Grid Information Technology as a New Technological Tool for e-Science, Healthcare and Life Science

Nowadays, scientific projects require collaborative environments and powerful computing resources capable of handling huge quantities of data, which gives rise to e-Science. These requirements are evident in the need to optimise time and efforts in activities to do with health. When e-Science focuses on the collaborative handling of all the information generated in clinical medicine and health, e-Health is the result. Scientists are taking increasing interest in an emerging technology – Grid Information Technology – that may offer a solution to their current needs. The current work aims to survey how e-Science is using this technology all around the world. We also argue that the technology may provide an ideal solution for the new challenges facing e-Health and Life Science.Hoy en día, los proyectos científicos requieren poderosos recursos de computación capaces de manejar grandes cantidades de datos, los cuales han dado paso a la ciencia electrónica (e-ciencia). Estos requerimientos se hacen evidentes en la necesidad de optimizar tiempo y esfuerzos en actividades relacionadas con la salud. Cuando la e-ciencia se enfoca en el manejo colaborativo de toda la información generada en la medicina clínica y la salud, da como resultado la salud electrónica (e-salud). Los científicos se han interesado cada vez más y más en una tecnología emergente, como lo es la Tecnología de información en red, la que puede ofrecer solución a sus necesidades cotidianas. El siguiente trabajo apunta a examinar como la e-ciencia es empleada en el mundo. También se discute que la tecnología puede proveer una solución ideal para encarar nuevos desafíos en e-salud y Ciencias de la Vida.Nowadays, scientific projects require collaborative environments and powerful computing resources capable of handling huge quantities of data, which gives rise to e-Science. These requirements are evident in the need to optimise time and efforts in activities to do with health. When e-Science focuses on the collaborative handling of all the information generated in clinical medicine and health, e-Health is the result. Scientists are taking increasing interest in an emerging technology – Grid Information Technology – that may offer a solution to their current needs. The current work aims to survey how e-Science is using this technology all around the world. We also argue that the technology may provide an ideal solution for the new challenges facing e-Health and Life Science

Development of an Ontology of Tourist Attractions for Recommending Points of Interest in a Group Recommender System for Tourism

In recent years, the tourism industry has witnessed substantial growth, thanks to the pro liferation of digital technology and online platforms. Tourists now have greater access to information and the ability to make informed travel decisions. However, the abundance of available information often leaves tourists overwhelmed when selecting points of inter est (POI) that align with their preferences. Recommender Systems (RS) have emerged as a solution, personalising recommendations based on tourist behaviour, social networks, and contextual factors. To enhance RS efficacy, researchers have begun exploring the integration of psychological factors, such as personality traits. Yet, to meet the demands of modern tourists, a robust knowledge base, such as a tourist attractions ontology, is essential for seamless and rapid matching of tourist characteristics and preferences with available POI. With that in mind, this project aims to enhance a Group Recommender System (GRS) prototype, GrouPlanner, by creating a robust tourist attractions ontology. This ontology will facilitate rapid and accurate matching of points of interest with tourists’ character istics, including personality, preferences, and demographic data, ultimately improving POI recommendations. First, there needs to be an understanding of the personality of tourists and how it influences their choices when it comes to picking the best point of interest based on their personality. With that knowledge acquired, it is time to choose a way to represent this knowledge in the form of an ontology. In this project, the Protégé ontology editor was used to design the ontology and the rela tionships between the tourists’ personality and the points of interest. After designing the ontology, it had to be converted to a database so the Grouplanner system could access it. So, to do that, a solution was designed to integrate the designed ontology in a triple store data base, in this case, Apache Fuseki. With the database implemented, several tests were made to verify if the database would give the recommended points of interests based on the tourists’ preferences. This tests were later analysed.Nos anos mais recentes, a indústria do turismo presenciou um crescimento substancial dev ido à tecnologia digital e plataformas online. Cada vez mais, os turistas têm acesso a uma abundância de informação que influencia a habilidade de tomar decisões sobre viajar. No entanto, esta informação pode complicar a seleção dos pontos de interesse que alinhem com as preferências dos turistas. Para combater isso, sistemas de recomendação (SR) emergi ram como uma solução, personalizando as recomendações com base no comportamento do turista, redes socias e outros fatores. Para aumentar a eficácia destes sistemas, os investi gadores começaram a explorar a possibilidade de integração com fatores psicológicos, como traços de personalidade. Apesar disso, para cumprir as exigências dos turistas modernos, uma base de conhecimento robusta, como uma ontologia de atrações turísticas, é essencial para, de forma eficaz e eficiente, corresponder as características dos turistas com os pontos de interesse disponíveis. Com isso em mente, este projeto tem como objetivo melhorar um protótipo de um sistema de recomendação (GrouPlanner), criando uma ontologia robusta de atrações turísticas. Essa ontologia facilitará a correspondência rápida e precisa de pontos de interesse com as car acterísticas dos turistas, incluindo a sua personalidade e as suas preferências, melhorando assim as recomendações de pontos de interesse. Em primeiro lugar, é necessário compreender a personalidade dos turistas e como ela influ encia as suas escolhas ao selecionar o melhor ponto de interesse com base na sua person alidade. Com esse ponto adquirido, é necessário escolher uma maneira de representar esse conhecimento na forma de uma ontologia. Neste projeto, o editor de ontologias Protégé foi utilizado para projetar a ontologia e as relações entre a personalidade dos turistas e os pontos de interesse. Após a construção da ontologia, foi necessário convertê-la numa base de dados para que o sistema Grouplanner pudesse ter acesso. Para isso, foi desenhada uma solução para integrar a ontologia projetada numa base de dados "triple store", neste caso, o Apache Fuseki. Com a base de dados implementada, foram realizados vários testes para verificar se esta forneceria os pontos de interesse recomendados com base nas preferências dos turistas. Esses testes foram depois analisados

Risk-based neuro-grid architecture for multimodal biometrics

Recent research indicates that multimodal biometrics is the way forward for a highly reliable adoption of biometric identification systems in various applications, such as banks, businesses, government

Dynamic trust negotiation for decentralised e-health collaborations

In the Internet-age, the geographical boundaries that have previously impinged upon inter-organisational collaborations have become decreasingly important. Of more importance for such collaborations is the notion and subsequent nature of security and trust - this is especially so in open collaborative environments like the Grid where resources can be both made available, subsequently accessed and used by remote users from a multitude of institutions with a variety of different privileges spanning across the collaboration. In this context, the ability to dynamically negotiate and subsequently enforce security policies driven by various levels of inter-organisational trust is essential. Numerous access control solutions exist today to address aspects of inter-organisational security. These include the use of centralised access control lists where all collaborating partners negotiate and agree on privileges required to access shared resources. Other solutions involve delegating aspects of access right management to trusted remote individuals in assigning privileges to their (remote) users. These solutions typically entail negotiations and delegations which are constrained by organisations, people and the static rules they impose. Such constraints often result in a lack of flexibility in what has been agreed; difficulties in reaching agreement, or once established, in subsequently maintaining these agreements. Furthermore, these solutions often reduce the autonomous capacity of collaborating organisations because of the need to satisfy collaborating partners demands. This can result in increased security risks or reducing the granularity of security policies. Underpinning this is the issue of trust. Specifically trust realisation between organisations, between individuals, and/or between entities or systems that are present in multi-domain authorities. Trust negotiation is one approach that allows and supports trust realisation. The thesis introduces a novel model called dynamic trust negotiation (DTN) that supports n-tier negotiation hops for trust realisation in multi-domain collaborative environments with specific focus on e-Health environments. DTN describes how trust pathways can be discovered and subsequently how remote security credentials can be mapped to local security credentials through trust contracts, thereby bridging the gap that makes decentralised security policies difficult to define and enforce. Furthermore, DTN shows how n-tier negotiation hops can limit the disclosure of access control policies and how semantic issues that exist with security attributes in decentralised environments can be reduced. The thesis presents the results from the application of DTN to various clinical trials and the implementation of DTN to Virtual Organisation for Trials of Epidemiological Studies (VOTES). The thesis concludes that DTN can address the issue of realising and establishing trust between systems or agents within the e-Health domain, such as the clinical trials domain

Utility of collaborative GIS for maritime spatial planning: Design and evaluation of Baltic Explorer

Maritime spatial planning (MSP) needs tools to facilitate discussions and manage spatial data in collaborative workshops that involve actors with various backgrounds and expertise. However, the reported use of spatial tools in real‐world MSP is sparse. A better understanding is needed of how geographic information systems (GIS) can effectively support collaboration in MSP. We studied the utility of GIS tools for collaborative MSP in five steps: first, identifying shortcomings in available GIS for supporting collaborative MSP; second, defining requirements for an effective collaborative GIS (CGIS) for MSP; third, designing and developing a prototype CGIS, Baltic Explorer; fourth, demonstrating the system; and fifth, evaluating the system. In a real‐world MSP workshop, we demonstrated that the functionalities of Baltic Explorer can support and facilitate discussions in collaborative work. We also found that more research is needed about the use of spatial data in collaborative MSP and integration of model‐based geospatial analysis into CGIS

Evolving a secure grid-enabled, distributed data warehouse : a standards-based perspective

As digital data-collection has increased in scale and number, it becomes an important type of resource serving a wide community of researchers. Cross-institutional data-sharing and collaboration introduce a suitable approach to facilitate those research institutions that are suffering the lack of data and related IT infrastructures. Grid computing has become a widely adopted approach to enable cross-institutional resource-sharing and collaboration. It integrates a distributed and heterogeneous collection of locally managed users and resources. This project proposes a distributed data warehouse system, which uses Grid technology to enable data-access and integration, and collaborative operations across multi-distributed institutions in the context of HV/AIDS research. This study is based on wider research into OGSA-based Grid services architecture, comprising a data-analysis system which utilizes a data warehouse, data marts, and near-line operational database that are hosted by distributed institutions. Within this framework, specific patterns for collaboration, interoperability, resource virtualization and security are included. The heterogeneous and dynamic nature of the Grid environment introduces a number of security challenges. This study also concerns a set of particular security aspects, including PKI-based authentication, single sign-on, dynamic delegation, and attribute-based authorization. These mechanisms, as supported by the Globus Toolkit’s Grid Security Infrastructure, are used to enable interoperability and establish trust relationship between various security mechanisms and policies within different institutions; manage credentials; and ensure secure interactions