, as a measure of the ecological succession (ecosystem maturity).
Overall, we have advanced the understanding of Digital Ecosystems, creating
Ecosystem-Oriented Architectures where the word ecosystem is more than just a
metaphor.Comment: 39 pages, 26 figures, journa
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