Fast, linked, and open – the future of taxonomic publishing for plants: launching the journal PhytoKeys

The paper describes the focus, scope and the rationale of PhytoKeys, a newly established, peer-reviewed, open-access journal in plant systematics. PhytoKeys is launched to respond to four main challenges of our time: (1) Appearance of electronic publications as amendments or even alternatives to paper publications; (2) Open Access (OA) as a new publishing model; (3) Linkage of electronic registers, indices and aggregators that summarize information on biological species through taxonomic names or their persistent identifiers (Globally Unique Identifiers or GUIDs; currently Life Science Identifiers or LSIDs); (4) Web 2.0 technologies that permit the semantic markup of, and semantic enhancements to, published biological texts. The journal will pursue cutting-edge technologies in publication and dissemination of biodiversity information while strictly following the requirements of the current International Code of Botanical Nomenclature (ICBN)

Privacy-Preserving Reengineering of Model-View-Controller Application Architectures Using Linked Data

When a legacy system’s software architecture cannot be redesigned, implementing additional privacy requirements is often complex, unreliable and costly to maintain. This paper presents a privacy-by-design approach to reengineer web applications as linked data-enabled and implement access control and privacy preservation properties. The method is based on the knowledge of the application architecture, which for the Web of data is commonly designed on the basis of a model-view-controller pattern. Whereas wrapping techniques commonly used to link data of web applications duplicate the security source code, the new approach allows for the controlled disclosure of an application’s data, while preserving non-functional properties such as privacy preservation. The solution has been implemented and compared with existing linked data frameworks in terms of reliability, maintainability and complexity

Modeling views in the layered view model for XML using UML

In data engineering, view formalisms are used to provide flexibility to users and user applications by allowing them to extract and elaborate data from the stored data sources. Conversely, since the introduction of Extensible Markup Language (XML), it is fast emerging as the dominant standard for storing, describing, and interchanging data among various web and heterogeneous data sources. In combination with XML Schema, XML provides rich facilities for defining and constraining user-defined data semantics and properties, a feature that is unique to XML. In this context, it is interesting to investigate traditional database features, such as view models and view design techniques for XML. However, traditional view formalisms are strongly coupled to the data language and its syntax, thus it proves to be a difficult task to support views in the case of semi-structured data models. Therefore, in this paper we propose a Layered View Model (LVM) for XML with conceptual and schemata extensions. Here our work is three-fold; first we propose an approach to separate the implementation and conceptual aspects of the views that provides a clear separation of concerns, thus, allowing analysis and design of views to be separated from their implementation. Secondly, we define representations to express and construct these views at the conceptual level. Thirdly, we define a view transformation methodology for XML views in the LVM, which carries out automated transformation to a view schema and a view query expression in an appropriate query language. Also, to validate and apply the LVM concepts, methods and transformations developed, we propose a view-driven application development framework with the flexibility to develop web and database applications for XML, at varying levels of abstraction

The Information Commons: a public policy report

This report describes the history of the information commons, presents examples of online commons that provide new ways to store and deliver information, and concludes with policy recommendations. Available in PDF and HTML versions.BRENNAN CENTER FOR JUSTICE at NYU SCHOOL OF LAW Democracy Program, Free Expression Policy Project 161 Avenue of the Americas, 12th floor New York NY 10013 Phone: (212) 998-6730 Web site: www.brennancenter.org Free Expression Policy Project: www.fepproject.or

The Information Commons: a public policy report

This report describes the history of the information commons, presents examples of online commons that provide new ways to store and deliver information, and concludes with policy recommendations. Available in PDF and HTML versions.BRENNAN CENTER FOR JUSTICE at NYU SCHOOL OF LAW Democracy Program, Free Expression Policy Project 161 Avenue of the Americas, 12th floor New York NY 10013 Phone: (212) 998-6730 Web site: www.brennancenter.org Free Expression Policy Project: www.fepproject.or

HTML Macros -- Easing the Construction and Maintenance of Web Texts

Authoring and maintaining large collections of Web texts is a cumbersome, error-prone and time-consuming business. Ongoing development of courseware for the High Performance Computing Consortium (HPCC) TLTP has only helped to emphasise these problems. Courseware requires the application of a coherent document layout (templates) for each page, and also the use of standard icons with a consistent functionality, in order to create a constant look and feel throughout the material. This provides the user with an environment where he or she can access new pages, and instantly recognise the format used, making the extraction of the information on the page much quicker, and less immediately confusing. This paper describes a system that was developed at UKC to provide a solution to the above problems via the introduction of HTML macros. These macros can be used to provide a standard document layout with a consistent look and feel, as well as tools to ease user navigation. The software is written in Perl, and achieves macro expansion and replacement using the Common Gateway Interface (CGI) and filtering the HTML source. Using macros in your HTML results in your document source code being shorter, more robust, and more powerful. Webs of documents can be built extremely fast and maintenance is made much simpler. Keywords: Authoring, Automation Tools, Perl filters for HTML, Teaching and learning on the We