SWI-Prolog and the Web

Where Prolog is commonly seen as a component in a Web application that is either embedded or communicates using a proprietary protocol, we propose an architecture where Prolog communicates to other components in a Web application using the standard HTTP protocol. By avoiding embedding in external Web servers development and deployment become much easier. To support this architecture, in addition to the transfer protocol, we must also support parsing, representing and generating the key Web document types such as HTML, XML and RDF. This paper motivates the design decisions in the libraries and extensions to Prolog for handling Web documents and protocols. The design has been guided by the requirement to handle large documents efficiently. The described libraries support a wide range of Web applications ranging from HTML and XML documents to Semantic Web RDF processing. To appear in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP)Comment: 31 pages, 24 figures and 2 tables. To appear in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP

Grid Resources, Services and Data ­ Towards a Semantic Grid System

Howard Temin, who died on February 9, 1994, was driven by the genetic preoccupations of the “phage group” to an insight that was fundamental to thedevelopment of contemporary cellular biology. Howard went to Caltech in 1955 to begin graduate studies, and there developed a unique scientific style, blending the influences of Max Delbrück and Renato Dulbecco. His work was marked by a devotion to understanding the genetic issues posed by cancer-inducing viruses. This focus on genetics put him firmly in the traditions of American science dating back to the beginning of the century, and his concern with virus-induced cancer also built on a rich past. But Howard‘s fierce belief in himself, his deep scholarship, and his remarkable insight allowed him to realize a synthesis that made him one of the most creative scientists of the twentieth century

The Nornir run-time system for parallel programs using Kahn process networks on multi-core machines – A flexible alternative to MapReduce

Even though shared-memory concurrency is a paradigm frequently used for developing parallel applications on small- and middle-sized machines, experience has shown that it is hard to use. This is largely caused by synchronization primitives which are low-level, inherently non-deterministic, and, consequently, non-intuitive to use. In this paper, we present the Nornir run-time system. Nornir is comparable to well-known frameworks such as MapReduce and Dryad that are recognized for their efficiency and simplicity. Unlike these frameworks, Nornir also supports process structures containing branches and cycles. Nornir is based on the formalism of Kahn process networks, which is a shared-nothing, message-passing model of concurrency. We deem this model a simple and deterministic alternative to shared-memory concurrency. Experiments with real and synthetic benchmarks on up to 8 CPUs show that performance in most cases scales almost linearly with the number of CPUs, when not limited by data dependencies. We also show that the modeling flexibility allows Nornir to outperform its MapReduce counterparts using well-known benchmarks. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited

Smartcard Integration with Kerberos V5

We describe our design and implementation of smartcard integration with Kerberos V5. Authentication is among the most important applications for smartcards and is one of the critical requirements for computer security. By augmenting Kerberos V5 with tamper-resistant hardware, we enhance the security of Kerberos V5 and offer a potential "killer application" leading to wider adoption of smartcard technology.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/107923/1/citi-tr-98-7.pd

Enhancement of the usability of SOA services for novice users

Recently, the automation of service integration has provided a significant advantage in delivering services to novice users. This art of integrating various services is known as Service Composition and its main purpose is to simplify the development process for web applications and facilitates reuse of services. It is one of the paradigms that enables services to end-users (i.e.service provisioning) through the outsourcing of web contents and it requires users to share and reuse services in more collaborative ways. Most service composers are effective at enabling integration of web contents, but they do not enable universal access across different groups of users. This is because, the currently existing content aggregators require complex interactions in order to create web applications (e.g., Web Service Business Process Execution Language (WS-BPEL)) as a result not all users are able to use such web tools. This trend demands changes in the web tools that end-users use to gain and share information, hence this research uses Mashups as a service composition technique to allow novice users to integrate publicly available Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) services, where there is a minimal active web application development. Mashups being the platforms that integrate disparate web Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to create user defined web applications; presents a great opportunity for service provisioning. However, their usability for novice users remains invalidated since Mashup tools are not easy to use they require basic programming skills which makes the process of designing and creating Mashups difficult. This is because Mashup tools access heterogeneous web contents using public web APIs and the process of integrating them become complex since web APIs are tailored by different vendors. Moreover, the design of Mashup editors is unnecessary complex; as a result, users do not know where to start when creating Mashups. This research address the gap between Mashup tools and usability by the designing and implementing a semantically enriched Mashup tool to discover, annotate and compose APIs to improve the utilization of SOA services by novice users. The researchers conducted an analysis of the already existing Mashup tools to identify challenges and weaknesses experienced by novice Mashup users. The findings from the requirement analysis formulated the system usability requirements that informed the design and implementation of the proposed Mashup tool. The proposed architecture addressed three layers: composition, annotation and discovery. The researchers developed a simple Mashup tool referred to as soa-Services Provisioner (SerPro) that allowed novice users to create web application flexibly. Its usability and effectiveness was validated. The proposed Mashup tool enhanced the usability of SOA services, since data analysis and results showed that it was usable to novice users by scoring a System Usability Scale (SUS) score of 72.08. Furthermore, this research discusses the research limitations and future work for further improvements

Technologies to Support Authentication in Higher Education:A Study for the UK Joint Information Systems Committee, August 21th, 1996

This report provides a short and limited study, commissioned by JISC, of the technologies available to support authentication, reviews the needs expressed by a set of people contacted for the study, and provides the beginnings of a road-map on how a National system might be established.First a brief overview of the fundamentals of Security technology is provided. As part of the study, we were asked to consult a number of people - particularly from the set of those supported under the JISC Electronic Library initiative. These were supplemented by some people at UKERNA and in Information Services departments in the universities. We present our impressions of the requirements envisioned by the people consulted, and their proposed solutions; with very few exceptions, the needs expressed were very limited, and the solutions limited to specific applications. This reflects, we believe, more the selection of the people consulted, than the true needs of the area. It was also coloured, in our view, by the fact that there was no indication that any finance for a wider initiative might be available.A more detailed review of the current methods of authentication, the needs and the status of different applications follows. This includes a brief discussion about the Standards being developed in the Internet Engineering Task Force in conjunction with the wider deployment of the Internet and the status of infrastructure standardisation and deployment. We consider also a number of applications: electronic mail, the World Wide Web, remote log-in, document security, multimedia conferencing, directories, general network facilities and electronic commerce. A brief discussion of a number of ancillary technical and legal issues follow: this includes smart-cards, directory systems and key escrow. The existence of legal considerations is indicated, but little argument is developed other than the appending of proposed Government legislation. As a final section, we start on a Road Map of how we might proceed to a National authentication infrastructure for Higher Education. We believe that such a system should be distributed in nature, and could well leverage on the investment already made in an X.500 distributed directory system. It is clear that the current technology would need considerable updating; much broader involvement must be achieved from other sectors of the universities for such an initiative to have broad impact. We mention some of the measures that should be undertaken to enable a successful broader applicability. Based on the existence of a National directory system, we then propose a National authentication infrastructure by proposing a system of Certification Authorities, distributed registration and update, and the retention of the certificates in the National directory system. We propose that existing projects in secure E-mail and electronic libraries be asked how they might be modified if such an infrastructure was developed.A substantial distributed infrastructure for authentication could have implication well beyond the university sector. For this reason, it may be possible to co-fund the development and many of the earlier trials from sources outside JISC. We propose that we explore avenues of co-funding both from the British Foresight Programme and from the European Union Telematics programme.<br/