Global Grids and Software Toolkits: A Study of Four Grid Middleware Technologies

Grid is an infrastructure that involves the integrated and collaborative use of computers, networks, databases and scientific instruments owned and managed by multiple organizations. Grid applications often involve large amounts of data and/or computing resources that require secure resource sharing across organizational boundaries. This makes Grid application management and deployment a complex undertaking. Grid middlewares provide users with seamless computing ability and uniform access to resources in the heterogeneous Grid environment. Several software toolkits and systems have been developed, most of which are results of academic research projects, all over the world. This chapter will focus on four of these middlewares--UNICORE, Globus, Legion and Gridbus. It also presents our implementation of a resource broker for UNICORE as this functionality was not supported in it. A comparison of these systems on the basis of the architecture, implementation model and several other features is included.Comment: 19 pages, 10 figure

Mediated data integration and transformation for web service-based software architectures

Service-oriented architecture using XML-based web services has been widely accepted by many organisations as the standard infrastructure to integrate heterogeneous and autonomous data sources. As a result, many Web service providers are built up on top of the data sources to share the data by supporting provided and required interfaces and methods of data access in a unified manner. In the context of data integration, problems arise when Web services are assembled to deliver an integrated view of data, adaptable to the specific needs of individual clients and providers. Traditional approaches of data integration and transformation are not suitable to automate the construction of connectors dedicated to connect selected Web services to render integrated and tailored views of data. We propose a declarative approach that addresses the oftenneglected data integration and adaptivity aspects of serviceoriented architecture

An information retrieval approach to ontology mapping

In this paper, we present a heuristic mapping method and a prototype mapping system that support the process of semi-automatic ontology mapping for the purpose of improving semantic interoperability in heterogeneous systems. The approach is based on the idea of semantic enrichment, i.e., using instance information of the ontology to enrich the original ontology and calculate similarities between concepts in two ontologies. The functional settings for the mapping system are discussed and the evaluation of the prototype implementation of the approach is reported. \ud \u

Combined aptamer and transcriptome sequencing of single cells.

The transcriptome and proteome encode distinct information that is important for characterizing heterogeneous biological systems. We demonstrate a method to simultaneously characterize the transcriptomes and proteomes of single cells at high throughput using aptamer probes and droplet-based single cell sequencing. With our method, we differentiate distinct cell types based on aptamer surface binding and gene expression patterns. Aptamers provide advantages over antibodies for single cell protein characterization, including rapid, in vitro, and high-purity generation via SELEX, and the ability to amplify and detect them with PCR and sequencing

Behavior change interventions: the potential of ontologies for advancing science and practice

A central goal of behavioral medicine is the creation of evidence-based interventions for promoting behavior change. Scientific knowledge about behavior change could be more effectively accumulated using "ontologies." In information science, an ontology is a systematic method for articulating a "controlled vocabulary" of agreed-upon terms and their inter-relationships. It involves three core elements: (1) a controlled vocabulary specifying and defining existing classes; (2) specification of the inter-relationships between classes; and (3) codification in a computer-readable format to enable knowledge generation, organization, reuse, integration, and analysis. This paper introduces ontologies, provides a review of current efforts to create ontologies related to behavior change interventions and suggests future work. This paper was written by behavioral medicine and information science experts and was developed in partnership between the Society of Behavioral Medicine's Technology Special Interest Group (SIG) and the Theories and Techniques of Behavior Change Interventions SIG. In recent years significant progress has been made in the foundational work needed to develop ontologies of behavior change. Ontologies of behavior change could facilitate a transformation of behavioral science from a field in which data from different experiments are siloed into one in which data across experiments could be compared and/or integrated. This could facilitate new approaches to hypothesis generation and knowledge discovery in behavioral science

SPEIR: Scottish Portals for Education, Information and Research. Final Project Report: Elements and Future Development Requirements of a Common Information Environment for Scotland

The SPEIR (Scottish Portals for Education, Information and Research) project was funded by the Scottish Library and Information Council (SLIC). It ran from February 2003 to September 2004, slightly longer than the 18 months originally scheduled and was managed by the Centre for Digital Library Research (CDLR). With SLIC's agreement, community stakeholders were represented in the project by the Confederation of Scottish Mini-Cooperatives (CoSMiC), an organisation whose members include SLIC, the National Library of Scotland (NLS), the Scottish Further Education Unit (SFEU), the Scottish Confederation of University and Research Libraries (SCURL), regional cooperatives such as the Ayrshire Libraries Forum (ALF)1, and representatives from the Museums and Archives communities in Scotland. Aims; A Common Information Environment For Scotland The aims of the project were to: o Conduct basic research into the distributed information infrastructure requirements of the Scottish Cultural Portal pilot and the public library CAIRNS integration proposal; o Develop associated pilot facilities by enhancing existing facilities or developing new ones; o Ensure that both infrastructure proposals and pilot facilities were sufficiently generic to be utilised in support of other portals developed by the Scottish information community; o Ensure the interoperability of infrastructural elements beyond Scotland through adherence to established or developing national and international standards. Since the Scottish information landscape is taken by CoSMiC members to encompass relevant activities in Archives, Libraries, Museums, and related domains, the project was, in essence, concerned with identifying, researching, and developing the elements of an internationally interoperable common information environment for Scotland, and of determining the best path for future progress

A Question of Empowerment: Information Technology and Civic Engagement in New Haven, Connecticut

Extravagant claims have been made for the capacity of IT (information technology) to empower citizens and to enhance the capacity of civic organizations. This study of IT use by organizations and agencies in New Haven, Connecticut, 1998-2004, tests these claims, finding that the use of IT by nonprofits is selective, tending to serve agencies patronized by community elites rather than populations in need. In addition, the study finds that single interest groups are far more effective in using IT than more diverse civic and neighborhood groups.This publication is Hauser Center Working Paper No. 30. The Hauser Center Working Paper Series was launched during the summer of 2000. The Series enables the Hauser Center to share with a broad audience important works-in-progress written by Hauser Center scholars and researchers

Towards A Taxonomy of Emerging Topics in Open Government Data: A Bibliometric Mapping Approach

The purpose of this paper is to capture the emerging research topics in Open Government Data (OGD) through a bibliometric mapping approach. Previous OGD research has covered the evolution of the discipline with the application of bibliometric mapping tools. However, none of these studies have extended the bibliometric mapping approach for taxonomy building. Realizing this potential, we used a bibliometric tool to perform keyword analysis as a foundation for taxonomy construction. A set of keyword clusters was constructed, and qualitative analysis software was used for taxonomy creation. Emerging topics were identified in a taxonomy form. This study contributes towards the development of an OGD taxonomy. This study contributes to the procedural realignment of a past study by incorporating taxonomy building elements for taxonomy creation. These contributions are significant because there is insufficient taxonomy research in the OGD discipline. The taxonomy building procedures extended in this study are applicable to other fields

StreamOnTheFly: a Peer-to-peer network for radio stations and podCasters

The StreamOnTheFly network demonstrates new ways of management and personalisation technologies for audio. The architecture is based on a decentralized network of software components using automatic metadata replication in a peer-to-peer manner. The network also promotes a new common metadata schema and content exchange format. Content reuse and content exchange is made possible by StreamOnTheFly in several use cases

Reducing semantic complexity in distributed Digital Libraries: treatment of term vagueness and document re-ranking

The purpose of the paper is to propose models to reduce the semantic complexity in heterogeneous DLs. The aim is to introduce value-added services (treatment of term vagueness and document re-ranking) that gain a certain quality in DLs if they are combined with heterogeneity components established in the project "Competence Center Modeling and Treatment of Semantic Heterogeneity". Empirical observations show that freely formulated user terms and terms from controlled vocabularies are often not the same or match just by coincidence. Therefore, a value-added service will be developed which rephrases the natural language searcher terms into suggestions from the controlled vocabulary, the Search Term Recommender (STR). Two methods, which are derived from scientometrics and network analysis, will be implemented with the objective to re-rank result sets by the following structural properties: the ranking of the results by core journals (so-called Bradfordizing) and ranking by centrality of authors in co-authorship networks.Comment: 12 pages, 4 figure