Automated syntactic mediation for Web service integration

As the Web Services and Grid community adopt Semantic Web technology, we observe a shift towards higher-level workflow composition and service discovery practices. While this provides excellent functionality to non-expert users, more sophisticated middleware is required to hide the details of service invocation and service integration. An investigation of a common Bioinformatics use case reveals that the execution of high-level workflow designs requires additional processing to harmonise syntactically incompatible service interfaces. In this paper, we present an architecture to support the automatic reconciliation of data formats in such Web Service worklflows. The mediation of data is driven by ontologies that encapsulate the information contained in heterogeneous data structures supplying a common, conceptual data representation. Data conversion is carried out by a Configurable Mediator component, consuming mappings between \xml schemas and \owl ontologies. We describe our system and give examples of our mapping language against the background of a Bioinformatics use case

An Architecture for distributed multimedia database systems

In the past few years considerable demand for user oriented multimedia information systems has developed. These systems must provide a rich set of functionality so that new, complex, and interesting applications can be addressed. This places considerable importance on the management of diverse data types including text, images, audio and video. These requirements generate the need for a new generation of distributed heterogeneous multimedia database systems. In this paper we identify a set of functional requirements for a multimedia server considering database management, object synchronization and integration, and multimedia query processing. A generalization of the requirements to a distributed system is presented, and some of our current research and developing activities are discussed

Geoscience after IT: Part L. Adjusting the emerging information system to new technology

Coherent development depends on following widely used standards that respect our vast legacy of existing entries in the geoscience record. Middleware ensures that we see a coherent view from our desktops of diverse sources of information. Developments specific to managing the written word, map content, and structured data come together in shared metadata linking topics and information types

Extracting, Transforming and Archiving Scientific Data

It is becoming common to archive research datasets that are not only large but also numerous. In addition, their corresponding metadata and the software required to analyse or display them need to be archived. Yet the manual curation of research data can be difficult and expensive, particularly in very large digital repositories, hence the importance of models and tools for automating digital curation tasks. The automation of these tasks faces three major challenges: (1) research data and data sources are highly heterogeneous, (2) future research needs are difficult to anticipate, (3) data is hard to index. To address these problems, we propose the Extract, Transform and Archive (ETA) model for managing and mechanizing the curation of research data. Specifically, we propose a scalable strategy for addressing the research-data problem, ranging from the extraction of legacy data to its long-term storage. We review some existing solutions and propose novel avenues of research.Comment: 8 pages, Fourth Workshop on Very Large Digital Libraries, 201

Generating multimedia presentations: from plain text to screenplay

In many Natural Language Generation (NLG) applications, the output is limited to plain text – i.e., a string of words with punctuation and paragraph breaks, but no indications for layout, or pictures, or dialogue. In several projects, we have begun to explore NLG applications in which these extra media are brought into play. This paper gives an informal account of what we have learned. For coherence, we focus on the domain of patient information leaflets, and follow an example in which the same content is expressed first in plain text, then in formatted text, then in text with pictures, and finally in a dialogue script that can be performed by two animated agents. We show how the same meaning can be mapped to realisation patterns in different media, and how the expanded options for expressing meaning are related to the perceived style and tone of the presentation. Throughout, we stress that the extra media are not simple added to plain text, but integrated with it: thus the use of formatting, or pictures, or dialogue, may require radical rewording of the text itself

A CD-ROM Based Agricultural Information Retrieval System

An information retrieval system for agricultural extension was developed using CD-ROM technology as the primary medium for information delivery. Object-oriented database techniques were used to organize the information. Conventional retrieval techniques including hypertext, fulltext searching, and relational databases, and decision support programs such as expert systems were integrated into a complete package for accessing information stored on the CDROM. A multimedia user interface was developed to provide a variety of capabilities including computer graphics and high-resolution digitized images. Information for the disk was gathered and entered using extension publications which were tagged using an SGML-based document markup language. The fully operational CD-ROM system has been implemented in all 67 county extension offices in Flori

Security Policy Management for a Cooperative Firewall

Increasing popularity of the Internet service and increased number of connected devices along with the introduction of IoT are making the society ever more dependent on the Internet services availability. Therefore, we need to ensure the minimum level of security and reliability of services. Ultra-Reliable Communication (URC) refers to the availability of life and business critical services nearly 100 percent of the time. These requirements are an integral part of upcoming 5th generation (5G) mobile networks. 5G is the future mobile network, which at the same time is part of the future Internet. As an extension to the conventional communication architecture, 5G needs to provide ultra-high reliability of services where; it needs to perform better than the currently available solutions in terms of security, confidentiality, integrity and reliability and it should mitigate the risks of Internet attack and malicious activities. To achieve such requirements, Customer Edge Switching (CES) architecture is presented. It proposes that the Internet user’s agent in the network provider needs to have prior information about the expected traffic of users to mitigate maximum attacks and only allow expected communication between hosts. CES executes communication security policies of each user or device acting as the user’s agent. The policy describes with fine granularity what traffic is expected by the device. The policies are sourced as automatically as possible but can also be modified by the user. Stored policies will follow the mobile user and will be executed at the network edge node executing Customer Edge Switch functions to stop all unexpected traffic from entering the mobile network. State-of-the-art in mobile network architectures utilizes the Quality of Service (QoS) policies of users. This thesis motivates the extension of current architecture to accommodate security and communication policy of end-users. The thesis presents an experimental implementation of a policy management system which is termed as Security Policy Management (SPM) to handle above-mentioned policies of users. We describe the architecture, implementation and integration of SPM with the Customer Edge Switching. Additionally, SPM has been evaluated in terms of performance, scalability, reliability and security offered via 5G customer edge nodes. Finally, the system has been analyzed for feasibility in the 5G architecture