Web Single Sign-On Authentication using SAML

Companies have increasingly turned to application service providers (ASPs) or Software as a Service (SaaS) vendors to offer specialized web-based services that will cut costs and provide specific and focused applications to users. The complexity of designing, installing, configuring, deploying, and supporting the system with internal resources can be eliminated with this type of methodology, providing great benefit to organizations. However, these models can present an authentication problem for corporations with a large number of external service providers. This paper describes the implementation of Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) and its capabilities to provide secure single sign-on (SSO) solutions for externally hosted applications

Modeling energy flow and nutrient cycling in natural semiarid grassland ecosystems with the aid of thematic mapper data

Energy flow and nutrient cycling were modeled as affected by herbivory on selected intensive sites along gradients of precipitation and soils, validating the model output by monitoring selected parameters with data derived from the Thematic Mapper (TM). Herbivore production was modeled along the gradient of soils and herbivory, and validated with data derived from TM in a spatial data base

An Introduction to Temporal Optimisation using a Water Management Problem

Optimisation problems usually take the form of having a single or multiple objectives with a set of constraints. The model itself concerns a single problem for which the best possible solution is sought. Problems are usually static in the sense that they do not consider changes over time in a cumulative manner. Dynamic optimisation problems to incorporate changes. However, these are memoryless in that the problem description changes and a new problem is solved - but with little reference to any previous information. In this paper, a temporally augmented version of a water management problem which allows farmers to plan over long time horizons is introduced. A climate change projection model is used to predict both rainfall and temperature for the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area in Australia for up to 50 years into the future. Three representative decades are extracted from the climate change model to create the temporal data sets. The results confirm the utility of the temporal approach and show, for the case study area, that crops that can feasibly and sustainably be grown will be a lot fewer than the present day in the challenging water-reduced conditions of the future