32,053 research outputs found
Implementing infrastructures for managing learning objects
Klemke, R., Ternier, S., Kalz, M., & Specht, M. (2010). Implementing infrastructures for managing learning objects. British Journal of Educational Technology, 41(6), 873-882. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8535.2010.01127.x PrePrint Version. Original available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8535.2010.01127.x Retrieved October 20, 2010.Making learning objects available is critical to reuse learning resources. Making content transparently available and providing added value to different stakeholders is among the goals of the European Commission's eContentPlus programme. This article analyses standards and protocols relevant for making learning objects accessible in distributed data provider networks. Types of metadata associated with learning objects and methods for metadata generation are discussed. Experiences from European projects highlight problems in implementing infrastructures and mapping metadata types into common application profiles. The use of learning contents and its associated metadata in different scenICOPER, Share.TEC, OpenScou
Attitudinal and behavioural determinants influencing decision makers when adopting integration technologies in local government
Over the last few years, the advent of innovative
or revolutionary integration technologies has
influenced pivotal decisions within top management
to strategically transform Local Government
Authorities (LGAs). These technologies may
represent a huge cost for adopting LGAs, but may
also offer the chance to achieve competitive
advantage through superior service delivery. With
the emergence of electronic Government (e-
Government), LGAs are turning to integration
technologies to fully automate and e-enable their
business processes and integrate their IT
infrastructures. While prior research on the adoption
of integration technologies in the private and public
domain has considered several determinants (e.g.
benefits, barriers, costs), little attention has been
given to investigate the attitudinal and behavioural
determinants influencing top managementâs decision
making process for the adoption of integration
technologies in LGAs. Notwithstanding, the
implications of this research have yet to be assessed,
leaving scope for timeliness and novel research.
Therefore, it is of high importance to investigate this
area within LGAs and contribute to the area of
strategic decision making by examining attitudinal
and behavioural determinants of top management in
relation to integration technologies adoption
Obvious: a meta-toolkit to encapsulate information visualization toolkits. One toolkit to bind them all
This article describes âObviousâ: a meta-toolkit that abstracts and encapsulates information visualization toolkits implemented in the Java language. It intends to unify their use and postpone the choice of which concrete toolkit(s) to use later-on in the development of visual analytics applications. We also report on the lessons we have learned when wrapping popular toolkits with Obvious, namely Prefuse, the InfoVis Toolkit, partly Improvise, JUNG and other data management libraries. We show several examples on the uses of Obvious, how the different toolkits can be combined, for instance sharing their data models. We also show how Weka and RapidMiner, two popular machine-learning toolkits, have been wrapped with Obvious and can be used directly with all the other wrapped toolkits. We expect Obvious to start a co-evolution process: Obvious is meant to evolve when more components of Information Visualization systems will become consensual. It is also designed to help information visualization systems adhere to the best practices to provide a higher level of interoperability and leverage the domain of visual analytics
Single-Board-Computer Clusters for Cloudlet Computing in Internet of Things
The number of connected sensors and devices is expected to increase to billions in the near
future. However, centralised cloud-computing data centres present various challenges to meet the
requirements inherent to Internet of Things (IoT) workloads, such as low latency, high throughput
and bandwidth constraints. Edge computing is becoming the standard computing paradigm for
latency-sensitive real-time IoT workloads, since it addresses the aforementioned limitations related
to centralised cloud-computing models. Such a paradigm relies on bringing computation close to
the source of data, which presents serious operational challenges for large-scale cloud-computing
providers. In this work, we present an architecture composed of low-cost Single-Board-Computer
clusters near to data sources, and centralised cloud-computing data centres. The proposed
cost-efficient model may be employed as an alternative to fog computing to meet real-time IoT
workload requirements while keeping scalability. We include an extensive empirical analysis to
assess the suitability of single-board-computer clusters as cost-effective edge-computing micro data
centres. Additionally, we compare the proposed architecture with traditional cloudlet and cloud
architectures, and evaluate them through extensive simulation. We finally show that acquisition costs
can be drastically reduced while keeping performance levels in data-intensive IoT use cases.Ministerio de EconomĂa y Competitividad TIN2017-82113-C2-1-RMinisterio de EconomĂa y Competitividad RTI2018-098062-A-I00European Unionâs Horizon 2020 No. 754489Science Foundation Ireland grant 13/RC/209
Using real options to select stable Middleware-induced software architectures
The requirements that force decisions towards building distributed system architectures are usually of a non-functional nature. Scalability, openness, heterogeneity, and fault-tolerance are examples of such non-functional requirements. The current trend is to build distributed systems with middleware, which provide the application developer with primitives for managing the complexity of distribution, system resources, and for realising many of the non-functional requirements. As non-functional requirements evolve, the `coupling' between the middleware and architecture becomes the focal point for understanding the stability of the distributed software system architecture in the face of change. It is hypothesised that the choice of a stable distributed software architecture depends on the choice of the underlying middleware and its flexibility in responding to future changes in non-functional requirements. Drawing on a case study that adequately represents a medium-size component-based distributed architecture, it is reported how a likely future change in scalability could impact the architectural structure of two versions, each induced with a distinct middleware: one with CORBA and the other with J2EE. An option-based model is derived to value the flexibility of the induced-architectures and to guide the selection. The hypothesis is verified to be true for the given change. The paper concludes with some observations that could stimulate future research in the area of relating requirements to software architectures
An AER handshake-less modular infrastructure PCB with x8 2.5Gbps LVDS serial links
Nowadays spike-based brain processing emulation is
taking off. Several EU and others worldwide projects are
demonstrating this, like SpiNNaker, BrainScaleS, FACETS, or
NeuroGrid. The larger the brain process emulation on silicon is,
the higher the communication performance of the hosting
platforms has to be. Many times the bottleneck of these system
implementations is not on the performance inside a chip or a
board, but in the communication between boards. This paper
describes a novel modular Address-Event-Representation (AER)
FPGA-based (Spartan6) infrastructure PCB (the AER-Node
board) with 2.5Gbps LVDS high speed serial links over SATA
cables that offers a peak performance of 32-bit 62.5Meps (Mega
events per second) on board-to-board communications. The
board allows back compatibility with parallel AER devices
supporting up to x2 28-bit parallel data with asynchronous
handshake. These boards also allow modular expansion
functionality through several daughter boards. The paper is
focused on describing in detail the LVDS serial interface and
presenting its performance.Ministerio de Ciencia e InnovaciĂłn TEC2009-10639-C04-02/01Ministerio de EconomĂa y Competitividad TEC2012-37868-C04-02/01Junta de AndalucĂa TIC-6091Ministerio de EconomĂa y Competitividad PRI-PIMCHI-2011-076
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