Connected Information Management

Society is currently inundated with more information than ever, making efficient management a necessity. Alas, most of current information management suffers from several levels of disconnectedness: Applications partition data into segregated islands, small notes don’t fit into traditional application categories, navigating the data is different for each kind of data; data is either available at a certain computer or only online, but rarely both. Connected information management (CoIM) is an approach to information management that avoids these ways of disconnectedness. The core idea of CoIM is to keep all information in a central repository, with generic means for organization such as tagging. The heterogeneity of data is taken into account by offering specialized editors. The central repository eliminates the islands of application-specific data and is formally grounded by a CoIM model. The foundation for structured data is an RDF repository. The RDF editing meta-model (REMM) enables form-based editing of this data, similar to database applications such as MS access. Further kinds of data are supported by extending RDF, as follows. Wiki text is stored as RDF and can both contain structured text and be combined with structured data. Files are also supported by the CoIM model and are kept externally. Notes can be quickly captured and annotated with meta-data. Generic means for organization and navigation apply to all kinds of data. Ubiquitous availability of data is ensured via two CoIM implementations, the web application HYENA/Web and the desktop application HYENA/Eclipse. All data can be synchronized between these applications. The applications were used to validate the CoIM ideas

Investigating the use of semantic technologies in spatial mapping applications

Semantic Web Technologies are ideally suited to build context-aware information retrieval applications. However, the geospatial aspect of context awareness presents unique challenges such as the semantic modelling of geographical references for efficient handling of spatial queries, the reconciliation of the heterogeneity at the semantic and geo-representation levels, maintaining the quality of service and scalability of communicating, and the efficient rendering of the spatial queries' results. In this paper, we describe the modelling decisions taken to solve these challenges by analysing our implementation of an intelligent planning and recommendation tool that provides location-aware advice for a specific application domain. This paper contributes to the methodology of integrating heterogeneous geo-referenced data into semantic knowledgebases, and also proposes mechanisms for efficient spatial interrogation of the semantic knowledgebase and optimising the rendering of the dynamically retrieved context-relevant information on a web frontend

An artefact repository to support distributed software engineering

The Open Source Component Artefact Repository (OSCAR) system is a component of the GENESIS platform designed to non-invasively inter-operate with work-flow management systems, development tools and existing repository systems to support a distributed software engineering team working collaboratively. Every artefact possesses a collection of associated meta-data, both standard and domain-specific presented as an XML document. Within OSCAR, artefacts are made aware of changes to related artefacts using notifications, allowing them to modify their own meta-data actively in contrast to other software repositories where users must perform all and any modifications, however trivial. This recording of events, including user interactions provides a complete picture of an artefact's life from creation to (eventual) retirement with the intention of supporting collaboration both amongst the members of the software engineering team and agents acting on their behalf

A Brief History of Web Crawlers

Web crawlers visit internet applications, collect data, and learn about new web pages from visited pages. Web crawlers have a long and interesting history. Early web crawlers collected statistics about the web. In addition to collecting statistics about the web and indexing the applications for search engines, modern crawlers can be used to perform accessibility and vulnerability checks on the application. Quick expansion of the web, and the complexity added to web applications have made the process of crawling a very challenging one. Throughout the history of web crawling many researchers and industrial groups addressed different issues and challenges that web crawlers face. Different solutions have been proposed to reduce the time and cost of crawling. Performing an exhaustive crawl is a challenging question. Additionally capturing the model of a modern web application and extracting data from it automatically is another open question. What follows is a brief history of different technique and algorithms used from the early days of crawling up to the recent days. We introduce criteria to evaluate the relative performance of web crawlers. Based on these criteria we plot the evolution of web crawlers and compare their performanc

A schema-based P2P network to enable publish-subscribe for multimedia content in open hypermedia systems

Open Hypermedia Systems (OHS) aim to provide efficient dissemination, adaptation and integration of hyperlinked multimedia resources. Content available in Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks could add significant value to OHS provided that challenges for efficient discovery and prompt delivery of rich and up-to-date content are successfully addressed. This paper proposes an architecture that enables the operation of OHS over a P2P overlay network of OHS servers based on semantic annotation of (a) peer OHS servers and of (b) multimedia resources that can be obtained through the link services of the OHS. The architecture provides efficient resource discovery. Semantic query-based subscriptions over this P2P network can enable access to up-to-date content, while caching at certain peers enables prompt delivery of multimedia content. Advanced query resolution techniques are employed to match different parts of subscription queries (subqueries). These subscriptions can be shared among different interested peers, thus increasing the efficiency of multimedia content dissemination

User Applications Driven by the Community Contribution Framework MPContribs in the Materials Project

This work discusses how the MPContribs framework in the Materials Project (MP) allows user-contributed data to be shown and analyzed alongside the core MP database. The Materials Project is a searchable database of electronic structure properties of over 65,000 bulk solid materials that is accessible through a web-based science-gateway. We describe the motivation for enabling user contributions to the materials data and present the framework's features and challenges in the context of two real applications. These use-cases illustrate how scientific collaborations can build applications with their own "user-contributed" data using MPContribs. The Nanoporous Materials Explorer application provides a unique search interface to a novel dataset of hundreds of thousands of materials, each with tables of user-contributed values related to material adsorption and density at varying temperature and pressure. The Unified Theoretical and Experimental x-ray Spectroscopy application discusses a full workflow for the association, dissemination and combined analyses of experimental data from the Advanced Light Source with MP's theoretical core data, using MPContribs tools for data formatting, management and exploration. The capabilities being developed for these collaborations are serving as the model for how new materials data can be incorporated into the Materials Project website with minimal staff overhead while giving powerful tools for data search and display to the user community.Comment: 12 pages, 5 figures, Proceedings of 10th Gateway Computing Environments Workshop (2015), to be published in "Concurrency in Computation: Practice and Experience