A Process Framework for Semantics-aware Tourism Information Systems

The growing sophistication of user requirements in tourism due to the advent of new technologies such as the Semantic Web and mobile computing has imposed new possibilities for improved intelligence in Tourism Information Systems (TIS). Traditional software engineering and web engineering approaches cannot suffice, hence the need to find new product development approaches that would sufficiently enable the next generation of TIS. The next generation of TIS are expected among other things to: enable semantics-based information processing, exhibit natural language capabilities, facilitate inter-organization exchange of information in a seamless way, and evolve proactively in tandem with dynamic user requirements. In this paper, a product development approach called Product Line for Ontology-based Semantics-Aware Tourism Information Systems (PLOSATIS) which is a novel hybridization of software product line engineering, and Semantic Web engineering concepts is proposed. PLOSATIS is presented as potentially effective, predictable and amenable to software process improvement initiatives

The Dark Energy Survey Data Management System

The Dark Energy Survey collaboration will study cosmic acceleration with a 5000 deg2 griZY survey in the southern sky over 525 nights from 2011-2016. The DES data management (DESDM) system will be used to process and archive these data and the resulting science ready data products. The DESDM system consists of an integrated archive, a processing framework, an ensemble of astronomy codes and a data access framework. We are developing the DESDM system for operation in the high performance computing (HPC) environments at NCSA and Fermilab. Operating the DESDM system in an HPC environment offers both speed and flexibility. We will employ it for our regular nightly processing needs, and for more compute-intensive tasks such as large scale image coaddition campaigns, extraction of weak lensing shear from the full survey dataset, and massive seasonal reprocessing of the DES data. Data products will be available to the Collaboration and later to the public through a virtual-observatory compatible web portal. Our approach leverages investments in publicly available HPC systems, greatly reducing hardware and maintenance costs to the project, which must deploy and maintain only the storage, database platforms and orchestration and web portal nodes that are specific to DESDM. In Fall 2007, we tested the current DESDM system on both simulated and real survey data. We used Teragrid to process 10 simulated DES nights (3TB of raw data), ingesting and calibrating approximately 250 million objects into the DES Archive database. We also used DESDM to process and calibrate over 50 nights of survey data acquired with the Mosaic2 camera. Comparison to truth tables in the case of the simulated data and internal crosschecks in the case of the real data indicate that astrometric and photometric data quality is excellent.Comment: To be published in the proceedings of the SPIE conference on Astronomical Instrumentation (held in Marseille in June 2008). This preprint is made available with the permission of SPIE. Further information together with preprint containing full quality images is available at http://desweb.cosmology.uiuc.edu/wik

1st INCF Workshop on Global Portal Services for Neuroscience

The goal of this meeting was to map out existing portal services for neuroscience, identify their features and future plans, and outline opportunities for synergistic developments. The workshop discussed alternative formats of future global and integrated portal services

Adding Value to Statistics in the Data Revolution Age

As many statistical offices in accordance with the European Statistical System commitment to Vision 2020, since the second half of 2014 Istat has implemented its internal standardisation and industrialisation process within the framework of a common Business Architecture. Istat modernisation programme aims at building services and infrastructures within a plug-and-play framework to foster innovation, promote reuse and move towards full integration and interoperability of statistical process, consistent with a service-oriented architecture. This is expected to lead to higher effectiveness and productivity by improving the quality of statistical information and reducing the response burden. This paper addresses the strategy adopted by Istat which is focused on exploiting administrative data and new data sources in order to achieve its key goals enhancing value to users. The strategy is based on some priorities that consider services centred on users and stakeholders as well as Linked Open Data, to allow Machine-to-Machine data and metadata integration through definition of common statistical ontologies and semantics

EcoGIS – GIS tools for ecosystem approaches to fisheries management

Executive Summary: The EcoGIS project was launched in September 2004 to investigate how Geographic Information Systems (GIS), marine data, and custom analysis tools can better enable fisheries scientists and managers to adopt Ecosystem Approaches to Fisheries Management (EAFM). EcoGIS is a collaborative effort between NOAA’s National Ocean Service (NOS) and National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), and four regional Fishery Management Councils. The project has focused on four priority areas: Fishing Catch and Effort Analysis, Area Characterization, Bycatch Analysis, and Habitat Interactions. Of these four functional areas, the project team first focused on developing a working prototype for catch and effort analysis: the Fishery Mapper Tool. This ArcGIS extension creates time-and-area summarized maps of fishing catch and effort from logbook, observer, or fishery-independent survey data sets. Source data may come from Oracle, Microsoft Access, or other file formats. Feedback from beta-testers of the Fishery Mapper was used to debug the prototype, enhance performance, and add features. This report describes the four priority functional areas, the development of the Fishery Mapper tool, and several themes that emerged through the parallel evolution of the EcoGIS project, the concept and implementation of the broader field of Ecosystem Approaches to Management (EAM), data management practices, and other EAM toolsets. In addition, a set of six succinct recommendations are proposed on page 29. One major conclusion from this work is that there is no single “super-tool” to enable Ecosystem Approaches to Management; as such, tools should be developed for specific purposes with attention given to interoperability and automation. Future work should be coordinated with other GIS development projects in order to provide “value added” and minimize duplication of efforts. In addition to custom tools, the development of cross-cutting Regional Ecosystem Spatial Databases will enable access to quality data to support the analyses required by EAM. GIS tools will be useful in developing Integrated Ecosystem Assessments (IEAs) and providing pre- and post-processing capabilities for spatially-explicit ecosystem models. Continued funding will enable the EcoGIS project to develop GIS tools that are immediately applicable to today’s needs. These tools will enable simplified and efficient data query, the ability to visualize data over time, and ways to synthesize multidimensional data from diverse sources. These capabilities will provide new information for analyzing issues from an ecosystem perspective, which will ultimately result in better understanding of fisheries and better support for decision-making. (PDF file contains 45 pages.