The Database Query Support Processor (QSP)

The number and diversity of databases available to users continues to increase dramatically. Currently, the trend is towards decentralized, client server architectures that (on the surface) are less expensive to acquire, operate, and maintain than information architectures based on centralized, monolithic mainframes. The database query support processor (QSP) effort evaluates the performance of a network level, heterogeneous database access capability. Air Force Material Command's Rome Laboratory has developed an approach, based on ANSI standard X3.138 - 1988, 'The Information Resource Dictionary System (IRDS)' to seamless access to heterogeneous databases based on extensions to data dictionary technology. To successfully query a decentralized information system, users must know what data are available from which source, or have the knowledge and system privileges necessary to find out this information. Privacy and security considerations prohibit free and open access to every information system in every network. Even in completely open systems, time required to locate relevant data (in systems of any appreciable size) would be better spent analyzing the data, assuming the original question was not forgotten. Extensions to data dictionary technology have the potential to more fully automate the search and retrieval for relevant data in a decentralized environment. Substantial amounts of time and money could be saved by not having to teach users what data resides in which systems and how to access each of those systems. Information describing data and how to get it could be removed from the application and placed in a dedicated repository where it belongs. The result simplified applications that are less brittle and less expensive to build and maintain. Software technology providing the required functionality is off the shelf. The key difficulty is in defining the metadata required to support the process. The database query support processor effort will provide quantitative data on the amount of effort required to implement an extended data dictionary at the network level, add new systems, adapt to changing user needs, and provide sound estimates on operations and maintenance costs and savings

SoK: Cryptographically Protected Database Search

Protected database search systems cryptographically isolate the roles of reading from, writing to, and administering the database. This separation limits unnecessary administrator access and protects data in the case of system breaches. Since protected search was introduced in 2000, the area has grown rapidly; systems are offered by academia, start-ups, and established companies. However, there is no best protected search system or set of techniques. Design of such systems is a balancing act between security, functionality, performance, and usability. This challenge is made more difficult by ongoing database specialization, as some users will want the functionality of SQL, NoSQL, or NewSQL databases. This database evolution will continue, and the protected search community should be able to quickly provide functionality consistent with newly invented databases. At the same time, the community must accurately and clearly characterize the tradeoffs between different approaches. To address these challenges, we provide the following contributions: 1) An identification of the important primitive operations across database paradigms. We find there are a small number of base operations that can be used and combined to support a large number of database paradigms. 2) An evaluation of the current state of protected search systems in implementing these base operations. This evaluation describes the main approaches and tradeoffs for each base operation. Furthermore, it puts protected search in the context of unprotected search, identifying key gaps in functionality. 3) An analysis of attacks against protected search for different base queries. 4) A roadmap and tools for transforming a protected search system into a protected database, including an open-source performance evaluation platform and initial user opinions of protected search.Comment: 20 pages, to appear to IEEE Security and Privac

Large-scale event extraction from literature with multi-level gene normalization

Text mining for the life sciences aims to aid database curation, knowledge summarization and information retrieval through the automated processing of biomedical texts. To provide comprehensive coverage and enable full integration with existing biomolecular database records, it is crucial that text mining tools scale up to millions of articles and that their analyses can be unambiguously linked to information recorded in resources such as UniProt, KEGG, BioGRID and NCBI databases. In this study, we investigate how fully automated text mining of complex biomolecular events can be augmented with a normalization strategy that identifies biological concepts in text, mapping them to identifiers at varying levels of granularity, ranging from canonicalized symbols to unique gene and proteins and broad gene families. To this end, we have combined two state-of-the-art text mining components, previously evaluated on two community-wide challenges, and have extended and improved upon these methods by exploiting their complementary nature. Using these systems, we perform normalization and event extraction to create a large-scale resource that is publicly available, unique in semantic scope, and covers all 21.9 million PubMed abstracts and 460 thousand PubMed Central open access full-text articles. This dataset contains 40 million biomolecular events involving 76 million gene/protein mentions, linked to 122 thousand distinct genes from 5032 species across the full taxonomic tree. Detailed evaluations and analyses reveal promising results for application of this data in database and pathway curation efforts. The main software components used in this study are released under an open-source license. Further, the resulting dataset is freely accessible through a novel API, providing programmatic and customized access (http://www.evexdb.org/api/v001/). Finally, to allow for large-scale bioinformatic analyses, the entire resource is available for bulk download from http://evexdb.org/download/, under the Creative Commons -Attribution - Share Alike (CC BY-SA) license

Horizontal activites. QLIF subproject 7: Horizontal activities

QLIF subproject 7 represents four horizontal activities common to the project, namely: • Environmental and sustainability audits • Cost-benefit analyses and socio-economic impact assessments • Dissemination and technology transfer • Training of graduate and postgraduate researchers Activities in the horizontal research have shown that organic crop production systems generally are more energy-efficient and have lower greenhouse gas emissions than the conventional production. In terms of dissemination the QLIF website has been central and the QLIF newsletter has attracted more than 1000 subscribers. Coupling of the website with the open access database Organic Eprints provides a prospective source of project information that can be accessed also by future stakeholders in organic and low-input systems. Training events arranged annually for students have contributed to proliferation of skills and knowledge gained in QLIF. Also, these events have served to mediate the attitude needed for research in organic and low-input farming

HelioClim-1: 21-years of daily values in solar radiation in one-click

International audienceThe HelioClim-1 database offers daily means of surface solar irradiance for the period 1985-2005 and has been cre-ated from archives of images of the Meteosat First Generation satellites. Expectations of users regarding access to similar data were carefully analyzed, especially regarding dissemination of and access to data, and were taken at the heart of the design of the database. Efforts were made to deliver time-series spanning over 21 years very rapidly on the Web with a limited number of clicks. The soundness of the approach by MINES ParisTech is now rewarded by the large number of access to HelioClim-1, approximately 400 per workday, and by the number of scientific publications using these data. The Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS) has declared HelioClim-1 as a Data Collection of Open Resources for Everyone (GEOSS Data-CORE) in November 2011. A Web processing service (WPS) obeying the OGC (Open Geospatial Consortium) standard has been developed. Being interoperable, it can be invoked in operational routines, such as those under development in the European funded ENDORSE and MACC projects

Historical landscape of Sistan in Iran and Afghanistan: EAMENA Dataset for assessing environmental impact on cultural heritage

This dataset is an exported subset of the Endangered Archaeology in the Middle East and North Africa (EAMENA) database. It includes archaeological and cultural heritage places, such as ancient settlements, historical structures, traditional villages, and irrigation systems within the central areas of the historical landscape of Sistan (), located in eastern Iran and southwestern Afghanistan. The data was gathered by the visual inspection of 16,875 km2 of open-access satellite imagery accessible on Google Earth covering the period from 2001 to 2022, utilising the EAMENA methodology for archaeological and condition assessment. It is stored in the EAMENA web-based open-access database, hosted by the University of Oxford. The primary objective of compiling this dataset is to evaluate the impact of recent climate and environmental changes, as well as other disturbance factors, such as agriculture, building and development, and infrastructure, on the cultural heritage places of this historical region

A Platform Independent Web-Based Data Managementn System For Random Access File

With the advent of the Web, the Internet has evolved into a user-friendly medium capable of high speed, on demand information delivery. Putting data onto the World Wide Web in the form of a fully accessible, searchable database can open up a wide variety of possibilities for teaching, learning and research. There are many different types of web-based database management system (DBMS), e.g., Oracle, Informix/Illustra, IBM DB2, Object Design, ranging from small systems that run on personal computers to huge systems that run on mainframes. However, these systems have limitations such as being platform dependent, not portable and expensive. This thesis describes the development of WebDB, a platform independent webbased data management system using Java servIets and random access files to address the problems. It is developed in order to provide the management functions to WebEd2000's database. WebEd2000 is a working prototype of Web-based distance learning system developed at the Broadband and ATM Research Group, Universiti Putra Malaysia (UPM). It enables delivering conventional lecture notes over the Web and providing various tools to help in managing and maintaining course materials in a server. The WebDB approach is for the ease of the centralized management of database administrator over the WebEd2000 users and maintains the database. It also enables instructors to access to their database and update it when necessary. Instead of WebEd2000 database, the system allows its users to put another database on the server. WebDB is mainly developed using the combination of Java servlets and JavaScript technologies. The server-side servlets are used to handle the requests from client and the responses from server. The random access file served as database repository in the database server where all the data is stored. The client-side JavaScript is used to enable DHTML features and perform less-security-concern processes in order to reduce the workload of the web-server. Lastly, WebEd can be easily set up and deployed in any platform and web-servers with minimal modifications. Portability is achieved by utilizing Java technology for the system applications and random access file as the data repository

Integration of information and educational systems in the universal education university electronic environment

The article is devoted to the integration of educational resources and educational and informational systems in a single information and educational environment of the university. Access to the university's information and educational environment is carried out through the additional web-site of the official portal “Information and educational environment” for authorization, which uses technology of the single sign-on point, the main element of which is the creation of a user database. Taking into account the features of the analyzed directory services and the use of the domain structure of the network organization, we have selected to create the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) database using the OpenLDAP open protocol. Were described the implementation of the settings for a single sign-on page using the protocol for the web CAS (Central Authentication Service). To synchronize the University's corporate email and available Google services with the LDAP database, Google Apps developed a Google Apps Directory Sync application that synchronizes the structure and all users in Google Apps. In order to synchronize the e-learning system based on the LMS Moodle, an existing appropriate module was used to authenticate users through the LDAP database. Configuring the module, synchronizing users and groups is presented in the article. Also are listed the settings specified in the LocalSettings.php file that are related to LDAP authentication with the university's wiki portal via the installed and connected LDAP authentication module. Also we described an approach to synchronizing users with the systems of scientific conferences and seminars based on the open conference system engine, which includes a module for LDAP authenticatio