Maintaining and Publishing Metadata Application Profiles with Extensible Authoring Format

Thesis (Master of Science in Library and Information Studies)--University of Tsukuba, no. 41490, 2019.9.2

ParkingJSON: An Open Standard Format for Parking Data in Smart Cities

Data marketplaces and data management platforms offer a viable solution to build large city-scale Internet of Things (IoT) applications. Contemporary data marketplaces and data management platforms for smart cities such as Intelligent IoT Integrator (I3), Cisco Kinetic, Terbine, and Streamr present a middleware platform to help the data owners to provide their data to the application developers. However, such platforms suffer from adoption issues because of the interoperability concerns that stem from heterogeneous data formats. On the one hand, the IoT devices and the software used by the device owners follow either a custom data standard or a proprietary industrial standard. On the other hand, the application developers consuming data from multiple device owners expect the data to follow one common standard to process the data without developing custom software for each data feed. Therefore, a common data standard is desired to enable interoperable data exchange through data marketplace and data management platforms while promoting adoption. We present our experiences from developing a city-scale real-time parking application for a smart city. We also introduce ParkingJSON, a new open standard format for parking data in smart cities, which could help the parking data providers to cover all types of parking infrastructures through a single JSON schema. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first parking data standard proposed that a) covers a wide range of parking spaces and structures, b) integrates spatial information, and c) provides support for data integrity and authenticity

JUpdate: A JSON Update Language

Although JSON documents are being used in several emerging applications (e.g., Big Data applications, IoT, mobile computing, smart cities, and online social networks), there is no consensual or standard language for updating JSON documents (i.e., creating, deleting or changing such documents, where changing means inserting, deleting, replacing, copying, moving, etc., portions of data in such documents). To fill this gap, we propose in this paper an SQL-like language, named JUpdate, for updating JSON documents. JUpdate is based on a set of six primitive update operations, which is proven complete and minimal, and it provides a set of fourteen user-friendly high-level operations with a well-founded semantics defined on the basis of the primitive update operations

A Pattern Language for RESTful Conversations

As a good user interface design is important for the success of an app, so is a good API for the success of a Web service. Within the RESTful Web services community there is a need for a systematic approach in knowledge sharing, for which patterns are particularly suitable. Using a RESTful service to achieve a certain goal often requires multiple client-server interactions, i.e., to have a conversation. While patterns of such RESTful conversations can be uncovered from existing APIs' usage scenarios, or the service engineering literature, they have never been gathered in a pattern language, nor properly visualized with a Domain Specific Modeling Language (DSML). These patterns provide valuable input for API designers, as well as API consumers, by establishing a common vocabulary to describe recurring conversations. To do so, this paper uses RESTalk, a DSML, to model the basic RESTful conversation patterns structured around the life cycle of a resource (create, discover, read, edit, delete, protect) by showing the corresponding sequences of HTTP request-response interactions. We show how the resulting pattern language can be applied to individual resources, or also collections of resources

Shared document repository

In the thesis we present a system architecture for repository of documents that was designed to support business processes in the area of insurance and reinsurance. The architecture supports multiple companies and is centralized. The key system properties we aimed for are security, responsivness, scalability, extensibility and maintainability. The architecture is based on a ASP.NET Core framework, which uses a module called ASP.NET Web API for creating back-end applications. The documents are saved in a CMS driven archive Easy Enterprise.X. For the metadata of documents a Microsoft SQL RDBMS is used. Authorization, authentication and LDAP federation are provided via the authorization server Keycloak. A search engine Elasticsearch is responsible for making quick searches accross the metadata of documents

SPA-sovellukset hajautettuna järjestelmänä

Single-page application -mallista (SPA) on tullut suosittu tapa tehdä web-sovelluksia. Sen ansiosta web-sivujen käyttökokemuksesta saadaan enemmän työpöytäsovellusten kaltainen, kun jokaista sivuvaihtoa ja operaatiota varten ei tarvitse ladata palvelimelta uutta HTML-sivua. SPA-malli tuo kuitenkin tavallisiin web-sovelluksiin mukaan hajautetun datan käsittelyn ongelmia. Eheyden hallinta hajautetuissa järjestelmissä on ikuisuusaihe tietojenkäsittelytieteen tutkimuksessa. SPA-sovelluksissa tähän ei kuitenkaan kiinnitetä juuri huomioita. Tässä tutkielmassa vertaillaan SPA-sovelluksia hajauttuihin tietokantoihin ja pyritään löytämään niistä tekniikoita, joita voisi soveltaa myös SPA-sovelluksiin. Vertailu aloitetaan esittelemällä erilaisia hajautettuja tietokantoja ja arvioidaan mitkä niistä vastaavat eniten SPA-mallin tilannetta. Tämän jälkeen vertailu keskittyy kahteen osa-alueeseen. Ensin esitellään hajautettujen tietokantojen käyttämiä tapoja replikoida dataa pisteestä toiseen ja vertaillaan niihin web-sovelluksien tapoja siirtää dataa selaimen ja palvelimen välillä. Lisäksi tutkitaan kuinka eheyteen liittyvät mallit, kuten ACID-ominaisuudet sekä eristyvyystasot ja -anomaliat toteutuvat tai ilmenevät SPA-sovelluksissa. Vertailun tuloksena havaittiin, että hajautettujen tietokantojen ja web-sovellusten käyttämät tiedonsiirtomenetelmät ovat jokseenkin erilaisia. Hajautetuissa tietokannoissa suositaan push-mallia päivitysten levittämisessä ja replikointi on sovelluskehittäjän näkökulmasta automaattista. Web-sovellukset käyttävät usein pull-mallia ja replikoinnin toteuttaminen on sovelluskehittäjän vastuulla. Eheyden hallintaan liittyen nousi esille joukko anomalioita, jotka ovat mahdollisia SPA-sovelluksissa ja vaativat huolellisuutta ohjelmoijalta. Löydösten perusteella on kuitenkin hyvät edellytykset lähteä kehittämään uusia kirjastoja, joilla havaittuja SPA-sovellusten ongelmia voitaisiin ratkaista.Single-page application (SPA) model has become a popular way of building web-applications. It makes the user experience of a website more similar to desktop-applications. This is achieved by not having to make a request to backend for each page navigation and operation. However the SPA model brings some challenges of distributed data management to basic web-applications. Managing distributed consistency is a perennial research topic in computer science. Yet this has received little attention in single-page application context. This thesis compares single-page applications to distributed databases and aims to identify techniques from them that could be used in single-page applications. The comparison begins by looking at different distributed databases and analysing which of them matches closest to the single-page application model. Then the comparison focuses on two topics. Techniques used by distributed databases for replicating data from site to another are presented and compared to techniques used in web application in communication between the server and the browser. Next topic of the thesis is to study how consistency related models like ACID-properties along with isolation levels and anomalies are realized or manifested in single-page applications. As a result of the comparison it was observed that the data transfer methods used in distributed databases and web-applications were somewhat different from each other. Distributed systems favor push model for replication and replication is automatic from application developers perspective. Web applications ofter use pull-model and implementing replication is application developers responsibility. A set of consistency anomalies that can be manifested in single-page applications where found while analysing the consistency topic. The findings give a good starting point for developing libraries that could solve some of the problems that were found

Development of User Interface for the Management Server of Html5 Based Mobile Agent Framework

The emergence of World Wide Web as a widely used content-sharing environment and a rich software platform has revolutionized the life style of people across the globe. The Web is an archetypal commodity used by millions of people on daily basis, for a variety of online services that range from photos, music, videos, and online games to online shopping, online banking, e-marketing, e-communication, online business, etc. A web browser is the most frequently used application to access the above-mentioned services. The appearance of HTML5 has enabled more and more applications to run in the web browsers. Latest research in the field of Web and computer networks has given a rapid upsurge in the usage of web-based services for data storage and information exchange. This has resulted in challenges to develop efficient web-based systems, which can handle huge amount of information flow. One of the solutions to these challenges is mobile agents. A mobile agent is a software program that is able to migrate from one host to another to continue its execution. This thesis presents the development of a User Interface for the management server of an HTML5-based mobile agent platform. This platform was developed in 2012 at Tampere University of Technology and its second iteration was completed in 2013 at the same campus. The management server of the framework was without a user interface and could to be managed only from the command line. In this thesis, a web-browser based User Interface for the management server of the framework is developed. The management server exposes a Web API to manage the mobile agents and the agent servers through an HTTP interface. So, the API is leveraged by using JavaScript to make Ajax calls

Open Dynamic Interaction Network: a cell-phone based platform for responsive EMA

The study of social networks is central to advancing our understanding of a wide range of phenomena in human societies. Social networks co-evolve concurrently alongside the individuals within them. Selection processes cause network structure to change in response to emerging similarities/differences between individuals. At the same time, diffusion processes occur as individuals influence one another when they interact across network links. Indeed, each network link is a logical abstraction that aggregates many short-lived pairwise interactions of interest that are being studied. Traditionally, network co-evolution is studied by periodically taking static snapshots of social networks using surveys. Unfortunately, participation incentives make surveys costly to deliver, which makes it impractical to collect snapshots at fine temporal resolution. On the other hand, collecting data at wider time intervals requires participants to perform error-prone recall about long periods of time. This creates a difficult research tradeoff between data cost and data quality. More recently, techniques of Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) have been developed, involving repeated sampling of subjects\u27 current behaviors and experiences in real time, in subjects\u27 natural environments. This thesis project describes the design, implementation, and validation of a new platform for responsive EMA. The Open Dynamic Interaction Network (ODIN) platform is a cost-effective and flexible cell-phone based platform to collect continuous time sensor data and deliver contextual surveys to a study population. ODIN allows social and behavioral health researchers to instrument study protocols by specifying both the questions to be asked and the rules governing when questions should be asked over the duration of the study. Researcher-specified rules can reference sensor data (e.g. time, GPS, accelerometer-based activity, Bluetooth-based proximity to other participants, etc), as well as the subject\u27s previous answers. ODIN is composed of four backend services, two web user interfaces, and an Android application. A pilot study was conducted over the course of 30 days with 16 participants to evaluate the system. The results obtained from the pilot show that the system successfully collects relevant data for the study as well as triggering questions according to the study needs. Adviser: Jitender Deogun and Bilal Kha