Integrating Existing Software Toolkits into VO System

Virtual Observatory (VO) is a collection of interoperating data archives and software tools. Taking advantages of the latest information technologies, it aims to provide a data-intensively online research environment for astronomers all around the world. A large number of high-qualified astronomical software packages and libraries are powerful and easy of use, and have been widely used by astronomers for many years. Integrating those toolkits into the VO system is a necessary and important task for the VO developers. VO architecture greatly depends on Grid and Web services, consequently the general VO integration route is "Java Ready - Grid Ready - VO Ready". In the paper, we discuss the importance of VO integration for existing toolkits and discuss the possible solutions. We introduce two efforts in the field from China-VO project, "gImageMagick" and " Galactic abundance gradients statistical research under grid environment". We also discuss what additional work should be done to convert Grid service to VO service.Comment: 9 pages, 3 figures, will be published in SPIE 2004 conference proceeding

Obvious: a meta-toolkit to encapsulate information visualization toolkits. One toolkit to bind them all

This article describes “Obvious”: 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

Adaptive service discovery on service-oriented and spontaneous sensor systems

Service-oriented architecture, Spontaneous networks, Self-organisation, Self-configuration, Sensor systems, Social patternsNatural and man-made disasters can significantly impact both people and environments. Enhanced effect can be achieved through dynamic networking of people, systems and procedures and seamless integration of them to fulfil mission objectives with service-oriented sensor systems. However, the benefits of integration of services will not be realised unless we have a dependable method to discover all required services in dynamic environments. In this paper, we propose an Adaptive and Efficient Peer-to-peer Search (AEPS) approach for dependable service integration on service-oriented architecture based on a number of social behaviour patterns. In the AEPS network, the networked nodes can autonomously support and co-operate with each other in a peer-to-peer (P2P) manner to quickly discover and self-configure any services available on the disaster area and deliver a real-time capability by self-organising themselves in spontaneous groups to provide higher flexibility and adaptability for disaster monitoring and relief

From Big Data to Big Displays: High-Performance Visualization at Blue Brain

Blue Brain has pushed high-performance visualization (HPV) to complement its HPC strategy since its inception in 2007. In 2011, this strategy has been accelerated to develop innovative visualization solutions through increased funding and strategic partnerships with other research institutions. We present the key elements of this HPV ecosystem, which integrates C++ visualization applications with novel collaborative display systems. We motivate how our strategy of transforming visualization engines into services enables a variety of use cases, not only for the integration with high-fidelity displays, but also to build service oriented architectures, to link into web applications and to provide remote services to Python applications.Comment: ISC 2017 Visualization at Scale worksho

Combining Mobile Agents and Process-based Coordination to Achieve Software Adaptation

We have developed a model and a platform for end-to-end run-time monitoring, behavior and performance analysis, and consequent dynamic adaptation of distributed applications. This paper concentrates on how we coordinate and actuate the potentially multi-part adaptation, operating externally to the target systems, that is, without requiring any a priori built-in adaptation facilities on the part of said target systems. The actual changes are performed on the fly onto the target by communities of mobile software agents, coordinated by a decentralized process engine. These changes can be coarse-grained, such as replacing entire components or rearranging the connections among components, or fine-grained, such as changing the operational parameters, internal state and functioning logic of individual components. We discuss our successful experience using our approach in dynamic adaptation of a large-scale commercial application, which requires both coarse and fine grained modifications

A Methodology for Engineering Collaborative and ad-hoc Mobile Applications using SyD Middleware

Today’s web applications are more collaborative and utilize standard and ubiquitous Internet protocols. We have earlier developed System on Mobile Devices (SyD) middleware to rapidly develop and deploy collaborative applications over heterogeneous and possibly mobile devices hosting web objects. In this paper, we present the software engineering methodology for developing SyD-enabled web applications and illustrate it through a case study on two representative applications: (i) a calendar of meeting application, which is a collaborative application and (ii) a travel application which is an ad-hoc collaborative application. SyD-enabled web objects allow us to create a collaborative application rapidly with limited coding effort. In this case study, the modular software architecture allowed us to hide the inherent heterogeneity among devices, data stores, and networks by presenting a uniform and persistent object view of mobile objects interacting through XML/SOAP requests and responses. The performance results we obtained show that the application scales well as we increase the group size and adapts well within the constraints of mobile devices