What Are We Doing with the Website: Transition, Templates, and User Experience in One Special Collections Library

[Excerpt] At the Eberly Family Special Collections Library (SCL), we have found that our website is often the first place a researcher will look to learn about our repository. Our online web presence is a business card, our chance to make a positive first impression. While our library, among others, has devoted time and resources to the development of new access tools and discovery layers, we have learned that our online presence also needs updates, revisions, and improvements. New tools and access points are valuable, but we can also improve existing tools even as we look forward to new developments in access and discovery. Through conscious efforts to include end users’ feedback in our website design decisions, we create more effective online tools. Our website is a crucial component of our efforts to direct users to our collections, and to publicize our services and programs. In this same vein, our end users can contribute to this design partnership through dedicated user experience testing. The SCL experimented with collaborative decision-making with its website committee, as well as with user experience testing in order to support our requests for additional web development work from the Libraries’ Information Technology department (I-Tech). Through this process, our library gained a more holistic understanding of the needs of online special collections and archives users; we also learned how to communicate more effectively between the department who worked with end users (SCL) and the department performing the actual web development work (I-Tech). While development work was limited to working within the mandatory web template, our user experience testing and the efforts of our internal website committee resulted in a better online experience for our stakeholders, based on the feedback we received from usability testing. Although our website is always a work in progress, we feel that we were able to develop practical ways to adjust to a website migration within in a dispersed and hierarchical information technology environment

A practical and open source implementation of IEC 61850-7-2 for IED monitoring applications

A new open source mapping of IEC 61850-7-2 to web services has been defined and implemented. This work is useful for rapidly implementing user interfaces—particularly web-based interfaces—for monitoring and controlling Intelligent Electronic Devices (IEDs) from multiple vendors. The web service mapping has been implemented using the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), with a message format in JavaScript Object Notation (JSON). This approach requires a simple and ubiquitous software stack for its implementation, which is a significant advantage over existing client-server communications mappings. The use of an open source paradigm allows for the rapid iteration and refinement of the design, implementation, and testing of the internal details of the proposed protocol stack, in a collaborative manner. These developments are of immediate interest to users of IEC 61850 and are particularly relevant to the IEC 61850 standardization process

Automated Runtime Testing of Web Services

Service-oriented computing (SOC) is a relatively new paradigm for developing software applications through the composition of software units called services. With services, software is no longer owned but offered remotely, within or across organisational borders. Currently, the dominant technology for implementing services is that of Web services. Since service requestors do not usually have access to the implementation source code, from their perspective, services are offered as black boxes. However, requestors need to verify first that provided services are trustworthy and implemented correctly before they are integrated into their own business-critical systems. The verification and testing of remote, third-party services involve unique considerations, since testing must be performed in a blackbox manner and at runtime. Addressing the aforementioned concerns, the research work described in this thesis investigates the feasibility of testing Web services for functional correctness, especially at runtime. The aim is to introduce rigour and automation to the testing process, so that service requestors can verify Web services with correctness guarantees and with the aid of tools. Thus, formal methods are utilised to specify the functionality of Web services unambiguously, so that they are amenable to automated and systematic testing. The well-studied stream X-machine (SXM) formalism has been selected as suitable for modelling both the dynamic behavior and static data of Web services, while a proven testing method associated with SXMs is used to derive test sets that can verify the correctness of the implementations. This research concentrates on testing stateful Web services, in which the presence of state makes their behaviour more complex and more difficult to specify and test. The nature of Web service state, its effect on service behaviour, and implications on service modelling and testing, are investigated. In addition, comprehensive techniques are described for deriving a stream X-machine specification of a Web service, and for subsequently testing its implementation for equivalence to the specification. Then, a collaborative approach that makes possible third-party Web service verification and validation is proposed, in which the service provider is required to supply a SXM specification of the service functionality along with the standard WSDL description of its interface. On top of that, techniques are proposed for service providers to include information that ground the abstract SXM specification to the concrete Web service implementation. Having these descriptions available, it is possible to automate at runtime not only test set generation but also test case execution on Web services. A tool has been developed as part of this work, which extends an existing SXM-based testing tool (JSXM). The tool supports the tester activities, consisting of generation of abstract test cases from the SXM specification and their execution on the Web service under test using the supplied grounding information. Practical Web service examples are also used throughout the thesis to demonstrate the proposed techniques

An environment for educational service communities

In most global economies, there is a strong trend from agriculture and manufacturing towards service-orientation and tertiarisation: Services, products with value-added service solutions and, more recently, automated Internet service offerings seamlessly delivered through on-demand elastic cloud computing resources. In the affected societies, education is recognised as a key factor for maintaining the competitiveness. Specialised education about services is widely available, but tool support for hands-on learning and testing of how services can be produced, offered, delivered and improved is missing. We aim to fill this gap between theory and application by proposing an integrated environment for educational service communities such as service engineering classes. Initial results of our work show that the environment, which supports both auto-didactic learning and team-based competitive and collaborative learning-by-doing throughout the service lifecycle, motivates students and increases their practical knowledge about services. Our experience with the actual use of the environment in the context of a university course about web services and conclude the article with suggestions for future work are discussed

SPEIR: Scottish Portals for Education, Information and Research. Final Project Report: Elements and Future Development Requirements of a Common Information Environment for Scotland

The SPEIR (Scottish Portals for Education, Information and Research) project was funded by the Scottish Library and Information Council (SLIC). It ran from February 2003 to September 2004, slightly longer than the 18 months originally scheduled and was managed by the Centre for Digital Library Research (CDLR). With SLIC's agreement, community stakeholders were represented in the project by the Confederation of Scottish Mini-Cooperatives (CoSMiC), an organisation whose members include SLIC, the National Library of Scotland (NLS), the Scottish Further Education Unit (SFEU), the Scottish Confederation of University and Research Libraries (SCURL), regional cooperatives such as the Ayrshire Libraries Forum (ALF)1, and representatives from the Museums and Archives communities in Scotland. Aims; A Common Information Environment For Scotland The aims of the project were to: o Conduct basic research into the distributed information infrastructure requirements of the Scottish Cultural Portal pilot and the public library CAIRNS integration proposal; o Develop associated pilot facilities by enhancing existing facilities or developing new ones; o Ensure that both infrastructure proposals and pilot facilities were sufficiently generic to be utilised in support of other portals developed by the Scottish information community; o Ensure the interoperability of infrastructural elements beyond Scotland through adherence to established or developing national and international standards. Since the Scottish information landscape is taken by CoSMiC members to encompass relevant activities in Archives, Libraries, Museums, and related domains, the project was, in essence, concerned with identifying, researching, and developing the elements of an internationally interoperable common information environment for Scotland, and of determining the best path for future progress

The OMII Software – Demonstrations and Comparisons between two different deployments for Client-Server Distributed Systems

This paper describes the key elements of the OMII software and the scenarios which OMII software can be deployed to achieve distributed computing in the UK e-Science Community, where two different deployments for Client-Server distributed systems are demonstrated. Scenarios and experiments for each deployment have been described, with its advantages and disadvantages compared and analyzed. We conclude that our first deployment is more relevant for system administrators or developers, and the second deployment is more suitable for users’ perspective which they can send and check job status for hundred job submissions