7,945 research outputs found
Semi-automated creation of converged iTV services: From macromedia director simulations to services ready for broadcast
While sound and video may capture viewers’ attention, interaction can captivate them. This has not been available prior to the advent of Digital Television. In fact, what lies at the heart of the Digital Television revolution
is this new type of interactive content, offered
in the form of interactive Television (iTV) services. On top of that, the new world of converged networks has created a demand for a new type of converged services on a range of mobile terminals (Tablet PCs, PDAs and mobile phones). This paper aims at presenting a new approach to service creation that allows for the semi-automatic translation of simulations and rapid prototypes created in the accessible desktop
multimedia authoring package Macromedia Director
into services ready for broadcast. This is achieved by a series of tools that de-skill and speed-up the process of creating digital TV user interfaces (UI) and applications for mobile terminals.
The benefits of rapid prototyping are essential for the production of these new types of services, and are therefore discussed in the first section of this paper.
In the following sections, an overview of the
operation of content, service, creation and management sub-systems is presented, which illustrates why these tools compose an important and integral part of a system responsible of creating, delivering and managing converged broadcast and telecommunications services.
The next section examines a number of metadata
languages candidates for describing the iTV services user interface and the schema language adopted in this project. A detailed description of the operation of the two tools is provided to offer an insight of how they can be used to de-skill and speed-up the process of creating digital TV user interfaces and applications for mobile terminals. Finally, representative broadcast oriented and telecommunication oriented converged service components are also introduced, demonstrating how these tools have been used to generate different types of services
Impliance: A Next Generation Information Management Appliance
ably successful in building a large market and adapting to the changes of the
last three decades, its impact on the broader market of information management
is surprisingly limited. If we were to design an information management system
from scratch, based upon today's requirements and hardware capabilities, would
it look anything like today's database systems?" In this paper, we introduce
Impliance, a next-generation information management system consisting of
hardware and software components integrated to form an easy-to-administer
appliance that can store, retrieve, and analyze all types of structured,
semi-structured, and unstructured information. We first summarize the trends
that will shape information management for the foreseeable future. Those trends
imply three major requirements for Impliance: (1) to be able to store, manage,
and uniformly query all data, not just structured records; (2) to be able to
scale out as the volume of this data grows; and (3) to be simple and robust in
operation. We then describe four key ideas that are uniquely combined in
Impliance to address these requirements, namely the ideas of: (a) integrating
software and off-the-shelf hardware into a generic information appliance; (b)
automatically discovering, organizing, and managing all data - unstructured as
well as structured - in a uniform way; (c) achieving scale-out by exploiting
simple, massive parallel processing, and (d) virtualizing compute and storage
resources to unify, simplify, and streamline the management of Impliance.
Impliance is an ambitious, long-term effort to define simpler, more robust, and
more scalable information systems for tomorrow's enterprises.Comment: This article is published under a Creative Commons License Agreement
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/.) You may copy, distribute,
display, and perform the work, make derivative works and make commercial use
of the work, but, you must attribute the work to the author and CIDR 2007.
3rd Biennial Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research (CIDR) January
710, 2007, Asilomar, California, US
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
Knowledge Rich Natural Language Queries over Structured Biological Databases
Increasingly, keyword, natural language and NoSQL queries are being used for
information retrieval from traditional as well as non-traditional databases
such as web, document, image, GIS, legal, and health databases. While their
popularity are undeniable for obvious reasons, their engineering is far from
simple. In most part, semantics and intent preserving mapping of a well
understood natural language query expressed over a structured database schema
to a structured query language is still a difficult task, and research to tame
the complexity is intense. In this paper, we propose a multi-level
knowledge-based middleware to facilitate such mappings that separate the
conceptual level from the physical level. We augment these multi-level
abstractions with a concept reasoner and a query strategy engine to dynamically
link arbitrary natural language querying to well defined structured queries. We
demonstrate the feasibility of our approach by presenting a Datalog based
prototype system, called BioSmart, that can compute responses to arbitrary
natural language queries over arbitrary databases once a syntactic
classification of the natural language query is made
The Semantic Automated Discovery and Integration (SADI) Web service Design-Pattern, API and Reference Implementation
Background. 
The complexity and inter-related nature of biological data poses a difficult challenge for data and tool integration. There has been a proliferation of interoperability standards and projects over the past decade, none of which has been widely adopted by the bioinformatics community. Recent attempts have focused on the use of semantics to assist integration, and Semantic Web technologies are being welcomed by this community.

Description. 
SADI – Semantic Automated Discovery and Integration – is a lightweight set of fully standards-compliant Semantic Web service design patterns that simplify the publication of services of the type commonly found in bioinformatics and other scientific domains. Using Semantic Web technologies at every level of the Web services “stack”, SADI services consume and produce instances of OWL Classes following a small number of very straightforward best-practices. In addition, we provide codebases that support these best-practices, and plug-in tools to popular developer and client software that dramatically simplify deployment of services by providers, and the discovery and utilization of those services by their consumers.

Conclusions.
SADI Services are fully compliant with, and utilize only foundational Web standards; are simple to create and maintain for service providers; and can be discovered and utilized in a very intuitive way by biologist end-users. In addition, the SADI design patterns significantly improve the ability of software to automatically discover appropriate services based on user-needs, and automatically chain these into complex analytical workflows. We show that, when resources are exposed through SADI, data compliant with a given ontological model can be automatically gathered, or generated, from these distributed, non-coordinating resources - a behavior we have not observed in any other Semantic system. Finally, we show that, using SADI, data dynamically generated from Web services can be explored in a manner very similar to data housed in static triple-stores, thus facilitating the intersection of Web services and Semantic Web technologies
Handling Data-Based Concurrency in Context-Aware Service Protocols
Dependency analysis is a technique to identify and determine data
dependencies between service protocols. Protocols evolving concurrently in the
service composition need to impose an order in their execution if there exist
data dependencies. In this work, we describe a model to formalise context-aware
service protocols. We also present a composition language to handle dynamically
the concurrent execution of protocols. This language addresses data dependency
issues among several protocols concurrently executed on the same user device,
using mechanisms based on data semantic matching. Our approach aims at
assisting the user in establishing priorities between these dependencies,
avoiding the occurrence of deadlock situations. Nevertheless, this process is
error-prone, since it requires human intervention. Therefore, we also propose
verification techniques to automatically detect possible inconsistencies
specified by the user while building the data dependency set. Our approach is
supported by a prototype tool we have implemented.Comment: In Proceedings FOCLASA 2010, arXiv:1007.499
Cosmological Simulations on a Grid of Computers
The work presented in this paper aims at restricting the input parameter
values of the semi-analytical model used in GALICS and MOMAF, so as to derive
which parameters influence the most the results, e.g., star formation, feedback
and halo recycling efficiencies, etc. Our approach is to proceed empirically:
we run lots of simulations and derive the correct ranges of values. The
computation time needed is so large, that we need to run on a grid of
computers. Hence, we model GALICS and MOMAF execution time and output files
size, and run the simulation using a grid middleware: DIET. All the complexity
of accessing resources, scheduling simulations and managing data is harnessed
by DIET and hidden behind a web portal accessible to the users.Comment: Accepted and Published in AIP Conference Proceedings 1241, 2010,
pages 816-82
Linked education: interlinking educational resources and the web of data
Research on interoperability of technology-enhanced learning (TEL) repositories throughout the last decade has led to a fragmented landscape of competing approaches, such as metadata schemas and interface mechanisms. However, so far Web-scale integration of resources is not facilitated, mainly due to the lack of take-up of shared principles, datasets and schemas. On the other hand, the Linked Data approach has emerged as the de-facto standard for sharing data on the Web and offers a large potential to solve interoperability issues in the field of TEL. In this paper, we describe a general approach to exploit the wealth of already existing TEL data on the Web by allowing its exposure as Linked Data and by taking into account automated enrichment and interlinking techniques to provide rich and well-interlinked data for the educational domain. This approach has been implemented in the context of the mEducator project where data from a number of open TEL data repositories has been integrated, exposed and enriched by following Linked Data principles
The Hidden Web, XML and Semantic Web: A Scientific Data Management Perspective
The World Wide Web no longer consists just of HTML pages. Our work sheds
light on a number of trends on the Internet that go beyond simple Web pages.
The hidden Web provides a wealth of data in semi-structured form, accessible
through Web forms and Web services. These services, as well as numerous other
applications on the Web, commonly use XML, the eXtensible Markup Language. XML
has become the lingua franca of the Internet that allows customized markups to
be defined for specific domains. On top of XML, the Semantic Web grows as a
common structured data source. In this work, we first explain each of these
developments in detail. Using real-world examples from scientific domains of
great interest today, we then demonstrate how these new developments can assist
the managing, harvesting, and organization of data on the Web. On the way, we
also illustrate the current research avenues in these domains. We believe that
this effort would help bridge multiple database tracks, thereby attracting
researchers with a view to extend database technology.Comment: EDBT - Tutorial (2011
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