Virgil - Providing Institutional Access to a Repository of Access Grid Sessions

This paper describes the VIRGIL (Virtual Meeting Archival) system which was developed to provide a simple, practical, easy-to-use method for recording, indexing and archiving large scale distributed videoconferences held over Access Grid nodes. Institutional libraries are coming under increasing pressure to support the storage, access and retrieval of such mixed-media complex digital objects in their institutional repositories. Although systems have been developed to record access grid sessions, they don’t provide simple mechanisms for repository ingestion, search and retrieval; and they require the installation and understanding of complex Access Grid tools to record and replay the virtual meetings. Our system has been specifically designed to enable both: the easy construction and maintenance of an archive of Access Grid sessions by managers; and easy search and retrieval of recorded sessions by users. This paper describes the underlying architecture, tools and Web interface we developed to enable the recording, storage, search, retrieval and replay of collaborative Access Grid sessions within a Fedora repository

Open Repositories 2.0: Harvesting Community Annotations to Enhance Discovery services

Over the past few years, collaborative social tagging and annotation systems that involve communities of users creating and sharing their own metadata, have exploded on the Internet. Examples of such systems include: Flickr, Del.icio.us, Connotea, YouTube, LastFm. Such systems are exemplary of the Web 2.0 phenomena because they use the Internet to harness collective intelligence. Although there are issues associated with the quality of the metadata generated by online communities, there are also significant advantages including the cost benefits of leveraging community effort to generate metadata and enhanced search and discovery services that result from richer, more relevant metadata and rankings of resources. In this paper we describe the HarvANA (Harvesting and Aggregating Networked Annotations) system that we are developing at the University of Queensland. The objective of HarvANA is to develop an efficient streamlined system (that is based on open standards and comprises a set of open source services) that can leverage the explosion of community annotation/tagging systems and exploit the resulting metadata to improve discovery and reasoning across open repositories

Emissions of Transport Refrigeration Units with CARB Diesel, Gas-to-Liquid Diesel, and Emissions Control Devices

A novel in situ method was used to measure emissions and fuel consumption of transport refrigeration units (TRUs). The test matrix included two fuels, two exhaust configurations, and two TRU engine operating speeds. Test fuels were California ultra low sulfur diesel and gas-to-liquid (GTL) diesel. Exhaust configurations were a stock muffler and a Thermo King pDPF diesel particulate filter. The TRU engine operating speeds were high and low, controlled by the TRU user interface. Results indicate that GTL diesel fuel reduces all regulated emissions at high and low engine speeds. Application of a Thermo King pDPF reduced regulated emissions, sometimes almost entirely. The application of both GTL diesel and a Thermo King pDPF reduced regulated emissions at high engine speed, but showed an increase in oxides of nitrogen at low engine speed