Collaboration Enabling Internet Resource Collection-Building Software and Technologies

Over the last decade the Library of the University of California, Riverside and its collaborators have developed a number of systems, service designs, and projects that utilize innovative technologies to foster better Internet finding tools in libraries and more cooperative and efficient effort in Internet link and metadata collection building. The open-source software and projects discussed represent appropriate technologies and sustainable strategies that we believe will help Internet portals, digital libraries, virtual libraries, library catalogs-with-portal-like-capabilities (IPDVLCs), and related collection-building efforts in academia to better scale and more accurately anticipate and meet the needs of scholarly and educational users.published or submitted for publicatio

Supporting service discovery, querying and interaction in ubiquitous computing environments.

In this paper, we contend that ubiquitous computing environments will be highly heterogeneous, service rich domains. Moreover, future applications will consequently be required to interact with multiple, specialised service location and interaction protocols simultaneously. We argue that existing service discovery techniques do not provide sufficient support to address the challenges of building applications targeted to these emerging environments. This paper makes a number of contributions. Firstly, using a set of short ubiquitous computing scenarios we identify several key limitations of existing service discovery approaches that reduce their ability to support ubiquitous computing applications. Secondly, we present a detailed analysis of requirements for providing effective support in this domain. Thirdly, we provide the design of a simple extensible meta-service discovery architecture that uses database techniques to unify service discovery protocols and addresses several of our key requirements. Lastly, we examine the lessons learnt through the development of a prototype implementation of our architecture

Search and Discovery Tools for Astronomical On-line Resources and Services

A growing number of astronomical resources and data or information services are made available through the Internet. However valuable information is frequently hidden in a deluge of non-pertinent or non up-to-date documents. At a first level, compilations of astronomical resources provide help for selecting relevant sites. Combining yellow-page services and meta-databases of active pointers may be an efficient solution to the data retrieval problem. Responses generated by submission of queries to a set of heterogeneous resources are difficult to merge or cross-match, because different data providers generally use different data formats: new endeavors are under way to tackle this problem. We review the technical challenges involved in trying to provide general search and discovery tools, and to integrate them through upper level interfaces.Comment: 7 pages, 2 Postscript figures; to be published in A&A

Enterprise application reuse: Semantic discovery of business grid services

Web services have emerged as a prominent paradigm for the development of distributed software systems as they provide the potential for software to be modularized in a way that functionality can be described, discovered and deployed in a platform independent manner over a network (e.g., intranets, extranets and the Internet). This paper examines an extension of this paradigm to encompass ‘Grid Services’, which enables software capabilities to be recast with an operational focus and support a heterogeneous mix of business software and data, termed a Business Grid - "the grid of semantic services". The current industrial representation of services is predominantly syntactic however, lacking the fundamental semantic underpinnings required to fulfill the goals of any semantically-oriented Grid. Consequently, the use of semantic technology in support of business software heterogeneity is investigated as a likely tool to support a diverse and distributed software inventory and user. Service discovery architecture is therefore developed that is (a) distributed in form, (2) supports distributed service knowledge and (3) automatically extends service knowledge (as greater descriptive precision is inferred from the operating application system). This discovery engine is used to execute several real-word scenarios in order to develop and test a framework for engineering such grid service knowledge. The examples presented comprise software components taken from a group of Investment Banking systems. Resulting from the research is a framework for engineering servic

Core Services in the Architecture of the National Digital Library for Science Education (NSDL)

We describe the core components of the architecture for the (NSDL) National Science, Mathematics, Engineering, and Technology Education Digital Library. Over time the NSDL will include heterogeneous users, content, and services. To accommodate this, a design for a technical and organization infrastructure has been formulated based on the notion of a spectrum of interoperability. This paper describes the first phase of the interoperability infrastructure including the metadata repository, search and discovery services, rights management services, and user interface portal facilities

Italian center for Astronomical Archives publishing solution: modular and distributed

The Italian center for Astronomical Archives tries to provide astronomical data resources as interoperable services based on IVOA standards. Its VO expertise and knowledge comes from active participation within IVOA and VO at European and international level, with a double-fold goal: learn from the collaboration and provide inputs to the community. The first solution to build an easy to configure and maintain resource publisher conformant to VO standards proved to be too optimistic. For this reason it has been necessary to re-think the architecture with a modular system built around the messaging concept, where each modular component speaks to the other interested parties through a system of broker-managed queues. The first implemented protocol, the Simple Cone Search, shows the messaging task architecture connecting the parametric HTTP interface to the database backend access module, the logging module, and allows multiple cone search resources to be managed together through a configuration manager module. Even if relatively young, it already proved the flexibility required by the overall system when the database backend changed from MySQL to PostgreSQL+PgSphere. Another implementation test has been made to leverage task distribution over multiple servers to serve simultaneously: FITS cubes direct linking, cubes cutout and cubes positional merging. Currently the implementation of the SIA-2.0 standard protocol is ongoing while for TAP we will be adapting the TAPlib library. Alongside these tools a first administration tool (TASMAN) has been developed to ease the build up and maintenance of TAP_SCHEMA-ta including also ObsCore maintenance capability. Future work will be devoted at widening the range of VO protocols covered by the set of available modules, improve the configuration management and develop specific purpose modules common to all the service components.Comment: SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation 2018, Software and Cyberinfrastructure for Astronomy V, pre-publishing draft proceeding (reduced abstract

Semantic web service architecture for simulation model reuse

COTS simulation packages (CSPs) have proved popular in an industrial setting with a number of software vendors. In contrast, options for re-using existing models seem more limited. Re-use of simulation component models by collaborating organizations is restricted by the same semantic issues however that restrict the inter-organization use of web services. The current representations of web components are predominantly syntactic in nature lacking the fundamental semantic underpinning required to support discovery on the emerging semantic web. Semantic models, in the form of ontology, utilized by web service discovery and deployment architecture provide one approach to support simulation model reuse. Semantic interoperation is achieved through the use of simulation component ontology to identify required components at varying levels of granularity (including both abstract and specialized components). Selected simulation components are loaded into a CSP, modified according to the requirements of the new model and executed. The paper presents the development of ontology, connector software and web service discovery architecture in order to understand how such ontology are created, maintained and subsequently used for simulation model reuse. The ontology is extracted from health service simulation - comprising hospitals and the National Blood Service. The ontology engineering framework and discovery architecture provide a novel approach to inter- organization simulation, uncovering domain semantics and adopting a less intrusive interface between participants. Although specific to CSPs the work has wider implications for the simulation community

Impliance: A Next Generation Information Management Appliance

ably successful in building a large market and adapting to the changes of the last three decades, its impact on the broader market of information management is surprisingly limited. If we were to design an information management system from scratch, based upon today's requirements and hardware capabilities, would it look anything like today's database systems?" In this paper, we introduce Impliance, a next-generation information management system consisting of hardware and software components integrated to form an easy-to-administer appliance that can store, retrieve, and analyze all types of structured, semi-structured, and unstructured information. We first summarize the trends that will shape information management for the foreseeable future. Those trends imply three major requirements for Impliance: (1) to be able to store, manage, and uniformly query all data, not just structured records; (2) to be able to scale out as the volume of this data grows; and (3) to be simple and robust in operation. We then describe four key ideas that are uniquely combined in Impliance to address these requirements, namely the ideas of: (a) integrating software and off-the-shelf hardware into a generic information appliance; (b) automatically discovering, organizing, and managing all data - unstructured as well as structured - in a uniform way; (c) achieving scale-out by exploiting simple, massive parallel processing, and (d) virtualizing compute and storage resources to unify, simplify, and streamline the management of Impliance. Impliance is an ambitious, long-term effort to define simpler, more robust, and more scalable information systems for tomorrow's enterprises.Comment: This article is published under a Creative Commons License Agreement (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/.) You may copy, distribute, display, and perform the work, make derivative works and make commercial use of the work, but, you must attribute the work to the author and CIDR 2007. 3rd Biennial Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research (CIDR) January 710, 2007, Asilomar, California, US