Context-Aware Information Retrieval for Enhanced Situation Awareness

In the coalition forces, users are increasingly challenged with the issues of information overload and correlation of information from heterogeneous sources. Users might need different pieces of information, ranging from information about a single building, to the resolution strategy of a global conflict. Sometimes, the time, location and past history of information access can also shape the information needs of users. Information systems need to help users pull together data from disparate sources according to their expressed needs (as represented by system queries), as well as less specific criteria. Information consumers have varying roles, tasks/missions, goals and agendas, knowledge and background, and personal preferences. These factors can be used to shape both the execution of user queries and the form in which retrieved information is packaged. However, full automation of this daunting information aggregation and customization task is not possible with existing approaches. In this paper we present an infrastructure for context-aware information retrieval to enhance situation awareness. The infrastructure provides each user with a customized, mission-oriented system that gives access to the right information from heterogeneous sources in the context of a particular task, plan and/or mission. The approach lays on five intertwined fundamental concepts, namely Workflow, Context, Ontology, Profile and Information Aggregation. The exploitation of this knowledge, using appropriate domain ontologies, will make it feasible to provide contextual assistance in various ways to the work performed according to a user’s taskrelevant information requirements. This paper formalizes these concepts and their interrelationships

Global Grids and Software Toolkits: A Study of Four Grid Middleware Technologies

Grid is an infrastructure that involves the integrated and collaborative use of computers, networks, databases and scientific instruments owned and managed by multiple organizations. Grid applications often involve large amounts of data and/or computing resources that require secure resource sharing across organizational boundaries. This makes Grid application management and deployment a complex undertaking. Grid middlewares provide users with seamless computing ability and uniform access to resources in the heterogeneous Grid environment. Several software toolkits and systems have been developed, most of which are results of academic research projects, all over the world. This chapter will focus on four of these middlewares--UNICORE, Globus, Legion and Gridbus. It also presents our implementation of a resource broker for UNICORE as this functionality was not supported in it. A comparison of these systems on the basis of the architecture, implementation model and several other features is included.Comment: 19 pages, 10 figure

Workflow Partitioning and Deployment on the Cloud using Orchestra

Orchestrating service-oriented workflows is typically based on a design model that routes both data and control through a single point - the centralised workflow engine. This causes scalability problems that include the unnecessary consumption of the network bandwidth, high latency in transmitting data between the services, and performance bottlenecks. These problems are highly prominent when orchestrating workflows that are composed from services dispersed across distant geographical locations. This paper presents a novel workflow partitioning approach, which attempts to improve the scalability of orchestrating large-scale workflows. It permits the workflow computation to be moved towards the services providing the data in order to garner optimal performance results. This is achieved by decomposing the workflow into smaller sub workflows for parallel execution, and determining the most appropriate network locations to which these sub workflows are transmitted and subsequently executed. This paper demonstrates the efficiency of our approach using a set of experimental workflows that are orchestrated over Amazon EC2 and across several geographic network regions.Comment: To appear in Proceedings of the IEEE/ACM 7th International Conference on Utility and Cloud Computing (UCC 2014

DRIVER Technology Watch Report

This report is part of the Discovery Workpackage (WP4) and is the third report out of four deliverables. The objective of this report is to give an overview of the latest technical developments in the world of digital repositories, digital libraries and beyond, in order to serve as theoretical and practical input for the technical DRIVER developments, especially those focused on enhanced publications. This report consists of two main parts, one part focuses on interoperability standards for enhanced publications, the other part consists of three subchapters, which give a landscape picture of current and surfacing technologies and communities crucial to DRIVER. These three subchapters contain the GRID, CRIS and LTP communities and technologies. Every chapter contains a theoretical explanation, followed by case studies and the outcomes and opportunities for DRIVER in this field

A mediation framework for web services in a peer-to-peer environment

Centralized architectures based on the client server paradigm show their limits each time the Internet extends its capabilities. They present problems in terms of security, robustness, performance, high needs for administration. Short time solutions like load balancing and replication, or purchasing of more powerful hardware tend to cope with these limits for a while, but do not provide a definitive answer to these problems. Currently, different proprietary approaches hinder attempts to enabling communication between heterogeneous systems, while the Internet is developing toward a better interoperability with service-oriented architectures. Recent open source and standardization efforts allow building a framework providing an original answer to interoperability and scalability over the Internet. The use of Web Services (WS) as a means of communication between information systems, combined with a Peer-to-Peer (P2P) architecture for a more reliable network resources repartition and decentralization, forms a stable base for a new kind of distributed architecture. Furthermore, the composition and aggregation of multiple WS allow providers to supply with large scale meta-services. However, the use of heterogeneous WS in a dynamic context like P2P still faces challenges concerning the matching of WS and their respective interfaces. This paper discusses the use of mediation as an alternative to deal with the constant evolution of Web Services availability, and proposes a framework for a WS-enabled P2P platform. © 2005 IEEE

Improving the Scalability of DPWS-Based Networked Infrastructures

The Devices Profile for Web Services (DPWS) specification enables seamless discovery, configuration, and interoperability of networked devices in various settings, ranging from home automation and multimedia to manufacturing equipment and data centers. Unfortunately, the sheer simplicity of event notification mechanisms that makes it fit for resource-constrained devices, makes it hard to scale to large infrastructures with more stringent dependability requirements, ironically, where self-configuration would be most useful. In this report, we address this challenge with a proposal to integrate gossip-based dissemination in DPWS, thus maintaining compatibility with original assumptions of the specification, and avoiding a centralized configuration server or custom black-box middleware components. In detail, we show how our approach provides an evolutionary and non-intrusive solution to the scalability limitations of DPWS and experimentally evaluate it with an implementation based on the the Web Services for Devices (WS4D) Java Multi Edition DPWS Stack (JMEDS).Comment: 28 pages, Technical Repor