Cloud services within a ROLE-enabled Personal Learning Environment

The ROLE project (Responsive Open Learning Environments) is focused on the next generation of Personal Learning Environments (PLE). In this paper, we first describe the engineering process used to create either a new widget bundle, a group of applications or service widgets. The widgets integrated in a ROLE PLE consist of two cloud-based services, a social networking and a mind-mapping tool, where learners can perform and collaborate on learning activities. We also modified other widgets to create a complete learning experience. The whole platform is running on a cloudcomputing infrastructure and one of the services is using a cloud-based database. Additionally, we describe the initial experiences from using this cloud education environment in Galileo University, Guatemala, in a web-based course with students from three different Latin-American countries. We measured emotional aspects, motivation, usability and attitudes towards the environment. The results demonstrated the readiness of cloud-based education solutions, and how ROLE can bring together such an environment from a PLE perspective

aDORe djatoka: An Open-Source Jpeg 2000 Image Server and Dissemination Service Framework

4th International Conference on Open RepositoriesThis presentation was part of the session : Conference PresentationsDate: 2009-05-19 03:00 PM – 04:30 PMThe JPEG 2000 image format has attracted considerable attention due to its rich feature set defined in a multi-part open ISO standard, and its potential use as a holy-grail preservation format providing both lossless compression and rich service format features. Until recently there was lack of an implementation agnostic (e.g., Kakadu, Aware, etc) API for JPEG 2000 compression and extraction, and an open-source service framework, upon which rich Web 2.0-style applications can be developed. Recently we engaged in the development of aDORe djatoka , an open-source JPEG 2000 image server and dissemination framework to help address some of these issues. The djatoka image server is geared towards Web 2.0 style reuse through URI-addressability of all image disseminations including regions, rotations, and format transformations. Djatoka also provides a JPEG 2000 compression / extraction API that serves as an abstraction layer from the underlying JPEG 2000 library (e.g., Kakadu, Aware, etc).  The initial release has attracted considerable interest and is already being used in production environments, such as at the Biodiversity Heritage Library , who uses djatoka to serve more than eleven million images. This presentation introduces the aDORe djatoka image server and describes various interoperability approaches with existing repository systems.  Djatoka was derived from a concrete need to introduce a solution to disseminate high-resolution images stored in an aDORe repository system.  Djatoka is able to disseminate images that reside either in a repository environment or that are Web-accessible at arbitrary URIs.  Since dynamic service requests pertaining to an identified resource (the entire JPEG 2000 image) are being made, the OpenURL Framework was selected to provide an extensible dissemination service framework. The OpenURL service layer simplifies development and provides exciting interoperability opportunities. The presentation will showcase the flexibility of this interface by introducing a mobile image collection viewer developed for the iPhone / iTouch platform

Evolution of Orchestration Towards 5G

Service orchestration is an essential activity in 5G networks. It performs optimal resource allocation and provisions services in an effective sequence based on demands across a collection of physical or virtual network functions (P/VNF). This paper summarizes several orchestration environments and components along with their evolution towards 5G. A brief operational comparison of platforms such as Open Source Management and Orchestration (OSM MANO), Open Platform for NFV (OPNFV) and Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP) have been presented, along with different deployment models and architectural alternatives

Sensing as a Service Model for Smart Cities Supported by Internet of Things

The world population is growing at a rapid pace. Towns and cities are accommodating half of the world's population thereby creating tremendous pressure on every aspect of urban living. Cities are known to have large concentration of resources and facilities. Such environments attract people from rural areas. However, unprecedented attraction has now become an overwhelming issue for city governance and politics. The enormous pressure towards efficient city management has triggered various Smart City initiatives by both government and private sector businesses to invest in ICT to find sustainable solutions to the growing issues. The Internet of Things (IoT) has also gained significant attention over the past decade. IoT envisions to connect billions of sensors to the Internet and expects to use them for efficient and effective resource management in Smart Cities. Today infrastructure, platforms, and software applications are offered as services using cloud technologies. In this paper, we explore the concept of sensing as a service and how it fits with the Internet of Things. Our objective is to investigate the concept of sensing as a service model in technological, economical, and social perspectives and identify the major open challenges and issues.Comment: Transactions on Emerging Telecommunications Technologies 2014 (Accepted for Publication

From Service Conversation Models to WS-CDL

Changing business environments are forcing organizations to develop flexible and adaptable enterprise systems. To accomplish this and to solve associated systems integration issues, many are moving towards web service technology. Two key ingredients of web services based solution are service composition and service choreography. While there has been lot of advancement in respect to service composition, service choreography rather largely remains an open problem. WS-CDL specification is considered to be a candidate standard for service choreography; however, consensus on support mechanisms to develop conversation models depicting peer-to-peer interactions are yet to be reached. In this paper, we develop an approach as well required heuristics for identifying service interaction patterns from business process models and using them to develop conversation models. We provide detailed discussion on heuristics, illustrate our approach through an example, as well as indicate how these conversation models can be used for generating WS-CDL specifications

Pedagogical advantages of 3D virtual field trips and the challenges for their adoption

In a six-month long Innovate UK-funded project (November 2015 – April 2016), we investigated the feasibility of creating a sustainable national 3D ‘virtual field-trips’ (VFT) software service, to support and deliver field trip-based education through a virtual channel in schools and higher education institutions (HEIs). The idea of a 3D VFT service emerged from Virtual Skiddaw App, the 3D virtual geology fieldtrip, of The Open University’s (OU) Open Science Laboratory . In the feasibility project, we (at the OU) (co-investigator) along with Daden (project-lead) and Design Thinkers, UK (co-investigator) we looked into the technical, pedagogical, commercial and service design aspects of the 3D VFT service. In this presentation, we focussed on the pedagogy strand of this feasibility project: pedagogical advantages of 3D VFTs, and the challenges for their adoption in schools and HEIs. We discussed the following: pedagogical underpinnings of 3D virtual environments and 3D VFTs in disciplines such as geology, biology, environmental science/studies and geography which are founded on field observations, exploration and enquiry; potential of integrating VFTs within the curricula in schools and in HEIs; perceptions of educators, students and assessment bodies towards 3D VFTs, and virtual fieldwork, in general; we used the Virtual Skiddaw App in workshops and presentations to illustrate the concept of a 3D VFT; views of stakeholders towards the 3D VFT service: advantages, challenges and their requirements from this service. Our empirical investigations have been user-centred – focussing on the stakeholders and particularly, the end-users such as educators, students and fieldwork specialists, and we have interacted with them via interviews, service design workshops, demonstrations and a survey to elicit their perceptions and requirements

Towards delay-aware container-based Service Function Chaining in Fog Computing

Recently, the fifth-generation mobile network (5G) is getting significant attention. Empowered by Network Function Virtualization (NFV), 5G networks aim to support diverse services coming from different business verticals (e.g. Smart Cities, Automotive, etc). To fully leverage on NFV, services must be connected in a specific order forming a Service Function Chain (SFC). SFCs allow mobile operators to benefit from the high flexibility and low operational costs introduced by network softwarization. Additionally, Cloud computing is evolving towards a distributed paradigm called Fog Computing, which aims to provide a distributed cloud infrastructure by placing computational resources close to end-users. However, most SFC research only focuses on Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) use cases where mobile operators aim to deploy services close to end-users. Bi-directional communication between Edges and Cloud are not considered in MEC, which in contrast is highly important in a Fog environment as in distributed anomaly detection services. Therefore, in this paper, we propose an SFC controller to optimize the placement of service chains in Fog environments, specifically tailored for Smart City use cases. Our approach has been validated on the Kubernetes platform, an open-source orchestrator for the automatic deployment of micro-services. Our SFC controller has been implemented as an extension to the scheduling features available in Kubernetes, enabling the efficient provisioning of container-based SFCs while optimizing resource allocation and reducing the end-to-end (E2E) latency. Results show that the proposed approach can lower the network latency up to 18% for the studied use case while conserving bandwidth when compared to the default scheduling mechanism

An integrated SDN architecture for application driven networking

The target of our effort is the definition of a dynamic network architecture meeting the requirements of applications competing for reliable high performance network resources. These applications have different requirements regarding reli- ability, bandwidth, latency, predictability, quality, reliable lead time and allocatability. At a designated instance in time a virtual network has to be defined automatically for a limited period of time, based on an existing physical network infrastructure, which implements the requirements of an application. We suggest an integrated Software Defined Network (SDN) architecture providing highly customizable functionalities required for efficient data transfer. It consists of a service interface towards the application and an open network interface towards the physical infrastruc- ture. Control and forwarding plane are separated for better scalability. This type of architecture allows to negotiate the reser- vation of network resources involving multiple applications with different requirement profiles within multi-domain environments

Service-oriented Approach Supporting Dynamic Manufacturing Networks Operations

[EN] In the current economic crisis, also the manufacturing sector is asked to evolve towards more dynamic organizational structures within which, composing manufacturing processes, almost in real time, will become a need. This work aims at introducing flexibility and dynamisms to current manufacturing processes by separating its tasks from its final performers. With the proposed approach, the performers replacement can be done almost seamlessly. Additionally, the approach shows how dynamic negotiation and contracting, either for a whole process or a single activity, can be smoother if the task specification is based on a standard service interface defined at the ecosystem level. At the end, a prototype implementation is briefly described.Franco Pereyra, RD.; Ortiz Bas, Á.; Gómez-Gasquet, P. (2013). Service-oriented Approach Supporting Dynamic Manufacturing Networks Operations. IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology. 408:345-354. doi:10.1007/978-3-642-40543-3_37S345354408Osório, A.L., Afsarmanesh, H., Camarinha-Matos, L.M.: Open Services Ecosystem Supporting Collaborative Networks. In: Ortiz, Á., Franco, R.D., Gómez Gasquet, P. (eds.) BASYS 2010. IFIP AICT, vol. 322, pp. 80–91. Springer, Heidelberg (2010)Afsarmanesh, H., Camarinha-Matos, L., Msanjila, S.: On management of 2nd generation Virtual Organizations Breeding Environments. Annual Reviews in Control 33(2), 209–219 (2009)Afsarmanesh, H., Camarinha-Matos, L.: A Framework for Management of Virtual Organization Breeding Environments. In: Camarinha-Matos, L.M., Afsarmanesh, H., Ortiz, A. (eds.) Collaborative Networks and Their Breeding Environments. IFIP, vol. 186, pp. 35–48. Springer, Boston (2005)Franco, R.D., Ortiz Bas, A., Gómez-Gasquet, P., Rodriguez Rodriguez, R.: Open Ecosystems, Collaborative Networks and Service Entities Integrated Modeling Approach. In: Camarinha-Matos, L.M., Xu, L., Afsarmanesh, H. (eds.) Collaborative Networks in the Internet of Services. IFIP AICT, vol. 380, pp. 74–83. Springer, Heidelberg (2012)Minguez, J., Zor, S., Reimann, P.: Event-driven business process management in Engineer-to-Order supply chains. In: 2011 15th International Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work in Design (CSCWD), pp. 624–631 (2011)Wang, X., Cai, H., Xu, B.: An Extended Petri-Net Based Approach for Supply Chain Process Modeling and Web Service Transformation. In: International Conference on Management and Service Science, MASS 2009, pp. 1–5 (2009)Mowshowitz, A.: The switching principle in Virtual Organization. eJOV 1(1), 7–18 (1999)Franco, Ortiz Bas, Lario Esteban, F.C.: Modeling extended manufacturing processes with service-oriented entities. Service Business 3(1), 31–50 (2009)Vallejos, R.V., Lima, C., Varvakis, G.: A Framework To Create A Virtual Organization Breeding Environment In The Mould And Die Sector. In: Camarinha-Matos, L.M., Afsarmanesh, H., OIlus, M. (eds.) Network-Centric Collaboration and Supporting Frameworks. IFIP, vol. 224, pp. 599–608. Springer, Boston (2006)Bocchi, L., Fiadeiro, J., Rajper, N., Reiff-Marganiec, S.: Structure and Behaviour of Virtual Organisation Breeding Environments (January 2010)Romero, D., Molina, A.: VO breeding environments & virtual organizations integral business process management framework. Information Systems Frontiers 11(5), 569–597 (2009)Ulieru, M., Grobbelaar, S.: Engineering Industrial Ecosystems in a Networked World. In: 5th IEEE International Conference on Industrial Informatics, vol. 1, pp. 1–7 (2007)Rajini, S.N.S., Bhuvaneswari, D.T.: Service Based Architecture for Manufacturing Sector (2010)Lobov, A., Puttonen, J., Herrera, V.V., Andiappan, R., Lastra, J.L.M.: Service oriented architecture in developing of loosely-coupled manufacturing systems. In: 6th IEEE International Conference on Industrial Informatics, INDIN 2008, pp. 791–796 (2008)Jammes, F., Smit, H., Lastra, J.L.M., Delamer, I.M.: Orchestration of service-oriented manufacturing processes. In: 10th IEEE Conference on Emerging Technologies and Factory Automation, ETFA 2005, vol. 1, pp. 617–624 (2005)Zor, S., Görlach, K., Leymann, F.: Using BPMN for Modeling Manufacturing Processes. Neuer Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, Wien (2010