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The National Transport Data Framework
Report by Professor Peter Landshoff (Cambridge University) and
Professor John Polak (Imperial College London) on a project for
the Department for Transport.
emails: [email protected] [email protected] NTDF is designed to be a resource for data owners to deposit descriptions
into a central catalogue, so that people can search for data and find data
and understand their characteristics. The value of this is to individuals, to
commercial organizations, and to public bodies. For example, services that
provide better information to travellers will help to make their journey
less stressful and persuade them to make more use of public transport.
Transport operators need very diverse information to help them
plan developments to their services: demographic, geographical, economic etc.
And policy makers need a similar range of information to help them decide
how to divide their budget and afterwards to evaluate how valuable it has
been.This work was supported by the Department for Transport (DfT)
An open standard for the exchange of information in the Australian timber sector
The purpose of this paper is to describe business-to-business (B2B) communication and the characteristics of an open standard for electronic communication within the Australian timber and wood products industry. Current issues, future goals and strategies for using business-to-business communication will be considered.
From the perspective of the Timber industry sector, this study is important because supply chain efficiency is a key component in an organisation's strategy to gain a competitive advantage in the marketplace. Strong improvement in supply chain performance is possible with improved business-to-business communication which is used both for building trust and providing real time marketing data.
Traditional methods such as electronic data interchange (EDI) used to facilitate B2B communication have a number of disadvantages, such as high implementation and running costs and a rigid and inflexible messaging standard. Information and communications technologies (ICT) have supported the emergence of web-based EDI which maintains the advantages of the traditional paradigm while negating the disadvantages. This has been further extended by the advent of the Semantic web which rests on the fundamental idea that web resources should be annotated with semantic markup that captures information about their meaning and facilitates meaningful machine-to-machine communication.
This paper provides an ontology using OWL (Web Ontology Language) for the Australian Timber sector that can be used in conjunction with semantic web services to provide effective and cheap B2B communications
Bridging global divides with tracking and tracing technology
Product-tracking technology is increasingly available to big players in the value chain connecting producers to consumers, giving them new competitive advantages. Such shifts in technology don't benefit small producers, especially those in developing regions, to the same degree. This article examines the practicalities of leveling the playing field by creating a generic form of tracing technology that any producer, large or small, can use. It goes beyond considering engineering solutions to look at what happens in the context of use, reporting on work with partners in Chile and India and reflecting on the potential for impact on business and community well-being
Clusters and supply chain management: challenges and obstacles
Purpose: This paper provides an insight into cluster supply chain (CSC) management by identifying
challenges and obstacles in the design, implementation and improvement of CSC. This evaluation aims to
propose future research directions for the management of CSC.
Research Approach: A systematic review of published research on CSC management between 2006 and
2013 is conducted in order to round up previous research in this area and identify the gaps in the design,
implementation and management of CSC; up on which the paper closes with a proposed agenda for future
work.
Findings and Originality: There is a limited understanding of the supply chain cluster concept and the
implementation of its practices in addition to the lack of studies that focused on how to model, manage
and improve the performance of CSC. Therefore, this paper would contribute to knowledge by providing an
insight into CSC management and identifying future research directions for developing SC cluster theories
in order to maximize the integration of supply chain and accordingly improving the performance of firms.
Research Impact: A limited number of studies have been conducted to demonstrate the potential impact of
CSC. The previous research did not provide a comprehensive review focusing on the evolution and the
development of CSC idea. The review in this paper will summarise the research up to now in CSC area in
order to identify challenges and obstacles in the design, implementation and improvement of CSC and
propose future research directions.
Practical Impact: This paper helps companies to understand benefits that can be raised from creating CSC
and gives them directions for improving their capabilities to create CSC and select SC partners, which
consequently help in increasing their competitiveness in terms of enhancing performance and increasing
sustainability
PluralisMAC: a generic multi-MAC framework for heterogeneous, multiservice wireless networks, applied to smart containers
Developing energy-efficient MAC protocols for lightweight wireless systems has been a challenging task for decades because of the specific requirements of various applications and the varying environments in which wireless systems are deployed. Many MAC protocols for wireless networks have been proposed, often custom-made for a specific application. It is clear that one MAC does not fit all the requirements. So, how should a MAC layer deal with an application that has several modes (each with different requirements) or with the deployment of another application during the lifetime of the system? Especially in a mobile wireless system, like Smart Monitoring of Containers, we cannot know in advance the application state (empty container versus stuffed container). Dynamic switching between different energy-efficient MAC strategies is needed. Our architecture, called PluralisMAC, contains a generic multi-MAC framework and a generic neighbour monitoring and filtering framework. To validate the real-world feasibility of our architecture, we have implemented it in TinyOS and have done experiments on the TMote Sky nodes in the w-iLab.t testbed. Experimental results show that dynamic switching between MAC strategies is possible with minimal receive chain overhead, while meeting the various application requirements (reliability and low-energy consumption)
LightBox: Full-stack Protected Stateful Middlebox at Lightning Speed
Running off-site software middleboxes at third-party service providers has
been a popular practice. However, routing large volumes of raw traffic, which
may carry sensitive information, to a remote site for processing raises severe
security concerns. Prior solutions often abstract away important factors
pertinent to real-world deployment. In particular, they overlook the
significance of metadata protection and stateful processing. Unprotected
traffic metadata like low-level headers, size and count, can be exploited to
learn supposedly encrypted application contents. Meanwhile, tracking the states
of 100,000s of flows concurrently is often indispensable in production-level
middleboxes deployed at real networks.
We present LightBox, the first system that can drive off-site middleboxes at
near-native speed with stateful processing and the most comprehensive
protection to date. Built upon commodity trusted hardware, Intel SGX, LightBox
is the product of our systematic investigation of how to overcome the inherent
limitations of secure enclaves using domain knowledge and customization. First,
we introduce an elegant virtual network interface that allows convenient access
to fully protected packets at line rate without leaving the enclave, as if from
the trusted source network. Second, we provide complete flow state management
for efficient stateful processing, by tailoring a set of data structures and
algorithms optimized for the highly constrained enclave space. Extensive
evaluations demonstrate that LightBox, with all security benefits, can achieve
10Gbps packet I/O, and that with case studies on three stateful middleboxes, it
can operate at near-native speed.Comment: Accepted at ACM CCS 201
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