Database Management Systems: A NoSQL Analysis

Volume 1 Issue 7 (September 2013

Software reliability and dependability: a roadmap

Shifting the focus from software reliability to user-centred measures of dependability in complete software-based systems. Influencing design practice to facilitate dependability assessment. Propagating awareness of dependability issues and the use of existing, useful methods. Injecting some rigour in the use of process-related evidence for dependability assessment. Better understanding issues of diversity and variation as drivers of dependability. Bev Littlewood is founder-Director of the Centre for Software Reliability, and Professor of Software Engineering at City University, London. Prof Littlewood has worked for many years on problems associated with the modelling and evaluation of the dependability of software-based systems; he has published many papers in international journals and conference proceedings and has edited several books. Much of this work has been carried out in collaborative projects, including the successful EC-funded projects SHIP, PDCS, PDCS2, DeVa. He has been employed as a consultant t

Fraud detection for online banking for scalable and distributed data

Online fraud causes billions of dollars in losses for banks. Therefore, online banking fraud detection is an important field of study. However, there are many challenges in conducting research in fraud detection. One of the constraints is due to unavailability of bank datasets for research or the required characteristics of the attributes of the data are not available. Numeric data usually provides better performance for machine learning algorithms. Most transaction data however have categorical, or nominal features as well. Moreover, some platforms such as Apache Spark only recognizes numeric data. So, there is a need to use techniques e.g. One-hot encoding (OHE) to transform categorical features to numerical features, however OHE has challenges including the sparseness of transformed data and that the distinct values of an attribute are not always known in advance. Efficient feature engineering can improve the algorithm’s performance but usually requires detailed domain knowledge to identify correct features. Techniques like Ripple Down Rules (RDR) are suitable for fraud detection because of their low maintenance and incremental learning features. However, high classification accuracy on mixed datasets, especially for scalable data is challenging. Evaluation of RDR on distributed platforms is also challenging as it is not available on these platforms. The thesis proposes the following solutions to these challenges: • We developed a technique Highly Correlated Rule Based Uniformly Distribution (HCRUD) to generate highly correlated rule-based uniformly-distributed synthetic data. • We developed a technique One-hot Encoded Extended Compact (OHE-EC) to transform categorical features to numeric features by compacting sparse-data even if all distinct values are unknown. • We developed a technique Feature Engineering and Compact Unified Expressions (FECUE) to improve model efficiency through feature engineering where the domain of the data is not known in advance. • A Unified Expression RDR fraud deduction technique (UE-RDR) for Big data has been proposed and evaluated on the Spark platform. Empirical tests were executed on multi-node Hadoop cluster using well-known classifiers on bank data, synthetic bank datasets and publicly available datasets from UCI repository. These evaluations demonstrated substantial improvements in terms of classification accuracy, ruleset compactness and execution speed.Doctor of Philosoph

Public Libraries: techno trends and collective memory

By public library I mean here a library providing some kind of universal access to its assets, one whose readership isn’t exclusively tied and restricted to a particular organization – including the generally called public libraries, but also many specialized libraries, such as the academic of the open kind. Despite all efforts, public libraries continue to face strong barriers to their participation in the information society. Participants of the World Meeting on the Future of the ISIS Software recognized that “the ISIS Software Family has a unique technological concept and developmental mission to cope with Information Storage and Retrieval Systems (ISRS), particularly for developing countries where the technology is widely known and used; that the ISIS Software Family has now fully embraced the Free and Open Source Software approach and the support of UNICODE structures to be fully open and multilingual” (Rio Declaration 2008), restating thus the persistent relevance of this software family. OSS (Coar 2006) is defined as software whose source code is freely available, therefore allowing for free inspection and/or utilization, i.e., it is available for study and use by everyone without any payment or any other barrier to access. the lack of technical skill in libraries, a situation that libraries share with much of the public and cultural sectors. The study of OSS ILS, and of the their adaptation to the needs of specific public libraries may be the solution to this. Library Management Systems) that enhances digital archive interoperability between a diverse range of libraries

Prudent fraud detection in internet banking

Most commercial Fraud Detection components of Internet banking systems use some kind of hybrid setup usually comprising a Rule-Base and an Artificial Neural Network. Such rule bases have been criticised for a lack of innovation in their approach to Knowledge Acquisition and maintenance. Furthermore, the systems are brittle; they have no way of knowing when a previously unseen set of fraud patterns is beyond their current knowledge. This limitation may have far reaching consequences in an online banking system. This paper presents a viable alternative to brittleness in Knowledge Based Systems; a potential milestone in the rapid detection of unique and novel fraud patterns in Internet banking. The experiments conducted with real online banking transaction log files suggest that Prudent based fraud detection may be a worthy alternative in online banking. © 2012 IEEE

Assessing the vulnerabilities and securing MongoDB and Cassandra databases

Due to the increasing amounts and the different kinds of data that need to be stored in the databases, companies, and organizations are rapidly adopting NoSQL databases to compete. These databases were not designed with security as a priority. NoSQL open-source software was primarily developed to handle unstructured data for the purpose of business intelligence and decision support. Over the years, security features have been added to these databases but they are not as robust as they should be, and there is a scope for improvement as the sophistication of the hackers has been increasing. Moreover, the schema-less design of these databases makes it more difficult to implement traditional RDBMS like security features in these databases. Two popular NoSQL databases are MongoDB and Apache Cassandra. Although there is a lot of research related to security vulnerabilities and suggestions to improve the security of NoSQL databases, this research focusses specifically on MongoDB and Cassandra databases. This study aims to identify and analyze all the security vulnerabilities that MongoDB and Cassandra databases have that are specific to them and come up with a step-by-step guide that can help organizations to secure their data stored in these databases. This is very important because the design and vulnerabilities of each NoSQL database are different from one another and hence require security recommendations that are specific to them

Investigation of 29 Antimicrobial Compounds in Soil Using Newly Developed UHPLC-MS/MS Method

This article belongs to the Section Analytical Chemistry)While the prudent and reasonable use of veterinary antimicrobial agents in food-producing animals is necessary, researchers over the decades have shown that these antimicrobial agents can spread into the environment through livestock manure and wastewater. The analysis of the occurrence of antimicrobial compounds in soil samples is of a great importance to determine potential impacts on human and animal health and the environment. In this study, an affordable, rugged and simple analytical method has been developed for the determination of twenty-nine antimicrobial compounds from five different classes (tetracyclines, fluoro(quinolones), macrolides, sulfonamides and diaminopirimidines). Liquid-liquid extraction (LLE) with extract filtration combined with ultra-high performance liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry (UHPLC-MS/MS) was the best strategy for the simultaneous determination of all analytes. The developed method was validated according to the Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2021/808. The limit of detections (LODs) ranged from 0.5 to 2.0 µg/kg, while the limit of quantitation (LOQ) was established at 1.0 to 20.0 µg/kg. The developed method was successfully applied for the determination of antimicrobial residues in one hundred and eighteen soil samples obtained from four European countries (Austria, Czech Republic, Estonia and Portugal). Doxycycline in the concentration levels of 9.07 µg/kg-20.6 µg/kg was detected in eight of the analysed samples. Samples were collected from areas where natural fertilizers (swine or cow manure) were applied. Our method can be efficiently used to monitor anti-microbial compounds in soil samples.This research was supported by funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation programme under grant agreement No. 773830: One Health European Joint Programme (project FED-AMR, No. JRP15-AMR2.1-FED-AMR). Research at the National Veterinary Research Institute (PIWet), Poland, was also partially supported by the Polish Ministry of Education and Science from the funds for science in the years 2018–2022 allocated for the implementation of a co-financed international project. Research at Centre for the Studies of Animal Science (CECA), University of Porto, Portugal, was also supported by FCT/MCTES [UIDB/00211/2020] through national funds.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

The Lived Experience of Family Nurse Practitioners Performing Sexual Health Assessments

Sexuality incorporates a multitude of feelings including beliefs, fantasies, and aspects of pleasure, intimacy, and reproduction. In addition, sexuality involves rights to gender identity and role, sexual acts and orientation. Sexual and reproductive health and rights is a global health, development, and human rights priority. Universal access to sexual and reproductive health is essential. Negative sexual health outcomes are increasing in the United States and sexuality is often a neglected area for health providers including nurses. With an increasing share of the primary care services nationally, family nurse practitioners (FNPs) have the means to provide quality sexual health care across the life span and improve universal access and sexual health outcomes. The purpose of this qualitative study was to understand the lived experiences of female FNPs when performing sexual health assessments on their adult clients in primary care. Family nurse practitioners are educated and trained to provide holistic, client centered nursing care inclusive of sexual health assessments. The study included in-depth interviews with ten female FNPs. These interviews were analyzed using van Manen\u27s interpretive phenomenological approach. The Self-Concept Mode of The Roy Adaptation Model guided this study. Understanding the phenomenon of the lived experience of female FNPs illuminated the common experiences and shared meanings for FNPs. The interpretive statement was: The performance of a sexual health assessment by FNPs on their adult clients in primary care is the development of presence and prudence in relation to their level of their self-concept. Since sexual health affects all human beings, there are global nursing implications for education, practice, and research in understanding the meanings of the essential themes of presence, prudence, and self-concept