Research in information managment at Dublin City University

The Information Management Group at Dublin City University has research themes such as digital multimedia, interoperable systems and database engineering. In the area of digital multimedia, a collaboration with our School of Electronic Engineering has formed the Centre for Digital Video Processing, a university designated research centre whose aim is to research, develop and evaluate content-based operations on digital video information. To achieve this goal, the range of expertise in this centre covers the complete gamut from image analysis and feature extraction through to video search engine technology and interfaces to video browsing. The Interoperable Systems Group has research interests in federated databases and interoperability, object modelling and database engineering. This report describes the research activities of the major groupings within the Information Management community in Dublin City University

Secure data sharing and processing in heterogeneous clouds

The extensive cloud adoption among the European Public Sector Players empowered them to own and operate a range of cloud infrastructures. These deployments vary both in the size and capabilities, as well as in the range of employed technologies and processes. The public sector, however, lacks the necessary technology to enable effective, interoperable and secure integration of a multitude of its computing clouds and services. In this work we focus on the federation of private clouds and the approaches that enable secure data sharing and processing among the collaborating infrastructures and services of public entities. We investigate the aspects of access control, data and security policy languages, as well as cryptographic approaches that enable fine-grained security and data processing in semi-trusted environments. We identify the main challenges and frame the future work that serve as an enabler of interoperability among heterogeneous infrastructures and services. Our goal is to enable both security and legal conformance as well as to facilitate transparency, privacy and effectivity of private cloud federations for the public sector needs. © 2015 The Authors

Search and orchestration of data and processes in a federated environment

This paper describes on-going research on streamlining the access and use of spatial data and processes in Australia. Spatial data in Australia is available on-line at many levels of government from local authorities, state and territories (jurisdictions), and nationally from the Commonwealth and other sources. Much of this data is available via Open Geospatial Consortium and World Wide Web Consortium standard web services. This abstract discusses three related research topics that have been identified by a wide range of stakeholders through a comprehensive consultation process. These are search and discovery, federation and orchestration of data and processes. The commonality across the three research topics is that they all require Semantic Web and Artificial Intelligence methods and embrace the various standards, and if needed, propose modifications to such standard

Road monitoring utilizing cooperative HD Maps maintenance and Linked Data:a case study of road construction monitoring

In the context of intelligent traffic systems, the latest developments focus on elevating the infrastructure's capability by creating intelligent solutions unlocked by industrial revolution 4.0. Digitalization elevates the capability of sub-systems in the context of the urban environment and accelerates business-as-usual processes. In this context, practitioners strive to integrate the information streams from sub-systems for a unified, accurate, accessible and coherent view of information from diverse sources, enabling better decision-making and operational efficiency. However, the format of information streams is vendor-specific and introduces a burden while integrating the data streams.In this project, on the one hand, in the automotive domain vehicles rely on high-resolution maps and semantics of the environment. To this end, a growing sector emphasizes smart infrastructure through the sensory collection and analytics of on-site occurrences on the roads and providing it to the end users and the vehicles, entities such as HD Map providers. On the other hand, there exist vital entities in the operation of intelligent traffic infrastructure that share information about the traffic actors and incidents, such as National Access Points (NAPs). Finally, there are entities whose day-to-day operation necessitates information collection and site visits for on-site observations of the road incidents and direct them back to their business processes, entities such as road operators, local authorities, and municipalities, to name a few.The developed prototype strives to perform data integration of sources of information triggering roadwork and construction occurrences while mitigating interoperability issues using graph databases, ontologies and Linked Data. This design project steps in a niche application of data integration and interoperable infrastructure in the context of smart cities, enabling the infrastructure to utilise the efforts of operational actors in their processes

Scaling Heterogeneous Databases and the Design of Disco

Access to large numbers of data sources introduces new problems for users of heterogeneous distributed databases. End users and application programmers must deal with unavailable data sources. Database administrators must deal with incorporating new sources into the model. Database implementors must deal with the translation of queries between query languages and schemas. The Distributed Information Search COmponent (Disco) 1 addresses these problems. Query processing semantics are developed to process queries over data sources which do not return answers. Data modeling techniques manage connections to data sources. The component interface to data sources flexibly handles different query languages and translates queries. This paper describes (a) the distributed mediator architecture ofDisco, (b) its query processing semantics, (c) the data model and its modeling of data source connections, and (d) the interface to underlying data sources. 1

A Framework for Semantic Interoperability for Distributed Geospatial Repositories

Interoperable access of geospatial information across disparate geospatial applications has become essential. Geospatial data are highly heterogeneous -- the heterogeneity arises both at the syntactic and semantic levels. Finding and accessing appropriate data in such a distributed environment is an important research issue. The paper proposes a methodology for interoperable access of geospatial information based on Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) specified standards. An architecture for integrating diverse geospatial data repositories has been proposed using service-based methodology. The semantic issues for discovery and retrieval of geospatial data over distributed geospatial services have also been proposed in the paper. The proposed architecture utilizes the ontological concepts for service description and subsequent discovery of services. An approach for semantic similarity assessment of geospatial services has been discussed