Foundations of fast communication via XML

Communication with XML often involves pre-agreed document types. In this paper, we propose an offline parser generation approach to enhance online processing performance for documents con-forming to a given DTD. Our examination of DTDs and the languages they define demonstrates the existence of ambiguities. We present an algorithm that maps DTDs to deterministic context-free grammars defining the same languages. We prove the grammars to be LL(1) and LALR(1), making them suitable for standard parser generators. Our experiments show the superior performance of generated optimized parsers. Our results generalize from DTDs to XML Schema specifications with certain restrictions, most notably the absence of namespaces, which exceed the scope of context-free grammars

A Semantic-Based Information Management System to Support Innovative Product Design

International competition and the rapidly global economy, unified by improved communication and transportation, offer to the consumers an enormous choice of goods and services. The result is that companies now require quality, value, time to market and innovation to be successful in order to win the increasing competition. In the engineering sector this is traduced in need of optimization of the design process and in maximization of re-use of data and knowledge already existing in the company. The “SIMI-Pro” (Semantic Information Management system for Innovative Product design) system addresses specific deficiencies in the conceptual phase of product design when knowledge management, if applied, is often sectorial. Its main contribution is in allowing easy, fast and centralized collection of data from multiple sources and in supporting the retrieval and re-use of a wide range of data that will help stylists and engineers shortening the production cycle. SIMI-Pro will be one of the first prototypes to base its information management and its knowledge sharing system on process ontology and it will demonstrate how the use of centralized network systems, coupled with Semantic Web technologies, can improve inter-working activities and interdisciplinary knowledge sharing

Issues about the Adoption of Formal Methods for Dependable Composition of Web Services

Web Services provide interoperable mechanisms for describing, locating and invoking services over the Internet; composition further enables to build complex services out of simpler ones for complex B2B applications. While current studies on these topics are mostly focused - from the technical viewpoint - on standards and protocols, this paper investigates the adoption of formal methods, especially for composition. We logically classify and analyze three different (but interconnected) kinds of important issues towards this goal, namely foundations, verification and extensions. The aim of this work is to individuate the proper questions on the adoption of formal methods for dependable composition of Web Services, not necessarily to find the optimal answers. Nevertheless, we still try to propose some tentative answers based on our proposal for a composition calculus, which we hope can animate a proper discussion

Performance impact of web services on Internet servers

While traditional Internet servers mainly served static and later also dynamic content, the popularity of Web services is increasing rapidly. Web services incorporate additional overhead compared to traditional web interaction. This overhead increases the demand on Internet servers which is of particular importance when the request rate to the server is high. We conduct experiments that show that the imposed overhead of Web services is non-negligible during server overload. In our experiments the response time for Web services is more than 30% higher and the server throughput more than 25% lower compared to traditional web interaction using dynamically created HTML pages

Data literacy in the smart university approach

Equipping classrooms with inexpensive sensors for data collection can provide students and teachers with the opportunity to interact with the classroom in a smart way. In this paper two approaches to acquiring contextual data from a classroom environment are presented. We further present our approach to analysing the collected room usage data on site, using low cost single board computer, such as a Raspberry Pi and Arduino units, performing a significant part of the data analysis on-site. We demonstrate how the usage data was used to model specifcic room usage situation as cases in a Case-based reasoning (CBR) system. The room usage data was then integrated in a room recommender system, reasoning on the formalised usage data, allowing for a convenient and intuitive end user experience based on the collected raw sensor data. Having implemented and tested our approaches we are currently investigating the possibility of using (XML)Schema-informed compression to enhance the security and efficiency of the transmission of a large number of sensor reports generated by interpreting the raw data on-site, to our central data sink. We are investigating this new approach to usage data transmission as we are aiming to integrate our on-going work into our vision of the Smart University to ensure and enhance the Smart University's data literacy

Proviola: A Tool for Proof Re-animation

To improve on existing models of interaction with a proof assistant (PA), in particular for storage and replay of proofs, we in- troduce three related concepts, those of: a proof movie, consisting of frames which record both user input and the corresponding PA response; a camera, which films a user's interactive session with a PA as a movie; and a proviola, which replays a movie frame-by-frame to a third party. In this paper we describe the movie data structure and we discuss a proto- type implementation of the camera and proviola based on the ProofWeb system. ProofWeb uncouples the interaction with a PA via a web- interface (the client) from the actual PA that resides on the server. Our camera films a movie by "listening" to the ProofWeb communication. The first reason for developing movies is to uncouple the reviewing of a formal proof from the PA used to develop it: the movie concept enables users to discuss small code fragments without the need to install the PA or to load a whole library into it. Other advantages include the possibility to develop a separate com- mentary track to discuss or explain the PA interaction. We assert that a combined camera+proviola provides a generic layer between a client (user) and a server (PA). Finally we claim that movies are the right type of data to be stored in an encyclopedia of formalized mathematics, based on our experience in filming the Coq standard library.Comment: Accepted for the 9th International Conference on Mathematical Knowledge Management (MKM 2010), 15 page

An Expressive Language and Efficient Execution System for Software Agents

Software agents can be used to automate many of the tedious, time-consuming information processing tasks that humans currently have to complete manually. However, to do so, agent plans must be capable of representing the myriad of actions and control flows required to perform those tasks. In addition, since these tasks can require integrating multiple sources of remote information ? typically, a slow, I/O-bound process ? it is desirable to make execution as efficient as possible. To address both of these needs, we present a flexible software agent plan language and a highly parallel execution system that enable the efficient execution of expressive agent plans. The plan language allows complex tasks to be more easily expressed by providing a variety of operators for flexibly processing the data as well as supporting subplans (for modularity) and recursion (for indeterminate looping). The executor is based on a streaming dataflow model of execution to maximize the amount of operator and data parallelism possible at runtime. We have implemented both the language and executor in a system called THESEUS. Our results from testing THESEUS show that streaming dataflow execution can yield significant speedups over both traditional serial (von Neumann) as well as non-streaming dataflow-style execution that existing software and robot agent execution systems currently support. In addition, we show how plans written in the language we present can represent certain types of subtasks that cannot be accomplished using the languages supported by network query engines. Finally, we demonstrate that the increased expressivity of our plan language does not hamper performance; specifically, we show how data can be integrated from multiple remote sources just as efficiently using our architecture as is possible with a state-of-the-art streaming-dataflow network query engine