Active artefact management for distributed software engineering

We describe a software artefact repository that provides its contents with some awareness of their own creation. "Active" artefacts are distinguished from their passive counterparts by their enriched meta-data model which reflects the work-flow process that created them, the actors responsible, the actions taken to change the artefact, and various other pieces of organisational knowledge. This enriched view of an artefact is intended to support re-use of both software and the expertise gained when creating the software. Unlike other organisational knowledge systems, the meta-data is intrinsically part of the artefact and may be populated automatically from sources including existing data-format specific information, user supplied data and records of communication. Such a system is of increased importance in the world of "virtual teams" where transmission of vital organisational knowledge, at best difficult, is further constrained by the lack of direct contact between engineers and differing development cultures

Tabulator Redux: writing Into the Semantic Web

A first category of Semantic Web browsers were designed to present a given dataset (an RDF graph) for perusal, in various forms. These include mSpace, Exhibit, and to a certain extent Haystack. A second category tackled mechanisms and display issues around linked data gathered on the fly. These include Tabulator, Oink, Disco, Open Link Software's Data Browser, and Object Browser. The challenge of once that data is gathered, how might it be edited, extended and annotated has so far been left largely unaddressed. This is not surprising: there are a number of steep challenges for determining how to support editing information in the open web of linked data. These include the representation of both the web of documents and the web of things, and the relationships between them; ensuring the user is aware of and has control over the social context such as licensing and privacy of data being entered, and, on a web in which anyone can say anything about anything, helping the user intuitively select the things which they actually wish to see in a given situation. There is also the view update problem: the difficulty of reflecting user edits back through functions used to map web data to a screen presentation. In the latest version of the Tabulator project, described in this paper we have focused on providing the write side of the readable/writable web. Our approach has been to allow modification and addition of information naturally within the browsing interface, and to relay changes to the server triple by triple for least possible brittleness (there is no explicit 'save' operation). Challenges which remain include the propagation of changes by collaborators back to the interface to create a shared editing system. To support writing across (semantic) Web resources, our work has contributed several technologies, including a HTTP/SPARQL/Update-based protocol between an editor (or other system) and incrementally editable resources stored in an open source, world-writable 'data wiki'. This begins enabling the writable Semantic Web

Greening cloud-enabled big data storage forensics : Syncany as a case study

The pervasive nature of cloud-enabled big data storage solutions introduces new challenges in the identification, collection, analysis, preservation and archiving of digital evidences. Investigation of such complex platforms to locate and recover traces of criminal activities is a time-consuming process. Hence, cyber forensics researchers are moving towards streamlining the investigation process by locating and documenting residual artefacts (evidences) of forensic value of users’ activities on cloud-enabled big data platforms in order to reduce the investigation time and resources involved in a real-world investigation. In this paper, we seek to determine the data remnants of forensic value from Syncany private cloud storage service, a popular storage engine for big data platforms. We demonstrate the types and the locations of the artefacts that can be forensically recovered. Findings from this research contribute to an in-depth understanding of cloud-enabled big data storage forensics, which can result in reduced time and resources spent in real-world investigations involving Syncany-based cloud platforms

DPMbox: An interactive user-friendly web interface for a disk-based grid storage system

Disk Pool Manager (DPM) es un sistema de gestión de almacenamiento que se usa dentro del Worldwide LHC Computing Grid. Ha sido desarrollado en el CERN y actualmente es el más usado dentro de esta infraestructura de computación distribuida. Avanzando hacia el uso de estándares que faciliten el uso de DPM, recientemente se implementó una interfaz WebDAV (una extensión del protocolo HTTP) para este sistema. A pesar de ello esta interfaz aún ofrece una funcionalidad básica, sobre todo accediendo desde un navegador web, lo que hace que siga siendo necesario usar algunas herramientas especiales. El objetivo de DPMbox es ofrecer una interfaz realmente amigable, intuitiva y que pueda usarse con herramientas ya conocidas por los usuarios, como es el caso de un navegador web, atrayendo así a usuarios menos técnicos de la comunidad científica. El proyecto basa su construcción en la interfaz WebDAV implementada y hace uso de tecnologías maduras y estándar que permiten este desarrollo como JavaScript/ECMAScript a través de jQuery u otras librerías de apoyo, así como HTML y CSS. Al realizarse como colaboración con el CERN el desarrollo se centra en las funcionalidades requeridas por el sistema DPM. Aún así, uno de los objetivos es que habiendo cumplido los requisitos iniciales, el sistema sea extensible y facilmente adaptable, haciendo posible su uso con otros sistemas que ofrezcan el protocolo WebDAV de manera general.Disk Pool Manager (DPM) is a lightweight storage management system for grid sites. It has been developed in CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research), and it is the most widely adopted solution in the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid infrastructure. Attracting less technical users has been an objective for the last years, thus, as an effort to move towards standard protocols that removes the need of special tools, DPM started offering a WebDAV (an extension of the HTTP protocol) interface, facilitating the access through commonly available tools, i.e. web browsers or WebDAV clients. However, this interface only provides basic functionality, especially when accessed from a web browser, making it still necessary to use some specific tools. DPMbox is a project for a friendly web interface that allows both technical and nontechnical users to manage their data from and into the grid by accessing it trough their web browsers. The project has been built getting advantage of the implemented WebDAV front-end, and as a web development it uses standard and mature web technologies like HTML, CSS and JavaScript/ECMAScript as its core language. As a collaboration with CERN, the development has been focused on the functionality required by the DPM, but one of the objectives is to make DPMbox easily expandable and flexible, enabling its use with other systems that offer the WebDAV protocol

Observation Centric Sensor Data Model

Management of sensor data requires metadata to understand the semantics of observations. While e-science researchers have high demands on metadata, they are selective in entering metadata. The claim in this paper is to focus on the essentials, i.e., the actual observations being described by location, time, owner, instrument, and measurement. The applicability of this approach is demonstrated in two very different case studies