QuickLET : a web-based tool for estimating pollutant loads in a watershed

textWeb-based modeling tools for estimating pollutant loads in watersheds are few in literature. Those that are available for public access often require domain expertise, making them relevant mostly among environmental researchers. Aside from intensive efforts required to gather enormous amount of data, the complexity of the modeling tools themselves hinder their application among non-technical users. Consequently, environmental decision makers often rely on outside consultants to perform watershed assessments for them. This report presents the Quick Load Estimating Tool (QuickLET), a Web-based tool for estimating pollutant loads in watersheds across the contiguous US. QuickLET empowers users to visualize the effects of land use patterns, cultivated crops, and conservation practices through graphical representation. QuickLET implements an export coefficient approach for predicting the pollutant loads resulting in significant simplification of the estimating process.Computational Science, Engineering, and Mathematic

Abstracted navigational actions for improved hypermedia navigation and maintainance.

This paper discusses the MESH framework, which proposes a fully object-oriented approach to hypermedia. Object-oriented abstractions are not only applied to the conceptual data model, but also to the navigation paradigm. This results in the concept of context-based navigation, which reduces the end user's disorientation problem by means of dynamically generated, context-sensitive guided tours. Moreover, maintainability is greatly improved, as both nodes and links are defined as instances of abstract classes. I this way, single links and entire guided tours are anchored on type level as abstract navigational actions, which are independent of the actual link instances.Marketing; Data; Model;

Website optimization, design, and restructuring.

The website has become a staple in the business environment, to provide information and services, and connect business-to-business and business-to-customers. Many of these sites require re-engineering in order to facilitate the needed complexities and frequent changes demanded. For such efforts, it is essential for web management to be adequately quantified with relevant metrics and measures. This thesis investigates useful metrics through a case study approach and presents usability and maintainability as the two primary categories of metrics, which provide useful information for web engineering analysis and development

A JavaScript Framework Comparison Based on Benchmarking Software Metrics and Environment Configuration

JavaScript is a client-side programming language that can be used in multi-platform applications. It controls HTML and CSS to manipulate page behaviours and is widely used in most websites over the internet. JavaScript frameworks are structures made to help web developers build web applications faster by offering features that enhance the user interaction with the web page. An increasing number of JavaScript frameworks have been released in recent years in the market to help front-end developers build applications in a shorter space of time. Decision makers in software companies have been struggling to determine which frameworks are best suited for a specific project. This work investigates the actual state-of-the-art of JavaScript framework comparison, and it proposes metrics and methods that could help developers when choosing a JavaScript framework. In this work, a benchmark framework executes tasks to test the efficiency of three JavaScript frameworks (AngularJS, Aurelia, and Ember). The research shows the impact of the environment (CPU usage and network connectivity) on JavaScript frameworks

Wordpress Plugins for Symbiota2

Symbiota is an open source project which helps biologists concentrate their efforts on curation of quality datasets rather than creating the tools. Symbiota’s graphical user interface is hardcoded into many PHP files resulting in poor maintainability and extensibility. The main goal of Symbiota is to separate the user interface of Symbiota with its core structure as the user interface is hard-coded with PHP. This helps in reducing the source lines of code. The secondary goal of Symbiota is to help Symbiota developers to add the Symbiota features to their website and also should identify whether the separation of user interface with core structure is feasible. This project is completely related to second goal. The content management in the second goal can be done by using a free and open source content management system called WordPress. WordPress plugins help WordPress developers to add features to their website without knowing a single line of code. In this project, two WordPress plugins were developed to help Symbiota2 developers to easily add Symbiota features to their website without knowing anything about coding. Symbiota Search is the first WordPress plugin developed in this project. It helps WordPress developers to add Symbiota search feature. Symbiota Validation is the second plugin developed in this project. It helps WordPress developers to add the sign in and sign up features of Symbiota to their website

MESH: an object-oriented approach to hypermedia modeling and navigation.

This paper introduces the MESH approach to hypermedia modeling and navigation, which aims at relieving the typical drawbacks of poor maintainability and user disorientation. The framework builds upon two fundamental concepts. The data model combines established entity-relationship and object-oriented abstractions with proprietary concepts into a formal hypermedia data model. Uniform layout and link typing specifications can be attributed and inherited in a static node typing hierarchy, whereas both nodes and links can be submitted dynamically to multiple complementary classifications. In the context-based navigation paradigm, conventional navigation along static links is complemented by run-time generated guided tours, which are derived dynamically from the context of a user's information requirements. The result is a two-dimensional navigation paradigm, which reconciles complete navigational freedom and flexibility with a measure of linear guidance. These specifications are captured in a high-level, platform independent implementation framework.Data; Model; Specifications; Classification; Information; Requirements;

Towards a virtual research environment for paediatric endocrinology across Europe

Paediatric endocrinology is a medical specialty dealing with variations of physical growth and sexual development in childhood. Genetic anomalies that can cause disorders of sexual development in children are rare. Given this, sharing and collaboration on the small number of cases that occur is needed by clinical experts in the field. The EU-funded EuroDSD project (www.eurodsd.eu) is one such collaboration involving clinical centres and clinical and genetic experts across Europe. Through the establishment of a virtual research environment (VRE) supporting sharing of data and a variety of clinical and bioinformatics analysis tools, EuroDSD aims to provide a research infrastructure for research into disorders of sex development. Security, ethics and information governance are at the heart of this infrastructure. This paper describes the infrastructure that is being built and the inherent challenges in security, availability and dependability that must be overcome for the enterprise to succeed

Scala Server Faces

Progress in the Java language has been slow over the last few years. Scala is emerging as one of the probable successors for Java with features such as type inference, higher order functions, closure support and sequence comprehensions. This allows object-oriented yet concise code to be written using Scala. While Java based MVC frameworks are still prevalent, Scala based frameworks along with Ruby on Rails, Django and PHP are emerging as competitors. Scala has a web framework called Lift which has made an attempt to borrow the advantages of other frameworks while keeping code concise. Since Sun’s MVC framework, Java Server Faces 2.0 and its future versions seem to be heading in a reasonably progressive direction; I have developed a framework which attempts to overcome its limitations. I call such a framework ―Scala Server Faces‖. This framework provides a way of writing Java EE applications in Scala yet borrow from the concept of ―convention over configuration‖ followed by rival web frameworks. Again, an Eclipse tool is provided to make the programmer\u27s task of writing code on the popular Eclipse platform. Scala Server Faces, the framework and the tool allows the programmer to write enterprise web applications in Scala by providing features such as templating support, CRUD screen generation for database model objects, an Ant script to help deployment and integration with the Glassfish Application Server