Towards Collaborative Scientific Workflow Management System

The big data explosion phenomenon has impacted several domains, starting from research areas to divergent of business models in recent years. As this intensive amount of data opens up the possibilities of several interesting knowledge discoveries, over the past few years divergent of research domains have undergone the shift of trend towards analyzing those massive amount data. Scientific Workflow Management System (SWfMS) has gained much popularity in recent years in accelerating those data-intensive analyses, visualization, and discoveries of important information. Data-intensive tasks are often significantly time-consuming and complex in nature and hence SWfMSs are designed to efficiently support the specification, modification, execution, failure handling, and monitoring of the tasks in a scientific workflow. As far as the complexity, dimension, and volume of data are concerned, their effective analysis or management often become challenging for an individual and requires collaboration of multiple scientists instead. Hence, the notion of 'Collaborative SWfMS' was coined - which gained significant interest among researchers in recent years as none of the existing SWfMSs directly support real-time collaboration among scientists. In terms of collaborative SWfMSs, consistency management in the face of conflicting concurrent operations of the collaborators is a major challenge for its highly interconnected document structure among the computational modules - where any minor change in a part of the workflow can highly impact the other part of the collaborative workflow for the datalink relation among them. In addition to the consistency management, studies show several other challenges that need to be addressed towards a successful design of collaborative SWfMSs, such as sub-workflow composition and execution by different sub-groups, relationship between scientific workflows and collaboration models, sub-workflow monitoring, seamless integration and access control of the workflow components among collaborators and so on. In this thesis, we propose a locking scheme to facilitate consistency management in collaborative SWfMSs. The proposed method works by locking workflow components at a granular attribute level in addition to supporting locks on a targeted part of the collaborative workflow. We conducted several experiments to analyze the performance of the proposed method in comparison to related existing methods. Our studies show that the proposed method can reduce the average waiting time of a collaborator by up to 36% while increasing the average workflow update rate by up to 15% in comparison to existing descendent modular level locking techniques for collaborative SWfMSs. We also propose a role-based access control technique for the management of collaborative SWfMSs. We leverage the Collaborative Interactive Application Methodology (CIAM) for the investigation of role-based access control in the context of collaborative SWfMSs. We present our proposed method with a use-case of Plant Phenotyping and Genotyping research domain. Recent study shows that the collaborative SWfMSs often different sets of opportunities and challenges. From our investigations on existing research works towards collaborative SWfMSs and findings of our prior two studies, we propose an architecture of collaborative SWfMSs. We propose - SciWorCS - a Collaborative Scientific Workflow Management System as a proof of concept of the proposed architecture; which is the first of its kind to the best of our knowledge. We present several real-world use-cases of scientific workflows using SciWorCS. Finally, we conduct several user studies using SciWorCS comprising different real-world scientific workflows (i.e., from myExperiment) to understand the user behavior and styles of work in the context of collaborative SWfMSs. In addition to evaluating SciWorCS, the user studies reveal several interesting facts which can significantly contribute in the research domain, as none of the existing methods considered such empirical studies, and rather relied only on computer generated simulated studies for evaluation

Developing Collaborative XML Editing Systems

In many areas the eXtensible Mark-up Language (XML) is becoming the standard exchange and data format. More and more applications not only support XML as an exchange format but also use it as their data model or default file format for graphic, text and database (such as spreadsheet) applications. Computer Supported Cooperative Work is an interdisciplinary field of research dealing with group work, cooperation and their supporting information and communication technologies. One part of it is Real-Time Collaborative Editing, which investigates the design of systems which allow several persons to work simultaneously in real-time on the same document, without the risk of inconsistencies. Existing collaborative editing research applications specialize in one or at best, only a small number of document types; for example graphic, text or spreadsheet documents. This research investigates the development of a software framework which allows collaborative editing of any XML document type in real-time. This presents a more versatile solution to the problems of real-time collaborative editing. This research contributes a new software framework model which will assist software engineers in the development of new collaborative XML editing applications. The devised framework is flexible in the sense that it is easily adaptable to different workflow requirements covering concurrency control, awareness mechanisms and optional locking of document parts. Additionally this thesis contributes a new framework integration strategy that enables enhancements of existing single-user editing applications with real-time collaborative editing features without changing their source code

Factors shaping the evolution of electronic documentation systems

The main goal is to prepare the space station technical and managerial structure for likely changes in the creation, capture, transfer, and utilization of knowledge. By anticipating advances, the design of Space Station Project (SSP) information systems can be tailored to facilitate a progression of increasingly sophisticated strategies as the space station evolves. Future generations of advanced information systems will use increases in power to deliver environmentally meaningful, contextually targeted, interconnected data (knowledge). The concept of a Knowledge Base Management System is emerging when the problem is focused on how information systems can perform such a conversion of raw data. Such a system would include traditional management functions for large space databases. Added artificial intelligence features might encompass co-existing knowledge representation schemes; effective control structures for deductive, plausible, and inductive reasoning; means for knowledge acquisition, refinement, and validation; explanation facilities; and dynamic human intervention. The major areas covered include: alternative knowledge representation approaches; advanced user interface capabilities; computer-supported cooperative work; the evolution of information system hardware; standardization, compatibility, and connectivity; and organizational impacts of information intensive environments

On Consistency and Network Latency in Distributed Interactive Applications: A Survey—Part I

This paper is the first part of a two-part paper that documents a detailed survey of the research carried out on consistency and latency in distributed interactive applications (DIAs) in recent decades. Part I reviews the terminology associated with DIAs and offers definitions for consistency and latency. Related issues such as jitter and fidelity are also discussed. Furthermore, the various consistency maintenance mechanisms that researchers have used to improve consistency and reduce latency effects are considered. These mechanisms are grouped into one of three categories, namely time management, Information management and system architectural management. This paper presents the techniques associated with the time management category. Examples of such mechanisms include time warp, lock step synchronisation and predictive time management. The remaining two categories are presented in part two of the survey

Collaborative Product Representation for Emergent Electronic Marketplace

Griffith Sciences, School of Information and Communication TechnologyNo Full Tex

Design Synchronization in Distributed Collaborative Design - Design Change in Product-Process Design Across Global Enterprises

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

Modeling 4.0: Conceptual Modeling in a Digital Era

Digitization provides entirely new affordances for our economies and societies. This leads to previously unseen design opportunities and complexities as systems and their boundaries are re-defined, creating a demand for appropriate methods to support design that caters to these new demands. Conceptual modeling is an established means for this, but it needs to be advanced to adequately depict the requirements of digitization. However, unlike the actual deployment of digital technologies in various industries, the domain of conceptual modeling itself has not yet undergone a comprehensive renewal in light of digitization. Therefore, inspired by the notion of Industry 4.0, an overarching concept for digital manufacturing, in this commentary paper, we propose Modeling 4.0 as the notion for conceptual modeling mechanisms in a digital environment. In total, 12 mechanisms of conceptual modeling are distinguished, providing ample guidance for academics and professionals interested in ensuring that modeling techniques and methods continue to fit contemporary and emerging requirements

Current Trends and New Challenges of Databases and Web Applications for Systems Driven Biological Research

Dynamic and rapidly evolving nature of systems driven research imposes special requirements on the technology, approach, design and architecture of computational infrastructure including database and Web application. Several solutions have been proposed to meet the expectations and novel methods have been developed to address the persisting problems of data integration. It is important for researchers to understand different technologies and approaches. Having familiarized with the pros and cons of the existing technologies, researchers can exploit its capabilities to the maximum potential for integrating data. In this review we discuss the architecture, design and key technologies underlying some of the prominent databases and Web applications. We will mention their roles in integration of biological data and investigate some of the emerging design concepts and computational technologies that are likely to have a key role in the future of systems driven biomedical research

Management and Visualisation of Non-linear History of Polygonal 3D Models

The research presented in this thesis concerns the problems of maintenance and revision control of large-scale three dimensional (3D) models over the Internet. As the models grow in size and the authoring tools grow in complexity, standard approaches to collaborative asset development become impractical. The prevalent paradigm of sharing files on a file system poses serious risks with regards, but not limited to, ensuring consistency and concurrency of multi-user 3D editing. Although modifications might be tracked manually using naming conventions or automatically in a version control system (VCS), understanding the provenance of a large 3D dataset is hard due to revision metadata not being associated with the underlying scene structures. Some tools and protocols enable seamless synchronisation of file and directory changes in remote locations. However, the existing web-based technologies are not yet fully exploiting the modern design patters for access to and management of alternative shared resources online. Therefore, four distinct but highly interconnected conceptual tools are explored. The first is the organisation of 3D assets within recent document-oriented No Structured Query Language (NoSQL) databases. These "schemaless" databases, unlike their relational counterparts, do not represent data in rigid table structures. Instead, they rely on polymorphic documents composed of key-value pairs that are much better suited to the diverse nature of 3D assets. Hence, a domain-specific non-linear revision control system 3D Repo is built around a NoSQL database to enable asynchronous editing similar to traditional VCSs. The second concept is that of visual 3D differencing and merging. The accompanying 3D Diff tool supports interactive conflict resolution at the level of scene graph nodes that are de facto the delta changes stored in the repository. The third is the utilisation of HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) for the purposes of 3D data management. The XML3DRepo daemon application exposes the contents of the repository and the version control logic in a Representational State Transfer (REST) style of architecture. At the same time, it manifests the effects of various 3D encoding strategies on the file sizes and download times in modern web browsers. The fourth and final concept is the reverse-engineering of an editing history. Even if the models are being version controlled, the extracted provenance is limited to additions, deletions and modifications. The 3D Timeline tool, therefore, implies a plausible history of common modelling operations such as duplications, transformations, etc. Given a collection of 3D models, it estimates a part-based correspondence and visualises it in a temporal flow. The prototype tools developed as part of the research were evaluated in pilot user studies that suggest they are usable by the end users and well suited to their respective tasks. Together, the results constitute a novel framework that demonstrates the feasibility of a domain-specific 3D version control